Psychologists serve on Boards and also coach leaders who serve on Boards. This article addresses acquisition events from a practitioner perspective. There are three key political actors in corporate acquisitions: a powerful Deal Team, a less powerful Integration Team, and the Board of Directors. During the last stages of M&A deal making, the Deal Team may be so narrowly fixated on deal completion that concerns of the Integration Team may be given short shrift or the Integration Team may lack the political will to challenge members of the Deal Making Team. In other situations, the Integration Team can get so confident that it fails to ask itself tough questions about what is unique about a particular acquisition. One of the critical roles of the Board during the final phase of deal making is to ensure that the voice of the less powerful Integration Team is properly heard and to understand the Integration Team's assumptions. A second critical political role of the Board is to make routine Board of Director post acquisition review: What was the discrepancy between the acquisition's promises versus the shareholder value actually achieved 24-36 months later? Future research should focus on the role of Boards during deal making and in systematically reviewing deal results.

Psychologist managers help clients obtain valid information so that they can make free choices. Choices about corporate and individual transitions are one of those critical decision areas where psychologists can add unique value by helping clients to arrive at decisions using a structured approach to decision making. Corporate and individual transition decisions include mergers, acquisitions, alliances, and new employment. In this article the author describes one structured framework for collecting valid information using nine business factors. Specific questions to ask and specific websites to visit are provided. Limitations of the framework are discussed.

First, let me thank Dr. Pavur for his comments. One takeaway that I get from his piece is that job descriptions would be of greater value if there was more focus on the type teamwork skills require...

Professor Finkelman could not be more clear about his rejection of the ideas in the article: “For a wide variety of reasons (strategic, psychometric, ethical, legal) it makes no sense to even consi...

Job descriptions are building blocks for internal-oriented talent management processes such as recruitment, succession planning, coaching, training, and compensation. However, job descriptions also have an external audience when used as part of a recruitment program. In the recruitment situation, these multiple constituencies can cause a conflict, resulting in job descriptions that either lack validity or lack critical information necessary for valid hiring decisions. This article explores the inner contradictions of job descriptions and suggests an approach companies can use to make these basic tools more useful in recruitment.

Astrigo tiene problemas. Las ganancias de esta cadena de mejoramiento para el hogar fueron mucho menores que las esperadas y sus ventas van en picada. La unica forma de salvarse seria recortando su fuerza laboral en 10%. Pero los despidos masivos danarian el compromiso con los empleados y su capacidad de dar un buen servicio al cliente, valores clave de la empresa. Y usar el efectivo reservado para las adquisiciones estrategicas tambien contradice sus valores. ?Que deberia hacer el CEO? Los asesores de consejos de administracion Laurence J. Stybel y Maryanne Peabody, de Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, sugieren que la empresa imite a McDonald�s y anuncie la intencion de Astrigo de enfocarse en los intereses de los accionistas de largo plazo. Esta movida estableceria un marco que ayudaria a la direccion a tomar decisiones tacticas con mayor claridad y flexibilidad. Luego, la empresa podria emplear el efectivo para comprar algo de tiempo para analizar sus opciones. Si no puede evitar los despidos, lo menos costoso es dejar ir primero a los ultimos en llegar. El ex CEO Jurgen Dormann entiende los desafios de Astrigo. Cuando se hizo cargo de ABB, la firma tenia serios problemas. Despues de dar un remezon a su comite ejecutivo, Dormann acudio personalmente a los 180.000 empleados de la compania para solicitar su ayuda. Ellos brindaron ideas que le ahorraron a la organizacion US$ 1.600 millones, y asi salvaron a la empresa. El profesor de gestion Robert I. Sutton dice que muchos ejecutivos asumen que los despidos son la mejor forma de reducir costos. No piensan en cuanto tarda en notarse el impacto del ahorro generado por los recortes de personal, los costos de contratar y entrenar a nuevos empleados una vez que la situacion mejora, o el dano a la moral y la productividad. Los ejecutivos de Astrigo deberian pensar en otras opciones, como reducir sueldos, recortar beneficios, vacaciones no pagadas o incentivar las renuncias voluntarias. Si es inevitable hacer despidos, Astrigo deberia hacerlo rapidamente y deberia considerar que despedir al 10% de desempeno mas bajo es el peor enfoque.

This article summarizes a review of the careers of 50 executives who have been outstanding in traversing the careers of their professional lives. In a world of short job tenure-elongated middle age, most executives will have to simultaneously manage two separate careers. One career is called full-time assignment work and is the traditional “job.” The other career is called project assignment work, also known as interim or consulting work. Many think these two careers will occur sequentially. This typical framework sets leaders up for perceived failure because this sequential model is no longer realistic. Leaders will be traversing between full time and project based work through their professional lives.

Leadership mandates tend to fall into one of three major categories: continuity (we should continue business as usual), good to great (we've been doing fine, but we need to do even better) and turnaround (we need to make dramatic changes to survive). Myriad problems can arise when an executive is given one leadership mandate while others are operating under a different, conflicting set of directives. Such stealth mandates are no-win situations, leading to the executive constantly butting heads with his or her boss, colleagues and others in the organization. To identify the true leadership mandate for a position, executives need to ask three crucial questions about the business unit they lead: (1) What needs to be changed within the next 12 months? (2) What needs to be honored or maintained during the next 12 months? (3) What must be avoided at all costs? Different constituencies should be queried, including key customers, and each of the questions should elicit a discussion about technology, business processes, culture and people. When executives discover that a stealth mandate is in play, they need to renegotiate mandates. One important goal is to establish realistic frameworks that will then become the basis for their future performance evaluation. Of course this is much easier said than done. But when an executive continues to operate in the shadow of a stealth mandate, he or she is setting himself or herself up to fail.

Los mandatos ocultos pueden existir por gran cantidad de razones. A veces las politicas organizacionales son un factor muy importante. En otros ejemplos, la alta direccion de una empresa simplemente podria ser demasiado disfuncional para acordar un mandato de liderazgo claro y consistente... y que decir de comunicarlo a otros. A menudo, el problema comienza cuando se contrata o se promueve a un directivo; en este caso, la naturaleza humana basica desempena un rol importante.

Para evitar problemas con empleados, colegas y jefes, lo mejor es saber clasificar las diferentes relaciones que uno crea dentro de su trabajo

A corporate strategic plan is merely an expensive report until it is put in the hands of a manager who can execute it. A pairing of Maccoby's management classification scheme and a product-life-cycle concept yields a model that can match strategic-business-unit operational requirements and the leader most likely to succeed.

Writers Get Results Three months after the writing assignment, researchers looked at the results in terms of job attainment. There was no significant difference between the two control groups in terms of success in finding employment. The experimental group, however, were more likely to have found full time employment. Sixty eight percent of the experimental group found jobs versus 48% of those that wrote diaries without emotional content and 27% of the group which did not keep a diary. In terms of self-reports, the experimental group reported consuming less alcohol than either of the other two groups. Why Do Diaries Work? There was no significant difference between the three groups in terms of phone calls made, networking meetings, or letters sent out. The difference appeared to be the value of the diary in working out thoughts and feelings surrounding job loss. It allowed them to work out the negative feelings and to attain closure, thus achieving new perspective. Job loss can provoke powerful emotions that are sometimes difficult to deal with. The inhibition of these negative feelings is itself a form of psychological and physiological work. When an individual must actively keep from talking about important feelings, the work of inhibition can result in short term increases in autonomic nervous system activity. And this increase in itself becomes an additional source of stress. A second problem with not dealing emotionally with job loss is that is increases the likelihood of being able to conceptually come to grips with what has happened. This failure increases the likelihood of continued ruminations, which make it more difficult to approach the job market in a positive framework. Support for this theory can be found in other studies. On study of 200 corporate employees found that a correlation between major physical illnesses (cancer, hypertension, etc.) and unwillingness to openly discuss significant trauma.