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The past few decades have witnessed a phenomenal progress in our understanding of employee mobility as a critical driver and consequence of various outcomes for individuals, organizations, industries, and economies. In the process, researchers have tackled several important issues in conducting empirical research on employee mobility. This chapter provides a critical discussion of the extant literature focusing on five broad areas: identification of mobility, timing of mobility, outcomes of mobility and their operationalization, model identification, and other related issues. In doing so, this article identifies some of the empirical choices and methodologies adopted in prior mobility studies, evaluates those practices, and suggests areas of improvements for the practice. It is hoped that future studies will benefit from this chapter's insight by building on the best practices from the literature while continuously and successfully tackling the issues that have been challenging the researchers on this increasingly important topic of scholarly inquiry.

Firm-specific human capital (FSHC) has been an integral part of the vocabulary in the strategy field. Many scholars argue that FSHC inhibits employee mobility and drives employee retention at a discount, value appropriation, and firms' competitive advantage. FSHC also plays a central role in the resource-based view of the firm. In recent years, however, a significant debate has emerged on the validity and usefulness of the construct. The purpose of the chapter is to revisit this debate and discuss both challenges and opportunities related to FSHC. In a form of conversation, we take aim at FSHC from different angles and discuss its role as a mobility friction, in value appropriation of established firms, in the context of transitions between paid employment and entrepreneurship, and in the views of practitioners. While we agree that our understanding of the concept of FSHC must evolve, we continue to see its value in our theoretical toolbox.

This chapter investigates the relationship between the composition of initial spinout teams and spinout survival. We develop a theory suggesting that spinout founders hiring from their prior firm versus hiring from the external labor market to assemble spinout teams will have differential effects on spinout survival. Using confidential employee–employer linked data in the legal services industry provided by the United States Census Bureau, we find evidence that inclusion of spinout team members from the founder's prior firm is positively related to spinout survival, a relationship which increases with included members' prior earnings. In contrast, we find that inclusion of spinout team members from firms outside the founder's prior firm is positively associated with spinout failure, a relationship which becomes statistically insignificant when included team members' prior earnings are high. Taken together, our results point to the potential hazards associated with using external markets to assemble spinout teams, thereby establishing an important boundary condition for extant theory which has focused on the benefits associated with spinout team size, but has often neglected the labor market strategy through which such teams are assembled.

Eleven representative examples of professional development are examined in what is labelled a new era of administrator training. An analysis is presented of the conditions that have helped foster interest in the creation of new approaches to the training of school administrators. Ten current conditions in the area of administrator training where improvement is needed are reported on. Commonalities among the new approaches to training are discussed and these principles juxtaposed against the status quo in administrator training. It is concluded that the new era of professional development is significantly different from many current training programmes, in terms of both process and content. These differences are examined in detail. Potential problems in these newer approaches to administrator training are noted.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

This chapter provides a presentation about Chapter 1 of The Balance of the National Economy, 1923–24, edited by Pavel Illich Popov. The Balance was issued in June 1926 by the Central Statistical Administration (CSU or TsSU) of the USSR, which Popov had headed from July 1918 to January 1926. In the first part of our chapter, we show how Popov’s work on the balance of the national economy was rooted in the specific scientific and political culture of zemstvo statisticians inherited from the Tsar. Statistical inquiry was considered an objective scientific process based on international standards. Furthermore, like zemstvo statisticians, CSU statisticians developed great autonomous political power. The balance of the national economy was built according to these principles, which met harsh criticism from revolutionaries and Bolsheviks. In the second part, we analyze the contents of Popov’s Chapter 1, especially the theoretical foundations of the balance and its connection with Soviet planning. In the third part, we discuss the balance’s significance in the years 1926–1929, years which ended the NEP and launched the first Five-Year Plan, so as to understand how CSU’s balance didn’t become a standard Soviet statistical instrument and was discarded as a “bourgeois” device.

Forensic crime labs play an important role in the criminal justice system’s response to violent gun crimes in the USA. The purpose of this paper is to describe the methods of firearms analysis including ballistics imaging and proposed best practices for investigating gun crimes. A separate line of research has begun to explore the structure of forensic labs and how structure impacts lab performance.

To date, however, proposed best practices in firearms investigation have not been empirically tested within crime labs. The authors address this gap in the literature by using a mediation model examining organizational correlates of a limited number of tasks (identified by Peter Gagliardi’s 13 Critical Tasks) believed to enhance our final dependent measures, forensic crime lab outcomes (NIBIN acquisitions and hits). The authors examine, therefore, the relationship between organizational correlates, collected from a sample of publicly funded labs in the USA, on several of Gagliardi’s tasks and then explore the relationship of those tasks on our outcome variables: NIBIN acquisitions and hits.

Results indicate agency size and number of agencies serviced by a lab are significant factors associated with our mediating variables (Gagliardi’s tasks). Communication was identified as a significant task associated with achieving NIBIN acquisitions and hits. In general, this study underscores the importance of communication between labs and other institutional constituents for increasing ballistics imaging outputs. Furthermore, findings provide partial support for Gagliard’s tasks, by highlighting the role of enhanced communication on organization-based performance outcomes.

This study is the first to examine the mediating effect of Gagliardi’s tasks on the organizational performance of ballistics imaging systems within crime labs. In addition, this study examines the influence of organizational correlates on these mediating tasks.

This study examined the impact of perceived threat and cohesion on the ability of groups to solve problems in a situation of social conflict. The self‐reports and behaviors of 31 groups of college males were studied within a comprehensive, strategic simulation of intergroup conflict. The simulation was based on both a value conflict and an economic competition over scarce resources. A coding scheme for group problem solving was created based in part on Janis' seven symptoms of groupthink. Change scores were calculated over different points in time to assess the relationships among perceived threat, group cohesion, and dysfunctional group problem solving. Large increases in perceived threat were significantly related to decrements in problem‐solving effectiveness regardless of whether cohesion was stable or increased. Groups who reported high and increasing levels of cohesion experienced a decrement in problem solving regardless of the increase in perceived threat, while groups who showed small changes in cohesion demonstrated decreased problem solving under high perceived threat. The results were consistent with Janis' model of groupthink, and Fisher's eclectic model of intergroup conflict.

Although models have been published in the literature covering various aspects of the job performance domain (e.g., technical performance, contextual performance), researchers have recently recognized a void in these models and have called for their expansion to include adaptive performance components (Campbell, 1999; Hesketh & Neal, 1999; London & Mone, 1999; Murphy & Jackson, 1999). Toward this end, Pulakos, Arad, Donovan, and Plamondon (2000) developed a taxonomy of adaptive job performance similar to the model of job performance developed by Campbell, McCloy, Oppler, and Sager (1993). This model contained eight dimensions of adaptive job performance. Pulakos et al. began their research with a review of various literatures on adaptability and identified six different aspects of adaptive performance. These are shown in Table 1, along with the research references from which they were derived. The diversity of substantive areas that are represented in the research articles cited in Table 1 is a testament to the perceived importance of adaptability across a number of behavioral disciplines. Although the idea that adaptive performance is multi-dimensional was reasonable based on the wide range of behaviors “adaptability” has encompassed in the literature (for example, adapting to organizational change, different cultures, different people, new technology), no published research prior to Pulakos et al. had systematically defined or empirically examined specific dimensions of adaptive job performance. Pulakos et al. conducted two studies to refine the six-dimension model of individual adaptive job performance derived from the literature. In Study 1, over 1,000 critical incidents from 21 different jobs were content analyzed, yielding an eight-dimension taxonomy of adaptive performance. That is, the critical incident analysis produced two additional adaptive performance dimensions that are shown at the bottom of Table 1.