SAGE Publications

Geert Hofstede’s legendary national culture research is critiqued. Crucial assumptions which underlie his claim to have uncovered the secrets of entire national cultures are described and challenged. The plausibility of systematically causal national cultures is questioned.

The purpose of this article is to clarify the readiness for change concept and examine how change agents can influence employee readiness for organizational change. The article contributes to an improved understanding of change dynamics in four important ways. First, readiness for change is distinguished from resistance to change. Readiness is described in terms of the organizational members' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. Second, a model is offered that describes the influence strategies as well as the importance of change agent credibility and interpersonal and social dynamics in the readiness creation process. Third, by combining urgency of, and employee readiness for, needed changes, a typology of readiness programs is offered. Fourth, a large multinational corporation's efforts to create readiness for large-scale change are described to provide a cogent illustration of the various readiness interventions described in the model.

The article examines the role of proactive personality in predicting work engagement and job performance. On the basis of the literature on proactive personality and the job demands–resources model, we hypothesized that employees with a proactive personality would be most likely to craft their own jobs, in order to stay engaged and perform well. Data were collected among 95 dyads of employees ( N = 190), who were working in various organizations. The results of structural equation modeling analyses offered strong support for the proposed model. Employees who were characterized by a proactive personality were most likely to craft their jobs (increase their structural and social job resources, and increase their job challenges); job crafting, in turn, was predictive of work engagement (vigor, dedication, and absorption) and colleague-ratings of in-role performance. These findings suggest that, to the extent that employees proactively adjust their work environment, they manage to stay engaged and perform well.

Cuộc xâm lược Iraq được xây dựng dựa trên những thông tin về tình hình đã chứng minh là không bền vững, nhưng điều này không dẫn đến sự thay đổi trong chiến lược của các lực lượng liên minh. Các phân tích tình huống truyền thống về lãnh đạo cho thấy rằng những thông tin chính xác về bối cảnh là một yếu tố quan trọng của cơ chế ra quyết định, nhưng những thông tin như vậy dường như không thể giải thích được các quyết định của những người tham gia. Một mô hình thay thế được phát triển, điều chỉnh phân tích vấn đề Tame và Wicked của Rittell và Webber, liên kết với typology của Etzioni về tuân thủ, để đề xuất một phân tích thay thế có nguồn gốc từ các phương pháp tiếp cận xây dựng xã hội. Điều này sau đó được áp dụng cho ba nghiên cứu trường hợp bất đối xứng, cho thấy rằng các nhà ra quyết định tham gia tích cực hơn rất nhiều vào việc cấu thành bối cảnh so với những gì lý thuyết tình huống truyền thống cho phép, và rằng một cách diễn giải thuyết phục về bối cảnh sau đó hợp pháp hóa một hình thức hành động cụ thể thường liên quan đến cách thức tương tác ưu tiên của nhà ra quyết định, thay vì những gì ‘tình huống’ dường như đòi hỏi. Thực chất, bối cảnh được tái cấu trúc như một đấu trường chính trị chứ không phải là một phòng thí nghiệm khoa học.

Companies increasingly collaborate in their technological activities. Collaboration enables firms to learn about uncertain and turbulent technological change, and enhances their ability to deal with novelty. A number of studies reveal the importance for successful collaboration of high levels of inter-personal trust between scientists, engineers, and managers in the different partners. However, these individual relationships are vulnerable to labor turnover and inter-personal difficulties. Using two examples of highly successful technological collaborations, it is argued that the survival of such relationships in the face of these inevitable inter-personal problems requires the establishment of interorganizational trust. Such trust is characterized by community of interest, organizational cultures receptive to external inputs, and widespread and continually supplemented knowledge among employees of the status and purpose of the collaboration.

Individuals' awarenessof moral issues is an important first step in the ethicaldecision-making process. Relying on research in social cognition andbusiness ethics, we hypothesized that moral awareness is influenced byissue-related factors (magnitude of consequences of the moral issueand issue framing in moral terms) and social contextrelated factors(competitive context and perceived social consensus that the issue isethically problematic). The hypotheses were tested in a fieldexperiment involving 291competitive intelligence practitioners.Results generally supported the hypotheses. Qualitative analysisyielded additional insights into the content of respondents' moralawareness.

Mentoring relationships may be critical for women seeking advancement in organizations. The infrequency of mentoring relationships for females suggests special concerns and considerations. This literature review draws upon current research to examine the interpersonal and organizational barriers female managers face in developing and maintaining effective mentoring relationships in organizations. An analysis is made of gender differences in the function, nature, and effectiveness of mentoring relationships. Recommendations and guidelines for future research and theory development are proposed. The groundwork for a longitudinal theory of mentoring and career development for women in organizations is presented. Implications for organizations are also discussed.

Although a great deal of research has addressed the issue of outcome "fairness," relatively little has been done to illuminate the relationship between perceptions of outcome fairness (distributive justice), organizational systems fairness (procedural justice), job satisfaction, and intent to turnover. This paper isolates the empirical relationships between the types of perceived fairness, critical work attitudes, and intent to turnover using a sample of 88 employees in technical fields such as computer assisted design, product testing and assurance, and computer equipment repair. Intent to turnover was found to be most sensitive to perceptions of procedural justice. Implications of these results for managers are discussed.