Making Employee Involvement Work: Cooperative Goals and Controversy to Reduce Costs

Organizations are involving employees to helpreduce costs to succeed in the intensely competitivemarketplace. However, many researchers have beenskeptical of the value of participation. This study uses Deutsch's theory of cooperation and competitionto examine the critical mediating variable of theinteraction as employees discuss how to reduce costs.Results of structural equation analyses on datacollected from interviews when employees participated inreducing costs indicate that cooperative goalscontributed to constructive discussion among employeesthat resulted in productive work and strongerrelationships, which in turn led employees to be committed toreducing costs. Competitive goals were negativelycorrelated with dynamics and outcomes. These resultssuggest that researchers and managers can agree that employee involvement has potential butemployees need cooperative goals and skills to discussissues open-mindedly and constructively to realize thesebenefits.     

Relationship marketing: Its key role in entrepreneurship

The authors argue that relationship marketing can readily be adopted by a small entrepreneurial business but it will need to be adapted to the entrepreneurial environment into which it is introduced. Results from initial research suggest that entrepreneurial enterprises employ relationship marketing more effectively than less entrepreneurial organisations and they derive commercial benefits such as higher growth rates and fewer customer defections. The authors argue that entrepreneurship can be learned and so less entrepreneurial firms have the potential to learn from more successful entrepreneurs. They offer some specific recommendations but they recognise that the task is not easy because the SME has to create an internal culture that is capable of both embracing relationship marketing and being alert to opportunity.     

Innovation by Teams in Shanghai,China: Cooperative Goals for Group Confidence and Persistence*

Organizations increasingly ask teams to stimulate innovation but research is needed to identify the conditions when teams have the confidence and persistence to innovate successfully. Using the concepts of cooperation, competition, group potency and initiative, this study proposes that relationships where team members believe that their goals are cooperative in that one person's goal attainment helps others reach their goals lay the foundation for innovation. Specifically, cooperative goals convince team members that they have the group potency to complete a range of tasks and the initiative to persist to overcome obstacles and innovate. In contrast, competitive, negatively related goals and independent, unrelated goals are hypothesized to undermine confidence, persistence and innovation. Group members from 101 teams from various organizations in Shanghai, China, completed a survey with measures of cooperative, competitive and independent goals, group potency, and initiative; their project leader completed the measure of innovation. Structural equation analysis supports the theoretical framework that cooperative goals help group members develop the confidence of group potency and the initiative to persist to accomplish tasks and innovate. These results suggest that cooperative goals and group potency and initiative are important conditions that help teams innovate for organizations and thereby specify conditions that can help groups realize their potential to achieve innovation for organizations.     

Generalized linear mixed models: a review and some extensions

Breslow and Clayton (J Am Stat Assoc 88:9–25,1993) was, and still is, a highly influential paper mobilizing the use of generalized linear mixed models in epidemiology and a wide variety of fields. An important aspect is the feasibility in implementation through the ready availability of related software in SAS (SAS Institute, PROC GLIMMIX, SAS Institute Inc., URL , 2007), S-plus (Insightful Corporation, S-PLUS 8, Insightful Corporation, Seattle, WA, URL , 2007), and R (R Development Core Team, R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria, URL , 2006) for example, facilitating its broad usage. This paper reviews background to generalized linear mixed models and the inferential techniques which have been developed for them. To provide the reader with a flavor of the utility and wide applicability of this fundamental methodology we consider a few extensions including additive models, models for zero-heavy data, and models accommodating latent clusters.