4 Person–Environment Fit in Organizations: An Assessment of Theoretical Progress

Abstract

Person–environment (P–E) fit is a central concept in organizational behavior research. Historically, reviews of P–E fit research have summarized empirical studies but said little about whether P–E fit research has made theoretical progress. This chapter applies criteria for evaluating theory to review and assess the theoretical status and progress of P–E fit research. The review encompasses P–E fit theories that span nearly a century and cover research on job satisfaction, job stress, vocational choice, recruitment and selection, and organizational climate and culture. This review indicates that most theories in P–E fit research fall well short of criteria for developing strong theory, and theories presented in recent years are no stronger than those developed decades earlier. Reasons for theoretical stagnation in P–E fit research are identified, and ways to promote theoretical progress are discussed.     

9 Creativity in Organizations

Abstract

In this chapter, I review contemporary theories and research on creativity in organizations. After discussing key definitional issues in this domain, I review the contemporary scholarly literature proceeding from the most molecular of perspectives focusing on within-individual processes to the more molar perspective of the collective creativity that can take place in work groups. While the within-individual process featured most prominently in the extant literature is intrinsic motivation, after a treatment of some fundamental issues surrounding the intrinsic motivation construct, I review research on conscious and unconscious thinking and positive and negative affect as key internal processes relevant to understanding creativity. Next, I focus on contextual influences on creativity including safety signals, creativity prompts, supervisors, leadership, and networks. Lastly, I focus on creativity in groups (from both an input and a process perspective). In closing, I reiterate a recurrent theme throughout the review. This is an exciting era for research on creativity in organizations with many intriguing questions awaiting future scholarly inquiry.     

7 Emotion in Organizations

Abstract

Emotion has become one of the most popular—and popularized—areas within organizational scholarship. This chapter attempts to review and bring together within a single framework the wide and often disjointed literature on emotion in organizations. The integrated framework includes processes detailed by previous theorists who have defined emotion as a sequence that unfolds chronologically. The emotion process begins with a focal individual who is exposed to an eliciting stimulus, registers the stimulus for its meaning, and experiences a feeling state and physiological changes, with downstream consequences for attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions, as well as facial expressions and other emotionally expressive cues. These downstream consequences can result in externally visible behaviors and cues that become, in turn, eliciting stimuli for interaction partners. For each stage of the emotion process, there are distinct emotion regulation processes that incorporate individual differences and group norms and that can become automatic with practice. Although research often examines these stages in relative isolation from each other, I argue that each matters largely due to its interconnectedness with the other stages. Incorporating intraindividual, individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels of analysis, this framework can be a starting point to situate, theorize, and test explicit mechanisms for the influence of emotion on organizational life.

We keep coming back to feelings, I'll have time for feelings after I'm dead. Right now we're busy. (NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, speaking about the historic Independence Day 2006 launch of the space shuttle Discovery, after discussing the horror and sadness at losing the Columbia space shuttle in 2003, the worry leading up to the launch of Discovery, and the relief and pleasure at watching Discovery succeed; Boyce, 2006)     

8 Organizations and Management in China

Abstract

China’s economic transition and its integration into the global economy have been widely recognized as among the most important social changes in the past three decades. This transformation has attracted scholarly attention from multiple disciplines, and sociologists have made particularly important contributions to literature emphasizing theories of organizations, organizational change, and management practice. In this article, we present a critical review of the state of sociological literature on organization and management issues in the transition process. We focus on studies that explore how organizations shaped the trajectory of China’s economic transition, how organizations affect important social and economic outcomes during transition, and the unique challenges that managers face in China’s transition context. We conclude with suggestions for resolving central debates and future research directions.     

Transformations and Legitimacy in Nonprofit Organizations—The Case of Amnesty International and the Brutalization Thesis

This paper looks at organizational change in voluntary nonprofit organizations. Their 'purposive' nature makes voluntary organizations difficult to change while their tendency to oligarchic control results in this change often being imposed from the top. Amnesty International's death penalty work demonstrates the complexity of organizational change, as well as the accountability for and the legitimacy of change in nonprofits. Legitimacy should not be equated with organizational strength, and will remain subject to shifting, contested social norms concerning standards of behavior.     

10 Coordination in Organizations: An Integrative Perspective

Abstract

Coordination, the process of interaction that integrates a collective set of interdependent tasks, is a central purpose of organizations. In this review we begin by discussing the origins of interest in coordination, tracing some of the classic perspectives. We present a review of recent literature on coordination in organizations arranged according to the mechanisms that help achieve it. We then go beyond this review to provide a framework to understand what different coordination mechanisms and activities accomplish. We propose that coordination mechanisms (such as routines, meetings, plans, and schedules) impact the work of organizations by creating three integrative conditions for coordinated activity: accountability, predictability, and common understanding. We end by examining the implications of such a perspective for future research on coordination in organizations.     

2 Untapped Potential in the Study of Negotiation and Gender Inequality in Organizations

Abstract

Negotiation is a process that creates, reinforces, and reduces gender inequality in organizations, yet the study of gender in negotiation has little connection to the study of gender in organizations. We review the literature on gender in job negotiations from psychology and organizational behavior, and propose ways in which this literature could speak more directly to gender inequality in organizations by incorporating insights from research on gender in intra‐household and collective bargaining. Taken together, these literatures illuminate how negotiations at the individual, household, and collective levels may contribute to the construction and deconstruction of gender inequality in organizations.     

Private Action for Public Good?: The Public Role of Voluntary Sector Organizations

Voluntary sector organizations claim to be private institutions acting for the public good. However, if the concept of public is disengaged from the state and connected instead to citizenship, VSOs can be shown to have both private and public origins, as well as private and public impacts. As citizens, VSOs are public organizations serving the public good through their purported representation of the people and civic leadership. The legitimacy of their assumption of these public roles remains a continuing challenge.     

Japan’s Innovation of Public Organizations in the Research and Development Field

The Japanese government implemented drastic restructuring of the central government in 2001. As a part of this reform, the incorporated administrative agency (IAA) system was newly introduced in view of carrying out certain public functions in a more flexible, business-like and autonomous way. Research and development activities in the public sector are now mostly conducted by the incorporated administrative agencies. In this article, the purpose of this reorganization is firstly described followed by the outline of this system and current accomplishments. In concluding, the Japanese undertaking of a new public organization is analyzed in comparison with the European and “Anglo-Saxon” countries.

Contradictions,Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizations: A Constitutive Approach†

This article presents a constitutive approach to the study of organizational contradictions, dialectics, paradoxes, and tensions. In particular, it highlights five constitutive dimensions (i.e., discourse, developmental actions, socio-historical conditions, presence in multiples, and praxis) that appear across the literature in five metatheoretical traditions—process-based systems, structuration, critical, postmodern, and relational dialectics. In exploring these dimensions, it defines and distinguishes among key constructs, links research to process outcomes, and sets forth a typology of alternative ways of responding to organizational tensions. It concludes by challenging researchers to sharpen their focus on time in process studies, privilege emotion in relation to rationality, and explore the dialectic between order and disorder.     

A Contradiction in Terms? Making Sense of Emotional Intelligence in a Construction Management Environment

Emotional intelligence (EI) has been hailed as being critical to individual performance within organizations. However, recent theoretical debates indicate that scholars need to apply a more differentiated lens when examining the utility of EI in a particular organizational context. In this study, we seek to contribute preliminary empirical evidence to this debate. Drawing upon an interpretivist approach and a narrative analysis, we examine how UK construction project managers make sense of EI, and how this shapes their receptiveness to the construct. Our data analysis suggests that there are enduring, albeit changing, characteristics of the industry and the sensemaking processes of project managers that renders the construct, at least for the time being, of limited utility. Thus, our analysis is a cautionary tale for those management scholars and practitioners who argue for the ‘trainability’ of EI.     

Global Innovation Networks – Organizations and People

Innovation is increasingly the outcome of global networks that connect geographically dispersed knowledge centers. The international business (IB) literature has developed a sophisticated understanding of the multinational enterprise (MNE) as an organization generates value by integrating knowledge across national borders. We advance this literature by making three key arguments. First we highlight the three megatrends that shape the strategy of the modern MNE: the disaggregation of the value chain into ever narrower activities, the migration of value to knowledge-intensive intangibles and the rise of huge emerging markets like China and India, whose domestic firms can grow to enormous size before venturing abroad. Second, we trace these three megatrends to falling spatial transaction costs, enabled in the main, by digitalization. Third, we draw on earlier research on the generic forms of global linkages, arguing that the IB literature has limited itself to organizational pipelines, while paying relatively little attention to personal relationships. The latter are particularly important in the genesis of both entrepreneurship and radical innovation, but are particularly sensitive to the anti-globalization policies. An environment where technology continues to reduce spatial transaction costs, while policy raises them, strengthens large MNEs at the expense of innovative international new ventures.     

3 Staffing Twenty‐first‐century Organizations

Abstract

We highlight important differences between twenty‐first‐century organizations as compared with those of the previous century, and offer a critical review of the basic principles, typical applications, general effectiveness, and limitations of the current staffing model. That model focuses on identifying and measuring job‐related individual characteristics to predict individual‐level job performance. We conclude that the current staffing model has reached a ceiling or plateau in terms of its ability to make accurate predictions about future performance. Evidence accumulated over more than 80 years of staffing research suggests that general mental abilities and other traditional staffing tools do a modest job of predicting performance across settings and jobs considering that, even when combined and corrected for methodological and statistical artifacts, they rarely predict more than 50% of the variance in performance. Accordingly, we argue for a change in direction in staffing research and propose an expanded view of the staffing process, including the introduction of a new construct, in situ performance, and an expanded view of staffing tools to be used to predict future in situ performance that take into account time and context. Our critical review offers a novel perspective and research agenda with the goal of guiding future research that will result in more useful, applicable, relevant, and effective knowledge for practitioners to use in organizational settings.     

Public-Private Organizations Behaviour: the Paradoxes in the Implementation of Ghana’s Health Insurance Scheme

Public Organization Review - Organizations public or private have their interests to pursue in public policies. Individuals in organizations are driven by visions and missions of their...     

Strategic Management in the Public Sector: Reflections on It’s Applicability to Iranian Public Organizations

Strategic management is a managerial story of private sector that has been transferred to the public sector. Many authors have challenged its applicability in public organizations. This paper discusses some important barriers to implementation of strategic management in the public sector empirically. After presenting a conceptual model, we examine several important factors that influence the failure or shortcomings of public sector strategic management. The last section of paper offers implications for theory and practice.     

How Does Government Size and Structure Respond Empirically to Changes in its Organisational Environment?

Does government size and structure adapt to changes in government’s organisational environment (particularly to uncertainty and complexity) as predicted by organisational theory? We find – using a range of statistical analyses – support for each of the major theories of organisation adaptation (the contingency-based view, resource-based view, and the rational choice view). We find that both government size and structure change – holding other factors constant – for changes in the uncertainty and complexity of governments’ organisational environments. We find seven clusters of governments which adapt their organisational sizes differently in response to changes in the uncertainty and complexity of their organisational environments – and four clusters of governments with differing preferences for the way they adapt governmental structures. We also use the available data to divide governments according to the extent to which they adapt their organisational size and structure reactively (after changes occur in their organisational environment), contemporaneously or strategically (before these changes in their organisational environment occur).     

‘Slipping through the Net’: The Impact of Incremental Development on the Built Environment of the Historic Coastal Town of Queenscliff in Victoria,Australia

Studies of the impact of development on the built environment often concentrate on areas of sudden change, where new constructions of a radically different scale, purpose or style are clearly seen to dramatically alter existing places. However, change is often more gradual. The cumulative effects of a large number of individual small changes are both extensive and often unrecognized until after they have taken effect, each individual development having ‘slipped through the net’ cast by planning authorities. The problem with this incremental process is that the result is often the erosion of the spatial and experiential qualities previously valued in that locality. As an example, this paper investigates four residential planning case studies in Queenscliff, a small historic coastal town in Victoria, Australia. Through analysis of their individual and cumulative impact on the neighbourhood character of this town, the paper explores the broader implications for the built environment of other Australian coastal towns and highlights the difficulties faced by all planners and residents trying to protect the character of their towns.     

Do Transformational Leaders Affect Employee Performance and Normative Commitment Through General Self-Efficacy? Analysis in Ghanaian Public Sector Organizations

Public Organization Review - The study sought to evaluate whether transformational leaders affect employee performance and normative commitment through general self-efficacy in the public sector...     

Up or Out—or Stay Put? Product Positioning in an Evolving Technology Environment

When the development cycle for a product is longer than the development cycle for a core technology that is embedded in it, designers may need to modify the product̂s design to avail of upgrades in this core technology. We model optimal product positioning with regard to technology choice in this setting, using a stochastic dynamic programming framework. Under fairly general assumptions, we find that there are three possible optimal actions: to abandon the project, to maintain the current technology, or to reposition so as to use the best technology currently available. We characterize the optimal positioning sequence in different design environments, discussing throughout the practical implications of our model. Previous research and conventional wisdom suggest early finalization of product specifications if design flexibility is decreasing over time. In contrast, we find that in some design environments, repositioning late in the development cycle can be optimal.     

What is a Healthy Sustainable Built Environment? Developing Evidence-Based Healthy Built Environment Indicators for Policy-Makers and Practitioners

Abstract

Healthy built environments place people and communities at the heart of urban planning, encouraging decision-making based on human health, well-being and environmental sustainability. This paper describes the development of a set of indicators to assist in this endeavour—by translating and linking the research evidence base with policy-makers and other practitioners. The paper describes how the indicators were chosen, contextualized and subsequently structured to maximize useability for urban planners and health professionals working together to improve community health and neighbourhood sustainability.