Suchergebnisse

This paper integrates corporate governance research on the consequences of executive power and the upper echelons literature on top managers' cognitive orientation to develop a framework in which the characteristics of the chief executive officer (CEO) predict corporate strategic refocusing. With data from a sample of large and diversified firms, we examine the extent to which newly appointed CEOs' strategic orientation determines whether they use their power to maintain the status quo or refocus their firms' business portfolios. We assess CEOs' power with seven widely used indicators and use experience as heir apparent to the prior CEO as a measure of new CEOs' strategic orientation. Overall, results show that CEOs' power use is influenced by heir apparent experience in predicting the level of corporate strategic refocusing. Heir apparent experience interacts with four power indicators—compensation, functional expertise, elite education, and number of outside boards on which the new CEO is seated—but the interaction between heir apparent experience and number of outside boards is contrary to what was hypothesized.

Many employees in the world are evaluated and rewarded at work based on who they are ("particularism") rather than based on impersonal judgments of their performance ("universalis"). Yet the field of organizational behavior has been virtually silent on how employees react to workplaces dominated by particularism. In an effort to understand the role of particularistic organizational practices, several ideas from comparative institutions theories are applied to questions of organizational behavior, and the model is tested in samples of large manufacturing and service organizations in the United States and Hungary. It was found that employees in a modernist political system (United States) did echo social scientists' claims by reporting that their employers' personnel practices were comparatively more universalistic than those in organizations operating in a neotraditional polity (Hungary). This perception of differences in personnel practices mediated the relationship between political system and employees' trust in one another, their perceptions of coworker shirking, and their organizational commitment.

Procedural justice is placed within a larger theoretical context developed from theories of comparative institutions. In a sample of Lithuanian and American electronics companies it was found that: (a) Employees in the "neotraditional" political economy perceived their organizations as less meritocratic than did their peers in the "modern" political economy. (b) The relationship between political economy and employee perceptions of procedural justice was mediated by the organizations' use of meritocratic practices. (c) Procedural justice was associated with employee organizational commitment and coworker trust, controlling for political economy.

This paper compares organization culture assessments in two high reliability organizations (HROs) with each other, with similar assessments done in other HROs, and with assessments done in other kinds of organizations. It then assesses the consistency of the culture assessments in the two HROs reported here with the theoretical typology of HROs offered by Schulman, and compares the relationship of culture norms to attitudes and role perceptions found in this research with similar relationships found in the HROs. Finally, the paper provides field data from the two organizations reported on here that support Schulman's model.