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The competing values model (CVM) describes organizational culture in terms of what appear to be mutually exclusive value dimensions: structural control vs. flexibility, focus on internal vs. external stakeholders, and means vs. ends. The apparent paradox in simultaneously expressing competing values has implications for a variety of organizational phenomena, including leadership, decision making, and strategic management. The CVM thus offers promise for providing a common metric for multi‐level, trans‐organizational, and cross‐cultural analyses. To date, however, underlying assumptions regarding the competing values framework as a characterization of culture have not been fully validated. This research provides a test of the competing values model with methodology that is conceptually consonant with the paradoxical nature of the theory. Using a sample drawn from 10 U.S. organizations, a Qsort and multidimensional scaling analysis produce qualified support for a structure of organizational cultural values consistent with the CVM. Further, this study elaborates the CVM by suggesting a mechanism whereby the apparent paradox of competing values might be more effectively managed.

To examine the role of perceived team climate in facilitating leadership and sociotechnical optimization to affect quality related outcomes in a municipal government.

A survey was administered to employees working in a municipal government, measuring leadership, perceived team climate, technical subsystem components, and team performance. Hypotheses were tested with multiple regression, and the fit of a path model implied by all hypotheses was tested with structural equation modeling.

Institution‐level communications and department‐level leadership had the greatest effects in shaping perceptions of team climate. Perceived team climate predicted process improvement, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. Perceived team climate also substantially mediated relationships between leadership support for teamwork and technical components with these outcomes.

Data were collected at one point in time from a single source, workers in a US municipal government. Some measures were new. A longitudinal design would strengthen causal inferences regarding the origins and effects of team climates.

Soft controls such as norms influence the effectiveness of teams in process improvement. Mid‐level managers have the greatest impact among leaders in creating a team climate. Open communication makes a difference to virtually every aspect of performance.

This paper demonstrates the importance of shaping perceptions of a team climate to facilitate process and quality improvement. It emphasizes the importance of open communications and clarifies changing roles of leadership in modern organizations. Finally, it provides rare documentation of quality management in government.

In this study, the authors applied a routine dynamics perspective to examine how agile routines enhance efficiency while allowing flexibility in a world of flux. Hence, the authors conducted an ethnographic case study in the IT sector, following a scrum team. The findings indicate that agile routines create affordances for addressing temporal orientations toward the past, present, and future. Within the scrum framework, each routine has a designed temporal orientation, such that the planning meeting is oriented toward the future. Actors enacted this single, temporal orientation through temporal demarcating patterns. However, in some instances, other temporal orientations conflicted with the dominant one. In those cases, actors enacted temporal integrating patterns that embraced multiple temporal orientations. The authors contribute to research on routine dynamics by demonstrating how (1) temporal demarcating enables organizational benefits, (2) temporal integrating enables learning from and anticipating problems, and (3) temporal spaces emerge within routine enactments to solve problems at hand.

While it is generally well known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the US southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semistructured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially linked movement schools – locations where the deeply intense work took place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting, creatively translating, and resocializing human agents in preparation for dangerous performance – we follow the biographical paths of carriers of the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated, transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville movement core cadre – products of the Nashville movement workshop schools – were especially important because they served as bridging leaders by serially linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this way, they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where the movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the US civil rights movement in particular.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

This paper reports an investigation of the personal-values systems of 567 public-sector managers from the U.S., Canada, and Japan. The results of this research indicate that, despite some specific differences, there is an overarching, coherent North American public-sector managerial values systems. Moreover, it is similar in some ways to that of its Japanese counterparts. However, these values systems - North American and Japanese - are clearly distinct