D. Bowen and E. Lawler III argue that human resources holds the key to sustained quality improvement. Consequently, the HRM department can potentially play a critical role in an organization’s TQM effort.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Facing the Customer: Empowerment or Production Line?
D. Bowen and E. Lawler III explain that in recent years, there has been a rush to adopt an empowerment approach, in which employees face the customer “free of rulebooks,” encouraged to do whatever is necessary to satisfy the customer. The production-line approach is a very different management style.
Service Encounters as Rites of Integration: An Information Processing Model
David E. Bowen and Christine M. Pearson discuss how service encounters are conceptualized as rites of integration which can establish the appropriate level of psychological involvement between service providers and customers.
Hiring for the Organization, Not the Job
This article by D. Bowen, G. Ledford, Jr. and B. Nathan examines a new approach to selection in which employee are hired to fit the characteristics of an organization, not just the requirements of a particular job.
Personality Measures as a Selection Tool for High Involvement Organizations
R. Nathan, Gerald E. Ledford, David E. Bowen, and Thomas G. Cummings discuss how measures of growth needs and social needs from the Personality Research Form, or PRF (Jackson, 1984) are shown to be a valid selection tool for a high involvement organization, based on the criterion of performance in a content valid pre-employment training program.
What Laws Govern the Size of a Meaningful Pay Increase?
This study by David Bowen, Christopher G. Worley, and Edward E. Lawler III examined the relationship between different size pay increases and their meaningfulness to employees.
Strategically Designed Benefit Plans as a Source of Competitive Advantage
David E. Bowen and Chistopher A. Wadley discuss how employee benefit plans, which can add 50% to payroll and be neither understood nor appreciated by employees, can be a source of costly headaches for a firm.
Service in Manufacturing: Some Strategic and Theoretical Implications
In this paper by David E. Bowen, Caren J. Siehl, and Benjamin Schneider, approaches to enhancing the competitiveness of domestic manufacturing operations are re-conceptualized as ways of restructuring production operations to include attributes of service operations.
Services Marketing and Management: Implications for Organizational Behavior
David E. Bowen and Benjamin Schneider argue that the marketing of services and the management of service organizations have been understudied relative to the marketing of goods and the management of organizations that produce goods.
Where is Human Resources Management Going? Six Models in Search of a Future
Michael Driver, Robert Coffey, and David E. Bowen state that there seems to be a growing consensus that HRM is at a crucial crossroads in its role within corporations in the United States.
Strategies for Managing On-Site Customers in Service Organizations
David E. Bowen describes strategies that managers in the service sector can use to respond effectively to customer presence within their organizations.
Moving from Production to Service in Human Resources Management
This article by Dave Bowen and Larry E. Greiner contends that the effectiveness of Human Resources (HR) staff groups responsible for personnel in organizations is limited because these groups often perform their role with a production orientation rather than a service orientation.