Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Organizational Behavior

This is a book not simply to be read, but to be savored. It poses for the reflective practioner the question of relationship between religion and economic creativity and productivity. It gives practical suggestions to any leader on the achievement of that critical motivational force--the linkage between personal inner needs and corporate mission.--C. Roland Christensen, Harvard Business School

Action Research and Organizational Development describes a process of change that encourages research and consulting skills. In this process, research data about an organization or culture is systematically collected to develop an understanding of the needs, issues and problems. The information provides the impetus for focusing the change and making discoveries. This work describes the characteristics of the action research process and the procedure for its implementation. This particular type of applied social research differs from other varieties in the immediacy of the...

In this provocative volume, a pioneering organizational psychologist explains that the failure of many human resource programs in business, education, and government is largely due to their mechanistic assumptions. By contrasting the classical human resource paradigm--and its emphasis on consistency and a clock-like structure to organizations-- with the evolutionary paradigm and its focus on variation, conflicting interests and complexity, the author shows how shifting to an evolutionary perspective can make organizations more adaptive, hence human resource programs more attuned to human...

This book answers the question virtually every manager and most CEOs are asking: Why doesn't this organization perform better? To re-energize their companies, CEOs must understand the source of their inconsistent behavior by examining their true driving values, working with managers and employees to raise and resolve issues sooner, setting goals and personal development plans, and more.

Virtually every manager and CEO wonders why his or her organization doesn't perform better. What's wrong at the top? When effectiveness has gone stale despite using all the cutting-edge...

Ethical failures are rooted in leadership failure, the lack of a corporate culture in which ethical concerns have been integrated, and unresponsiveness to key organizational stakeholders. This book seeks to enhance our understanding of the causes of ethical debacles in an era when ethical missteps can often lead to corporate bankruptcies or worse. Sims offers practical solutions for mitigating damage and preventing such problems from happening in the first place. He also explains how to institutionalize ethics throughout an organization.

Sims asserts that organizations wishing...

Scapegoating is the identification--then blaming and punishing--of individuals for problems that rightly belong to the larger organization. Dyckman and Cutler offer a survival guide for people affected by workplace scapegoating. They show us the social and psychological roots of scapegoating and explain how the individual and system act together to enable this human drama. This book shows how both individuals and the workplace system contribute to scapegoating. This book follows the career of the scapegoat and presents ways that the pattern can be interrupted. Strategies to help remove the...

The interviews included in this fascinating collection of discussions with popular songwriters focus on the craft itself--and as such, they are of interest to both music fans and to budding songwriters. What inspires songwriters? Where do their songs come from? What is their process? What do they do when they get stuck? In this book, readers will hear from a vast range of well-known, successful songwriters, many of them performers as well, revealing the nuances of their skill: how they write their songs, from conception to finished work. The book discusses both song history and style. The...

For every business, the choice is stark: Change--or die. At any moment, fully two-thirds of America's companies claim to be in the midst of some type of organizational revamping, though most of these initiatives will fail. What many companies neglect to recognize is that organizational change needs to come from within, no matter how profound the external forces. Positive change requires change agents throughout the organization--those individuals who can translate the strategic vision of leaders into pragmatic behavior. This book identifies the qualities of great change agents and how...

One of the pioneers of the Total Quality movement, W. Edwards Deming, famously proclaimed, Drive out fear so that everyone may work more effectively for the company. But after attending a quality conference in the 1990s devoted to Deming's proposition, the authors felt somehow drained; talking about fear seemed to have sucked the life out of the entire audience. They began to wonder if it was a vicious circle; what if focusing on fear, even in an effort to drive it out, actually kept you in fear? What if the conversation were shifted to hope--not to negate or invalidate fear but to bring...

"Building Community in Buildings" takes us on a fascinating journey through workplaces large and small, old and new, traditional and contemporary, to explore the dynamic relationships between people and the structures in which they work. Noting that a child born today will spend 90 percent of his or her life inside, Jana Kemp and Ken Baker integrate insights from management and building design to reveal new understandings about workplace productivity and performance. Showcasing dozens of examples--from office buildings to libraries to hospitals--the authors highlight innovative practies...

A management professor and a religion professor team up to provide a fresh, penetrating look at the obstacles that prevent people from achieving their full potential. As authors Charles Watson and Thomas Idinopulos demonstrate, inner demons like a lack of integrity, mindless conformity, passivity, or greed conspire to keep people from doing their best. But people can avoid becoming their own worst enemies by using their uniquely human capacities to their fullest--to be more responsible, more creative, more self-disciplined, and more honest. Using these strengths, the authors show, makes it...

Project teams are the rule rather than the exception in today's organizations. But thanks to the pressure of performance goals, conflicting agendas, and political jockeying, few teams make superior decisions consistently. Instead, team members communicate poorly or not at all, avoid provocative discussion, occasionally stab each other in the back, or in many other ways forget that their job is to make decisions that lead the company forward. Jana Kemp, an authority on team decision making, saves the day by offering tested methods and tools team members and their leaders can use to ratchet...

In today's stressful work environment, organizations can be crippled not only by product failures or dramatic market shifts but by internal demons. Typical symptoms of corporate dis-ease include distrust, lack of communication, territoriality, and other negative qualities that fester below the surface and ultimately sap the organization's vitality. But according to these experts in organizational dynamics, it doesn't have to be that way. In truly strong organizations, employees experience joy in performing their tasks and give their utmost to add value and help achieve organizational...

Innovation in the private and public sectors has been the subject of a great deal of study, since it is central to the economic growth and effective governance of most organizations. Determining the changes needed in an organization is less difficult than determining how to make the changes work. This volume is the result of a three-year study that investigated the factors associated with the implementation of program changes in a nonprofit community welfare agency.

The results of the research showed that a greater understanding of the implementation process was needed, both by the...

Key metaphors in world-system analysis are profoundly spatial, but there have been few attempts to understand how space, location, and topography affect world-system organization and process. To fill this gap, this book examines case studies of the restructuring of space and transport in core, semiperipheral, and peripheral economies. It addresses such topics as the role of ocean transport in linking terrestrially based units of the capitalist world economy, the role of land transport systems in the construction and restructuring of relationships between raw materials peripheries and core...

Enthusiastically embraced by readers everywhere, this groundbreaking book is an antidote to the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success.

With an astounding array of anecdotes and case studies of the useful role mess can play in business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, hardware stores, and even the meteoric career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, coauthors Abrahamson and Freedman demonstrate that moderately messy systems use...