This paper by Karen Mishra, Gretchen M. Spreitzer, and Aneil Mishra draws from the literature as well as from interviews of managers who have managed downsizings to identify strategies which mitigate the damage to trust and empowerment typically incurred during downsizing activities.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Managing Performance for Organizational Change and Learning
This paper by A. Mohrman, Jr. and S. Mohrman asserts the centrality of performance management in managing the business, defining the individuals’ relationship with the organization, and functioning as a feedback and control mechanism.
The Discipline of Organization Design
S. Mohrman, A. Mohrman, Jr., and R. Tenkasi discuss how as organizations adapt to rapidly changing and increasingly demanding environments, they find themselves continually transforming themselves.
Towards a Theory of Strategic Change: A Multi-Lens Perspective and Integrative Framework
Nandini Rajagopalan and Gretchen M. Spreitzer provide a comprehensive review of the strategic change literature from three theoretical lenses: the rational, learning, and cognitive lenses.
Global Change As Contextual Collaborative Knowledge Creation
R. V. Tenkasi and S. Mohrman argue that the traditional models of international technology transfer may be inadequate to represent the complexities involved in effective global change since they rely on an ‘objectivist’ conception of knowledge, that views knowledge as an objective commodity to be transmitted from source to receiver.
Reward Systems That Reinforce Organizational Change
G. Ledford, Jr. and E. Lawler III argue that conventional pay system designs are failing because they are unable to grapple with organizational changes such as globalization, technological change, downsizing, delayering, and new business strategies.
The Practice of Organization & Human Resource Development in America’s Fastest Growing Firms
The following paper by Allan H. Church, and Gary C. McMahan reports the results of a recent survey project that investigated the contemporary practice of Organization Development among America’s Fastest Growing Firms (as identified by Fortune, October 5th, 1992).
Large-Scale Organizational Change As Learning: Creating Team-Based Organizations
Susan Mohrman and Allan Mohrman, Jr. explain that the transition to a team-based organization is a large-scale organizational change. It is both pervasive and deep.
Managing the Transformation Process: Planning for a Perilous Journey
William H. Davidson argues that successful transformation produces spectacular results, but the process can be prolonged and painful. Transformation occurs over a period of years in even the most agile and nimble organization.
Organization Development within the Firm: A Survey of the 500 Largest Industrials
Gary C. McMahan and Richard W. Woodman conducted a study in which the 500 largest industrial firms in the United States were surveyed with regard to their internal Organization Development (OD) practice.
Locating Meaning in Organizational Learning: The Narrative Basis of Cognition
Ramkrishnan V. Tenkasi and Richard J. Boland Jr. call for a fundamental reorientation of our understanding of human cognition and its relation to organizational learning, a turn that sees the basic organizing principle of cognition as essentially narrative and not schematic or representational.
Effective Reward Systems: Strategy, Diagnosis, Design and Change
Edward Lawler III provides a basic framework for the description of an organization’s reward system.
