Working Papers

Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations

Can Technology Save Performance Management?

Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. (CEO) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) explain how performance management, long the most unpopular HR process, has received increased criticism in recent years.

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Organization Agility and Talent Management

This article by Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) and Christopher G. Worley (CEO) uses case studies on Netflix and oDesk to show that organizations can create an agile workforce by adopting a set of talent management practices that encourage employees to learn and develop, and by reducing the transaction costs associated with changing the skill sets in their workforce.

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Eliminating Performance Appraisals

Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) asks the question “Should organizations stop doing performance appraisals?” The argument in favor of eliminating them is that they frequently do more damage than good.

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Individualizing Organizations: What it takes

Forty years ago, Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) wrote an article arguing that organizations could be more effective and provide a better quality of life for their employees if they would individualize their relationship with their employees.

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Executive Team Member Needed

Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) shares how in order to survive, organizations have had to keep pace with the changes that have occurred. In the future they will have to keep up with an increasingly rapid rate of change in order to survive.

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Talent Analytics Measurement and Reporting: Building a Decision Science or Merely Tracking Activity?

John W. Boudreau (CEO) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) ask the question “Is the use and effectiveness of talent and HR reporting progressing from a focus on cost-efficiency and process-effectiveness, and toward a balanced combination that includes them, but extends to strategic measures than enhance talent and business decisions?”

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Research Update: Pay for Skills, Knowledge, and Competencies

Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. and Charles Rivers write that research interest in pay for skills, knowledge, and competencies (SKC) has continued over the past three decades.

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Using Motivation Theory to Improve Gamification

Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. (CEO) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) explore the topic of gamification. Today, the purposeful use of games in work settings is growing rapidly. Organizations are rapidly embracing the systematic use of “gamification,” which brings game-like elements to core managerial processes.

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Revised Employee Involvement: Research Foundations

George S. Benson (University of Texas) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) share that high-involvement management practices (defined as an integrated set of Human Resource and work design practices that are designed to give all employees the skills, information, power, and rewards to make decisions in the workplace) have generated enormous interest among researchers in many different disciplines and geographies.

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What HR Executives Need to Know

Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) explains that talking about HR as a business partner certainly does not help the situation. Asking to be a business partner just does not get the “job done”. This is what HR should be, and in most cases, it should make a very strong argument to be positioned as a major strategic contributor.

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Commentaries on “The Changing Landscape of Employee Rewards: Observations and Prescriptions”

This paper first summarizes key themes from a recent paper by Gerald Ledford that was published in Organizational Dynamics. That paper reviewed changes in employee reward systems during the past 35 years, looked at factors explaining the changes, and recommended a set of five changes in the future. Five distinguished corporate HR leaders then comment on the paper, exploring a number of important topics in contemporary employee rewards.

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Strategic Role of HR

What is the relationship between the design and management of the HR function and HR’s role in organizational strategy? This is the key design question and one that can be answered by examining the research evidence from John W. Boudreau’s (CEO) and Edward E. Lawler’s III (CEO) international survey of hundreds of HR leaders that has been done every three years since 1995.

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