Research and Insights Archive

Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations

How Organization Agility Produces Sustained Performance: Bringing Coherence to Diverse Conceptual Perspectives (Download)

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Why and how organizations change – especially in competitive and dynamic environments – are central questions in organization theory and strategic management. Organization agility (OA) has emerged as a construct to describe the way organizations adapt quickly to continuous disruption and change, and theories explaining how OA works and produces performance outcomes have proliferated.

Rebellion and Revolution in Strategic Planning (or “Building a Strategic Architecture”)

Larry Greiner (USC) and Tom Cummings (USC) share that strategy consultants, managers and scholars have long relied on formal strategic planning to embody and implement their more abstract concepts of strategic management.

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4-D Theory of Strategic Transformation: When New CEOs Succeed and Fail

Larry Greiner, Thomas Cummings, and Arvind Bhambri discuss how there is no honeymoon for most new CEOs these days. Instead, they are challenged immediately by their boards to make major changes and improve financial performance. Entering with strong mandates for change, new CEOs frequently launch strategic transformation initiatives.

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Doing Research That is Useful for Theory and Practice

Doing Research That is Useful for Theory and Practice

Edward E. Lawler III, Allan M. Mohrman, Susan A. Mohrman, Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. and Thomas G. Cummings, (Jossey-Bass, 1999)
Dealing with issues that cut across all social and behavioral sciences, Doing Research That Is Useful for Theory and Practice is full of practical advice on conducting successful research.

Organization-Learning Disorders Conceptual Models and Intervention Hypothesis

This paper by William M. Snyder and Thomas G. Cummings presents a conceptual model that proposes how organization-learning disorders influence organization performance.

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The Effects of a Shift-System Innovation on a Turnover and Absenteeism: A Naturally Occurring Field Experiment

In this paper by Thomas G. Cummings and Mark A. Kizilos, the impact of a participatively designed 12-hour shift system on employee turnover and absenteeism was examined in a naturally occurring field experiment.

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Large-Scale Organizational Change

Large-Scale Organizational Change

Allan M. Mohrman, Susan Albers Mohrman, Gerald E. Ledford, Jr., Thomas G. Cummings, Edward E. Lawler III; Associates. (Jossey-Bass, 1989)
This book provides a comprehensive examination of the theoretical questions and practical issues organizations face when they undergo a large-scale change — that is, a change in the fundamental character of an entire organization.

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.

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Self-Designing Organizations: Towards Implementing Quality-of-Work-Life Innovations

This chapter by Tom Cummings and Susan A. Mohrman develops a strategy for implementing innovations requiring fundamental organizational change.

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Organization Development and Labor Law: Implications for Practice/Malpractice

This article by Charles Maxey and Thomas Cummings suggests that organization development (OD) interventions can inadvertently violate federal labor law.

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Assessing Innovative Organizational Design: The Case for A Feedback/Adaptation Model

Organizational change projects entail dynamic complex processes through which organizations and their members learn new ways to function. This paper by T. Cummings and Susan A. Mohrman assesses the appropriateness of traditional evaluation models for the assessment of these projects.

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