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.
With a focus on inter-firm relationships involving the simultaneous pursuit of competition and cooperation, we develop a conceptual framework that explicates key paradoxical conditions, paradoxical ...tension, and performance implications of tension in such relationships. We propose felt tension as the actual manifestation of the paradox and offer insights on critical capabilities necessary to understand and manage the paradox. Our paper extends the paradox literature in the inter-organizational context and provides a set of concepts and propositions designed to stimulate systematic empirical research on the competition–cooperation paradox.
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.
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in positive organizational scholarship in general, including positive organizational behavior (POB) in particular. This work identifies ...organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) as a prototypical POB. Conceptualizing OCBs in this way is sensible in light of more than 30 years of research highlighting the desirable aspects of such behavior. At the same time, some researchers have raised questions about positive organizational scholarship and have called for a more balanced view of ostensibly positive behaviors. The purpose of this paper, then, is to take a more nuanced view of OCBs while highlighting the dark side of citizenship behavior. In doing so, we review conceptual and empirical work that has challenged the idea that OCBs are inherently positive. We also discuss research that seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the conditions under which OCB does more harm than good. Finally, important areas for future research and the practical realities facing scholars who seek to publish research investigating the dark side of citizenship are addressed as well.
How do organizations survive in the face of change? Underlying this question is a rich debate about whether organizations can adapt—and if so how. One perspective, organizational ecology, presents ...evidence suggesting that most organizations are largely inert and ultimately fail. A second perspective argues that some firms do learn and adapt to shifting environmental contexts. Recently, this latter view has coalesced around two themes. The first, based on research in strategy suggests that dynamic capabilities, the ability of a firm to reconfigure assets and existing capabilities, explains long-term competitive advantage. The second, based on organizational design, argues that ambidexterity, the ability of a firm to simultaneously explore and exploit, enables a firm to adapt over time. In this paper, we review and integrate these comparatively new research streams and identify a set of propositions that suggest how ambidexterity acts as a dynamic capability. We suggest that efficiency and innovation need not be strategic tradeoffs and highlight the substantive role of senior teams in building dynamic capabilities.
