Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) stress theory, Gretchen Spreitzer and Aneil K. Mishra hypothesize that the negative effects of downsizing on commitment can be mitigated when trust and empowerment are high.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
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.
Building Leaders
Through insightful analysis and extensive case studies, Jay Conger and co-author Beth Benjamin provide the proven techniques, and common pit-falls to avoid, for building leadership talent at all levels.
Creating Self-Sustaining, High Skill Ecosystems
David Finegold discusses how most managers’ decisions to adopt a low-skill form of work organization, even if it hurt the performance of the British economy as a whole, could be seen as a rational response to the institutional conditions – e.g. short-term financial markets, an adversarial industrial relations system, a low supply of skills in the labour market – in which they operated.
Factors Affecting the Organizational Commitment of Technical Knowledge Workers: Generation X, Baby Boomers, and Beyond
D. Finegold, S. Mohrman, and G. Spreitzer discuss how gaining the commitment of knowledge workers will be one of the central management challenges in the new millennium.
When Does Culture Matter?
Past research has shown that national culture does matter- it affects people’s behavior- but research has left open the question of when culture matters. Martha L. Maznevski, Cristina B. Gibson, and Bradley L. Kirkman examine culture’s effects on four types of individual outcomes, and propose moderators at three levels of analysis.
Preserving Commitment During Downsizing: An Empirical Test of the Mitigating Effect of Trust and Empowerment
Gretchen M. Spritzer and Aneil K. Mishra explore whether the commitment of downsizing survivors can be preserved at a level comparable to employees who have not been subjected to a downsizing.
Beyond Competencies: Using the Ability to Learn from Experience for the Early Identification of International Executives
Morgan W. McCall, Gretchen M. Spreitzer, and Joan D. Mahoney discuss the development of an instrument which measures both traditional competencies for international executive success and the ability to learn from experience.
The Search for Flexibility: Skills and Workplace Innovation in the German Pump Industry
David Finegold and Karin Wagner find that the existence of a highly skilled workforce may deter the adoption of multifunctional work teams, but that countervailing strengths of the German skill-creation system can potentially help firms develop a new, distinctive German production model.
Adult Learning and Executive Education
Jay Conger and Katherine Xin explain that few efforts have been made to link the field of adult learning to executive education despite the potential for enhancing the impact of programs.
Leadership Development: Contemporary Practice
George P. Hollenbeck and Morgan W. McCall, Jr. speculate on what the current state of the science, art, and practice of leadership development implies for leadership development in the 2000s.
Early Identification of International Executives
This research by Gretchen M. Spreitzer, Morgan W. McCall, Jr., and Joan D. Mahoney extends the traditional approach to the early identification of executives by introducing the notion of ability to learn from experience.