Why do some organizations make required changes and achieve new levels of performance successfully, while other units in the same organization seemingly stumble and never achieve new levels of performance? This two-part video produced by Susan A. Mohrman & Serge Lashutka, 2001 reveals how viewing organizational change as a learning process that can be accelerated is the difference.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Organizing for High Performance: Employee Involvement, TQM, Reengineering, and Knowledge Management in the Fortune 1000
Edward E. Lawler III , Susan Albers Mohrman , and George Benson discuss how worldwide competition, the rapid expansion of the Internet, and the uncertainty of today’s economic climate are among the myriad forces testing the traditional approaches to management.
The Economic Approach to Personnel Research
M. Gibbs and A. Levenson explain that the economic approach to personnel and organizations has grown greatly in scope and importance over the last decade or two.
Designing Change Capable Organizations
Edward Lawler explains that organizations are increasingly operating in a business environment that is characterized by rapid change and increasing performance demands. As a result, organizations face the challenge of accomplishing two, often conflicting objectives: performing well and changing in order to adapt to their business environment.
The Era of Human Capital Has Finally Arrived
Edward Lawler III explains that because of the growth in knowledge and the ways it is used by organizations, the very nature of individual work has changed. Increasingly, work in developed countries is knowledge work in which people manage information, deal in abstract concepts, and are valued for their ability to think, analyze and problem solve.
Global Organizational Networks: Emergence and Future Prospects
Janet Fulk discusses how the closing years of the 20th century brought a burst of theory, research, analysis and social commentary that established the network as the most important emergent organizational structure and the preeminent metaphor sense-making by academics and practitioners alike.
Exploring the Dynamics of Innovation in Organizational Knowledge Networks
R. Tenkasi and S. Mohrman examine the patterns of action that characterize successful and unsuccessful discretionary, cross-functional, innovation networks in a large health care system.
Exporting Teams: Enhancing the Implementation and Effectiveness of Work Teams in Global Affiliates
Over the last 10 to 15 years, the use of work teams has proliferated around the globe. In order to better understand what makes teams effective in a variety of countries, Bradley L. Kirkman, Cristina B. Gibson, and Debra L. Shapiro examined the role that national culture plays in determining employee receptivity to the implementation of self-managing work teams (SMWTs).
Seize the Day: Organizational Studies Can and Should Make a Difference
Susan Mohrman explains that the organizational sciences have an unprecedented opportunity to generate information that is useful to organizations and can make a difference in how organizations evolve and in the quality of life of people.
New Directions for the Human Resources Organization: An Organization Design Approach
First published in 1996, this report by S. Mohrman, E. Lawler, and G. McMahan presents findings of a 1995 study that examined the human resources function in 130 large companies to see whether changes in the business environment and strategy of the corporation were leading to changes in practice and organization of the human resources function.
Consulting to Team-Based Organizations: An Organizational Design and Learning Approach
S. Mohrman and K. Quam discuss how team-based organizations follow a different logic from traditional hierarchical organizations that rely primarily on individuals as the primary performing unit.
Designing the Innovating Organization
Innovation is one of those curious phenomena which is universally desirable. Jay R. Galbraith argues that when it comes to creating it inside of existing organizations, innovation is one of the most difficult things to produce let alone to master.