Business Commons^™

From Play To Performance: Building An Effective Organization, Jessica N. Selee, Jade Johnson, Jocelyn N. Murray, Anna Samuelson, Jasmine Li, Andrew Lacanienta, Mat D. Duerden, Mark Widmer

Marriott Student Review

Under the Mentored Experience Grant, six students studies the impact that non-work activities (recreation or leisure) have on individual contributors or organization. Some employees refrain from participating in Leisure-at-Work (LAW) due to lack of time or skill, to cliques, to differing preferences, or fear of negative connotations. Employees report that LAW increases productivity, establishes and enriches social interactions, improves communication, attracts and retains employees in a company, and facilitates a culture of engagement, trust, and camaraderie. At the conclusion of our analysis, we identified areas of future research and recommendations for best practice.

Reflections Of A Doctoral Research On Knowledge Management (Km) Through An Afrocentric Lens In A Nigerian Oil Corporation, Okeoma John-Paul Okeke

The African Journal of Information Systems

This paper focuses on the reflections of a doctoral research that evaluated the challenges of the adoption and implementation of a knowledge management (KM) initiative through the experiences of the knowledge champions. The African/Nigerian socio-cultural view was used to explore the narrative accounts of the knowledge champions. A case study research was carried out using qualitative approaches. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used in data analysis. The findings demonstrated the ability to ground KM adoption within a socio-cultural specific context helped in making sense of the organizational KM experience. The paper serves as an academic expression to the current generation …

Mindfulness And Individual Error Orientation In High Reliability Organizations, Ellen Choi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mindfulness is a concept drawn from the contemplative traditions that refers to present-moment, non-judgmental awareness. Exactly how applicable mindfulness is in the workplace requires further empirical validation, particularly on outcomes immediately relevant to organizations. This study contributes to literature examining the effects of mindfulness in organizational settings by considering the effects of an 8-week workplace mindfulness training program in a high-reliability organization (hospital) on individual error orientation, an individual’s propensity to learn from error, worry about error, or hide error. This study adds to the current state of knowledge by providing further insight into why one holds a particular error …

Political Alignments In Organizations: Contextualization, Mobilization, And Coordination, Samuel B. Bacharach, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

This chapter develops a framework for conceptualizing and analyzing enduring political alignments in organizations. We address the following key questions: (a) What processes promote political alignments, in particular ones that are likely to be recognized and identifiable by members of an organization? and (b) What are the major forms of political alignment? Repeated coalitions among the same actors are the central mechanism that generates enduring, identifiable political alignments. The power relations within and between coalitions determine the nature of the political alignments. Overall, political alignments are construed as microinstitutions that generate coordinated efforts to influence organizational strategy, policies, and practices.

Relational Cohesion Model Of Organizational Commitment, Jeongkoo Yoon, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

[Excerpt] This chapter reviews the research program of relational cohesion theory (RCT) (Lawler & Yoon, 1993, 1996, 1998; Lawler et al., 2000; Thye et al., 2002) and uses it to develop a model of organizational commitment. Broadly, relational cohesion theory (RCT) has attempted to understand conditions and processes that promote an expressive relation in social exchange; an expressive relation is indicated by relational cohesion, that is, the degree to which exchange partners perceive their relationship as a unifying object having its own value. The research program argues that such relational cohesion is a proximal cause of various forms of behavioral …

Bringing Emotions Into Social Exchange Theory, Edward J. Lawler, Shane R. Thye

Edward J Lawler

We analyze and review how research on emotion and emotional phenomena can elaborate and improve contemporary social exchange theory. After identifying six approaches from the psychology and sociology of emotion, we illustrate how these ideas bear on the context, process, and outcome of exchange in networks and groups. The paper reviews the current state of the field, develops testable hypotheses for empirical study, and provides specific suggestions for developing links between theories of emotion and theories of exchange.

The Theory Of Relational Cohesion: Review Of A Research Program, Shane R. Thye, Jeongkoo Yoon, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

In this paper we analyze and review the theory of relational cohesion and attendant program of research. Since the early 1990s, the theory has evolved to answer a number of basic questions regarding cohesion and commitment in social exchange relations. Drawing from the sociology of emotion and modem theories of social identity, the theory asserts that joint activity in the form of frequent exchange unleashes positive emotions and perceptions of relational cohesion. In turn, relational cohesion is predicted to be the primary cause of commitment behavior in a range of situations. Here we outline the theory of relational cohesion, tracing …

Creating The Context For Effective Culture Work, Matthew Berberich

River Cities Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference

A culture that embraces change, responds quickly to changing needs and connects everyone at every level as business owners is an exciting future for companies and employees. In this culture leaders learn to unleash the unique potential in each individual to solve problems never solved before. The opportunity for positive impact goes far beyond our daily work. It spills into every area of our lives and in tangible ways impacts the world. Performance metrics and engagement only put you in line for this door to the future. The door can get locked when organizations become lulled into thinking “good-enough” by …

The Ultimate Culture Change Learning Session, Tim Kuppler

River Cities Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference

Awareness of the importance of culture is growing at a fast rate but there is no consistent understanding about how to effectively evolve culture with a direct and sustainable impact on performance. This awareness-understanding gap helps to explain why most organizations report they don’t understand their culture and believe change is needed. Culture crises (Uber, etc.) gain widespread exposure and superficial tips and keys dominate the popular press. Leaders and change agents often feel lost in the wilderness as they try to piece together improvements that will impact culture. This will likely be the most performance-focused culture educational session you …

Project Management Office To The Rescue: Aligning Workforce And Resources With Library Vision And Delivering Results, Anastasia Guimaraes, Zheng (John) Wang

Charleston Library Conference

Many libraries today are inundated with increasing number of tasks, projects, and initiatives through which they hope to achieve their mission and strategic vision only to find themselves losing focus and drowning in the volume of work. Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame struggled with absorbing an exponentially growing number of projects and aligning them with institutional strategic initiatives and goals. The increasing number of projects and the relatively stable size of the workforce significantly impacted the institution’s ability to complete projects in a timely fashion and within the budgetary allocation.

The Four Horsemen Of Negotiator Power, Michael Schaerer, Adam D. Galinsky, Joe Magee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Scholarly research generally finds that democratic governments are more likely to respect human rights than other types of regimes. Different human rights practices among long-standing and affluent democracies therefore present a puzzle. Drawing from democratic theory and comparative institutional studies, we argue more inclusive or "popular" democracies should enforce human rights better than more exclusive or "elite" democracies, even in the face of security threats from armed conflict. Instead of relying on the Freedom House or Polity indexes to distinguish levels of democracy, we adopt a more focused approach to measuring structures of inclusion, the Institutional Democracy Index (IDI), which …

Reinventing Translation: Toward A Common Language For Scholar-Practitioners, Ann Kowal Smith, Karen R. Nestor

Engaged Management ReView

Translation starts in one language, and converts to a second. But it doesn't change the languages or the people who "speak" them. We propose – instead of translation – the joint development of theory and practice that becomes a common language – a common language of a community of scholar-practitioners. This paper describes the work of two scholar-practitioners committed to addressing a pressing problem of practice: the educational attainment and skills required for positive outcomes in the 21st century workplace. This paper considers the original design and implementation of an innovative, theory-based workplace learning initiative (Books@Work) and, arising from this …

Recipe For Success: Behavioral Ingredients For Superior Performing Leaders, Linda M. Pittenger

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

The aviation and aerospace business is a complex adaptive system that includes emerging technologies, competitors, government policies, cost demands, globalization, and talent constraints. To effectively lead in the chaos of constant demands and disruptive and unpredictable external environments, having deep and broad functional expertise is not enough. Superior performing leaders require further broadening and deepening of selected behavioral competencies in order to succeed (Smith, 2000). Particular to aviation and aerospace, understanding the types of leaders needed to be successful is especially important since baby boomer employees will soon retire and the middle managers that will likely replace them lack the …

Mapping The Alignment Of Programmatic Mission, Functions And Outcomes With The Attainment Of Health Equity: An Overview Of The Approach And Initial Outcomes Through The Lens Of The Usda’S Cyfar Scp Program, Onyemaechi Nweke, Kara Ryan, Mpp, Bonita Williams, Phd

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Eliminating health disparities is a priority across national agenda and initiatives such as the National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities (NPA), the National Prevention Strategy, and Healthy People 2020. To advance this priority under the NPA, the Federal Interagency Health Equity Team (FIHET), which is an NPA federal cross-sector and collaborative platform, initiated a voluntary pilot “health equity mapping” exercise in 2014. This exercise served as a strategy to clarify the strategic alignment between participant federal partner program missions, goals, and activities, and the goal to end health disparities and promote health equity. The mapping process included an …

Power Dependence And Power Paradoxes In Bargaining, Samuel B. Bacharach, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

[Excerpt] What this article (and our larger program of work) is designed to demonstrate is that these very simple ideas represent a particularly suitable starting point for understanding the power struggle between parties who regularly engage in negotiation. Specifically, in this article we show that the approach contains certain paradoxes regarding the acquisition and use of power in an ongoing bargaining relationship. The dependence framework treats the ongoing relationship as a power struggle in which each party tries to maneuver itself into a favorable power position.

Local Workforce Development Boards: Alignment With Operational Indicators And Behavioral Characteristics, Sharon Humphreys Johnson

Dissertations

The ability of a region to remain competitively viable is dependent upon attracting new business and retaining existing businesses (Good & Strong, 2015). In many instances, regional growth depends on the workforce and the region’s ability to develop a talent pipeline of existing or accessible workers (Blakely & Leigh, 2010). The passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) increases the expectations of local workforce board leadership. The WIOA vision for Local Workforce Development Boards (LWDB) is to serve as strategic leaders and act as conveners of regional workforce system partners, stakeholders, and businesses to develop new structures for …

Finding Common Ground: Learning From Leaders Who Have Utilized Conflict Transformation Behaviors In The Mental Health Field In The United States, Tamarah E. Tilos

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to discover and describe how exemplary leaders establish common ground and produce breakthrough results in the mental health field by utilizing the 6 domains of conflict transformation: collaboration, communication, problem solving, process, emotional intelligence, and ethics.

Methodology: This thematic, phenomenological study was accomplished through examination of the lived experiences of exemplary leaders with firsthand experience transforming conflict and finding common ground. The target population for this study included executive-level leaders of nonprofit organizations, governmental institutions, state and national associations, and private businesses serving adults and children with mental illness, developmental or behavioral disabilities, …

Introduction To A Special Issue On Inequality In The Workplace (“What Works?), Pamela S. Tolbert, Emilio J. Castilla

Pamela S Tolbert

[Excerpt] While overt expressions of racial and gender bias in U.S. workplaces have declined markedly since the passage of the original Civil Rights Act and the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a half century ago (Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan 1997; Dobbin 2009), a steady stream of research indicates that powerful, if more covert forms of bias persist in contemporary workplaces (Greenwald and Banaji 1995; Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009; England 2010; Heilman 2012). In line with this research, high rates of individual and class-based lawsuits alleging racial and gender discrimination suggest that many …

Revolutionary Coalition Strength And Collective Failure As Determinants Of Status Reallocation, H. Andrew Michener, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

This experiment investigated the effects of collective performance and coalition strength on the redistribution of status prerogatives in triads. A status hierarchy was established within triads, such that one person held higher control status and the two others held lower status. Each group performed an ambiguous, decision-making task over two trials. Collective performance (i.e., success vs failure) was manipulated via bogus feedback regarding the group’s performance, while coalition strength was manipulated by varying the extent to which the two low-status members, acting together as a revolutionary coalition, could damage the outcomes received by the high-status member. Results indicate a collective-performance …

Power Processes In Bargaining, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

This is a theoretical article that integrates and extends a particular program of work on power in bargaining relationships. Power is conceptualized as a structurally based capability, and power use as tactical action falling within either conciliatory or hostile categories. The core propositions are (1) the greater the total amount of power in a relationship, the greater the use of conciliatory tactics and the lower the use of hostile tactics; and (2) an unequal power relationship fosters more use of hostile tactics and less use of conciliatory tactics than an equal power relationship. Distinct research on power dependence and bilateral …

Time Pressure And The Development Of Integrative Agreements In Bilateral Negotiations, Peter J. D. Carnevale, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

A laboratory experiment examined the effects of time pressure on the process and outcome of integrative bargaining. Time pressure was operationalized in terms of the amount of time available to negotiate. As hypothesized, high time pressure produced nonagreements and poor negotiation outcomes only when negotiators adopted an individualistic orientation; when negotiators adopted a cooperative orientation, they achieved high outcomes regardless of time pressure. In combination with an individualistic orientation, time pressure produced greater competitiveness, firm negotiator aspirations, and reduced information exchange. In combination with a cooperative orientation, time pressure produced greater cooperativeness and lower negotiator aspirations. The main findings were …

Resolving Conflict Through Explicit Bargaining, Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

This article analyzes the impact of conciliatory initiatives on conflict resolution in two-party bargaining. It specifically develops and tests a theory of unilateral initiatives derived from Osgood's (1962) notion of Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction (GRIT). The major propositions of the theory indicate that, given a pattern of mutual resistance or hostility, unilateral initiatives and tit-for-tat retaliation in response to punitive action will produce more conciliation and less hostility by an opponent. To test the theory, a bargaining setting was created in a laboratory experiment in which parties exchanged offers and counteroffers on an issue across a number …

Perceptions Of Power In Conflict Situations, Samuel B. Bacharach, H. Andrew Michener, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

Subjects rendered judgments regarding the power of the participants in a series of conflictual circumstances where an adversary threatened a target. These situations manipulated four independent variables: (a) the adversary's capacity to damage the target's interests, (b) the adversary's probability of actually attacking, (c) the target's ability to block the impending attack, and (d) the target's capacity to retaliate. Results showed that all of the independent variables affected the subjects' judgments of the adversary's power, while three of them (damage, blockage, and retaliation) affected judgments of the target's power. Differences in the predictive equations for judgments of adversary power and …

Cooptation And Coalition Mobilization, Edward J. Lawler, George A. Youngs Jr., Michael D. Lesh

Edward J Lawler

The question addressed by this research was, “When structural circumstances make revolutionary action likely, under what conditions will a cooptation strategy prevent subordinate revolts?” Experimental procedures established a group status hierarchy consisting of a leader and two subordinates. Groups earned collective outcomes, and the leader usurped an inequitable portion of these outcomes. In this context, the first experiment shows that a cooptation strategy (i.e., offer of a promotion to one of two subordinates) inhibits subordinate revolts. Two additional experiments indicate that the cooptation strategy is most effective (a) if the offer (strategy) provides the target of cooptation a source of …

Endorsement Of Formal Leaders: An Integrative Model, H. Andrew Michener, Edward J. Lawler

Edward J Lawler

This experiment develops an integrative, path-analytic model for the endorsement accorded formal leaders. The model contains four independent variables reflecting aspects of group structure (i.e., group success-failure, the payoff distribution, the degree of support by others members for the leader, and the vulnerability of the leader). Also included are two intervening variables reflecting perceptual processes (attributed competence and attributed fairness), and one dependent variable (endorsement). The results indicate that endorsement is greater when the group's success is high, when the payoff distribution is flat rather than hierarchical, and when the leader is not vulnerable to removal from office. Other support …

Outcome Alternatives And Value As Criteria For Multistrategy Evaluations, Edward J. Lawler, Samuel B. Bacharach

Edward J Lawler

No abstract provided.

Leadership In Kansas Agriculture: Examining Organization Ceos’ Styles And Skills, Brad A. Parker Mba, Cae, Jason D. Ellis Ph.D., Duke Rogers Ph.D.

Online Journal of Rural Research & Policy

This project’s primary purpose was to identify and describe the leadership styles and skills emphases of current Kansas agricultural organization chief executive officers. Twenty-three current CEOs participated and were described in terms of their leadership styles, leadership-skills emphases, and demographics. Overall, they appeared to be rather “middle of the road” on each of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire’s nine leadership scales. Leadership styles were not significantly affected by demographics, with the exception of formal leadership training affecting transactional leadership and education level, organizational category, and staff size affecting passive-avoidant leadership. Participants generally rated the 50 leadership skills as important. Leadership styles …

Mind The Gap, Ala Annual Conference 2017, Aisha Conner-Gaten

Aisha Conner-Gaten

The Differential Identity Activation & Integration Mechanism (Diaim): A Model Linking Female Businesspersons’ Identity Integration And Identity Activation To Negotiation, Yi Wen Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Women play an important role in business management (female businesspersons) but yet they face constraints in the workplace, such as in negotiations. As female businesspersons seem to be facing seemingly conflicting gender and business identities, the level of the integration between these identities, as captured by the construct gender-professional identity integration (G-PII), can be a critical factor that influences female businesspersons in negotiations. It is expected that the level of G-PII influences female businesspersons’ negotiation behaviors when their different identities (i.e., female identity, business identity or dual identities) are activated. Hence, a DIAIM model that depicts how female businesspersons with …

Leadership In An Australian Context: Highlighting A Qualitative Investigation With Construct Validity Support, Nezar Faris

The Qualitative Report

This paper highlights how criteria for validity that are usually utilized within quantitative research can be used to provide further validation to fully qualitative research. In this case, the qualitative research utilizes the grounded theory method. This research used the grounded theory to investigate leadership processes in the substantive setting of the Islamic organizations in Australia. The qualitative analysis of qualitative data generated a number of categories that were conceptually unique. Theoretical sampling directed the researcher toward data sources that provided further conceptual uniqueness. The similarity between some of these newly-generated categories and lower-order categories gave cause to claim convergent …