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.
Working Papers
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
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.
Identifying Strategic Leaders
Kathleen K. Reardon and Alan Rowe state that the key component of successful leadership now and in the next century is a responsiveness to continuous change.
Designing a Reconfiguration Organization
Jay Galbraith states that every company needs an organization which changes as quickly as its business changes. If not, the company is falling behind.
Me and Us: Differential Relationships Among Goal Setting Training, Efficacy and Effectiveness at the Individual and Team Level
In this paper by Cristina B. Gibson, efficacy-effectiveness relationships were examined for individual nurses and nursing teams who were either trained or untrained in goal-setting.
Intercultural Analysis of the Meaning of Teamwork: Evidence from Six Multinational Corporations
This paper by Mary E. Zellmer-Bruhn develops a conceptual framework to explain variance in the meaning of teamwork across national and organizational cultures.
Identifying Strategic Leaders
Kathleen K. Reardon and Alan Rowe argue that the key component of successful leadership now and in the next century is a responsiveness to continuous change. Such responsiveness requires suspending the illusion of control and denial of uncertainty psychologists tell us are characteristic of human thinking.
Building Better Bureaucracies
Paul A. Adler states that colloquially speaking, “bureaucracy” means red tape, over-controlling bosses, and apathetic employees. But large-scale organizations need appropriately designed formalized procedures and hierarchical structure to avoid chaos and to assure efficiency, quality, and timeliness.
Human Resource Management at Two Toyota Transplants
Paul A. Adler explains that there is broad consensus that the superlative efficiency and quality performance of Japanese auto “transplants” in the US is in large measure due to their combination of the “lean” production systems and distinctive human resource management practices.
Collaboration in the Virtual Organization
Susan G. Cohen and Don Mankin believe that collaboration is the key to effectiveness in the virtual organization.
Making Teams Work: Implications for Consulting Practice
Susan G. Cohen and Diane E. Bailey discuss how the use of teams has increased dramatically in response to competitive pressures for speed, costs, quality, and innovation.
We Can’t Get There Unless We Know Where We Are Going
In this chapter, S. Cohen, S. Mohrman, and A. Mohrman closely examine one set of factors that are critical for knowledge work team effectiveness –how organizations set and communicate direction for teams.