Management and Business Ethics: A Critique and Integration of Ethical Decision-making Models

This paper critically reviews the literature relating to the management of ethics within organizations and identifies, in line with other authors, a gap between theory and practice in the area. It highlights the role of management (both as an academic discipline and from a practitioner perspective) in bridging this gap and views managers, with their sense of individual ethical agency, as a key locus of ethics within organizations. The paper aims to address the theory–practice gap by surveying the business ethics literature in order to identify, draw together and integrate existing theory and research, with a particular emphasis upon models of ethical decision-making and their relationship to work values. Such an endeavour is necessary, not only because of the relative neglect of management practice by business ethics researchers, but also because of the current lack of integration in the field of business ethics itself. The paper outlines some of the main methodological challenges in the area and suggests how some of these may be overcome. Finally, it concludes with a number of suggestions as to how the theory–practice gap can be addressed through the development of a research agenda, based upon the previous work reviewed.     

Pluralism in Organizations: Learning from Unconventional Forms of Organizations

The bureaucratic organization is still regarded as the conventional organizational form, but is ill‐suited to an increasingly pluralistic world. Research on the variety of organizational forms has increased dramatically over the past three decades and offers the potential to understand better how pluralism is manifested and managed within organizations. However, this research remains fragmented. The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize research on unconventional organizations to explore how organizations resolve or attenuate the tensions related to pluralism. Drawing from research in leading management journals, it covers seven distinct literatures: ‘referent organization’, ‘temporary organization’, ‘pluralistic organization’, ‘meta‐organization’, ‘bridging organization’, ‘hybrid organization’ and ‘field‐configuring event’. For each literature, the authors trace the genealogy of the key concepts and review their distinct insights regarding organizational pluralism. They then synthesize and discuss their collective contributions and conclude with avenues of research for pluralism in organizations.     

Physical exercise,employee fitness and the management of health at work

Abstract

This paper presents some recent data on why organizations invest in exercise and physical fitness programmes for their stiff. These data suggest that, owing to a lack of evaluation studies, organizations act mainly on the basis of assumption and belief. However, from a subsequent review of the available literature on the personal and organizational effects of such programmes, it appears that these assumptions and beliefs are not altogether unfounded. The paper concludes by discussing the ways in which exercise and employee fitness programmes might help die individual and their organization in terms of the management of health at work.     

Past,Present and Future Research on Multiple Identities: Toward an Intrapersonal Network Approach

Abstract

Psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers have long recognized that people have multiple identities—based on attributes such as organizational membership, profession, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and family role(s)—and that these multiple identities shape people's actions in organizations. The current organizational literature on multiple identities, however, is sparse and scattered and has yet to fully capture this foundational idea. I review and organize the literature on multiple identities into five different theoretical perspectives: social psychological; microsociological; psychodynamic and developmental; critical; and intersectional. I then propose a way to take research on multiple identities forward using an intrapersonal identity network approach. Moving to an identity network approach offers two advantages: first, it enables scholars to consider more than two identities simultaneously, and second, it helps scholars examine relationships among identities in greater detail. This is important because preliminary evidence suggests that multiple identities shape important outcomes in organizations, such as individual stress and well-being, intergroup conflict, performance, and change. By providing a way to investigate patterns of relationships among multiple identities, the identity network approach can help scholars deepen their understanding of the consequences of multiple identities in organizations and spark novel research questions in the organizational literature.     

RITUALS OR GOOD WORKS: SOCIAL SIGNALING IN RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS

We develop a model of social signaling of religiosity and cooperative behavior in religious organizations. The model embeds a ritual‐based religious organization in which signaling arises through the use of costly rituals, and a discipline‐based religious organization in which such signaling occurs through the monitoring of past behavior. We use this framework to contrast—positively and normatively—these two forms of social signaling. We show that ritual‐based religions, while using a costly and wasteful signal, also imply a higher level of coordination of behavior in social interactions and a higher incidence of mutual cooperation. Our welfare analysis suggests that communities are more likely to support a switch to a discipline‐based religion if strategic complementarities are high, and if there is sufficiently high level of public information about social behavior. This accords with the success of Calvin's Reformation in Switzerland and France, a process characterized by the reduction of rituals along with the creation of institutions to monitor and publicize individuals' behavior, such as the Consistory.     

Organization theory: Where are you?

This paper seeks to summarize the present state of organization theory. It takes as its starting-point the work of early organization theorists and demonstrates that their work has been challenged in basically four different ways, i.e. regarding the view on (a) individuals in organizations, (b) the interaction among individuals in organizations, (c) the relationship between organizations and their environments and (d) the technology of organizations. The implications of these qualifications are discussed with reference to recent literature. These discussions led to the conclusion that the number of research questions have increased rather than decreased over the years. Thus, a unified organization theory may be less valid today than at the beginning of the century. This circumstance, however, it is argued, should not be considered a regression but rather a sign of increasing insight.     

Changing Leadership and Gender in Public Sector Organizations

The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which leadership at middle management level in the public realm is gendered. This is attempted largely through a consideration of academic literature, supported by some empirical findings from a research investigation into higher education and social work in Sweden and England and a review of literature that reveals varying types of leadership characterized as masculinist. Taking the position that context shapes social relationships and subject positions, and provides opportunities as well as constraints, we consider leadership in the public sector under the sway of new public management, framed by neo‐liberalism and the valorization of competition, self‐interested instrumentality, uncertainty and risk, operationalized in public sector organizations through performative regimes. It is argued that while some women and men are willing participants in the new regimes, others are antagonistic or ambivalent, finding themselves mired in neo‐bureaucratic processes of surveillance and control, often stuck in occupational cul‐de‐sacs. It is contended that neo‐liberalism and new public management are associated with masculinist forms of rationality that elevate individual winners and losers and divert attention from collective issues of gender. Rather than focus on gendered styles of leadership it is suggested that it is more important to look at their gendered performance and effects.     

Narrative, organizations and research

Given the rapid expansion of narrative approaches in management and organization theory in recent years, this paper investigates the contribution of this literature to the understanding of organizations and processes of organizing. The paper tells the story of the development of narrative approaches in organizational theory. Narrative's contribution to substantive areas of organization theory is evaluated. These developments are then reviewed in relation to an ongoing tension between story and science. We conclude by contemplating some of the criticisms, and the future, of narrative research.     

Field Research Practice in Management and Organization Studies: Reclaiming its Tradition of Discovery

This review reasserts field research's discovery epistemology. While it occupies a minority position in the study of organization and management, discovery-oriented research practice has a long tradition of giving insight into new, unappreciated and misappreciated processes that are important to how work is accomplished. I argue that while methods discourse has long emphasized that particularizing data and an emergent research design are productive for discovery, little to no attention has been paid to the conjectural processes necessary to imaginatively interpret these observations. I underscore them. What is the future for discovery work in business schools today? Issues arise when an increasing interest in discovery-oriented research is expressed in an institutional context that is bounded off from field research's home disciplines and is dominated by a validation epistemology. In light of this current context, I offer some initial thoughts on the work to be done to maintain fieldwork's discovery tradition in management and organization studies.     

Ignoring Leaders who Break Promises or Following God: How Depersonalization and Religious Faith Inform Employees’ Timely Work Efforts

This study investigates the relationship between employees’ perceptions of psychological contract breaches and their failure to meet work-related deadlines, with a particular focus on the mediating role of the depersonalization they assign to organizational authorities and the moderating role of their religious faith. Results based on multisource data, collected among employees and their supervisors in Pakistani organizations, show that an important factor that underpins the connection between beliefs about broken organizational promises and a diminished propensity to finish work on time is that employees depersonalize organizational leaders. This mediating effect is mitigated by employees’ religious faith. For organizations, this study thus identifies a key mechanism – exhibiting indifference to the people in charge – by which employees’ frustrations about resource-depleting contract breaches may inadvertently escalate into ineffective time management, and it identifies some workers among whom this counterproductive dynamic is less likely, namely, employees who can draw from their religious faith.     

The role of dualities in arbitrating continuity and change in forms of organizing

A substantial body of literature on new forms of organizing has forecast the end of bureaucracy. More recent empirical studies, however, indicate that high‐performing organizations are adopting dual forms of organizing in which the controllability advantages associated with traditional forms work to complement and support the responsiveness attributes of new forms of organizing. The paradox is that, if organizations discard the key planning, co‐ordinating and direction‐setting mechanisms of traditional forms of organizing, they also remove the stabilizing dimensions of organizational form that are essential in periods of uncertainty and change. The challenge for organizations lies in learning how to manage the tensions or dualities between traditional and new forms of organizing, a process demanding the arbitration of continuity and change. This paper explores the concept of dualities and its salience in the management of organizing forms. First, the nature of dualities is explained; secondly, a set of characteristics is developed to describe the behaviour of dualities; and thirdly, suggestions are presented for arbitrating the tensions that exist in organizing form dualities. These three contributions are relevant because they signal the route to the effective creation and management of organizing form dualities, the benefit of which is the constructive combination of dynamic capabilities (underpinning innovation and responsiveness, the hallmarks of new forms of organizing) and operational capabilities (underpinning stability and efficiency, the hallmarks of traditional forms of organizing).     

Careering Downwards? Middle Managers' Experiences in the Downsized Organization

The future of middle management has been the focus of attention in the media, following a period of unprecedented restructuring in organizations. However, there are mixed messages in the literature on the impact that this restructuring has had on middle managers' roles and careers, as well as on their reaction to these changes. It is the aim of this paper to address some of these tensions and contradictions. The research presented here is based on a two-year study of middle management in 50 organizations across both the public and private sectors, involving semi-structured interviews with middle managers and key decision-makers. The findings show that, paradoxically, whilst middle managers report feelings of greater job satisfaction from increased empowerment over their work roles, this is in tandem with working in intensified work regimes with increased pressures and stress. Many middle managers are still looking towards hierarchical career progression as the main reward for their continued commitment, despite this being significantly diminished in the downsized, delayered organization. The denial of this reward for what is seen by many middle managers as excessive work demands, it is suggested, will ultimately lead to middle managers becoming increasingly bitter and jaundiced.     

Understanding stability and change in fields

In the literature on organizations, there are two very different views of social change. One emphasizes piecemeal change and actor learning. The other views change as more revolutionary resulting in entirely novel forms of organizations. On the surface, these two conceptions of social change seem incompatible. But, I argue that by situating organizations in field analysis, we can make sense about the conditions under which both can occur. This paper offers a framework for understanding strategic action in organizational fields. Embedded in this framework is the idea that these different theories of change operate under quite different structural conditions of fields. The emergence or transformation of a field implies radical change precisely because all elements of the structuring of the field are in flux. If one is observing an already existing field, then the dynamics of interaction are likely to be quite different. Actors in existing fields will work to maintain their position in the field. They will engage in strategic action to make changes in response to what others are doing in the field. Thus, in a stable field where the game for position is ongoing, we expect change to be more incremental, more imitative, and often, in reaction to the moves of others. I end by presenting an example of stability and suggesting a research agenda.     

Labor Market Intermediaries and the New Paradigm for Human Resources

Labor market intermediaries (LMIs) are entities that stand between the individual worker and the organization that needs work done. They include well-known operations such as executive search firms that act as brokers to fill jobs and temp agencies that lease labor to clients but also less familiar entities such as professional employer organizations (PEOs) that take on the legal obligations of employment for clients. LMI's mediate between individual workers and the organizations that need work done, shaping how workers are matched to organizations, how tasks are performed, and how conflicts are resolved [Autor, D.H. (2009). Studies of labor market intermediation: Introduction. In D. Autor (Ed.), Studies of labor market intermediation (pp. 1–26). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press]. They essentially disintermediate aspects of management that had been performed by employers. The growth and increasing prominence of LMI's is important for all research associated with the workplace because we can no longer do a study of “workers” in an organization and assume that they are all employees: Some may be temps under contract to an agency, some may be “employed” by a PEO, some may work for vendors. The reason that matters is because LMI's appear to alter attitudes and behaviors on all sides. For example, they change the bilateral, employee–employer relationship into a three-way “triangular” relationship. They may well create “dual allegiance” issues, where individuals feel ties to the search firm that placed them in their current job and their employer or the agency that employs them and the client on whose behalf they are currently working. Most fundamentally, they challenge the existing paradigms we have used to understand the workplace: Does “attraction–selection–attrition” have any relevance, for example, when employers hire temps placed by agencies into permanent jobs? What does career development mean when the person with the most influence over your next job is a search consultant? There is already an extensive literature on LMIs, but it is spread across disciplines and fields and mainly examines the labor market outcomes associated with the use of LMIs. The literature lacks a management voice. We know relatively little about the effects of LMIs on workplace attitudes and behaviors, the central focus of organizational behavior; about how LMIs and the associated rise of outside hiring change how we should think about topics such as recruiting and selection, a central concern of personnel psychology; we know even less about how LMIs change the way firms think about competencies and boundaries of the firm, central topics in strategy, when the firm's workforce is actually employed by another organization or when it can be reshuffled very quickly. We develop a taxonomy of LMIs and use it to classify the burgeoning but disjointed literature on LMIs across the social sciences. We classify LMIs in terms of three main attributes of human resource (HR) practices that they perform: Information Providers, Matchmakers, and Administrators. We describe first how LMI activities differ from HR management practices performed by employers in the traditional relationship. Second, we outline the existing research about how LMIs affect employment outcomes, such as access to employment, wages, work-related attitudes and behaviors, working conditions, and skill development. Finally, we highlight the implications of LMIs for management research, especially new, understudied research questions that need to be addressed.     

Rethinking Knowledge: A Bergsonian Critique of the Notion of Tacit Knowledge*

The recent focus on the intangible resources of the organization in general, and specifically the notion of knowledge, has problematized the notion of organization. Rather than seeing organizations as systems that integrate the use of all kinds of physical, financial and human resources, the knowledge‐based view (KBV) of the firm and knowledge management literature emphasize the organization as a site for the development, use of and dissemination of knowledge and other forms of intellectual resources and assets. KBV and knowledge management literature also address the notion of knowledge as such; is knowledge what can be represented by concepts, figures, and statistics, or are there qualities inherent in knowledge that cannot easily be described, disseminated, or procured? The notion of tacit knowledge has been used to denote all forms of knowledge that cannot be represented: knowledge that cannot be fully articulated, expressed in formulas or described in documents. This paper aims to provide a critique of the notion of tacit knowledge as it is used in KBV and knowledge management literature. It examines the notion of tacit knowledge through the philosophy of Henri Bergson and concludes that the notion of tacit knowledge is little more than an umbrella term for unrepresentable knowledge. Thus, the notion of tacit knowledge should be used with care rather than being a residual category of knowledge.     

Liminality in Management and Organization Studies: Process,Position and Place

This paper explores liminality, a concept receiving increased attention in management and organization studies and gaining prominence because of its capacity to capture the interstitial and temporary elements of organizing and work. The authors present a systematic review of the literature on liminality, covering 61 published papers, and undertake a critical analysis of how the concept of liminality has been used in prior research. This review reveals associations with three main themes: process; position; and place. For each theme, the authors identify the central research questions posed, while comparing individual and collective levels of analysis. During this process, the authors revisit several ideas central to the original, anthropological research on liminality, a perspective from which they suggest a rejuvenation of liminality research in management and organization studies. This paper argues for a greater focus on the liminal experience itself – especially its ritual and temporal dimensions – and for improving the comparative analysis of liminality following the three themes identified in this paper. The authors suggest that revising the agenda for liminality research along these lines could facilitate more informed responses to the challenges of an increasingly temporary and dynamic work life.     

Organizational commitment: a critique of the construct and measures

Organizational commitment has been at the centre of studies into individual and organizational performance for several decades. During this time, much has happened to the ways in which organizations behave, including the evolution of new forms of employee relations and new psychological contracts. Against a transformational background for organizations, developments in the ways that commitment is measured have been incremental and arguably detached from the broader context of 'new deals' for employees. This paper examines classical approaches to defining and measuring organizational commitment and, in the context of strategic human resource management, argues for its continued importance. Classic approaches, however, are criticized on the basis of diminished utility in light of revised employee–organization linkages. Suggestions for improving the relevance of commitment research to contemporary management research and practice are given.     

The Management of Workplace Conflict: Contrasting Pathways in the HRM Literature

This paper reviews the human resource management literature on the management of workplace conflict. It suggests that workplace conflict is commonly viewed in the literature as a symptom of management failure: the notion that conflict may be intrinsic to the nature of work because employees and managers have hard‐to‐reconcile competing interests is given short‐shrift. At the same time, the paper identifies important differences in the literature, which the authors call ‘pathways’, about the best methods to manage problems at the workplace. It is argued that four contrasting pathways can be detected in the literature with regard to how organizations approach workplace conflict management practices. Each pathway is examined fully and their respective strengths and weaknesses are assessed.     

基于免疫的组织健康捍卫机制建构:一个案例

本文借鉴医学免疫和健康的新视角,试图建构基于组织免疫行为的组织健康捍卫机制分析框架,探讨组织健康状态的理论维度和组织免疫行为如何捍卫组织健康状态并发挥作用的机制,同时,选取广东粤电集团沙角C电厂进行了案例研究。本文的研究揭示出,组织监视、组织防御和组织记忆是组织免疫过程的主要行为维度,而组织健康的理论维度,包括组织结构均衡性、功能活跃性、社会和谐性和环境适应性,组织免疫行为对组织健康有捍卫作用,任何一个要素和环节的缺失或失灵都会破坏组织健康状态,组织免疫系统的建立对于避免复杂系统的运行失败是非常关键的。