Klavdia Markelova Evans, Ashley Salaiz and Rob Austin McKee
This paper aims to address an important question of what makes companies succeed or not in their attempt to empower employees. As this study answers this question, the arguments…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to address an important question of what makes companies succeed or not in their attempt to empower employees. As this study answers this question, the arguments suggest that coordination is essential to creation of employee empowerment climate in organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
This is conceptual paper rooted in extensive research on both – empowerment (culture, climate and organizational structure) and coordination (formal and informal).
Findings
To help managers to be effective in their roles, this study presents four insights to creating empowerment climate. The arguments conclude that coordination provides a vessel for successful realization of empowerment. Specifically, only informal coordination (vs formal) will fully realize empowerment’s benefits. Given that the topic of empowerment is highly germane to managers in today’s context of the increasing number of employees working remotely, this work presents an important and actionable advance for managers.
Originality/value
This study represents original research that has not been published and is not currently under review at any other journal.
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This study aims to provide prescriptions through a practitioner lens to managers and leaders wishing to cultivate an organizational environment characterized by employees’…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to provide prescriptions through a practitioner lens to managers and leaders wishing to cultivate an organizational environment characterized by employees’ voluntary open upward communication.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents a two-step progression to fostering successful voluntary upward communication, framing manager’s feedback inquiry as a precursor to enabling employee voice. Rationale is provided for each step based on an extensive review of the management literature. At times, the reviewed research reveals counterintuitive findings that serve to underscore the importance of this article.
Findings
Hallmarks of effective organizations include managers who are open to feedback and employees who are comfortable providing it. Specific, actionable and feasible advice is provided for managers to seek feedback more actively and to inculcate a culture of open upward communication.
Originality/value
This paper offers guidance that goes beyond the traditional practices adopted by organizations to encourage upward communication, feedback and employee voice. Yet, this guidance is no more difficult to enact than these more common approaches and it is supported by a growing body of research that has yet to be fully translated into lay terms.
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Rob Austin McKee and Whitney Botsford Morgan
The purpose of this paper is to chronicle a major curricular change initiative involving BBA and MBA core program reviews and revisions at an Association to Advance Collegiate…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to chronicle a major curricular change initiative involving BBA and MBA core program reviews and revisions at an Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)-accredited College of Business. The authors provide rationales for the change effort that likely mirror those of similar institutions. Kotter’s 8 steps for transforming organizations (1995) are overlaid with the sequence of actions taken by the key change agents. Several examples of specific changes are provided to illustrate how the initiative was planned and completed, aligned with Kotter’s 8 steps.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper reports a case study of action research conducted during an extensive curricular change intervention undertaken at the focal institution. It includes details regarding how key change agents collected data to support the initiative, including conducting a survey, meeting with stakeholder groups and collecting information about other institutions.
Findings
The curricular review and revision process is challenging but navigable with a clear plan. Kotter’s 8 steps provide a solid foundation for such initiatives that can be tailored to the desired outcome(s) and the context within which the change is being pursued. Key takeaways and recommendations are interwoven within the narrative, intending to guide ambitious readers through a similar curricular change process with greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Originality/value
This paper is unique in its focus on a major curricular change initiative within an AACSB-accredited College of Business. It goes a step beyond a typical narrative case study by incorporating action research grounded in Kotter’s well-supported change management paradigm. As such, this paper represents a unique contribution to the literature.
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Given the dramatic changes taking place in society, the economy, and technology, 21st-century organizations need to engage in new, more spontaneous, and more innovative ways of…
Abstract
Given the dramatic changes taking place in society, the economy, and technology, 21st-century organizations need to engage in new, more spontaneous, and more innovative ways of managing. I investigate why an increasing number of companies are including artists and artistic processes in their approaches to strategic and day-to-day management and leadership.
Arieh Riskin, Peter Bamberger, Amir Erez and Aya Zeiger
Incivility is widespread in the workplace and has been shown to have significant affective and behavioral consequences. However, the authors still have a limited understanding as…
Abstract
Incivility is widespread in the workplace and has been shown to have significant affective and behavioral consequences. However, the authors still have a limited understanding as to whether, how and when discrete incivility events impact team performance. Adopting a resource depletion perspective and focusing on the cognitive implications of such events, the authors introduce a multi-level model linking the adverse effects of such events on team members’ working memory – the “workbench” of the cognitive system where most planning, analyses, and management of goals occur – to team effectiveness. The model which the authors develop proposes that that uncivil interpersonal behavior in general, and rudeness – a central manifestation of incivility – in particular, may place a significant drain on individuals’ working memory capacity, affecting team effectiveness via its effects on individual performance and coordination-related team emergent states and action-phase processes. In the context of this model, the authors offer an overarching framework for making sense of disparate findings regarding how, why and when incivility affects performance outcomes at multiple levels. More specifically, the authors use this framework to: (a) suggest how individual-level cognitive impairment and weakened coordinative team processes may mediate these incivility-based effects, and (b) explain how event, context, and individual difference factors moderators may attenuate or exacerbate these cognition-mediated effects.
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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balanceeconomics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary toman′s finding the good life and society enduring…
Abstract
A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.