This article presents a review of the book “Six Sigma Business Scorecard,” by Praveen Gupta.
This article presents a review of the book “The World's Most Powerful Leadership Principle: How to Become a Servant Leader,” by James C. Hunter.
This article presents a review of the book “Celebration of Fools: An Inside Look at the Rise and Fall of JCPenney,” by Bill Hare.
This article presents a review of the book “Riding the American Dream: The Official Story of Excelsior-Henderson Motorcycles,” by Daniel L. Hanlon.
Our case shows how a Norwegian Multinational Firm (Norwegian Multi) introduced a new performance management practice. The initial starting point was a "best practice" developed by a U.S. consultancy based on the benchmarking of large global firms. Norwegian Multi chose to remove from this best practice the elements that were seen as most provocative to dominant cultural values. Over time more and more subsidiaries reintroduced elements of the original practice.The management practice we examine performance management (PM)-can be regarded as an extension of the traditional performance appraisal, linking individual performance to corporate strategy.1 Researchers separate calculative PM (focus on individual contributions and rewards) and collaborative PM (focus on creating a partnership culture between employer and employee, for example through competency development).2 In the United States, PM practices contain both calculative and collaborative elements, whereas in Scandinavia the calculative element is downplayed.3 Norwegian firms have had a long tradition of holding annual "planning and development talks." This is, however, a single, once a year event intended to promote good working relations more than a managerial system for evaluating, developing and compensating employees.' We suggest that when introducing a "foreign best practice" into this setting, national values present initial barriers, whereas organizational capabilities and systems are crucial for the final shape of the practice.
Delivering critical feedback can be brutal for everyone involved. Most managers hate giving critical feedback, and most employees detest receiving it. In addition, critical feedback often fails to produce the desired results. We describe how cognitive and emotional dynamics-how we think and feel while giving and receiving feedback-can complicate this process, making it more painful and less useful than it should be. These dynamics often interfere with the ability of recipients to process and respond constructively to feedback. They also interfere with the ability of feedback givers to formulate and deliver feedback that is high quality and does not produce defensiveness. Further complicating matters, both feedback givers and receivers have a difficult time recognizing how their own cognitive and emotional dynamics are hindering their effectiveness in the feedback process. We illustrate how these dynamics hamper the feedback giving and receiving process and how understanding them can help managers produce more actionable feedback on performance (feedback that leads to learning and appropriate results).
Economic explanations of mergers and acquisitions tend to focus on issues of efficiency and strategic fit. When acquisitions fail, economic arguments tend to dominate the reasoning and explanations. While cohesive theory exists, empirical studies of acquisitions and divestitures of failed acquisitions based upon economic models are inconsistent and have poor explanatory power to identify clear success or failure factors. Non-economic explanations, on the other hand, generally lack an integration that goes much beyond suggesting that non-economic differences create integration problems and cannot explain why the economic synergies that organizations hope for often fail to materialize.In an attempt to address these challenges, we draw upon the stepfamily literature to propose several new concepts that provide insights into the factors that influence the success of acquisition execution and implementation. Since diversified corporations bear a striking resemblance to human stepfamilies, stepfamily theory can provide new managerial insights and prescriptions. Three main perspectives frame our view of merger and acquisition success: Biological Discrimination, Incomplete Institutionalization, and Deficit-Comparison. From these perspectives, we propose important factors and characteristics that can influence the ultimate success or failure of a merger or acquisition. From this metaphor, we provide managerial prescriptions for firms engaged in merger and acquisition activities to improve the probability for ultimate success.
Executive Overview With rare exceptions, the productivity of a modern corporation or nation lies more in its intellectual and systems capabilities than in its hard assets—raw materials, land, plant, and equipment. Intellectual and information processes create most of the value-added for firms in the large service industries—like software, medical care, communications, and education—which provide 79 percent of all jobs and 76 percent of all U.S. GNP.1 In manufacturing as well, intellectual activities—like R&D, process design, product design, logistics, marketing, marketing research, systems management, or technological innovation—generate the preponderance of value-added. McKinsey & Co. estimates that by the year 2000, 85 percent of all jobs in America and 80 percent of those in Europe will be knowledge-based. Yet few managements have systematically attacked the issues of developing, leveraging, and measuring the intellectual capabilities of their organizations. What are the keys to these processes? What light do research and best practice shed on this subject?
Many expatriate human resource (HR) policies, particularly in the area of compensation, remain rooted in the past because they continue to favor the expatriate over local staff and do not take into account the increasing qualifications and aspirations of these local employees. Inequitable treatment leads to low commitment and poor work performance among local staff. More importantly. inequitable treatment creates tension between local and expatriate employees and causes the local staff to be less willing to be cooperative or supportive of the expatriates with whom they have to work. Without local support, expatriates may experience greater difficulty adjusting to their new jobs and the new environment, which is a contributing factor in the failure of expatriates. To minimize these problems, HR practices of expatriating organizations should focus on providing more equitable compensation for local and expatriate employees, selecting expatriates who are truly worthy of the higher pay. and increasing the transparency of pay practices so that local employees can see the linkage between work inputs and compensation more clearly. Managers at the local organization should emphasize favorable referents for local staff, breed organizational identification among the employees, prepare the local staff for incoming expatriates, and encourage them to assist and mentor incoming expatriates. It is critical that multinational companies (MNCs) are aware that some existing HR practices have potentially unintended negative consequences and that neglecting the impact of these practices on local employees hurts the effectiveness of the organization as well as the ability of expatriates to succeed in their assignment.
This article presents a review of the book “Culture, Leadership and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies,” edited by Robert J. House, Paul J. Hanges, Mansour Javidan, Peter W. Dorfman and Vipin Gupta.
Academy of Management PerspectivesVol. 1, No. 2 ArticlesManaging Corporate Culture Through Reward SystemsJeffrey Kerr and John W. Slocum, Jr.Jeffrey KerrSouthern Methodist University and John W. Slocum, Jr.Southern Methodist UniversityPublished Online:1 May 1987https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.1987.4275817AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB ToolsDownload CitationsAdd to favoritesTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail View articleFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byAnd the Award for Best Actor Goes to…: Facades of Conformity in Organizational SettingsPatricia Faison Hewlin1 October 2003 | Academy of Management Review, Vol. 28, No. 4The Impact Of Collectivism And In-Group/Out-Group Membership On The Evaluation Generosity Of Team MembersCarolina Gómez, Bradley L. Kirkman and Debra L. Shapiro30 November 2017 | Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 43, No. 6Cleaning Up After the Cold War: Management and Social IssuesRichard Reed, David J. Lemak and W. Andrew Hesser1 July 1997 | Academy of Management Review, Vol. 22, No. 3Modes of Theorizing in Strategic Human Resource Management: Tests of Universalistic, Contingency, and Configurational Performance PredictionsJohn E. Delery and D. Harold Doty30 November 2017 | Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 39, No. 4Bad for Practice: A Critique of the Transaction Cost TheorySumantra Ghoshal and Peter Moran1 January 1996 | Academy of Management Review, Vol. 21, No. 1Organizational Culture and Employee RetentionJohn E. Sheridan30 November 2017 | Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 35, No. 5Diversification Posture and Top Management Team CharacteristicsJohn G. Michel and Donald C. Hambrick30 November 2017 | Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1Equity, Equality, Power, and ConflictBoris Kabanoff1 April 1991 | Academy of Management Review, Vol. 16, No. 2Effects of Procedural and Distributive Justice on Reactions to Pay Raise DecisionsRobert Folger and Mary A. Konovsky30 November 2017 | Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1 Vol. 1, No. 2 Permissions Metrics in the past 12 months History Published online 1 May 1987 Published in print 1 May 1987 Information© Academy of Management PerspectivesACKNOWLEDGMENTSPortions of this article were presented at the American Institute for Decision Sciences meeting in Toronto, November 1984. The authors acknowledge contributions on earlier drafts of this manuscript made by Michael Beer, Bill Joyce, Lynn Isabella, Ralph Kilmann, Edward Lawler, and Randy Schuler.Support for this project was given through a research grant to the authors from the Center for Enterprising, Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University.Download PDF
Executive Overview This study examines the global knowledge management (KM) experiences of Accenture, a pioneer in organization-wide KM efforts. We interviewed 18 KM managers and consultants in its U.S. and East Asian offices. We found that despite its significant efforts, Accenture was falling short of fully harnessing and transferring management knowledge across its global organization. Our study indicates that Accenture's global KM strategy, based on its “one global firm” vision, did not make sufficient considerations for local or regional challenges. Accenture was unsuccessful in motivating its East Asian consultants to contribute to KM by failing to show appreciation for their knowledge. Furthermore, Accenture appeared not to have provided adequate support for addressing cross-cultural challenges. Finally, its push for a standardized global KM practice made insufficient allowances for its local offices to address their own needs.
This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.
This article presents an examination of research that explores the idea that the quality of academic research is positively associated with judgments about managerial relevance. The authors also explore the notion that if managers cannot distinguish between high and low quality research than they cannot distinguish the relevance of the work. The authors examine the overlap between academics and practitioners and also comment on some of the issues that have given rise to conflict between these two groups.
Although one-on-one coaching can be very effective, this article advocates the benefits of leadership coaching in a group setting, because durable changes in leadership behavior are more likely to occur. Discussion is offered to show that leadership group coaching establishes a foundation of trust, makes for constructive conflict resolution, leads to greater commitment, and contributes to accountability, all factors that translate into better results for the organization. The article suggests that a change methodology centered on leadership group coaching creates high-performance teams, is an antidote to organizational silo formation, helps put into place boundaryless organizations, and makes for true knowledge management. A strong plea is made for aspiring leadership coaches to undergo clinical training to prepare them for the kind of deep-seated psychological problems that can derail the leadership coaching process. Commentary about the clinical approach to organizational intervention is included. The article also explores the similarities between leadership coaching and psychotherapy. Finally, the article includes a discussion of a number of general concerns about leadership coaching.
It has become increasingly clear in the research literature that successful organizations have found ways to ensure that their organizational missions are aligned both in terms of fit with the external environment and with all factors internal to the organization. The challenge is that accomplishing this fit is easier said than done. Too often there is a gap between what the organization says it seeks to do and what its employees actually do. The purpose of this paper is to offer managers a method by which they can create and conduct an audit of the gaps in the alignment of their organizational practices, policies, and procedures with their mission. The value of conducting such an audit is to create a diagnostic device to identify and close the gaps in an effort to secure better alignment with the mission. The authors use the mission of service excellence to illustrate the logic and process of developing such an audit, as this is one of the more challenging aspects of any organization and especially a service organization's mission. If what gets measured gets managed, then conducting such an audit can serve as an important tool for ensuring that the internal actions of the organization are being effectively managed to achieve the mission.
Achieving competitive success through people involves fundamentally altering how we think about the workforce and the employment relationship. It means achieving success by working with people, not by replacing them or limiting the scope of their activities. It entails seeing the workforce as a source of strategic advantage, not just as a cost to be minimized or avoided. Firms that take this different perspective are often able to successfully outmaneuver and outperform their rivals.
