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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/13620439610367252. When citing the article, please cite: Albert S. King, (1996), “Empowering the workplace: a commitment cohesion exercise”, Career Development International, Vol. 1 Iss: 7, pp. 5 - 11.

This article presents a comparative survey of organization evaluations of criteria for management excellence and their relevance to developing business organizations. The relationship between managers’ ranking of criteria, their perceptions of the best well‐managed corporations’ rankings of the same criteria, and what excellent organizations actually value, discloses critical areas of agreement among managers and discrepant perceptions of excellent organizations’ evaluation of priorities for achieving excellence. Findings demonstrate descriptive insight of developing organizations’ extrinsic views and the best well‐managed business corporations intrinsic evaluations concerning organization development efforts to achieve management excellence. Survey results highlight, with respect to criteria for management excellence, how removed developing business organizations are in crucial areas affecting preparation of management for seeking corporate excellence. Concomitant requirements for establishing better understanding of dialectics and more effective dialogue between theorists, consultants, and practitioners in important areas are reviewed.

A relationship between pay increases and performance ratings may reflect differences between individuals, between groups, or both. An empirical study of a firm’s compensation program, demonstrating what proportion of pay raise is attributable to individual performances and to group influences, is presented. The results show how concealed effects of groups pose difficult problems in examining pay‐for‐performance relationships in compensation systems. Policy implications for incentive programs, pay secrecy, differencies in pay for performance within and between work units, substitutability of pay components, and problems in associating individual performance with pay raises are discussed.

Describes the commitment cohesion exercise, which is an instrument that increases the understanding of employees’ attraction to “the ideal” or empowered organization. Suggests that managers and supervisors will find the exercise instrumental in surveying quality of work‐life problems within their organizations. The exercise also measures employees’ perception of loyalty, values and organizational commitment. Three conditions, i.e. loyalty, values and commitment, influence empowerment structures within an organization. Discusses these conditions or components within the exercise and uses them to define an eight‐phase model which individuals pass in their decision to form and join “ideal” or empowered organizations. The exercise supports the notion of a stepwise movement from loyalty to value congruence (or agreement) to organizational commitment. It also demonstrates how progressive phases are associated with perceived quality of work life and connected to an empowered organization.

Explains that the crescendo effect in career motivation is the driving force behind employee participation, involvement and the lasting value of commitment. Undoubtedly, much of the corporate world has given up on career motivation and commitment since, on average, businesses lose, and have to replace, half their employees in four years, half their mid‐level managers in five years and half their senior executives in seven years. For more than ten years the Human Resource Programme at Northern Illinois University in the USA has focused on studying companies that steadfastly continue to base their strategies for attraction, retention, motivation and employee involvement on career motivation and commitment. Presents a practicable and workable new strategic model based on career motivation to provide a profitable alternative to the turmoil of perpetual churn. Describes parallel organization initiatives to galvanize, simplify, build and leverage human resource career motivation and commitment.

Presents an overview of studies of the brain revealing that the cerebral cortex is divided into two hemispheres along with emergent implications for teaching the two‐sided mind and career selection in an experiential exercise format. The exercise follows a heuristic pattern of user‐friendly self‐discovery allowing participants to compare their actual thinking and problem‐solving behaviour with their professed attitudes in terms of left, right, and mixed brain patterns. For participants the exercise helps to: identify styles along with factors affecting attitudes and behaviour; increase understanding of the relationship and complexity between attitudes and behaviour; and to become more aware of their own attitudes and behaviour in career choice, training, and diverse situations. For career planning, instructional design and training managers the instrumented feedback design provides a tool for educational research and a conceptual analytic framework for recognizing the contingent complexity and feasibility issues involved in successful implementation of career and diversity training management.

Volume 25 celebrates the 25th year of publication for the American Journal of Business (AJB). Launched by eight MAC schools of business in March 1986, the Journal has featured more than 700 authors who have contributed more than 330 research articles at the intersection of theory and practice. From accounting to marketing, management to finance, the Journal prominently covers the breadth of the business disciplines as a general business outlet intended for both practitioners and academics. As the Journal reaches out beyond the MAC in sponsorship, authorship, and readership, we assess the Journal’s first quarter century of impact.

Once more Christmas has come and gone and we are swinging away into the future under the auspices of the New Year 1915. Surely so dark, so dreadful a festive season cannot be recalled by any of us. Yet the unity of our peoples, the good comradeship of all classes of the community, the glad surrender of personal service and goods for the common weal, have given us heart to go forward, believing with stronger confidence than ever in the righteousness of our cause, and welding together of the various parts of our Dominions into an United Empire.

The purpose of this paper is to capture legitimising principles of recent successions to the throne through narrative time. Further, this study considers leaders’ sense-giving to succession.

This research applies a “temporal narrative analysis” to explicate legitimising principles of narrative time in three recent case studies of royal succession: the kingdoms of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The findings show that royal successions in three modern European constitutional monarchies are legitimised through giving sense to narrative time. The legitimacy of timing succession is embedded in multiple temporal narratives, in which heirs apparent are brought forward as the new generation who will modernise the monarchy.

The paper presents an innovative conceptual framework of sense-giving to succession through narrative time. This framework will be helpful to scholars who aim to grasp legitimising principles of temporal narration in leadership succession.

The principal purposes of this paper are to provide normative advice in terms of managing the British Monarchy as a Corporate Heritage Brand and to reveal the efficacy of examining a brand's history for corporate heritage brands generally.

Taking a case history approach, the paper examines critical events in the Crown's history. It is also informed by the diverse literatures on the British Monarchy and also marshals the identity literatures and the nascent literature relating to corporate brands. Six critical incidents that have shaped the monarchy over the last millennium provide the principal data source.

In scrutinising key events from the institution's historiography it was found that the management and maintenance of the Crown as a corporate brand entail concern with issues relating to: continuity (maintaining heritage and symbolism); visibility (having a meaningful and prominent public profile); strategy (anticipating and enacting change); sensitivity (rapid response to crises); respectability (retaining public favour); and empathy (acknowledging that brand ownership resides with the public). Taking an integrationist perspective, the efficacy of adopting a corporate marketing approach/philosophy is also highlighted.

A framework for managing Corporate Heritage is outlined and is called “Chronicling the Corporate Brand”. In addition to Bagehot's dictum that the British Monarch had a constitutional obligation to encourage, advise and warn the government of the day, the author concludes that the Sovereign has a critical societal role and must be dutiful, devoted and dedicated to Her (His) subjects.

This is one of the first papers to examine the British Monarchy through a corporate branding lens. It confirms that the Crown is analogous to a corporate brand and, therefore, ought to be managed as such.