Workplaces in America and elsewhere show pervasive job dissatisfaction, distrust, and disengagement, with the evidence suggesting that these problems are getting worse and have a number of negative ...consequences for employers as well as employees. What follows is a necessarily selective exploration of human resource management in organizations, covering why it is often done so badly, what theory suggests about how to do it better, and why so little of what is known is actually implemented.
Although most of the research and public pressure concerning sustainability has been focused on the effects of business and organizational activity on the physical environment, companies and their ...management practices profoundly affect the human and social environment as well. This article briefly reviews the literature on the direct and indirect effects of organizations and their decisions about people on human health and mortality. It then considers some possible explanations for why social sustainability has received relatively short shrift in management writing, and outlines a research agenda for investigating the links between social sustainability and organizational effectiveness as well as the role of ideology in understanding the relative neglect of the human factor in sustainability research.
Social science theories can become self-fulfilling by shaping institutional designs and management practices, as well as social norms and expectations about behavior, thereby creating the behavior ...they predict. They also perpetuate themselves by promulgating language and assumptions that become widely used and accepted. We illustrate these ideas by considering how the language and assumptions of economics shape management practices: theories can "win" in the marketplace for ideas, independent of their empirical validity, to the extent their assumptions and language become taken for granted and normatively valued, therefore creating conditions that make them come "true".
The common heuristic association between scarcity and value implies that more valuable things appear scarcer (King, Hicks, & Abdelkhalik, 2009), an effect we show applies to time as well. In a series ...of studies, we found that both income and wealth, which affect the economic value of time, influence perceived time pressure. Study 1 found that changes in income were associated with changes in perceived time pressure. Studies 2-4 showed that experimentally manipulating time's perceived economic value caused greater feelings of time pressure and less patient behavior. Finally, Study 5 demonstrated that the relationship between income and time pressure was strengthened when participants were randomly assigned to think about the precise economic value of their time.
The relative scarcity of policy-relevant research is the inevitable result of editorial policies pursued by most if not all of the highest status management and organization science journals. ...Ironically, there are a plethora of policy-oriented journals available as publication outlets, so it is possible to both publish and read policy-relevant scholarship, just not in the usual places. These facts pose a challenge to traditional journals, including those published by the Academy of Management.
This paper suggests ways to change the process and product of managerial research. The structure and processes governing both the careers of academics and the prepublication review of their work ...limit the influence of management research on practice, social policy, and even the terms of public discourse about organizational issues. These limits prevail despite the good intentions and heroic efforts of journal editors and reviewers. We should implement what we know about building innovative organizations that are more effective in having knowledge turned into action.
Changes in the values and careers of particularly younger employees and changes in organizations, including the reduction of hierarchical levels and greater use of teams and matrix ...structures—combined with new communication technologies and more social networking—have produced calls for new organization theories for these new realities. Using organizational power and influence as a focus, I argue that fundamental theoretical processes remain largely unchanged in their explanatory power, in part because such phenomena can be linked to survival advantages. The new workers-new work arguments are consistent with the continuing emphasis on novelty and theoretical innovation in the organization sciences, an emphasis that, while promulgated in virtually all the journals, may poorly serve the development of reliable and valid knowledge and hinder our ability to provide useful advice for both organizations and their employees.
According to Terror Management Theory, people respond to reminders of mortality by seeking psychological security and bolstering their self-esteem. Because previous research suggests that having ...power can provide individuals a sense of security and self-worth, we hypothesize that mortality salience leads to an increased motivation to acquire power, especially among men. Study 1 found that men (but not women) who wrote about their death reported more interest in acquiring power. Study 2A and Study 2B demonstrated that when primed with reminders of death, men (but not women) reported behaving more dominantly during the subsequent week, while both men and women reported behaving more prosocially during that week. Thus, mortality salience prompts people to respond in ways that help them manage their death anxiety but in ways consistent with normative gender expectations. Furthermore, Studies 3-5 showed that feeling powerful reduces anxiety when mortality is salient. Specifically, we found that when primed to feel more powerful, both men and women experienced less mortality anxiety.
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