Advances in computing technology and internet-worked environments have driven profound realignments not only in the dynamics of technologically mediated interpersonal interactions but also in the way organizations engage with consumers, producers, and other businesses. Connectivity and Knowledge Management in Virtual Organizations: Networking and Developing Interactive Communications provides managers and academicians with a comprehensive review of innovations and trends in virtual organizations. Covering topics such as knowledge creation and management, virtual customer networks, e-commerce, and virtual communities this reference book offers incisive analysis of the full spectrum of technologies, applications, practices, and outcomes within this growing field.

This groundbreaking interdisciplinary Handbook showcases the latest intuition research, integrated in a framework that reconciles various views on what intuition is and how it works. The internationally renowned group of contributors presents their findings in five areas. Part I explores different facets of the intuiting process and its outcome, the role of consciousness and affect, and alternate ways of capturing intuition. Part II deals with its function in expertise, strategy, entrepreneurship, and ethics. Part III outlines intuitive decision making in critical occupations, legal profession, medicine, film and wine industry, and teaching. Part IV pushes the boundaries of our current understanding by exploring the possibility of non-local intuition, based on the principles of quantum holography. Part V investigates new techniques for developing intuitive skills. This cutting-edge, comprehensive Handbook will prove essential for academics and research students of social sciences, particularly management, psychology, sociology, entrepreneurship, leadership, team dynamics, HR and training. It will be also an invaluable resource for industry professionals searching for soft-core methods to increase productivity and creativity/innovation, to improve leadership and organizational climate, or to adopt new staff training and development methods. Contributors: A. Antonietti, B.T. Bakken, C. Betsch, R.T. Bradley, L.A. Burke, J.-F. Coget, E. Dane, A. Dijksterhuis, W. Duggan, I.D. Ebert, S. Epstein, A. Glockner, B. Graf, L.K. Gundry, J.R. Guzak, T. Haerem, M.B. Hargrove, C. Harteis, G.P. Hodgkinson, P. Iannello, K.-P. Ittner, J.R. Kickul, G. Klein, C. Kugler, C. Kuhnle, J. Langan-Fox, M. Mason, B. Morgenthaler, J.E. Pretz, D. Radin, G. Roth, E. Sadler-Smith, M. Sinclair, M. Strick, D.E. Tomasino, V. Vranic

The proper use and dissemination of information among stakeholders, organizations, and societies is crucial for the development of productive and prosperous communities. Governance, Communication, and Innovation in a Knowledge Intensive Society gathers current research on knowledge management in governments, organizations, and institutions, and presents a compilation useful to academics, professionals, politicians, and policy makers invested in knowledge-intensive societies. This book investigates the impact of knowledge and information technologies on fields as diverse as education, culture, science and business, in order to provide an effective framework for effectively navigating the nuances of an information-pervasive world.

You may be: - trying to fix the healthcare system in your country... - dealing with family break-up... - exploring change - and making it happen - in your organisation... - worrying about how to look after your elderly parents... In any case, you'll know that with some problems it's hard to know where to start - we can't define them, we get in a muddle thinking about them, we may try to ignore some aspect/s of them and - when we finally do something - they usually get worse. These problems are so entangled they become 'messy situations' and our first mistake is to try and fix them as we would fix a simple problem. But Systems Thinking offers a range of good ways of approaching these situations and unravelling them. Rosalind Armson is one of the world's foremost teachers and practitioners of Systems Thinking, and her remarkable book explains how these messes happen and what to do about them. Specifically, she sets out a series of sophisticated and challenging - but practical and easily learned - skills and techniques for thinking better when you're'in a mess'. Whether you're new to Systems Thinking or have long experience, the book invites you to develop your skills through working with your own messy situations. It's written for managers, project managers, team leaders, 'change leaders', strategists, policy makers and concerned citizens as well as university students from a broad set of disciplines. Organisations and readers in education, healthcare, environmental management, IT planning and social care are just a few of those likely to find it helpful.

This volume offers a collection of studies on problem of organization's efficiency, criteria for evaluating the efficiency, tools and methods for measuring the efficiency. The articles included present an interdisciplinary look at efficiency, its essence and the principles of its measurement. The contributions also identify a broad spectrum of conditions for achieving efficiency in various types of organizations and systems (e.g. public institution, non-profit organizations), representing various industries. The book collects selected papers presented at the 7th International Conference "Efficiency as a Source of the Wealth of Nations", held in Wroclaw, Poland, in May 2017.

A volume in Research in Management (Sponsored by the Southern Management Association) Series Editors Linda L. Neider and Chester A. Schriesheim, University of Miami Mirroring a parallel movement in psychology, one recent trend in the study of organizations has been an increased focus on positive management and organizational behavior. However, while contributing to an enhanced understanding of organizational phenomena, this focus tends to ignore negative aspects of workplace behavior, which can have very serious consequences for individuals, groups, and organizations. Given what many of us have seen over the past year in terms of the handling (mis-handling) of downsizing, restructuring, and compensation, it seems clear that the darker side of management is a topic of great concern. Thus, Volume 8 of Research in Management is devoted to exploring what has been called "The Dark Side" of management and organizational behavior. It includes seven chapters that are written by leading experts on a diverse range of topics, including abusive supervision attributions, dysfunctional mentors, destructive executives, social exclusion, public and private deviance, instrumental counterproductive behavior, and an examination of the difference between abusive and supportive leadership. Each of these chapters makes a unique contribution to understanding negative workplace behavior and each should stimulate a future stream of research in the same or related domains. Comments by the editors are also provided, highlighting other areas where the study of "dark side" behavior and phenomena would seem particularly beneficial for the advancement of knowledge about organizations and their effective functioning.

Among the most significant features of Sims and Dennehy's book are a focus beyond valuing and managing cultural diversity, and a demonstration of the interdependency that exists between a number of important individual differences (i.e., alienation, receptivity, style, power). They discuss some personal yet theoretical insights on answers and questions that are important in increasing our recognition, understanding, and appreciation of diversity and differences in general. In eleven original essays contributors examine a wide assortment of behaviors, issues, and individual differences while offering their reflections on answers and future questions that are key to leveraging diversity and difference in organizations.

Recent literature has emphasized the projected changes in organizational demographics and the fact that globalization also is changing the face of organizational landscapes. Taken together these trends are serving to increase the need to understand and appreciate cultural diversity in virtually all organizations. Many books already exist that attempt to address this topic. Each one attempts to provide a guide to dealing with a variety of racial, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds. The intent of Sims and Dennehy's book is to go beyond offering ideas or to serve simply as a guide to improve the management of diversity. Thus, a major goal of this book is to have its readers reflect on their personal diversity and difference experiences and to create a forum for answers and questions on the value of diversity and differences for all. The main thread that ties everything together in this book is the strategy of creating value through repeated emphasis on our need to look beyond valuing and managing diversity to the interdependency of a variety of individual variables that shape our lives.

The book begins by offering a bridge-building model as a tool that colleges and universities can use to decrease the alienation experienced by minority students on predominantly white campuses and to increase the social consciousness of all institutional constituents. The next chapter suggests that diversity is essential to learning, and good conversation is a powerful way to learn from diversity. The book then introduces a model that seeks to place the issue of diversity management as one part of an overall development change process. The notion that the success of some organizations in enhancing diversity is dependent upon the vision and strength of management is emphasized in the next chapter, which, by taking a different perspective, presents the argument that current corporate infrastructures do not promote diversity. Unless a company builds new internal support systems that encourage diversity of thought and action, employees hired to make the company more diverse will merely be homogenized into the prevailing culture. In the following chapter the role of training in U.S. organizations is discussed as a major component in increasing the recognition, understanding, and appreciation of diversity and difference. The concept of difference-based approach to advocacy and its relation to issues of gender are introduced as cornerstones of creating work environments that are supportive of employees' needs to balance work and family. The next chapter provides data for analysis of the expatriate's learning experience and applies the learning from expatriate experiences to those issues faced by minorities in a domestic setting. A need to create new intellectual diversity that focuses on foreign language skills applicable to the needs of economic, scientific, and technological markets is emphasized in the next chapter. Next, a comparison is made of the decision-making processes and practices of Japanese and American managers at a Japanese company in the United States. The author's pioneering findings can be generalized to understand decision-making in different cultures and organizations. The role of diversity educator is then discussed and the author persuasively argues that active learner participation, self-disclosure, and a trusting supportive environment are prerequisites to understanding and appreciating diversity. The book concludes with a review of the important points discussed by the contributors to this book, offers questions in need of answers, and identifies future issues on diversity and differences.

This book covers the main issues on the study of competencies and talent management in modern and competitive organizations. The chapters show how organizations around the world are facing (global) talent management challenges and give the reader information on the latest research activity related to that. Innovative theories and strategies are reported in this book, which provides an interdisciplinary exchange of information, ideas and opinions about the workplace challenges.

Across Europe, market mechanisms are spreading into areas where they did not exist before. In public administration, market governance is displacing other ways of coordinating public services. In social policy, the welfare state is retreating from its historic task of protecting citizens from the discipline of the market. In industrial relations, labor and management are negotiating with an eye to competitiveness, often against new non-union market players. What is marketization, and what are its effects? This book uses employment services in Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain as a window to explore the rise of market mechanisms. Based on more than 100 interviews with funders, managers, front-line workers, and others, the authors discuss the internal workings of these markets and the organizations that provide the services. This book gives readers new tools to analyse market competition and its effects. It provides a new conceptualization of the markets themselves, the dilemmas and tradeoffs that they generate, and the differing services and workplaces that result. It is aimed at students and researchers in the applied fields of social policy, public administration, and employment relations and has important implications for comparative political economy and welfare states.

This volume is focused on the emerging concept of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs). COINs are at the core of collaborative knowledge networks, distributed communities taking advantage of the wide connectivity and the support of communication technologies, spanning beyond the organizational perimeter of companies on a global scale. It includes the refereed conference papers from the 6th International Conference on COINs, June 8-11, 2016, in Rome, Italy. It includes papers for both application areas of COINs, (1) optimizing organizational creativity and performance, and (2) discovering and predicting new trends by identifying COINs on the Web through online social media analysis. Papers at COINs16 combine a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems and the psychology and sociality of collaboration, and intercultural analysis through the lens of online social media. They will cover most recent advances in areas from leadership and collaboration, trend prediction and data mining, to social competence and Internet communication.

One-size-fits-all cluster policies have been rightly criticized in the literature. One promising approach is to focus cluster policies on the specific needs of firms depending on the stage of development (emergence, growth, sustainment or decline) their cluster is in. In this highly insightful book, these stage-specific cluster policies are analysed and evaluated. Moreover, several chapters also focus on smart specialization policies to promote regional development by taking into account the emergence and adaptation of clusters and industries. In so doing, the book contributes to a newly emerging literature on how the cluster life cycle concept can inform policies and how these policies differ from static approaches that ignore the dynamism of clusters. The underlying idea is to foster the ability of clusters to renew themselves and to generate new developmental paths, thus preventing stagnation and decline. This state-of-the-art exploration of smart specialization from a cluster life cycle perspective is an invaluable book for academics in the fields of economic geography, entrepreneurship, innovation, industrial economics, regional studies and cluster research. It will also appeal to regional policy makers and practitioners dealing with public policy. Contributors include: Y. Al-Saleh, B.T. Asheim, A. Auer, M. Benner, P. Cooke, D. Fornahl, J.K. Fosse, M. Fromhold-Eisebith, M. Grillitsch, R. Hassink, A. Isaksen, K. Koschatzky, H. Kroll, T. Lammer-Gamp, B. Lageman, S. Mahroum, R. Martin, G. Meier zu Koecker, J. Nordhause-Janz, R. Normann, R. Ramlogan, D. Rehfeld, M. Rothgang, E. Schnab, T. Stahlecker, F. Toedtling, M. Trippl, E. Uyarra, J. Vicente

This book contributes a basic framework for and specific insights into interdisciplinary connections between production, logistics, and traffic subsystems. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which presents an overview of interdisciplinarity in value-added networks and freight traffic. This includes an introduction to the topic and a description of an integrated framework of production, logistics, and traffic. Furthermore, it describes the barriers and challenges of interdisciplinary decision-making and project management. In turn, the second part presents domain-specific perspectives on interdisciplinary decision support, exploring domain-specific challenges of interdisciplinary interfaces and requirements for management methods and instruments from the standpoint of production management, logistics management, traffic management, and information technologies.

Take an innovative approach to a climate of change within your workplace or organization with this guidebook on diversity and inclusion.

Author Maura G. Robinson, an authority on diversity and inclusion, has been helping companies create systemic process of change for more than twenty years. In "the Inclusion Revolution Is Now," she explores as you can

create an environment of inclusion where all employees are accountable for their behaviors, and able to work together to accomplish the organizational goals.

recognize that civil diversity impedes systemic processes of change to occur. So diversity is viewed as an initiative or a program with no sustainability at the organizational level.

ensure employees willingly practice inclusion regardless of personal beliefs.

While there is still racism, prejudice, sexism, and other exclusionist attitudes among people in the workplace, organizational leaders have the power and responsibility to mandate a climate of inclusion. Supporting diversity and inclusion is also a prerequisite for capitalizing on the ideas that diverse people can bring to your organization.

Most diversity practices used by organizations do not actually promote inclusion, and exclusion continues to exist. There's a better way to achieve inclusion, and it starts with "the Inclusion Revolution is Now."

"Lessons Learned" is a knowledge management approach for organizational learning and improved performance and productivity. However beneficial this approach is, few organizations have been able to implement the processes necessary for organizational success Utilizing Evidence-Based Lessons Learned for Enhanced Organizational Innovation and Change links the theoretical foundation of the "lessons learned" approach with current tools and evidence-based research in support of organizational development. Outlining best practices and emerging research in organizational learning, this publication is ideal for project managers, academicians, researchers, and upper-level students looking to implement these processes into their project management cycle, particularly in the risk management and quality control processes.

Many corporations, in their attempt to create innovative products and services, have focused on the concept of building teams. While many groups fizzle, on rare occasions the members of a group will experience an extraordinary eruption of excitement, transcending an organization's rigid confines to achieve astonishing results. These individuals, say Jean Lipman-Blumen and Harold J. Leavitt, are lucky enough to be members of a "hot group," a phenomenon they lucidly and enthusiastically describe in their ground-breaking new book Hot Groups.
A hot group is not a name for a newfangled team, task force, or committee. Rather, a hot group is defined by a distinctive state of mind coupled with a style of behavior that is intense and sharply focused on its ultimate goal. Stretching themselves beyond their own expectations, members of a hot group plunge into enterprises that have the potential to change, even ennoble, their own and others' lives.
Neither trendy fabrication nor new management fad, hot groups have existed since the dawn of civilization, perhaps invigorating groups of cavemen to hunt together furiously for food before winter's approach. Today, examples of hot groups abound in territories such as Silicon Valley, where impassioned people have blazed paths through the burgeoning computer industry. Consider the hot group that created the original Macintosh and revolutionized the personal computer market. John Sculley, who joined Apple in the early 1980s, described a "magnetic field" that surrounded the Macintosh hot group members, and Bill Gates, Microsoft's mastermind, reported that a hot programming group to which he once belonged "didn't obey a 24-hour clock." Instead, they programmed for days at a time, pausing only to eat and talk about software with fellow programmers. Here also are examples of hot groups at work in other industries: the individuals that created the blockbuster TV drama "Hill Street Blues"; the Navy and civilian personnel that transformed a standard cruiser into a guided missile cruiser in less than 12 months; and even the ad hoc crisis management group advising President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis. Indeed, the inspiring case studies found throughout Hot Groups illustrate that well-nourished hot groups can profoundly transform any type of organization.
Still, Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt recognize the risks inherent in loosening an organization's structural soil enough to accommodate these groups. Consequently, they address such issues as how to provide the kind of leadership required by a hot group, how to mesh a hot group with the regimented structure of the overall corporation, how managers can encourage new hot groups, and how best to cope with an overheated hot group.
Drawing on decades of research and experience with groups and organizations throughout the world, Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt have written an intensely engaging book about a phenomenon that will become increasingly important in our rapidly changing world. Expertly carving a path through this unmapped terrain, they lucidly demonstrate how managers and executives can ignite hot group sparks in their own organizations.

While it is possible for a company achieve short-term profit, it is much more difficult to sustain corporate success over time. This book is intended for those who run, or want to run, a business whatever its size or activity, with the objective of making it sustainable so that it will be a legacy for future generations. Indeed, the real purpose of corporate strategy is not only to make quick profits, but more importantly to create an organization that will endure. There is much to learn from the experience of established firms that have existed for a hundred years or more. They provide the material for this clear and concise book, which details the main elements of corporate strategy. Recognizing that each firm is unique, the book resists the temptation of quick fixes, instead offering lessons to be pondered and used on a case-by-case basis.

Technology in the world today impacts every aspect of society and has infiltrated every industry, affecting communication, management, security, etc. With the emergence of such technologies as IoT, big data, cloud computing, AI, and virtual reality, organizations have had to adjust the way they conduct business to account for changing consumer behaviors and increasing data protection awareness. The Handbook of Research on Social and Organizational Dynamics in the Digital Era provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings on all aspects of social issues impacted by information technology in organizations and inter-organizational structures and presents the conceptualization of specific social issues and their associated constructs. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as business management, knowledge management, and consumer behavior, this publication seeks to advance the practice and understanding of technology and the impacts of technology on social behaviors and norms in the workplace and society. It is intended for business professionals, executives, IT practitioners, policymakers, students, and researchers.

Instances of wrongdoing in and by organizations have featured heavily in news headlines in recent years. Why do organizational participants - employees, managers, senior officials - engage in illegal, unethical, and socially irresponsible behavior? The dominant view of wrongdoing as an abnormal phenomenon assumes that the perpetrator is a rational, proactive actor, working in isolation. However, Palmer develops an alternative approach in this book examining wrongdoing as a normal occurrence, produced by actors with no positive inclinations to engage in this practice, but whose behaviour is shaped by the immediate social context over a period of time. The book provides a comprehensive critical review of the theory and research on organizational wrongdoing. By using rich case study material, it illuminates different perspectives, potential explanations, policy implications, and suggestions for the way forward for the improvement of organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Good management skills alone won't get executives and their organizations far enough. What is also needed is the seemingly indefinable, evanescent, quirky, and paradoxical quality called leadership. Leadership lies in the emotional side of management. It pumps life into organizations and gives meaning to management structures. Leadership is symbolic, charismatic, inspirational--no matter how it is defined, Barach and Eckhardt prove that it can be DEGREESIlearned DEGREESR. Their book is thus a solidly researched, readable assessment of what leadership actually is, its various dimensions, its place among other necessary executive skills, and how it can be nurtured and propagated. With examples from the worlds of business, politics, sports, and the military and buttressed by sound academic studies, Barach and Eckhardt succeed in making the concept of leadership come alive and--of greatest value to organizations and their people--useful.

Barach and Eckhardt start by describing the emotional side of management, the paradoxical nature of leadership, and how it fits into the full set of executive responsibilities and skills. They go on to break leadership down into its 20 components. In chapters devoted to each component, they provide readers with well-documented descriptions of leadership's characteristics: desire, decisiveness, vision, integrity, anchoring, following, kinship, caring, inspiring, listening, telling, mentoring. They reassemble the parts and show how leadership works in Washington, D.C. Closing with a detailed discussion of the 6 most important leadership issues that Barach has identified in his decade-long study of the topic, the authors offer readers an opportunity to discover issues familiar to them personally, how to analyze them, and make use of the results.

As evidence builds that the Theory Y model of management, built on commitment and involvement, is far more successful in the workplace than the bureaucratic and authoritarian Theory X model, organizations seek new and more specific guidance in how to reinvent themselves into the Theory Y mode. Schuster outlines a step-by-step process to transform management theory into practice--he calls it Strategy A. As proof that the process works, he describes one firM's five-year-long intervention, in which Strategy A was applied with dramatic success. Other examples of Strategy A's successes are recounted here: how it worked in companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Disney, and elsewhere. Executives in the private and public sectors will find this a necessary resource to help them guide their organizations into this newly appreciated management style, while their academic colleagues will find new ways to communicate to their students its impressive benefits.

Part I delineates the foundation and definition of Strategy A. Chapter 1 describes organization culture and why it is an important determinant in organization performance. Schuster then explains the urgency of devising methods for improving productivity and competitiveness, summarizes results from his study of Fortune 1300 largest companies, and introduces Strategy A as an intervention process. Reviewing the work of other researchers, Schuster examines several successful contemporary American firms utilizing Strategy A, and then presents the results of his own research of one particular firM's performance. In Part II Schuster examines the principal steps in the application of Strategy A, discusses their rationale, and shows how other American firms have benefited from them.

Lissack and Gunz have gathered many of the leading practitioners from the science of complexity and its emerging applications to management--to give us an up-to-date, comprehensive understanding of this important new field and how it can change the way we think about the organizations. Complex systems, which consist of many interacting entities and exhibit properties such as self-organization, evolution, and constant novelty, exist in all domains of our world. The metaphors and models derived from complexity, say Lissack and Gunz, can be used to make sense of these systems and help managers shape them.

The three chapters in Part I introduce the topic of complexity science and how it relates to modern management practice, providing a context for the section on strategy, creativity, communications, and applications that follow. Part II examines strategy from a complexity perspective and complexity from a strategy perspective. In Part III the authors look at the intersection of complexity, creativity, and communication. Part IV on applications, examines how complexity-influenced theories of management actually affect routine management practice. Throughout, the book makes clear that what worked in a simpler, clearer world will not work today. State of the art yet basic enough to remain timely well into the future, this book will prove indispensable for organization decision makers everywhere and their academic colleagues.

The ability to implement change quickly is crucial to an organizations's success--not only in traditionally sedate industries, but also in today's fast-moving hi-tech ones. Sherman and Chaganti, from their study of 100 American corporations, half in stable industries, half in volatile ones, find that a firM's structure of governance bears heavily on the speed with which the firm can reorient itself. What are the characteristics of firms that change quickly? What inhibits others? And what, precisely, is the impact of a firM's stockholders, board and top management on its ability to adapt? Sherman and Chaganti provide answers to these and other questions, in the first book yet to focus entirely on the determinants of time in corporate reorientations.

In order for a firm to develop or sustain a competitive advantage, it must not only adapt correctly to environmental change, but also adapt quickly. This study examines the factors associated with the time a firm takes to initiate reorientation. The results of the research indicate that even in relatively large organizations, reorientations are not rare and occur routinely. Further, deterioration of a firM's financial condition tends to hasten its initiation of reorientation. However, the determinants of time taken to initiate reorientation differ in firms with relatively high prior performance and firms with relatively low prior performance.

This volume explores the concepts, themes, methods, and procedures of organization staffing. As author Aharon Tziner notes at the outset, although organizations usually attempt to predict the likely future performance of each applicant in terms of productivity, rarely do they consider the likelihood of the applicants finding gratification in their work-related needs and aspirations. Organizations which fail to consider these needs in the initial hiring process run the risk that extremely talented staff may eventually abandon the organization because of a lack of personal fulfillment. The short--and long-term consequences of these erroneous staffing policies range from decreased staff morale and efficiency to seriously impaired profitability. Tziner here offers a functional and integrated conceptual framework that enables organizations to maximize the probability that staffing decisions will result in optimal work adjustment and the enhancement of organizational productivity.

Tziner begins with an overview of the theoretical foundations of organizational staffing and a discussion of some basic concepts in the field. Subsequent chapters examine the process and methods of job analysis, predictors and measuring tools, and the staffing process. A separate chapter on staffing methods and instruments covers biodata, reference checks, the interview, psychological tests, graphological tests, situational tests, assessment centers, and peer evaluation. The following group of chapters address the cost of personnel programs, performance appraisal systems, work adjustment, and work-related attitudes. In the final chapter, Tziner shows the reader how to recognize the symptoms of work maladjustment. Numerous figures and tables illustrate points made in the text. Four appendices include additional helpful information such as guidelines for a structured interview and examples of performance appraisal rating formats. Industrial and organizational psychologists as well as human resources professionals will find Tziner's work an enlightening and practical guide to a long-overlooked aspect of the organization staffing process.