Learning plays a fundamental role in the production planning and growth of all organizations. With the need for more rapid changes in the global economy, the management of organizational change is a key factor in sustaining competitiveness in today's economy. This book has been developed with these learning needs' in mind. Human Learning: From Learning Curves to Learning Organizations covers a broad range of learning models and related topics beginning with learning curves to recent research on learning organizations. The book's focus is to enable researchers and practitioners to forecast any organization's learning needs' using the prediction aspects of an array of learning models. The book includes research and application discussions on topics such as accounting for previous experience; the learning-forgetting-relearning' phenomenon; parameter estimation with no previous experience; DeJong's incompressibility model; predictive learning models requiring only two learning parameters; long learning cycle times; the speed-error relationship; evaluating the cost of learning from the point of view of safety; and an examination of Learning Organizations. Each chapter is developed from published research and worked examples are used throughout.

Digitalization is on everyone's lips as new technology changes business landscapes and conventional companies are outperformed by younger digital and agile contestants. In this volatile environment it seems more relevant than ever before to understand the aspects and business logic behind the elusive phenomenon called "digitalization". Never before have there been such great opportunities to unleash the full potential of technology within organizations to create long-standing competitive advantage. This book explains the strategy and practice of how to lead and control the people side of digital change in a dynamic world of uncertainty and social complexity, and as such the book snares the elusive phenomena of digitalization Digitalization drives behavioral change and calls for a new way of thinking among senior executives. In practice, reaping the benefits of digital technology is not as easy as it first appears to be. This book provides a map to navigate in the volatile business landscape where change occurs continuously because of digital technology. It provides an historical frame of the evolution of digital technology, decodes digitalization's negative influence on the external aspects of customer satisfaction, discusses and explains the strategic and leadership consequences of different forms of digital change, and finally demonstrates how leading digital change can be put into practice. Illustrative case studies and examples are provided throughout as well as models and frameworks. This is a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, organizational change, technology and innovation management, and digitalization.

Cultures and moral expectations differ around the globe, and so the management of corporate responsibilities has become increasingly complex. Is there, however, a humanistic consensus that can bridge cultural and ethnic divides and reconcile the diverse and contrary interests of stakeholders world-wide? This book seeks to answer that question.

Collective action by firms is a central phenomenon in society, seen for example in standards setting, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and in relation to climate change, environmental and human rights issues. This incisive book reveals how firms set up specific devices, referred to by the authors as FCADs (Firms' Collective Action Devices), of which trade associations and chambers of commerce are the traditional forms, and investigates how firms organize themselves collectively, and their impact on the economy and democracy. Delving deeply into previously under-explored aspects of collective actions by firms, using the concepts of meta-organization and heterarchy, the book combines and expands on insights from history, political science, economics, sociology, management and organization theory. It demonstrates empirically how FCADs function on the basis of compromise and consensus, and analyzes their forms of action, their organizational dynamics and their recent evolution. This rigorous and pluridisciplinary evaluation of how businesses organize collectively will appeal to researchers and PhD students in organization studies and business management, as well as those in other disciplines who are interested in firms' collective action. It will also be a useful resource for business practitioners, public servants and politicians in contact with firms' collective action, and NGO members.

System, Actor and Process: Keywords in Organization Studies is intended as an epistemological 'compass' to navigate through the multifaceted key concepts typically used in organizational practice and research. The book illustrates thirty-four keywords using a tripartite structure: each keyword is briefly discussed from three points of view, namely the system-centered, actor-centered and process-centered conception of organization, which reflects the options emerging from contemporary epistemological debate in organizational studies and, more generally, in social sciences, namely objectivism, subjectivism, and the Weberian "third way". Primarily addressed to researchers and academics in organization studies, this book is also a useful resource for undergraduate or postgraduate students, for whom it may represent a thorough introduction to organizational concepts. It will also be a valuable tool for managers to apply in their everyday practice.

The Readings in the book cover the major topics comprising the field of organizational behavior, and do so with special emphasis on the findings of rigorous organizational research. The models and concepts presented in the following Readings are gleaned from literally thousands of studies of behavior in and of organizations. Authors Wagner and Hollenbeck have selected them to complement their textbook, Organizational Behavior: Securing Competitive Advantage (Routledge 2010). However it would be a worthwhile addition to any course in Organizational Behavior.

Explains how all institutions have to turn their relationship with stakeholders into a 'social' one, which involves designing new Trust and Engagement strategies. A specific indication on how to build and measure value out of these strategies is offered by the innovative 'Value for Engagement Model'.

Market Evolution: Competition and Cooperation is a selection of papers presented at the recent meeting of the European Association of Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE). The volume brings together twenty high-quality papers reflecting frontier research in modern industrial organization. The contributions cover a broad spectrum of increasing theoretical, empirical and policy issues, including analyses of the nature of the firm, product differentiation, research and development, strategic alliances, information sharing in the banking sector, exchange rate pass-through in international competition, labor unionization and product rivalry, buyer-supplier bargaining, multimarket competition and related entry, entry and exit processes, multinational enterprises in the Third World, European integration and the restructuring of Eastern Europe. From a theoretical perspective, many chapters apply game theory to the analysis of firm behaviors and market competition. Moreover, a large number of the studies contain a significant empirical part, mainly by employing econometric techniques, to test the hypotheses derived from modern industrial organization theories. Data from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the European Union are presented and analyzed.

Applied Industrial Organization offers a perspective on the richness of empirical industrial organization studies. Some papers derive empirical implications from theoretical models, but other papers start from empirical evidence and construct a theory. Three major topics are explored: the role of innovation, the evolution of market structure and firms, and the determinations of performance. As the central force of market economies, innovation is the essence of competition and results in changes to market structures. Other forces driving the evolution of markets and firms are also analyzed. Finally, the determinants of profitability are investigated. In particular, characteristics such as price flexibility, successful lenders and monopoly regulation are examined. Contributors include F.M. Scherer, Paul Geroski, John Hey, David Audretsch, Manfred Neumann, among others.

The Cloud Computing and Services Science book comprises a collection of the best papers presented at the International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER), which was held in The Netherlands in May 2011. In netting papers from the conference researchers and experts from all over the world explore a wide-ranging variety of the emerging Cloud Computing platforms, models, applications and enabling technologies. Further, in several papers the authors exemplify essential links to Services Science as service development abstraction, service innovation, and service engineering, acknowledging the service-orientation in most current IT-driven structures in the Cloud.

The Cloud Computing and Services Science book is organized around important dimensions of technology trends in the domain of cloud computing in relation to a broad scientific understanding of modern services emerging from services science. The papers of this book are inspired by scholarly and practical work on the latest advances related to cloud infrastructure, operations, security, services, and management through the global network. This book includes several features that will be helpful, interesting, and inspirational to students, researchers as well as practitioners. Professionals and decision makers working in this field will also benefit from this book

Moral pragmatism has been largely ignored in Business Ethics, despite its natural attraction and the fact that it is prominent in philosophy and socio-economic theories. The main premise of the book is that the complexity of today's business world does not permit a grand ethical theory, notwithstanding the different attempts made by scientists. Moral pragmatism is the 'go-to' approach where the ethical decision-making of managers varies dependent on different circumstances but it always integrates moral considerations. Ethical decision-making is no longer based simply on known rules, but entails the constant dynamic interaction of circumstances, the development of new rules, managers' past experiences, their knowledge concerning ethics, and skills of moral reasoning. This book interweaves the postmodern approach to management studies and, based on its innovative research, reintroduces moral pragmatism in Business Ethics. The combination of decision-making theories, philosophy and postmodernism paves the way for future novel research in Business Ethics, making it an excellent resource for researchers, academics, and advanced students in the field of Business Ethics. Practitioners, on the other hand, will benefit by improving their skills in ethical decision-making and leadership.

Rapidly growing technology and globalization have put tremendous pressure on management teams. Technological developments with far reaching implications on social, economic, political, and environmental ecosystems cannot be underemphasized. Currently, organizations are trying to be more inclusive and aware of diversity, rapid technology growth, and globalization along with remotely operating businesses for profit motivation. The delegative and individual employee-based management styles of the past have become obsolete. With globalization, virtual offices, and rapid technology growth, management challenges have become an expensive force to reckon with. In this book, the authors address the recent trends in management in global environments. The authors explore issues such as managing virtual teams, gender and management, e-commerce, biased financing, quantum computing, and disruption in the financial services industry. The book will serve as a valuable resource to researchers interested in the future management challenges facing global organizations.

The relatedness of individuals to their work organizations has changed radically in the past couple of decades, the result of a changing global environment in which uncertainty and technological advances have become paradoxical partners. Information and communication technologies appear to promise more certainty in the control of business operations, organizational knowledge and employee performance. Yet, despite this, people s experience of working life is of greater uncertainty and a feeling of having less control over their futures. This book contends that a corporate merger, on the scale of a global order is a catastrophic change and depends on killing off parts of the former organizations for its success. The act of annihilating parts of the former organizations is experienced as disengaged and murderous by organizational members. This thesis is based on case study research conducted on the topic of emotional connectedness in a network organization over a three year period. Fieldwork began at the time when the participating firm had just formed from a global merger of two large global enterprises. While this book brings forward dysfunctional aspects of the case study firm, it also offers something of practical significance to those who work in or with organizations, whether in the capacity of management or as a consultant. It offers a perspective that being alert to staff members felt experiences and their emotional connectedness, as a normal part of business, provides leading data on the health of the enterprise. Managers who are more wholly informed about organizational realities can work more realistically on resolving problems, assessing risks, or making strategic business decisions."

This comprehensive book synthesizes research from the past 50 years of innovation studies, addressing the main elements and providing a connected perspective on innovation within organizations. It explores the generation and adoption of both technological and nontechnological innovations, offering a coherent and systematic view of the process. Fariborz Damanpour examines innovation activity and internal mechanisms and processes in both business and nonbusiness organizations, providing an overview of key concepts, terms, and theory. Insights from behavioral, economic, and structure-based perspectives are used to explain existing findings and help the reader navigate current research on the management of innovation, as well as offering ideas and frameworks to guide new studies. Organizational Innovation will be an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate-level students of management and organization studies, particularly those working on the management of innovation and technology. It will also prove useful to educators in the field as a reference work for students.

* Most books tend to pigeon-hole leadership around traits, personality or behaviour but few offer genuine insights into how to step change leadership itself. This is the gap that Step Change is seeking to fill. * The book can be used in staff development, coaching scenarios and in MBA courses focusing on change management, leadership and human resource development. * Using cultural metaphors through popular film to illuminate the various stages, the book is brought to life for the reader. * The Leader's Journey offers a road map so that leaders can better appreciate where they are on the change cycle so that they can use the right interventions at the right time to move the change forward for themselves as well as their teams.

This book takes a new approach to ethics by focusing on the kinds of dilemmas that confront people almost daily on the job. The author's unique contribution is to meld philosophy with everyday decisionmaking, offering the reader a common sense approach to making ethical decisions. Mary Guy introduces ten core values which surround ethical dilemmas, demonstrating the way in which personnel can sensitize themselves to the values involved in a problem and reach a solution which maximizes the important values. Real-life case examples illustrate ethical dilemmas that involve personnel practices, organizing strategies, reporting functions, supervisory practices, whistleblowing, and more. Throughout, the author emphasizes the kinds of concerns which confront the vast majority of employees--from ambitious entry-level personnel to top executives. Realistic in tone, the discussion acknowledges the inevitable need to make compromises, showing how to optimize ethical values situations that arise on the job and for which no formal rules exist.

In her introductory chapter, Guy defines ethics, clarifies the relationship between ethical behavior and morality, and presents the ten guiding values that serve as the foundation for ethical decisions. Turning to a focus on decisionmaking, she explores such issues as the theoretical framework for rational decisionmaking, rational decisionmaking in real life, the application of ethical analysis to decisionmaking, and the definition of ethical decisionmaking. The four subsequent chapters present case studies of problems that personnel commonly encounter. In each case, Guy examines the ethical issues involved, applies various scenarios for reaching an ethical decision, and demonstrates the tension that exists among ethical decisionmaking, coping with daily exigencies, and accommodating the preferences of stakeholders. The concluding chapter summarizes the relationship between ethics and decisionmaking and offers a prescription for ensuring ethical decisionmaking throughout the organization. Must reading for managers in business, government, and not-for-profit organizations, this book is also an excellent supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses in business and public administration.

Human Resource Management, Innovation and Performance investigates the relationship between HRM, innovation and performance. Taking a multi-level perspective the book reflects critically on contentious themes such as high performance work systems, organizational design options, cross-boundary working, leadership styles and learning at work.

This volume is based around 14 chapters and two critical analyses which provide new perspectives on important organizational constructs. The first half of the book provides chapters by advanced graduate students who are making their first contributions to understanding organizational behavior. The second half of the book provides chapters illustrating new views of organizational constructs but from the perspectives of more established researchers in the field. All chapters share a common theme of attempting to provide new ways of viewing organizations and organizational behavior. Each chapter is based on the premise that, when presented with problems that seem impossible to solve, often the best results are achieved by finding new perspectives on the basic constructs being studied. These new perspectives provide insights which illuminate the problems for the theory of organizations as well as improving the ability of organizational members to solve practical organizational problems.

This book explores the premise that organizations are significantly influenced by their inter-organizational relationships; moreover, these relationships may generate important externalities, both positive and negative, impacting the environment at several levels. The advent of the Internet era, on the other hand, has resulted in disruptive changes in traditional inter-organizational networks, and some completely new inter-organizational settings are now arising. In its first part the book reviews the most commonly cited theories explaining inter-organizational phenomena: transaction costs economics, agency theory, resource dependence theory, game theories, collaborative networks theory, institutional theories, organizational ecology, resource-based / relational-based view of the firm, and knowledge network / social network theories. In Part II it thoroughly reviews the literature on a number of key IT-enabled inter-organizational systems currently on the rise, such as virtual organizations, e-intermediators and e-marketplaces. Lastly, Part III presents the case of the Yoox Group, a leading firm offering e-commerce services for fashion and design products. A framework is proposed for systematically linking the different possible types of inter-organizational relationships to specific, suitable sets of theories. The range of possible inter-organizational relationships is described on the basis of three pairs of opposites: conformism-breach, exploitation-exploration, and cooperation-competition. This results in a model that makes it possible to combine different theories in order to study the effects of inter-organizational ambidexterity and dynamism on performance.

This book examines the spectrum of green behaviors in organizational settings, focusing on the contribution that employees make through their environmental engagement. The authors provide an overview of green behaviors while clarifying the meaning of the concept and its critical importance to greening employees. By distinguishing between voluntary (e.g., encouraging colleagues to express their ideas about environmental issues), prescribed (e.g., having an obligation to implement environmental policies), and counterproductive (e.g., not caring about water or electricity consumption) behaviors, the book rethinks sustainable development, placing the psychological and environmental dimensions on a par. Aimed at researchers in human resource management, organizational behavior, organizational change, and psychology, this interdisciplinary study proposes a novel approach to sustainability by assessing employee behaviors at work.

Management research has traditionally assumed that leaders play an essential role in both public and private organizations and are required for a business to run smoothly. However, more recently, a vein of critical research has claimed that leaders can do more harm than good, creating confusion and putting their reputation before production and employee wellbeing. This book asks the question - what would happen if there were no leaders? Would employees be better off without formal (or informal) leaders? And even if such a utopia were desirable, would it be realizable in practice?

What kind of character strengths must leaders develop in themselves and others to create and sustain extraordinary organizational growth and performance? In this updated and expanded second edition, the author, John J. Sosik, answers this question by reviewing what is known about the connection between authentic transformational leadership and positive psychology. He summarizes a wealth of leadership knowledge in a unique collection of captivating stories about 25 famous leaders from business, history and pop culture: Aung San Suu Kyi, John F. Kennedy, Maya Angelou, Bill Gates, Brian Wilson, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Joe Namath, Malala Yousafzai, Mother Teresa, Angelina Jolie, Pope Saint John Paul II, Shirley Chisholm, Sheryl Sandberg, Andy Griffith, Margaret Thatcher, Oprah Winfrey, Nelson Mandela, Warren Buffet, Carlos Ghosn, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herb Kelleher, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Fred Rogers. What do these leaders have in common? Each possesses virtues of wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence and their associated character strengths that form the foundation of their outstanding leadership. Besides generating astonishing results for their organizations, these leaders reaped numerous physical, mental, social and spiritual benefits from their strong character. Their stories teach readers leadership principles that they too can apply to achieve sustainable growth and excellence. The author includes dozens of interesting examples, vivid anecdotes, and clear guidelines to offer readers an in-depth look at how character and virtue forms the moral fiber of authentic transformational leadership. Individuals currently in leadership positions as well as aspiring leaders will find the book's conversational style, fascinating stories, and practical guidelines both useful and inspiring.

A concise narrative with cases and examples of controversial corporate behaviour interwoven throughout. Provides a deep analysis of ethical issues such as universalism in ethics, the proper grounding of human rights, the legitimacy of moral agency for multinational corporations, and the authority of host country laws for students. From one of the leading academics in business ethics and globalisation. Aimed at upper level students, the book presents important issues, challenging students to develop an awareness and understanding of these topics, as well as building their analytical skills.