Brent Keltner and David Finegold state that raising levels of human capital investment to improve the quality of service delivery can be done but it requires restructuring recruiting and training practices in light of institutional constraints.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Human Resource System Effects at Production Facilities in Mexico
Lisa Hope Pelled and Kenneth D. Hill examined human resource system effects on performance and turnover at 40 production facilities in Mexico.
Institutional Effects on Skill Creation: A Comparison of Management Development in the U.S. and Germany
David Finegold and Brent Keltner explain that changes in requirements for competitive success in the global economy have led political economists to devote greater attention to shifts in corporate strategy and differences in education and training, primarily for production workers, across the industrialized countries.
Empowering Middle Managers to be Transformational Leaders: A Field Study
In this paper, Gretchen Spreitzer and Robert E. Quinn describe a field study of a large scale management development program for a Fortune 100 organization’s population of middle managers designed to stimulate change.
Strategic Human Resources Management: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
E. Lawler III states that when training costs and other human resource management costs are added to compensation costs, the human resource management function often is responsible for a large portion of an organizations total expenditures.
The Impact of Individual Differences on the Socialization of Workers to a Technological Intervention
This study by K. Michele Kacmar, Patrick M. Wright, and Gary C. McMahan examined the role of ability, motivation, and their interactions in the effectiveness of the use of training as a socialization tool.
New Directions for the Human Resources Organization
This landmark book, one of the most cited volumes on the topic of motivation in the workplace, defines Edward Lawler’s basic philosophy: in order to have effective organizations, we must understand how to motivate and encourage effective individual performance.
Job Design: A Contemporary Review and Future Prospects
The purpose of this chapter by Ricky W. Griffin and Gary C. McMahan is to summarize the historical development of job design theory and research, describe current theory and research regarding job design, and suggest new directions that job design theory and research might more fruitfully pursue in the future.
Designing Work Teams
Susan Mohrman explains that designing organizations in which the work team is the focal performing unit began in earnest in production settings, where “new design plants” (Lawler, 1978) or “high commitment work systems” (Walton, 1985) emerged in the 1970’s and are now widely used (Lawler, Mohrman and Ledford, 1993).
From Job-Based to Competency-Based Organizations
This article by Edward Lawler III challenges the basic assumption that jobs should be the fundamental building block of organizations. It stresses that with the new forms of organizations and the new demands organizations should be built around competencies not jobs.
A Perspective on Empowerment
Susan Mohrman explains that the term “empowerment” has come to express in many managers’ minds the essence of new approaches to management that are believed to be capable of delivering higher levels of performance by tapping into the energies and enthusiasm of employees.
A New Logic for Organization: Implications for Higher Education
This research by Edward Lawler III and Susan Mohrman seeks a different path in route to understanding potential. Changing tacks is based on the assumption that the qualities one finds in the mature international executive are NOT necessarily the same qualities we should be looking for in high potentials.