Leadership and expectations: Pygmalion effects and other self-fulfilling prophecies in organizations

The Pygmalion effect is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP) in which raising manager expectations regarding subordinate performance boosts subordinate performance. Managers who are led to expect more of their subordinates lead them to greater achievement. Programmatic research findings from field experiments are reviewed, and our present knowledge about the Pygmalion effect in the management of industrial, sales, and military organizations is summarized. A model is presented in which leadership is hypothesized to be the key mediator through which manager expectations influence subordinate self-efficacy, performance expectations, motivation, effort, and performance. The behaviors that comprise the Pygmalion Leadership Style are described. Besides creating the one-on-one Pygmalion effect, additional ways for managers to assert their leadership by creating productive organizationwide SFP are suggested. An agenda for research on SFP applications is proposed.     

Project Success: A Multidimensional Strategic Concept

This article presents projects as powerful strategic weapons, initiated to create economic value and competitive advantage. It suggests that project managers are the new strategic leaders, who must take on total responsibility for project business results. Defining and assessing project success is therefore a strategic management concept, which should help align project efforts with the short- and long-term goals of the organization. While this concept seems simple and intuitive, there is very little agreement in previous studies as to what really constitutes project success. Traditionally, projects were perceived as successful when they met time, budget, and performance goals. However, many would agree that there is more to project success than meeting time and budget. The object of this study was to develop a multidimensional framework for assessing project success, showing how different dimensions mean different things to different stakeholders at different times and for different projects. Given the complexity of this question, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and two data sets were used. The analysis identified four major distinct success dimensions: (1) project efficiency, (2) impact on the customer, (3) direct business and organizational success, and (4) preparing for the future. The importance of the dimensions varies according to time and the level of technological uncertainty involved in the project. The article demonstrates how these dimensions should be addressed during the project’s definition, planning, and execution phases, and provides a set of guidelines for project managers and senior managers, as well as suggestions for further research.     

Translating Nations: Actor-Network Theory in/and Canada*

Dans l'examen des problématiques de l«identité nationale» au Canada, la sociologie critique est de plus en plus tournée vers l'analyse discursive, aboutissant à des conclusions nuancées et complexes. Or, une telle approche risque d'escamoter d'autres analyses, tout aussi utiles, qui attribuent à la technologie un rôle central dans le processus de «nation-building» au Canada. Cet article explore la sociologie de la traduction, aussi appelée théorie d'acteur-réseau, et suggère que l'emprunt d'une telle approche se prêterait à une analyse plus complète des «questions nationales» du Canada et du Québec - analyse qui intégrerait les catégories du social et de la technique. Canadian critical sociology draws increasingly from discourse analysis to work out questions of national identity in Canada, yielding complex and nuanced results, but not sufficiently engaging with other work privileging technology as a central question in Canadian nation-building. This paper explores the sociology of translation, also known as actor-network theory, and suggests that such an approach might usefully be taken up in order to provide a more complete analysis of the “national questions” of Canada and Québec that integrates both social and technological categories.     

On the trimmed mean and minimax-variance L-estimation in Kolmogorov neighbourhoods

We consider the properties of the trimmed mean, as regards minimax-variance L-estimation of a location parameter in a Kolmogorov neighbourhood K() of the normal distribution: We first review some results on the search for an L-minimax estimator in this neighbourhood, i.e. a linear combination of order statistics whose maximum variance in K_t() is a minimum in the class of L-estimators. The natural candidate – the L-estimate which is efficient for that member of K_t,() with minimum Fisher information – is known not to be a saddlepoint solution to the minimax problem. We show here that it is not a solution at all. We do this by showing that a smaller maximum variance is attained by an appropriately trimmed mean. We argue that this trimmed mean, as well as being computationally simple – much simpler than the efficient L-estimate referred to above, and simpler than the minimax M- and R-estimators – is at least “nearly” minimax.     

Inference for general parametric functions in box‐Cox‐type transformation models

The authors propose a simple but general method of inference for a parametric function of the Box‐Cox‐type transformation model. Their approach is built upon the classical normal theory but takes parameter estimation into account. It quickly leads to test statistics and confidence intervals for a linear combination of scaled or unsealed regression coefficients, as well as for the survivor function and marginal effects on the median or other quantité functions of an original response. The authors show through simulations that the finite‐sample performance of their method is often superior to the delta method, and that their approach is robust to mild departures from normality of error distributions. They illustrate their approach with a numerical example.     

ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION AND THE EXCESS VOLATILITY OF STOCK PRICES

Evidence suggests the volatility of stock prices cannot be accounted for by information about future dividends. We argue that some of the volatility of stock prices in excess of fundamentals results from fluctuations in the amount of public information over time. Our model assumes that dividends and consumption are constant in the aggregate but that there are good firms and bad firms whose identity may be unknown to the public, as in Akerlof's "lemons" problem. In that case, the collective valuation of the constant dividend stream depends on the degree of informational asymmetry.     

Combining Happines’s and Suffering in a Retrospective View of Anchor Periods in Life: A Differential Approach to Subjective Well-Being

The intersection of dimensions of subjective well-being (SWB) generates SWB types. We delineated SWB types by cross-tabulating happiness and suffering ratings that participants attributed to outstandingly meaningful periods in their life referred to as anchor periods. A sample of 499 older Israelis (age 58–94) was queried about two positive periods (the happiest, the most important) and two negative periods (the most miserable, the most difficult). A variety of variables discriminated between the more frequent congruous types of Happy (high happiness and low suffering) and Unhappy (low happiness and high suffering), but also presented the incongruous types of Inflated (high happiness and high suffering) and Deflated (low happiness and low suffering) as discriminable. Thus, women were more likely to be Inflated whereas men were more likely to be Deflated; low education related more to Happy in the happiest period and to Unhappy in the negative periods; present life satisfaction related more to Happy than to Unhappy in the positive, but not in the negative, periods; and Holocaust survivors were more likely to be Deflated and Unhappy in the negative, but not in the positive, periods. The study supported a differential perspective on SWB within people’s narratives of their lives. An erratum to this article is available at .