This paper by Patrick M. Wright, Gary C. McMahan, and Abagail McWilliams integrates the theories and findings of micro-level organizational behavior/human resource management research with the macro-level resource-based view of the firm, specifically presenting a firm’s human resources as an important potential source of sustained competitive advantage.
Working Papers
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Perspective Making and Perspective Taking in Communities of Knowing
In this paper, Richard J. Boland Jr. and Ramkrishnan V. Tenkasi look to science as an example of knowledge work in a community of knowing, and draw implications for the design of electronic communication systems and policies to support perspective making and perspective taking.
Locating Meaning in Organizational Learning: The Narrative Basis of Cognition
Ramkrishnan V. Tenkasi and Richard J. Boland Jr. call for a fundamental reorientation of our understanding of human cognition and its relation to organizational learning, a turn that sees the basic organizing principle of cognition as essentially narrative and not schematic or representational.
Designing Information Technology to Support Distributed Cognition
Richard J. Boland Jr., Ramkrishnan V. Tenkasi, and Dov Te’Eni discuss how cognition in organizations is a distributed phenomenon, in which individual members of an organization reflect upon their experience, make plans, or take action.
Measurement, Evaluation and Reward of Profit Center Managers: A Cross-Cultural Field Study
This study by Kenneth A. Merchant, Chee W. Chow, and Anne Wu was designed to explore differences between the U.S. and Taiwanese firms in measuring, evaluating and rewarding profit center managers, a subject which has not been addressed in the research literature.
The Practice of Organization Development: A Survey of the 500 Largest Service Firms
In this study by Gary C. McMahan, Richard W. Woodman, and Ana Moreno, the 500 largest service firms in the United States were surveyed with regard to their internal Organization Development (OD) practice.
P=F(MxA): Cognitive Ability as a Moderator of the Relationship between Personality and Job Preference
This study by Patrick M. Wright, K. Michele Kacmar, Gary C. McMahan, and Kevin Deleeuw tested the validity of the use of personality tests with aptitude tests as predictors of performance for 203 warehousers using the Hollenbeck and Whitener (1988) interactive model.
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.
Groups as Self-Regulating Systems: A Control Theory Perspective of Norm Formation and Enforcement
This paper by Gary C. McMahan and Patrick Wright attempts to describe the integrated nature of norm formation and norm enforcement.
Looking Backward and Forward at Action Research
This article by G. Ledford, Jr. and S. Mohrman responds to commentaries on a set of action research studies that appeared in a special issue of Human Relations.
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).
Designing Effective Self-Managing Work Teams
This paper by Susan G. Cohen proposes a model of self-managing work team (SMWT) effectiveness derived from several theories of organizational behavior and empirical work.