HURS 205 Organizational Behavior and Leadership: Home

This article explores the management of cultural diversity in public and not-for-profit collaborations spanning organizational, professional and national boundaries. Through the framing of a culture paradox, it identifies three interrelated tensions pertaining to the management of cultural diversity towards collaborative advantage. These tensions address: interactions between organizations within a collaboration; interactions between individual actors and their orientation towards the collaboration and their host organization; and the quantity and extent of cultural diversity within a collaboration. The culture paradox and its inherent management tensions provide theoretical and practical conceptualizations that are relevant to management and governance of collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintaining a higher level of organizational performance would always remain an active research focus. Increased complexity in business environment requires organizations to continuously revisit their human resources for augmented output. Organizational consciousness is a relatively new paradigm for analyzing organizational behavior that views organizations as self-consciousness entities. The analytical approach provided by organizational consciousness benefits OD practitioners and researchers to transform or bring about permanent changes in organizations. The purpose of the present article is to critically evaluate the literature available on organizational consciousness and set forth avenues for research in the domain. The article develops a conceptual foundation for researchers to explore new themes in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Research was conducted to determine whether and why the perceived motive (traditional or self-serving) underlying an employee's organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) affects coworkers' justice perceptions of the rewards distributed in response to the OCB. Design/Methodology/Approach: In Study 1, 228 participants read a vignette in which the motive for a coworker's OCB was manipulated and provided ratings regarding liking, distributive justice, and perceived motive. In Study 2, similar methodology was used for a new sample of 227 participants, but vignettes now portrayed the OCB as lesser job-related than in Study 1. Findings: In both studies we found that rewards were viewed as more fair when traditional motives were perceived; liking mediated the relationship between motives and distributive justice. Although the conclusions replicated across studies, we found that the job-relatedness of the OCB made a difference such that participants viewed the rewarding of a job-related, traditionally motivated behavior as most fair. Implications: Perceptions of the motives underlying OCB and the job-relatedness of the specific OCB behavior are important factors when managers are considering providing rewards for those behaviors. Originality/Value: This study provides a new link between the impression management and OCB literatures by exploring the effect of OCB motive attributions on distributive justice perceptions when OCB is rewarded. It also contributes to this body of work by considering the role liking may play in the process, and by suggesting that the job-relatedness of OCBs can impact the perceived fairness of rewards for such behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, first of all, the problem of stress that employees in organizations face with is presented. Then the economic impact of stress at the individual, organizational as well as at the national level is discussed. Besides, various types of stress and various approaches to stress management that employees can use at work or in their everyday life are discussed widely as well. Such approaches include attacking the source of the stress, receiving social support, relaxation techniques, cognitive-behavioral techniques, wellness through proper exercise, diet, and rest, and others. Each employee can use those techniques that the best suit him/her and reduce the level of stress in his/her work and personal life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many prescriptions offered in the literature for enhancing creativity and innovation in organizations raise ethical concerns, yet creativity researchers rarely discuss ethics. We identify four categories of behavior proffered as a means for fostering creativity that raise serious ethical issues: (1) breaking rules and standard operating procedures; (2) challenging authority and avoiding tradition; (3) creating conflict, competition and stress; and (4) taking risks. We discuss each category, briefly identifying research supporting these prescriptions for fostering creativity and then we delve into ethical issues associated with engaging in the prescribed behavior. These four rubrics illustrate ethical issues that need to be incorporated into the creativity and innovation literature. Recommendations for how organizations can respond to the ethical issues are offered based on practices of exemplary organizations and theories of organizational ethics. A research agenda for empirically investigating the ethical impact these four categories of behavior have on organizations concludes the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Senior leaders increasingly embed paradoxes into their organization's strategy, but struggle to manage them effectively. To better understand how they do so, I compared in-depth qualitative data from six top management teams exploring and exploiting simultaneously. The results informed a model of dynamic decision making in which strategic paradoxes can be effectively engaged. The details of this dynamic decision-making model extend and complicate our understanding of managing paradoxes by depicting dilemmas and paradoxes as interwoven, explicating a consistently inconsistent pattern of addressing tensions, and framing both differentiating and integrating practices as necessary for engaging paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way in which organizations communicate with their employees during a change programme has been shown to have significant effects on the success of change initiatives, in particular an individual commitment, morale and retention. However, there have been few prior studies that have explored how organizations develop and deploy communication strategies in support of major change initiatives. In this article, we contribute to this discussion by showing how two organizations used a variety of communication strategies when implementing their change programmes and the effects these strategies had on their employees. The findings show that both the process and the content of the communication strategy are significant. In particular, the timing of change messages, matching communication strategies to the employee profile, the use of appropriate media, flexibility and the minimisation of uncertainty were especially significant. Based on our findings, we present a model of effective internal communication during the management of change programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the influence of employees' satisfaction through achievement, recognition and nature of work towards their willingness to work in teams in order to reinforce the employees' will towards working in teams. In this survey the relationship between the variables was tested among five major Malaysian organizations on the pathway of the theory of planned behavior. Herein, it was shown that the employees' satisfaction towards their achievement, recognition received, and nature of work was positively related and motivational towards their willingness to work in teams. The study thus contributed to the process of organizing and human resource development in terms of willingness to work in teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looked at six popular project management leadership styles across three industries to discover if there is a commonality in each industry as well as if the preferred methodology differs from industry to industry. The leadership styles researched were coaching, strategic, laissez-faire, bureaucratic, autocratic, and democratic. The three industries surveyed were healthcare, finance, and pharmaceuticals. Participants were made up of 61 employees (9 managers, 8 team leaders, and 44 team members) from the three industries. An electronic survey generated by Key Survey and using the Likert scale from one to five was sent to participants to complete within 48 hours. Data from the survey showed that all three industries best identify with strategic and democratic leadership styles. The healthcare industry preferred strategic and coaching best, finance industry preferred strategic and democratic, and pharmaceuticals preferred strategic, coaching, and democratic styles almost equally. Bureaucratic leadership was proven to be the least preferred style across all three industries. This study also showed that there was a leadership style preference when broken down by gender. Males favored democratic while females favored strategic, showing alignment with the overall preferred styles across industries. Our study confirms that there are leadership style preferences across industries and that this preference can vary only slightly by industry and by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions does a collective strategy exist among organizational members? Where should a scholar look for one? To offer one way to start solving these puzzles I propose a view of organizational strategy as a language game that governs the use of strategy labels at the level of the organization. Organizational strategy exhibits a division of linguistic labour, where responsibility for key concepts is assigned to particular individuals or organizational functions. Such linguistic experts oversee the proper use and maintenance of strategy language. The language-based view helps to understand linkages between institutional, network, organizational, and micro level views on strategy. It also problematizes widely held intuitions regarding the relationship between strategy and organizational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study that examines the connections between the training and development process and organizational culture change in an information technology (IT) division within a higher education institution in the U.S. Findings suggest that the training and development process within the IT division served as a bridge to organizational culture change, from an old organizational culture ("legacy") to a new organizational culture ("a holistic quilt"). The foundation of the bridge was leadership and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]