Organization Development Commons^™

Maximising Effectiveness Of Talent Pools Through Mindfulness: An Empirical Investigation In A Multinational Corporation, Tarmo Raudsepp

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Traditional human resource management is looking to identify and develop talent for maximising human capital in a competitive environment with limited resources and negative demographic trends. Attracting, deploying, motivating, developing and retaining talented employees is a corporate norm for meeting organisational goals. Proper human resource processes through rigorous mapping of employees according to the performance-potential matrix allow the grading of employees against peer groups to establish talent pools for development and internal succession planning.

Mindfulness originates from 2,500-year-old Buddhist spiritual practices and has a rare combination of spirituality and science. Eastern perspective originates from Asian traditions focusing on the self-regulation …

How Do Values Matter In The Relation Between Organizational Trust And Performance? The Case Of China, Lu Jiang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Trust in organizations has been demonstrated and discussed widely in research in Western cultures. With China’s rapidly developing economy, more and more Western managers work in China now, while an increasing number of Chinese managers work overseas. This makes research on the way trust in organizations operates in Chinese culture an important topic. This study contributes to the literature from the perspective of the way values matter in the relation between organizational trust and performance in China. This research proposes that in the context of China, employees’ and supervisor’s Confucian value system affects the trust in the supervisor positively, which …

Cheating Constraint Decisions And Discrimination Against Workers With Lower Financial Standing, Grace J. H. Lim, Marko Pitesa, Abhijeet K. Vadera

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Workers with lower financial standing face many personal challenges due to the relatively lower level of material resources they have at their disposal. We propose that lower financial standing not just impacts workers themselves, but also engenders discrimination from supervisors. Drawing on social cognition principles, we forward a situational inference perspective whereby supervisors make a naïve inference that workers with lower financial standing pose a higher risk of cheating which leads them to subject such workers to more negative treatment and deprive them of opportunities. We focus on two ubiquitous ways in which organizations constrain cheating behavior: worker surveillance and …

Going Beyond Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, And Democratic (Weird) Samples And Problems In Organizational Research, Marko Pitesa, Michele J. Gelfand

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The goal of organizational research is to make inferences about a target population based on samples studied. Most target populations referred to in theories of organizational behavior, whether explicitly or implicitly, tend to be the entire populations of workers or managers, or even the entire human population. A typical sample, however, is convenient, being located where most researchers are, and thus also predominantly from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries (WEIRD; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).

Employees’ Job Positions, Psychological Ownership, And Commitment To Change, Bo Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Organisational change is crucial to the development of enterprises. However, when enterprises are implementing major changes, there are great differences in the attitudes and behaviours of employees in different job positions toward changes. Research in this area is insufficient. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the problem of employee commitment amid enterprises’ organisational changes. This dissertation is committed to determining why employees at different levels and with different roles have different degrees of commitment to change and confirming the role of job positions in affecting employees’ psychological ownership of the change process. According to the findings, the impact of employees’ job rank …

Building Up A Culture Of Respect, Siow-Heng Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Recently, we have become more acutely aware of a variety of undesirable workplace circumstances and practices in Singapore. personal time; discriminatory workplace practices against members of various categories of minority groups; and bias against women staff.

Intra-Firm Hierarchies And Gender Gaps, Nicolo Dalvit, Aseem Patel, Joanne Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study how changes in female representation at the top of a firm’s organisation affect gender-specific outcomes across hierarchies within firms. We start by developing a theoretical model of a hierarchical firm, where gender representation in top organisational layers can affect gender-specific hiring and promotion probabilities at lower layers. We then exploit a recent French reform that imposed gender representation quotas in the boards of directors and test the model’s predictions in the data. Our empirical results show that the reform was successful in reducing gender wage and representation gaps at the upper layers of the firm, but not at …

Entering Dystopia: Should Your Face Be The Key To Your Fate?, Shilpa Madan, Krishna Savani, Gita V. Johar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

How would you feel if you were rejected from a job because you didn't look competent enough? Or if you were apprehended at a public place by the police because you looked like a criminal? Although these scenes sound dystopic and generate a sense of fear and anxiety, technology that claims that people's traits can be inferred from their faces already exists and is being used by businesses and governments worldwide.

Culture And Firms, Zhihui Gu, Hao Liang, Hanyu Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study how societal culture shapes business activities and corporate behavior by leveraging data on the locations of Confucian schools in Ancient China. The number of historic Confucian schools surrounding a current firm’s location proxies for the firm’s exposure to Confucianism, the dominant culture in China over the last two thou- sand years, and is immune to the subjectivity and selection problems of most culture measures. We find systematic differences in corporate behavior across regions based on their varying exposure to Confucianism. Listed companies more exposed Confucianism make greater social contributions, provide greater employee protection, and have higher entertainment expenses, …

Why Companies Practice Corporate Social Responsibility, Shawn Pope, Alwyn Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The article discussed why companies practice corporate social responsibility (CSR) and their meta-analysis of 200 surveys over 20 years found that CSR is often embraced as a “halo” strategy.

Getting The Best Of Both Worlds, Steven Burton, Janice Wong

Asian Management Insights

Pair a technical expert with a generalist for successful change management.

What Makes Employees Feel Empowered To Speak Up?, Shilpa Madan, Kevin Nanakdewa, Krishna Savani, Hazel Rose Markus

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Most managers understand that empowering employees to voice their opinions can help companies innovate and uncover their own shortcomings. However, this understanding does not seem to translate into action. Research shows that over 85% of employees remain silent on crucial matters because they worry about being viewed negatively. How can managers encourage employees to speak their minds at work? The authors’ new research identified a novel method to encourage employees to exercise their voice: creating a company culture that emphasizes the idea of choice. They found that employees were more likely to share their ideas and opinions at a company …

Why The Workplace Chameleon Is A Paradox For Diversity And Inclusion, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Do employees need to be like chameleons to survive certain corporate cultures, despite the best efforts of diversity and inclusion initiatives?

The Many Faces Of Class Ceiling: Its Manifestations At Different Career Stages And Ways To Overcome It, Jia Hui Lim

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Even with comparable education and level of competence, workers with lower socioeconomic status (SES) origins are disadvantaged in terms of earnings and occupational attainment. This class gap, or the “class ceiling,” is as large as the gender gap, but poorly understood. In my dissertation, I designed a series of related projects to explain and potentially mitigate the class ceiling problem. Across three projects, I mainly focused on where the problem starts—labor market and newcomer adjustment in organizations. I find that, beyond discrimination and bias that has been the focus of past work, many challenges stem from workers’ own psychology and …

Pressure To Be Creative: How Employees Respond To Organizational Creativity Pressure, Hye Jung Eun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Creativity and innovation are vital for organizational growth and success, driving many organizations to increase pressure for employee creativity. Yet, researchers have neglected investigating how employees respond to creativity pressure at the workplace. This dissertation introduces and develops a new scale for the concept of organizational creativity pressure – the pressure on employees to continually develop novel and useful ideas and solutions. The scale is further validated through extensive assessment of content and construct validity, empirically differentiating the construct from similar others such as performance pressure and support for creativity.

Drawing on the transactional theory of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, …

Myth Busted: Why Increased Diversity Doesn't Always Improve Performance, Richard Holden

Perspectives@SMU

Greater diversity doesn't necessarily equal better performance, and organisations still have to be mindful of how diversity is managed in order to improve performance, writes UNSW Business School's Richard Holden

The Cost Of Taking Charge At Work, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

CUHK research finds proactive employees have a higher chance of assuming leadership roles but they are also likely to have difficult interactions with co-workers

Managing And Growing Mncs In Asia, Gordon Perchthold

Perspectives@SMU

SMU Associate Professor Gordon Perchthold’s new book doles out “spoonfuls of knowledge” to help multinationals be Asia capable

The Role Of Employee Proactive Behaviors In Influencing Supervisors’ Trust In Employees, Ngai Meng Ho

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In organizations, proactive employees make things happen. They anticipate, initiate, and drive meaningful changes for a better future. Such proactive behaviors can be manifested in different forms. Initiating work improvements and voicing for changes are examples of the different proactive behaviors commonly demonstrated by employees.

Empirical studies have associated proactive behaviors at work with a range of positive workplace outcomes. However, only limited research has examined how proactive behaviors might be related to one particularly important outcome, trust, i.e., whether an employee’s proactive behaviors will influence the supervisor’s trust toward the employee. Accordingly, in this present research, I conducted two …

The Effects Of University Governance Structure On New Programme Development And Approval Process In Vietnamese Universities, Thi Anh Tram Le

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Universities and other higher education institutions are viewed as social organizations which play a crucial role in developing the economy, politic, culture, talent, and society of the country. Society expects the universities to well-fulfill their mission in education, academic research, public engagement for the economic development and sustainability of the country and the government is also accountable for supporting the universities to accomplish their missions.

In the context of the increasingly dynamic education industry, between a) internationalization with foreign schools establishing new ventures abroad or local schools recruiting students worldwide, b) the rapid development of information technology as digitization is …

Two-Way Mentoring: How Employees Can Learn From One Another, Peeyush Gupta, Michelle D. Steward, James A. Narus, D.V.R Seshadri

Asian Management Insights

Vibrant cross-generational interactions can result in strong relationships being formed, as demonstrated in the case of Tata Steel Ltd.

Employees’ Ritual Sense In Organization: A Scale Development Study And Effects Of Ritual Sense On Employee Outcomes, Jun Liang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The present research is focused on the topic of organizational rituals. On the basis of reviewing existing studies of organizational rituals, the present investigation (1) developed the scale of employees’ ritual sense and (2) empirically tested the effects of ritual sense in impacting employees’ workplace consequences. Two independent studies were conducted to develop the scale of employees’ ritual sense and to investigate how and when ritual sense is associated with employees’ workplace outcomes. Specifically, using data collected from 418 employees in China, Study 1 develops and validates an individual level measure of employee’s ritual sense. Collecting another sample of 453 …

The Governance Divide In Global Corporate Responsibility: The Global Structuration Of Reporting And Certification Frameworks, 1998-2017, Shawn Pope, Alwyn Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In recent decades, as worldwide attention to corporate responsibility increased, the global corporate responsibility (GCR) movement did not converge on a singular governance model nor hybridize into myriad country-specific models. The movement, rather, bifurcated into onerous certification frameworks and more lax reporting frameworks. We examine this ‘governance divide’ in the GCR movement by investigating the cross-national diffusion of seven core GCR frameworks. We adopt a glocalization perspective that conceptualizes a vertical nesting of local and global contexts. Our cross-national quantitative analyses suggest that, while linkages to global culture have encouraged business participation in all GCR frameworks, power dependencies related to …

Attention, Entrainment, And Rules In High Reliability Organizations, Tingting Lang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Chapter 1: How institutions enhance mindfulness: interactions between external regulators and front-line operators around safety rules (with Ravi S. Kudesia and Jochen Reb) How is it that some organizations can maintain nearly error-free performance, despite trying conditions? Within research on such high-reliability organizations, mindful organizing has been offered as a key explanation. It entails interaction patterns among front-line operators that keep them attentive to potential failures—and relies on them having the expertise and autonomy to address any such failures. In this study, we extend the mindful organizing literature, which emphasizes local interactions among operators, by considering the broader institutional context …

Managing Talent In The Gig Economy: Human Capital Implications, Richard Raymond Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

As digital technologies continue to open new connections and ways of working, the era of the gig economy will continue to thrive.

Perceptions Of Upward Social Mobility: The Role Of Culture, Social Class And Meritocratic Beliefs, Bek Wuay Tang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Perceptions of social mobility affect how people evaluate their society and influence support for policies to reduce income inequality. Although prior research has shown that Americans tend to overestimate upward social mobility (Alesina, Stantcheva, & Teso, 2018; Davidai & Gilovich, 2015; Kraus & Tan, 2015), this has not been demonstrated in a non-Western context. The primary goal of this research was to investigate if past findings of overestimations of social mobility would be replicated on a culturally different and non-Western sample (i.e. Singaporeans). A secondary goal was to examine factors that affect mobility perceptions in this sample and uncover possible …

Envy In Response To Help: A Helping As Status Relations Model, Kenneth Tai, Katrina Lin, Catherine K. Lam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Social exchange theory suggests that after receiving help, peopleexperience gratitude and they reciprocate by helping the original help giver.However, it remains unclear whether people experience other emotions that drive positive reciprocation after receiving help.Building on helping as status relations framework, we suggest that when higherperformers provide task-related help to lower performers, help recipients perceivethat help givers have higher status, and respond to the help with envy. Torebalance the status relation, help recipients are motivated to reciprocate byhelping the help giver. Results from three studies progressively support our predictionsthat help recipients respond with envy when they receive task-related help, butonly toward …

Family As A Source Of Inequality Reproduction In Organizations: The Role Of Family Impact On Work In Explaining The Class Ceiling, Pooja Mishra

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Being born into a poorer family is associated with lower socioeconomic attainment even when people are provided with identical educational and job opportunities, a pattern known as the “class ceiling.” The class ceiling is generated within organizations, but specific reasons causing this effect are not well understood. I propose that one important explanation why employees from poorer families do not fare as well as their more fortunate co-workers concerns differences in families themselves. I integrate research from sociology and psychology explaining challenges faced by families with scarce resources with organizational research on specific pathways through which families can interfere with …

Socioeconomic Mobility And Talent Utilization Of Workers From Poorer Backgrounds: The Overlooked Importance Of Within-Organization Dynamics, Marko Pitesa, Madan M. Pillutla

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Socioeconomic mobility, or the ability of individuals to improve their socioeconomicstanding through merit-based contributions, is a fundamental ideal of modern societies.The key focus of societal efforts to ensure socioeconomic mobility has been on the provision of educational opportunities. We review evidence that even with the same education and job opportunities, being born into a poorer family undermines socioeconomicmobility because of processes occurring within organizations. The burden of poorerbackground might, ceteris paribus, be economically comparable to the gender gap. Weargue that in the societal and scientific effort to promote socioeconomic mobility, the keycontext in which mobility is supposed to happen—organizations—and the …

Building Trust For A Positive Employee Experience, Richard Raymond Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

How do we create the right environment of trust at workplace and avoid surprises?