James O’Toole, Bruce Pasternack, and Jeffrey W. Bennett Using in-depth interviews and a survey of over 6,000 executives and managers in Asia, Europe, and North America, Booz-Allen & Hamilton is creating a global database of effective (and ineffective) leadership practices.
Working Papers
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Conversing Across Cultural Ideologies: East-West Communication Styles in Work and Non-Work Contexts
In research by Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Fiona Lee, Incheol Choi, Richard Nisbett, Shuming Zhao, and Jasook Koo, results suggest that cross-cultural differences in conversational indirectness are greater in work settings than in non-work settings. Implications for reducing cross-cultural miscommunication in organizations are discussed.
A Cultural Analysis of the Effectiveness of Transformational Leadership
Research by Gretchen Spreitzer, Katherine Xin, and Kimberly Hopkins Perttula examines the cultural boundaries of the effectiveness of transformational leadership.
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.
Beyond the Vision: What Makes HR Effective?
Edward Lawler III and Susan A. Mohrman argue that corporations are undergoing dramatic changes that have significant implications for how their human resources are managed and for how the human resource function is best organized and managed.
Disciplinary Constraints on the Advancement of Knowledge: The Case of Organizational Incentive Systems
Kenneth A. Merchant, Wim A. Van Der Stede, and Liu Zheng argue that research progress in accounting has been significantly hindered by most researchers’ excessively narrow focus on a single research discipline.
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.
A Motivational Model for Resolving Social Dilemmas in Discretionary Databases
Michael E. Kalman, Janet Fulk, and Peter Monge discuss how organizations have increasingly become sites of collective action, where task performers rely upon shared databases as flexible means to collect and distribute information widely.
Intranet Functionality as Collective Action
This study by Janet Fulk, Rebecca Heino, Andrew J. Flanagin, Peter Monge, Kijung Kim, and Wan-Ying Lin sought to provide insight into the collective action necessary to create a viable organizational knowledge-sharing network in the form of an Intranet. Intranets were conceived as offering the functionalities of public goods to organizational members, due to their connective and communal functions.
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.