SOURCES OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT: THE EFFECTS OF INTERNAL LABOR MARKETS AND WORKER VALUES

Data from the 1991 General Social Survey and National Organizations Survey are used to assess how organizational commitment is structured by one “demand side,” organizational-based factor, firm internal labor markets, and one “supply side,” individual-based factor, the values/preferences of workers. Findings indicate that organizational commitment is best explained by the joint influence of these two factors rather than by their independent effects. Specifically, firms with internal labor markets are conducive to the development of high levels of organizational commitment to the extent that what they offer, namely, opportunities for career-status and long-term employment “fit” what workers desire: job security and possibilities for promotion with their current employer. We offer directions for future research that may shed additional light on the manner in which internal labor markets and the values/preferences of workers may structure organizational commitment.     

A MODEL OF SITE‐SPECIFIC ANTECEDENTS OF ISO 14001 CERTIFICATION

ISO 14001 constitutes a major dilemma for many American firms. This new standard holds the promise of waste reduction and better process management, but the benefits and costs are very difficult to predict. This study attempts to identify and explain antecedents impacting the decision to pursue certification for some of the first plants certified in the United States. Using data from a large survey of U.S. managers and a Logit analysis, we find the factors influencing management decisions to actively pursue ISO 14001 certification to be distinctly different from those factors influencing management's decision not to pursue certification. For the latter, the decision is economically based; for the former, it is driven by other, more qualitative considerations.     

OPTIMAL AND HEURISTIC SOLUTIONS FOR THE MULTI‐ITEM NEWSVENDOR PROBLEM WITH A SINGLE CAPACITY CONSTRAINT

This research considers a multi‐item newsvendor problem with a single capacity constraint. While this problem has been addressed in the literature, the focus here is on developing simple, closed‐form expressions for the order quantities. The benefit of such an approach is that the solutions are straightforward to calculate and have managerial appeal. Additionally, we show these expressions to be optimal under a variety of conditions. For more general cases when these optimality conditions do not hold, we use these expressions as heuristic solutions. Via computational studies, we demonstrate that these heuristics are extremely effective when the optimality conditions are not satisfied.     

Ambiguous Allure: The Value–Pragmatics Model of Ethical Decision Making

Research in organizational ethics emphasizes those dispositional factors that are expected to foster positive ethical behavior. We seek to contribute to this literature by including personal values that are in contention with moral outcomes. Specifically, we combine the values of hedonism and power with benevolence and universalism. Our underlying premise of this value–pragmatics model is that nonmoral, as well as moral, dispositional characteristics simultaneously influence ethical decision making. We further contribute to the existing research by investigating how these contending values interact with situational factors, such as performance rewards and punishments for unethical conduct. We administer an experiment to subjects (N = 177) and analyze their decisions regarding the likelihood they would act unethically. Results indicate that both morally relevant and nonmoral variables have direct effects on these decisions, and that nonmoral as well as moral values interact with situational factors to significantly influence decisions. Implications for practice and research are discussed.