Mechanism Design Vohra, Rakesh V.
05/2011, Letnik:
v.Series Number 47
eBook
Mechanism design is an analytical framework for thinking clearly and carefully about what exactly a given institution can achieve when the information necessary to make decisions is dispersed and ...privately held. This analysis provides an account of the underlying mathematics of mechanism design based on linear programming. Three advantages characterize the approach. The first is simplicity: arguments based on linear programming are both elementary and transparent. The second is unity: the machinery of linear programming provides a way to unify results from disparate areas of mechanism design. The third is reach: the technique offers the ability to solve problems that appear to be beyond solutions offered by traditional methods. No claim is made that the approach advocated should supplant traditional mathematical machinery. Rather, the approach represents an addition to the tools of the economic theorist who proposes to understand economic phenomena through the lens of mechanism design.
Organizing America Perrow, Charles; Perrow, Charles
2002., 20090110, 2009, 2002, 2002-01-01
eBook
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more ...employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics railed against the nationalizing of the economy, against corporations' monopoly powers, political subversion, environmental destruction, and "wage slavery." How did a nation committed to individual freedom, family firms, public goods, and decentralized power become transformed in one century? Bountiful resources, a mass market, and the industrial revolution gave entrepreneurs broad scope. In Europe, the state and the church kept private organizations small and required consideration of the public good. In America, the courts and business-steeped legislators removed regulatory constraints over the century, centralizing industry and privatizing the railroads.
Organizations are dynamic, hierarchically structured entities. Such dynamism is reflected in the emergence of significant events at every organizational level. Despite this fact, there has been ...relatively little discussion about how events become meaningful and come to impact organizations across space and time. We address this gap by developing event system theory, which suggests that events become salient when they are novel, disruptive, and critical (reflecting an event's strength). Importantly, events can originate at any hierarchical level and their effects can remain within that level or travel up or down throughout the organization, changing or creating new behaviors, features, and events. This impact can extend over time as events vary in duration and timing or as event strength evolves. Event system theory provides a needed shift in focus for organizational theory and research by developing specific propositions articulating the interplay among event strength and the spatial and temporal processes through which events come to influence organizations.
Drawing from the foundation of positive psychology and the recently emerging positive organizational behavior, two studies (N = 1,032 and N = 232) test hypotheses on the impact that the selected ...positive psychological resource capacities of hope, optimism, and resilience have on desired work-related employee outcomes. These outcomes include performance (self-reported in Study 1 and organizational performance appraisals in Study 2), job satisfaction, work happiness, and organizational commitment. The findings generally support that employees' positive psychological resource capacities relate to, and contribute unique variance to, the outcomes. However, hope, and, to a lesser extent, optimism and resilience, do differentially contribute to the various outcomes. Utility analysis supports the practical implications of the study results.
Drawing on social identity theory and social-cognitive theory, we hypothesize that organizational identification predicts unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) through the mediation of moral ...disengagement. We further propose that competitive interorganizational relations enhance the hypothesized relationships. Three studies conducted in China and the United States using both survey and vignette methodologies provided convergent support for our model. Study 1 revealed that higher organizational identifiers engaged in more UPB, and that this effect was mediated by moral disengagement. Study 2 found that organizational identification once again predicted UPB through the mediation of moral disengagement, and that the mediation relationship was stronger when employees perceived a higher level of industry competition. Finally, Study 3 replicated the above findings using a vignette experiment to provide stronger evidence of causality. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
The dynamics of proactivity at work Grant, Adam M.; Ashford, Susan J.
Research in organizational behavior,
2008, 2008-1-00, 20080101, Letnik:
28
Journal Article
Recenzirano
As the organizational literature on specific proactive behaviors grows, researchers have noted inefficiencies and redundancies in the separate study of different proactive behaviors when their ...underlying nature, antecedents, processes, and consequences may be similar. We develop a framework designed to generalize across specific manifestations of proactivity, describing the nature, dimensions, situational antecedents, psychological mechanisms, dispositional moderators, and consequences of proactive behavior. We conclude by discussing implications and recommendations for organizational scholars to take a more proactive approach to constructing, evaluating, and cumulating theory about proactive behavior. Our chapter thus answers recent calls for integrative theory about the general dynamics of proactivity, and fits with current trends emphasizing the increasing importance of proactivity in organizational life.
In this study among 84 female school principals and 190 teachers, we tested the central process proposed by the Job Demands-Resources model of work engagement. We hypothesized that job resources have ...a positive impact on creativity and charismatic leadership behavior first through personal resources, and then through work engagement. School principals filled in a questionnaire via a secured website and indicated their levels of job resources, personal resources and work engagement, whereas teachers filled in a questionnaire about their school principal's creativity and charismatic leadership. Results supported the intervening effects of personal resources and work engagement in the job resources-creativity link. In addition, engaged school principals scored highest on charismatic leadership.
The use of control variables plays a central role in organizational research due to practical difficulties associated with the implementation of experimental and quasi‐experimental designs. As such, ...we conducted an in‐depth review and content analysis of what variables, and why such variables are controlled for, in 10 of the most popular research domains (task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, turnover, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, employee burnout, personality, leader‒member exchange, organizational justice, and affect) in organizational behavior/human resource management (OB/HRM) and applied psychology. Specifically, we examined 580 articles published from 2003 to 2012 in AMJ, ASQ, JAP, JOM, and PPsych. Results indicate that, across research domains with clearly distinct theoretical bases, the overwhelming majority of the more than 3,500 controls identified in our review converge around the same simple demographic factors (i.e., gender, age, tenure), very little effort is made to explain why and how controls relate to focal variables of interest, and control variable practices have not changed much over the past decade. To address these results, we offer best‐practice recommendations in the form of a sequence of questions and subsequent steps that can be followed to make decisions on the appropriateness of including a specific control variable within a particular theoretical framework, research domain, and empirical study. Our recommendations can be used by authors as well as journal editors and reviewers to improve the transparency and appropriateness of practices regarding control variable usage.
Unethical pro‐organizational behavior (UPB) is often visible to co‐workers; however, reactions to UPB are rarely considered in empirical research in spite of their importance to the social dynamics ...in the workplace. Drawing upon appraisal theory of emotion and the behavioral ethics literature, we predict that observing UPB would lead third parties to experience admiration due to the pro‐organizational nature of UPB; these third parties would in turn be motivated to display more helping behavior towards the UPB actor. Conversely, we predict that observing UPB would lead third parties to experience disgust due to the unethical nature of UPB; these third parties would dis‐identify themselves from the UPB actor by instigating incivility. Meanwhile, they would disengage themselves from the UPB actor by avoiding them in subsequent interactions. In addition, the observing employees might also engage in action‐oriented behavior such as whistle‐blowing behavior to sanction the UPB actor. Across an experience‐sampling study with three daily assessments as well as an experimental study, we find support for these predictions. Furthermore, we find that third parties’ moral attentiveness moderates the link between observed UPB and disgust, such that observed UPB leads to heightened feelings of disgust only when third parties have high levels of moral attentiveness. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our work.
Latent profile analysis (LPA) is a categorical latent variable approach that focuses on identifying latent subpopulations within a population based on a certain set of variables. LPA thus assumes ...that people can be typed with varying degrees of probabilities into categories that have different configural profiles of personal and/or environmental attributes. Within this article, we (a) review the existing applications of LPA within past vocational behavior research; (b) illustrate best practice procedures in a non-technical way of how to use LPA methodology, with an illustrative example of identifying different latent profiles of heavy work investment (i.e., working compulsively, working excessively, and work engagement); and (c) outline future research possibilities in vocational behavior research. By reviewing 46 studies stemming from central journals of the field, we identified seven distinct topics that have already been investigated by LPA (e.g., job and organizational attitudes and behaviors, work motivation, career-related attitudes and orientations, vocational interests). Together with showing descriptive statistics about how LPA has been conducted in past vocational behavior research, we illustrate and derive best-practice recommendations for future LPA research. The review and “how to” guide can be helpful for all researchers interested in conducting LPA studies.
•Shows how and why Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) has informed vocational behavior research.•Provides best-practice recommendations that guides researchers.•Provides an illustrative example with working compulsively and excessively, and work engagement.•Stimulates future LPA research within vocational behavior topics and in general.
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