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Books > Business & Economics > Business & management > Management & management techniques > Organizational theory & behaviour
This edited collection examines organizational conflict and how it is handled in seven different countries (and cultures) around the globe: France, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and Turkey. Experts on each country discuss how various social, cultural, and economic forces affect conflict management; how managerial styles differ with regard to organizational and interpersonal conflict management; alternative dispute mechanisms available in each country for the resolution of conflict; and how general managerial effectiveness can be improved with respect to organizational conflict.
Are humans fair by nature? Why do we often willingly trust strangers or cooperate with them even if those actions leave us vulnerable to exploitation? Does this natural inclination towards fairness or trust have implications in the market-place? Traditional economic theory would perhaps think not, perceiving human interaction as self-interested at heart. There is increasing evidence however that social norms and norm-driven behaviour such as a preference for fairness, generosity or trust have serious implications for economics. This book provides an easily accessible overview of economic experiments, specifically those that explore the role of fairness, generosity, trust and reciprocity in economic transactions. Ananish Chaudhuri approaches a variety of economic issues and problems including:
The book discusses how norm-driven behaviour can often lead to significantly different outcomes than those predicted by economic theories and these findings should in turn cause us to re-think how we approach economic analysis and policy. Assuming no prior knowledge of economics and containing a variety of examples, this reader friendly volume will be perfect reading for people from a wide range of backgrounds including students and policy-makers. The book should appeal to economics undergraduates studying experimental economics, microeconomics or game theory as well as students in social psychology, organizational behaviour, management and other business related disciplines.
This book explores how companies engage in CSR activities, how their corporate identity determines the way in which they perceive the stakeholders and, as a result, engage in dialogue-based relations with them.
Advanced countries have shown an increasing convergence in their economic performance and technological intensity, with a relative decline of the position of the United States and the emergence of the European and Japanese economies. The Technological Specialization of Advanced Countries moves beyond aggregate patterns and examines the sectoral structure of technological activities, the process of specialization, and the impact on national performance. Indicators of technology and of scientific activity are examined together with other economic and R & D data, providing a wealth of empirical evidence on the activities, and areas of strength and weakness of individual countries. The amount of disaggregated data provided, and the assessment offered on the state of art in science and technology indicators, make The Technological Specialization of Advanced Countries an important reference work. A description of the fields of national effort is provided and a special study is devoted to the fields of greater innovative dynamism where patenting has grown most rapidly. Over time, countries have concentrated their technological efforts in the fields of their greater strength, under the pressure of increasing international competition and the proprietary nature of know how. Conversely, in science there has generally been a decrease in the degree of specialization, with countries entering new fields of research, taking advantage of the open flow of scientific knowledge. For science and technology policy, the findings of The Technological Specialization of Advanced Countries suggest that national efforts should be combined with the growing international integration. The aims of maintaining established areas of strength and of developing new specializations in emerging fields should be balanced, and a more selective policy at the sectoral level is suggested.
Leadership in today's corporations is exercised not merely, or even primarily, by those at the very top of the organizational charts, but also by the many employees who find themselves in the middle of the corporation. These managers, directors, and vice presidents practice inner leadership in both senses of the term. They lead from within the organization, rather than from the top. They lead from within themselves, seeking to guide others by the light of their own core values and goals, which may be distinct from, if complementary to, the organization's goals. How they do so, and how they can be more effective inner leaders, is the focus of this book for current and aspiring leaders as well as their academic colleagues. Fairholm explains that there are four key characteristics that distinguish inner leaders from CEOs. First, inner leaders inhabit a unique corporate culture in which they relate not only to subordinates, but to peers and supervisors as well. Second, inner leaders' authority is often more a function of their personalities and personal charisma than it is of their official positions. Third, inner leaders have the ability to create a subculture within the corporation that facilitates attainment of "their" personal and professional goals and is consistent with "their" personal values. Fourth, inner leaders use different technologies (techniques, methods, and approaches) in the pursuit of their objectives. Current and aspiring leaders as well as their academic colleagues will benefit from this work.
Since the dawn of social science, theorists have debated how and why societies appear to change, develop and evolve. Today, this question is pursued by scholars across many different disciplines and our understanding of these dynamics has grown markedly. Yet, there remain important areas of disagreement and debate: what is the difference between societal change, development and evolution? What specific aspects of cultures change, develop or evolve and why? Do societies change, develop or evolve in particular ways, perhaps according to cycles, or stages or in response to survival necessities? How do different disciplines-from sociology to anthropology to psychology and economics-approach these questions? This book provides complex and nuanced answers to these, and many other, questions. First, the book invites readers to consider the broad landscape of societal dynamics across human history, beginning with humanity's origins in small nomadic bands of hunter gatherers through to the emergence of post-industrial democracies. Then, the book provides a tour of several prominent existing theories of cultural change, development and evolution. Approaches to explaining cultural dynamics will be discussed across disciplines and schools of thought, from "meme" theories to established cumulative cultural evolutionary theories to newly emerging theories on cultural tightness-looseness. The book concludes with a call for theoretical integration and a frank discussion of some of the most unexamined structures that drive cultural dynamics across schools of thought.
This volume brings together the latest thinking from experts in a wide range of fields on the evolving relationships between data, methods and theory.
Women are now part of senior management in higher education (HE) to varying degrees in most countries and actively contribute to the vision and strategic direction of universities. This book attempts to analyse their impact and potential impact on both organisational growth and culture
Moving away from the common/traditional focus on studying organizations from a distance, this highly engaging book introduces the idea of studying them from the inside. Inside Organizations: Exploring Organizational Experiences guides placement students, and any student undertaking part-time work in an organization, through 'insider inquiry', helping them to develop key reflexive and critical thinking skills for their future careers. It encourages you to pay attention to what goes on in organizations, to question what you experience and ultimately to make sense of how organizations function, helping you to develop key reflexive and critical thinking skills for your future careers. This book is ideal for students on programmes with a placement or internship element such as business and management, nursing and health, and education and is especially useful to those doing reflective journals and essays.
Employee participation programs have many faces, many definitions, many forms--and they change all the time. For some people they are meant to solve every problem in the workplace. For others they are ways to reduce resistance to management and its efforts to bring about organizational change. Still others see them as totally redundant and a hindrance to efficency and the implementation of good management practices. To make sense of it all, Bar-Haim integrates--historically, thematically, analytically--the wide but often incoherent knowledge we have about these programs, and in doing so portrays them in a clear, useful, multidimensional manner. The result is a work of scholarship and practical guidance that students, scholars, researchers, and executives will find important, an action-oriented source of vital information. Bar-Haim shows that participation programs in work organizations have always attempted to solve three basic human problems, problems stemming from industrial democracy and equality, work alienation, and occupational and managerial effectiveness. To do this he uses a rare multidimensional technique. He describes and analyzes the processes and behavior of participation, participants, and organizational forms using a a variety of conceptual and theoretical frames drawn from the social and management sciences. He enhances our understanding of participation programs on micro and macro levels, and then provides practical guidelines from the real-world experience of other scholars and executives. Among the several ironies he discovers are that the roles of enthusiasts, opponents, and skeptics changed during the course of a jubilee of these programs. By integrating a large body of research and suggesting a formal model to evaluate existing employee programs and projected ones, his book attempts to ease the enigmatic ambivalence we have toward worker participation in general. In fact, he shows that by better understanding the dynamics of participation programs, it is possible for those who desire such programs to create, construct, and maintain better ones.
Based upon a major research project and a high level of access to relevant individuals this is the first book that opens the door on the closed and guarded world of Japanese banking. The book discusses in first-hand terms the nature of the bank's relationships to its client firms, to members of its 'group' and to 'outsiders'; placing these relationships within a competitive strategy which the book sets forth in an original framework, the Relational Access Paradigm.
Distilling the vast literature on this most frequently studied variable in organizational behavior, Paul E. Spector provides students and professionals with a pithy overview of the research and application of job satisfaction. In addition to discussing the nature of and techniques for assessing job satisfaction, this text summarizes the findings regarding how people feel toward work, including cultural and gender differences in job satisfaction, personal and organizational antecedents, potential consequences, and interventions to improve job satisfaction. Students, researchers, and practitioners will particularly appreciate the extensive list of references and the Job Satisfaction Survey included in the Appendix. This book includes the latest research and new topics including the business case for job satisfaction, customer service, disabled workers, leadership, mental health, organizational climate, virtual work, and work-family issues. Further, paulspector.com features an ongoing series of blog articles, links to assessments mentioned in the book, and other resources on job satisfaction to coincide with this text. This book is ideal for professionals, researchers, and undergraduate and graduate students in industrial and organizational psychology and organizational behavior, as well as in specialized courses on job attitudes or job satisfaction. .
Our work life is changing. Every day new companies, technologies, and ideas emerge that impact how, where, and most importantly, why we work. Despite this exciting evolution, people remain the heart of change. People are tricky. People don't seem to evolve as fast as global trends. People get Stuck. Teams have people moving at different speeds with different levels of adoption in our evolving workplace. Some evolve and some don't. Teams get Stuck. Leaders, managers, and teammates struggle with this resistance and get frustrated. Frustrated people impact the performance of every organization. Organizations get Stuck. Why? The answer is deeply human and biological, rooted in the way our brain interacts with everything in the world, even work. When people feel they are losing something, they react by getting Stuck. Stuck connects over 20 years of research on our brain's reaction to the evolving workplace with real stories of people journeying through the challenge of being Stuck. The organizations, leaders, and managers who understand these concepts will evolve with the future. Those organizations will understand LOSS as a tool to achieve business WINs. This book addresses a critical concept that closes a gap in other popular business publications. Many books tell leaders and managers the process of how to change their organizations. However, many of these books lack a key mechanism for understanding human interactions. The mechanism is a biological function developed through evolution called attachment - the human need to connect to different tangible and intangible objects for support. Attachment is the reason that people connect with leaders and corporate culture, but also what creates a deep sense of loss during even the smallest changes. Stuck offers a complete understanding of attachment and how it impacts individuals, relationships, and organizations. The root of the challenge is the human need to connect to different tangible and intangible objects for support. The basis of the need for support is grounded in our need for attachment. Those who learn to understand loss through attachment behavior and the attachments of others will succeed. In addition, this book provides original data-based evidence from assessments conducted with nearly 20,000 respondents and original stories from the application of attachment concepts in more than 150 organizations across all sectors around the globe. It shines a light on attachment and use it as a lens to better understand our workplace. Stuck is not an academic study. It is a practical guide for leading the brain through change. For the first time, the authors tell stories that demonstrate their research and offer a roadmap for how to leverage attachment research to drive business success. Stuck provides not only the deep lessons from the authors' research, but clear steps for readers to use the lessons of attachment in their own work. In this way, the book serves as a guide to those leaders, managers, and employees who are ready to be unStuck.
This book presents the current and future issues facing opera houses and opera companies. Problems in different environments need different solutions. In particular, it opposes the American method of managing cultural institutions, preferring a European one where public support and funds plays a major role.
When Postmaster General Creswell penned his concern about the impact 2 of electronic diversion on his postal organization, the year was 1872. General Creswell, it turned out, fretted unnecessarily. Facsimile did not achieve commercial viability until roughly a century after his tenure as Postmaster General and today that technology is fading rapidly from the communication scene. Moreover, it never appears to have significantly affected physical letter volumes. However, if General Creswell were leading a major postal organization today, he likely would feel threatened by the potential of Internet communication to cause electronic diversion of physical mail. Should recent technology developments cause the oft-predicted (but so far incorrect) inflection point that would mark the beginning of declining mail volumes. the implications from a management standpoint will be profound. The relatively fixed nature of postal costs suggest that volume declines must be offset though improved productivity, reduced cost of inputs, revenue from new products that share common costs, or reduced level of universal service.
We live in a world ruled by standards. From toys and computers to corporate social responsibility, from the drycleaner in Nairobi to the Swedish radiation safety authority - international standards specify almost all aspects of society. This book questions how this is made possible. Standards need support in order to work and Ingrid Gustafsson explores how a control regime built on standards, certifications and accreditations can emerge over time and grow global. The global control regime is nurtured mainly by the questions connected to globalization: how can we trust things from other parts of the world? While resting on buzzwords such as 'trust' and 'confidence', the global control regime leaves us with a faceless bureaucratic system with no name and no one in charge. This has severe consequences for responsibility: if no one is in charge, then no one is to be held accountable for how standards rule the world. This is particularly pertinent because the author shows how states are embedded in standards to a much higher degree than previous research has shown. Offering in depth analysis, this book will be enjoyed by scholars and researchers of organizational theory, global governance and public administration.
* A unique contribution to the field of leadership specifically and HR and Learning and Development in general. * Shows learning journey an individual must take to become a transpersonal leader. * Draws from advances in leadership thinking that conceive leadership as beyond situational and strategic leadership and instead focused behavioural and spiritual leadership. * Builds on and utilises recent evidence based research by LeaderShape and others on the performance of leaders and on the application of neuroscience research. * Is designed to be engaging and accessible for senior leaders, HR and talent professionals - is practical with real-life case studies and examples from different contexts.
* A unique contribution to the field of leadership specifically and HR and Learning and Development in general. * Shows learning journey an individual must take to become a transpersonal leader. * Draws from advances in leadership thinking that conceive leadership as beyond situational and strategic leadership and instead focused behavioural and spiritual leadership. * Builds on and utilises recent evidence based research by LeaderShape and others on the performance of leaders and on the application of neuroscience research. * Is designed to be engaging and accessible for senior leaders, HR and talent professionals - is practical with real-life case studies and examples from different contexts.
This book tells how two successful financial services companies, Century Companies of America and CUNA Mutual Insurance, met the challenges of a changing marketplace by tranforming themselves through joining forces. Cowritten by Century Companies' CEO, the book describes how the boards and executives of the two companies reached the conclusion that affiliation with another company was the best strategy, how they selected each other as partners, how they accomplished the integration of the two organizations, the challenges they faced in doing so, and the lessons learned in the process. Human issues, not technical ones, were the most important in determining the success of organizational transformation, as were the early identification of cultural differences and the development of strategies to integrate those differences. The tumultuous changes that took place in the financial services industry in the early 1980s caused both companies to realize that they needed to undertake substantially different strategies than they had previously utilized. Cowritten by Century Companies' CEO, the book describes how the boards and executives of the two companies reached the conclusion that affiliation with another company was the best strategy, how they selected each other as partners, how they accomplished the integration of the two organizations, the challenges they faced in doing so, and the lessons learned in the process.
Building on his previous book, The Customer's Victory, François Dupuy outlines ways to manage a change process. Using practical examples from new case studies and discussion of current theories of organizational change, this book explains how true organizational change can be effected in both private businesses and public organizations. With a strong pedagogical format, case studies and a helpful glossary of terms, this is an invaluable guide both for managers having to deal with change implementation and for students and researchers of change management.
Designing Stress Resistant Organizations demonstrates, in a
persuasive way, how computational organization theory can be
applied to advance the field of management with its successful
integration of theory and practice.
No pre-pandemic strategy is effective anymore. None. Not for organizations large or small, for-profit or non-profit, domestic or global. Claims of a "return to normal" or "the new normal" are ridiculous. What we're facing is really a "new reality," and that reality is the need for agile strategic decisions and pragmatic views of the future. That means that strategy formulation can be reduced to a few days and the view of the future can only be 12-18 months. This is the antithesis of Peter Drucker's approach to strategy, but his highly effective approach was developed at GM three quarters of a century ago. It's time to move on. Alan Weiss has developed an original and completely new approach to strategy which thus far has certified over 100 people globally, delivering this approach to scores of firms of all types in four countries. More than two dozen firms are using this approach. Sentient Strategy is based on two modern dimensions: awareness of the environment in which the organization exists and has influence, and consciousness of the impact of actions being considered. The old SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) approaches are currently equivalent to riding down the freeway on a horse. We must drop the hubris that has led us to believe we can see years ahead and anticipate what's coming. No one predicted the Internet No one predicted the latest pandemic. It's time to turn volatility and disruption on their heads and use them as offensive weapons in the marketplace instead of trying to protect ourselves from them. Imagine a strategy that an organization can formulate in just a day or so, revisit easily and frequently, and design a series of shorter-term, viable futures. "Sentient" means "perceptive" and "self-aware." It doesn't mean "one size fits all" from a cookie-cutter firm's approach to strategy. Alan Weiss equips the reader to consider using this approach independently. These are new times-a new reality, a "no normal (TM)"-hence, it's ridiculous to use old approaches to strategy. There's a clear reason why Sears didn't morph into Amazon and why Hertz surrendered its number one spot to Enterprise.
An organisation's most important asset is its people. And critical to an organisation's success is the extent to which its people interact effectively - both with each other as team members and with the wider organisation. This is why managing teams has become a key area for a growing number of organisations around the world. While many organisations are world-class at managing their materials and machinery, they fall short in managing the human side of their activities.This book outlines the challenges faced by both team leaders and team members in 21st-century workplaces. It proposes 13 key performance or "team health" indicators for highly effective teams based on research data collected from a large range of industry sectors, team sizes and organisations in the UK. It contributes to the understanding of the nature and functioning of team cohesiveness by describing teamwork as a multi-component variable and identifying the factors that impact on teams and the implications of teamwork for organisations.The book sets out to aid organisations by introducing a Team Performance Diagnostic (TPD) tool. The TPD enables organisations to gain an accurate and detailed insight into the real-time performance of their teams, helps team managers to understand the underlying 'people' issues within the team and how to reach higher levels of team performance quickly. The TPD has been widely used in major multinationals and the UK public sector to pinpoint hard-to-find opportunities to achieve rapid improvements.The research suggests that the use of TPD contributes to more free-flowing feedback both within the team and in the organisation as a whole, and that successful teams are indicative of a healthy organisational culture.This book is an essential guide for senior managers and policy-makers dealing with team effectiveness, and will be highly useful for students of business and management.
The health of American manufacturing has been a cause of real concern during the 1980s. Foreign competition, hostile takeovers, new technologies and a host of other factors have caused dramatic changes in this key sector of the American economy. Many ob servers of this process of change are singing the "rust belt blues," consigning U.S. manufacturing greatness to the history books. In April 1986, the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University issued a study by its director, Dr. Murray L. Weidenbaum, which challenged this perception of American manu facturing's future. The report, entitled Learning to Compete, pointed to a variety of positive developments resulting from the ad versity faced by American firms in the first half of the decade: pro ducers had improved quality and productivity, reduced costs, and in creased emphasis on R&D. In November 1988, as a logical extension of this research, the Center held a conference on American Manufacturing in the 1990s. Focusing on American responses to the changing global competitive environment, this conference brought together the practical experi ence of business professionals and the more detached views of aca demic and media experts. In a day and a half of meetings, encompassing six separate ses sions, a luncheon address and an after-dinner debate, conference participants assembled an extensive profile on the state of U.S."
The issue of asymmetric information and public decision-making has been widely explored by economists. Most of the traditional analysis of public sector activities has been reviewed to take account of the different incentive problems arising from an asymmetric distribution of relevant information among the actors of the public decision-making process. A normative approach has been developed, mainly employing the principal agent paradigm to design incentive schemes which tackle adverse selection and moral hazard problems within public organizations. Still, this analysis is under way in many fields of public economics. However, a debate is ongoing on the theoretical limitations of this approach and on its relevance for the actual public sector activities. Public Decision-Making Processes and Asymmetry of Information encompasses different contributions to these issues, on both theoretical and practical areas. The innermost problem in the current discussion arises from the fact that this normative analysis is firmly rooted in the complete contracting framework, with the consequence that, despite the analytical complexities of most models, their results rely on very simplified assumptions. Most complexities of the organization of public sector, and more generally, of writing "contracts," are therefore swept away. Once the need for an incomplete contracting approach is recognized, the question becomes how to relax some of the assumptions characterizing the complete contracting framework, without getting ad hoc results. The Introduction to this book, written by Jean Jacques Laffont, sets the general grid to interpret the position of its papers in this debate. The four papers in Part 1 of thebook are devoted to developing the analysis of some of the theoretical issues mentioned in the Introduction. Part 2 is devoted to discussing the applications of the theory to different public sector activities. |
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