In such a complex and well-researched domain as decision support systems (DSS), with a long history of authors making insightful contributions since the 1960’s, it is critical for researchers, especially those less experienced, to have a broad knowledge of the seminal work that has been carried out by prior generations of researchers. This can serve to avoid proposing research questions which have been considered many times before, without having consideration for the answers which have been put forward by previous scholars, thereby reinventing the wheel or “rediscovering” findings about the life of organizations that have been presented long before. The study of human and managerial decision-making is also characterized by considerable depth and seminal research going back to the beginning of the 20th century, across a variety of fields of research including psychology, social psychology, sociology or indeed operations research. Inasmuch as decision-making and decision support are inextricably linked, it is essential for researchers in DSS to be very familiar with both stream of research in their full diversity so they are able to understand both what activity is being supported and how to analyze requirements for developing decision support artefacts. In addition, whilst the area of decision support has sometimes been characterized by technology-based hype, it is critical to recognize that only a clear focus on the thinking and actions of managers can provide decisive directions for research on their decision support needs. In this article, we consider first the characteristics of human cognition, before concentrating on the decision-making needs of managers and the lessons that can be derived for the development of DSS.
81-100 of 232 Results
Article
Ciara Heavin and Frederic Adam
Since the 1960s, information technology (IT)/information systems (IS) professionals, data practitioners, and senior managers have focused on developing decision support capabilities to enhance organizational decision making. Initially, this quest was mostly driven by successive generations of technological advances. However, in the last decade, the pace at which large volumes of diverse data can be collected and processed, new algorithmic advances, and the development of computational infrastructure such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs) have created new opportunities for global businesses in areas such as financial services, manufacturing, retail, sports, and healthcare. At this point, it seems that most industries and public services could potentially be revolutionized by these new techniques.
The word analytics has replaced the previous individual components of computerized decision support technologies that have been developed under various labels in the past (). Much of the traditional researcher and practitioner communities who were concerned with decision support, decision support systems (DSSs), and business intelligence (BI) have reoriented their attention to innovative tools and technologies to derive value from new data streams through artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics. Identifying the main areas of focus for decision support and analytics provides a stimulus for new ideas for researchers, managers, and IS/IT and data professionals. These stakeholders need to undertake new empirical studies that explain how analytics can be used to develop and enhance new forms of decision support while considering the dilemmas that may arise due to the data capture and analyses of new digital data streams.
Article
André O. Laplume
Instrumental stakeholder theory posits that managing for stakeholders using justice-based approaches produces competitive advantage for firms. However, achieving the ideals of stakeholder management may be challenging, and for some firms, unrewarding. Yet, when firms fail to manage for stakeholders, they contribute to stakeholder marginalization, a condition in which stakeholders feel unfairly treated and begin to scan for alternative arrangements with other firms. Stakeholder marginalization creates opportunities for competitors, but especially for new entrants, to pursue stakeholder innovation. Stakeholder innovation involves the creation of a business model that caters to marginalized stakeholder groups in a new way, by improving perceived conditions for those stakeholders (e.g., customers, employees, suppliers, or communities). Stakeholder innovations can threaten incumbencies as their ecosystems bloom and technologies improve, and they can start to draw a greater variety of resources away from incumbent networks. Because it can help to explain and predict both incumbent and new entrant behaviors, stakeholder capitalism is a useful frame for theorizing in the disciplines of management and entrepreneurship.
Article
Lukas Neumann and Oliver Gassmann
Frugal innovation as a concept was initially sparked by a groundbreaking article published in The Economist in 2010. In it, the conception and application of a handheld electrocardiogram (ECG), the Mac 400, specifically designed to serve the rural population in India, was introduced. Every aspect of this product and its ecosystem was designed to serve the customer at less than 25% of the original cost. Since this publication, a lively discussion around this concept has developed in academia as well as in the industry. As a term, “frugal innovation” refers to solutions (products or services), methods, or designs that focus on serving new customers in resource-constrained contexts at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) and/or emerging and developing markets. This understanding has broadened somewhat as such innovations gain increasing attention and relevance throughout all customer segments across the globe. What remains consistent is that frugal innovation is based on a new type of value architecture that is specifically developed to serve customers’ needs in the respective context by utilizing as few resources as possible. This approach leads to many cases where frugal innovations are novel and disruptive to their market environment. Research shows that for firms, especially traditional “Western” ones, these innovations require significant changes in firms’ activities along the entire value chain.
Article
Timothy L. Michaelis, Jeffrey M. Pollack, and Jon C. Carr
The act of being resourceful is a commonly displayed behavior in the process of entrepreneurship. For example, entrepreneurs are known to share resources with competitors, utilize their social networks to attract capital, exchange favors for resources, engage in resource bootstrapping behaviors, repurpose and/or recombine existing resources for new purposes (i.e., bricolage), and sometimes pivot from one opportunity to another following available resource options given current situational constraints (i.e., effectuation). Currently, research on the topic of resourcefulness in the entrepreneurship literature assumes these aforementioned resourceful behaviors are attributed to a limited resource environment rather than also originating from within the entrepreneur. Frugality is a new concept in the field of entrepreneurship that suggests entrepreneurs will also enact resourceful behaviors because of their own self-regulatory processes; that is, entrepreneurs will engage in resourcefulness behaviors as a preference rather than as a forced reaction to their external resource environment. Thus, frugality represents an individual-level antecedent of resourcefulness behaviors that is not bound to the conditions of necessity-based entrepreneurship. This is important as frugality opens the door for numerous future research directions in the context of both necessity-based and opportunity-based entrepreneurship. Frugality is defined as one’s general preference to (a) conserve resources and (b) apply an economic rationale in the acquisition of resources (i.e., assessing the opportunity cost of newly acquired resources). Research in the consumer behavior literature highlights that frugality is a culturally driven trait preference, whereby one is willing to sacrifice in the short term to achieve longer-term, idiosyncratic goals. Despite a large amount of research on frugal consumer behavior, there has yet to be a systematic inquiry into how frugality more broadly influences the process of new venture creation and organizations. Empirical research highlights that frugal entrepreneurs tend to engage in higher amounts of bricolage and effectuation, thus representing a promising new topic for better understanding the process of entrepreneurship. Although it is expected that future inquiry regarding frugality in entrepreneurship will naturally orient toward the topic of resourcefulness, it is also expected that frugality will relate to numerous other important topics such as entrepreneurial well-being, opportunity recognition, opportunity exploitation, and new venture growth. Considering the novelty of frugality in entrepreneurship, and management literature generally, it would benefit future research to systematically explore both the upsides and downsides to being frugal as it relates to value creation activities.
Article
Jenny K. Rodriguez and Elisabeth Anna Guenther
Gendered organization theory refers to an understanding of organizations as sites that (re)produce gender dynamics and the gender order. Bringing the gender lens to discussions about organization theory is useful to capture the filter through which relational dynamics operate in organizations and the way these (re)construct the psychological, cultural, and social dimensions that shape the organization as a dynamic, relational, and interdependent structure. Key ideas associated with gendered organization theory center on gender as a social category that continues to be the basis for inequality in working life. Gendered organization theory pays particular attention to how gender interacts with different dimensions of social, political, economic, and technological life and how this is mobilized in organizations as well as how organizations foster and tackle new and reformulated gender(ed) inequalities. However, gender is not the only social category of difference that shapes inequality in organizations and would benefit from more explicit insight from feminist theories to unpack the complex dynamics in organizations and the impact they have on individuals. Focusing on intersectionality, decolonial feminism, ecofeminism, queering, and theorizing beyond the human provides a more integrated framework to understand the complex and fluid impact of gender in organizations.
Article
Elisabeth Anna Guenther, Anne Laure Humbert, and Elisabeth Kristina Kelan
Gender research goes beyond adding sex as an independent, explanatory category. To conduct gender research in the field of business and management, therefore, it is important to apply a more sophisticated understanding of gender that resonates with contemporary gender theory. This entails taking the social construction of gender and its implications for research into consideration. Seeing gender as a social construct means that the perception of “women” and “men,” of “femininity/ties” and “masculinity/ties,” is the outcome of an embodied social practice.
Gender research is commonly sensitive to notions of how power is reproduced and challenges concepts such as “hegemonic masculinity” and “heteronormativity.” The first highlights power relations between gender groups, as well as the different types of existing masculinities. The latter emphasizes the pressure to rely on a binary concept of “women” and “men” and how this is related to heterosexuality, desire, and the body. Gender research needs to avoid the pitfalls of a narrow, essentialist concept of “women” and “men” that draws on this binary understanding of gender. It is also important to notice that not all women (or men) share the same experiences. The critique of Black feminists and scholars from the global South promoted the idea of intersectionality and postcolonialism within gender research. Intersectionality addresses the entanglement of gender with other social categories, such as age, class, disability, race, or religion, while postcolonial approaches criticize the neglect of theory and methodology originating in the global South and question the prevalence of concepts from the global North.
Various insights from gender theory inform business and management research in various ways. Concepts such as the “gendered organization” or “inequality regime” can be seen as substantial contributions of gender theory to organization theory. Analyzing different forms of masculinities and exploring ways in which gender is undone within organizations (or whether a supposedly gender-neutral organization promotes a masculine norm) can offer thought-provoking insights into organizational processes. Embracing queer theory, intersectionality, and postcolonial approaches in designing research allows for a broader image of the complex social reality. Altogether management studies benefit from sound, theoretically well-grounded gender research.
Article
A geographic information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, organize, and present spatial data, which is referenced to locations on the Earth. Locational information is of value for a wide range of human activities for decision-making relating to these activities. As spatial data is relatively complex, GIS represents a challenging computer application that has developed later than some other forms of computer systems. GIS uses spatial data for a region of the Earth; such regional data are of interest to a wide range of users whose activities take place in that region, and so many users in otherwise disconnected domains share spatial data. The availability and cost of spatial data are important drivers of GIS use, and the sourcing and integration of spatial data are continuing research concerns. GIS use now spans a wide range of disciplines, and the diversity created is one of the obstacles to a well-integrated research field.
Location analysis is the use of GIS for general-purpose analysis to determine the preferred geographic placement of human activities. Location analytics uses spatial data and quantitative spatial models to support decision-making, including location analysis. The growth of location analytics reflects the increasing amounts of data now available owing to new data collection technologies such as drones and because of the massive amounts of data collected by the use of mobile devices like smartphones. Location analytics allow many valuable new services that play an important role in new developments such as smart cities. Location analytics techniques potentially allow the tracking of individuals, and this raises many ethical questions, however useful the service provided; therefore, issues related to privacy are of increasing concern to researchers.
Article
Carol T. Kulik and Belinda Rae
The “glass ceiling” metaphor represents the frustration experienced by women in the 1980s and 1990s who entered the workforce in large numbers following equal opportunity legislation that gave them greater access to education and employment. After initial success in attaining lower management positions, the women found their career progress slowing as they reached higher levels of their organizations. A formal definition of the glass ceiling specifies that a female disadvantage in promotion should accelerate at the highest levels of the organization, and researchers adopting this formal definition have found mixed evidence for glass ceilings across organizations and across countries. Researchers who have expanded the glass ceiling definition to encompass racial minorities have similarly found mixed results. However, these mixed results do not detract from the metaphor’s value in highlighting the stereotype-based practices that embed discrimination deep within organizational structures and understanding why women continue to be underrepresented in senior organizational roles around the world. In particular, researchers investigating the glass ceiling have identified a variety of obstacles (including glass cliffs, glass walls, and glass doors) that create a more complete understanding of the barriers that women experience in their careers. As organizations offer shorter job ladders and less job security, the career patterns of both women and men are exhibiting more downward, lateral, and static movement. In this career context, the glass ceiling may no longer be the ideal metaphor to represent the obstacles that women are most likely to encounter.
Article
Clara Kulich and Michelle K. Ryan
A wealth of research has previously shown that gender stereotypes and discrimination keep women from climbing the corporate ladder. However, women who do break through the “glass ceiling” are likely to face new barriers. Research on the glass cliff phenomenon shows that, when women reach positions of power, they tend to do so in circumstances of crisis and instability. A number of archival, experimental, and qualitative studies have demonstrated that women are more likely to rise in the professional hierarchy in difficult, and for these women, potentially harmful, situations. For example, compared to their male peers, women are seen as more desirable for managerial or political leadership positions in times of instability and crises, or following scandals. Such appointments expose women to a higher risk of failure, criticism, and psychological distress, thus a danger of falling off an “invisible” cliff.
Article
Jawad Syed and Memoona Tariq
Diversity management refers to organizational policies and practices aimed at recruiting, retaining, and managing employees of diverse backgrounds and identities, while creating a culture in which everybody is equally enabled to perform and achieve organizational and personal objectives. In a globalized world, there is a need for contextual and transnational approaches to utilize the benefits that global diversity may bring as well as the challenges that organizations may face in managing a diverse workforce. In particular, it is important to take into account how diversity is theorized and managed in non-Western contexts, for example in BRICS countries (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and Muslim-majority countries. The literature confirms the need for organizational efforts to be focused on engaging with and managing a heterogeneous workplace in ways that not only yield sustainable competitive advantage but also are contextually and socially responsible. Organizations today are expected to take positive action, beyond legal compliance, to ensure equal access, employment and promotion opportunities, and also to ensure that diversity programs make use of employee differences, and contribute to local as well as global communities.
Article
In the late 1990s, there was considerable interest in national differences in entrepreneurial activity. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research program was developed to provide harmonized, cross-national measures of participation in business creation; business creation was considered a critical aspect of entrepreneurship. This information was considered important for understanding the national characteristics associated with business creation and its subsequent impact on economic growth. The initial effort involved 10 countries in 1999. By 2014 Adult Population Surveys (APS) had been completed 705 times in 104 countries and with six special samples; this involved 2.3 million individual interviews. While there have been changes in the administrative structure and the focus of the annual global reports, the most significant data collection procedures have been stable since 2002. The GEM APS data sets are currently the only harmonized cross-national comparisons of business creation and business ownership. Designed to provide estimates of the prevalence of both business creation and existing firms, they also allow estimates of the total number of business ventures. GEM data sets are publically available three years after completion, providing a unique resource for assessing factors affecting business creation and its subsequent role in economic growth. Systematic assessments by national experts in participating countries provide measures of the national entrepreneurial framework conditions, complementing a variety of established measures of national economic and political characteristics.
There are three distinct features that characterize the GEM initiative: the unique organizational structure, the global reports summarizing annual assessments of entrepreneurial activity, and data sets assembled and made available for public use. The initial organizational structure, a collaborative arrangement among national teams, was replaced by membership in the Global Entrepreneurship Research Association (GERA) in 2004. The annual global reports emphasize comparisons among member countries, the annual national reports the country-specific situations. Both are designed to facilitate reality-based public policy.
Data collection for the APS provides harmonized comparisons of business creation across countries and within-country time series. The APS data has made clear the substantial variation among countries, by a factor of 10; that national levels of participation are very stable over time; that business creation is much more prevalent in poorer countries; that all segments of society are active in business creation; and that business creation is an important catalyst for the processes that lead to economic growth. The National Expert Survey (NES) questionnaire data provides information about the nature of the entrepreneurial framework in the GEN countries.
There is much to be learned about the relationships between national context, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. The unique information in the GEM data sets should continue to facilitate improved understanding of this important phenomenon.
Article
Donald R. Lessard and D. Eleanor Westney
Strategy in a global setting involves competition in industries that extend across national boundaries and among firms with different national home bases that may tap into strategic resources in more than one location. The resources that the firm accesses from its home country provide it with international competitive advantage only if they are relevant in other markets, if the value they create is appropriable, and if they are transferable to those markets (RAT), These resources include tangible assets and factors of production, but, importantly, also the capabilities the firm develops. Similarly, the resources that it taps from other contexts provide it with further competitive advantage only if these resources are complementary to the firm’s existing resources, appropriable, and transferable to the locations where it can exploit them (CAT). These two sets of factors—RAT and CAT—provide a framework for international strategic decisions that emphasizes developing, acquiring, and transferring capabilities.
Article
Likoebe Maruping and Yukun Yang
Open innovation is defined as an approach to innovation that encourages a broad range of participants to engage in the process of identifying, creating, and deploying novel products or services. It is open in the sense that there is little to no restriction on who can participate in the innovation process. Open innovation has attracted a substantial amount of research and widespread adoption by individuals and commercial, nonprofit, and government organizations. This is attributable to three main factors. First, open innovation does not restrict who can participate in the innovation process, which broadens the access to participants and expertise. Second, to realize participants’ ideas, open innovation harnesses the power of crowds who are normally users of the product or service, which enhances the quality of innovative output. Third, open innovation often leverages digital platforms as a supporting technology, which helps entities scale up their business.
Recent years have witnessed a rise in the emergence of a number of digital platforms to support various open innovation activities. Some platforms achieve notable success in continuously generating innovations (e.g., InnoCentive.com, GitHub), while others fail or experience a mass exodus of participants (e.g., MyStarbucksIdea.com, Sidecar). Prior commentaries have conducted postmortems to diagnose the failures, identifying possible reasons, such as overcharging one side of the market, failing to develop trust with users, and inappropriate timing of market entry. At the root of these and other challenges that digital platforms face in open innovation is the issue of governance. In the article, governance is conceptualized as the structures determining how rigidly authority is exerted and who has authority to make decisions and craft rules for orchestrating key activities. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive framework for understanding governance as applied to open innovation that takes place on digital platforms. A governance perspective can lend insight on the structure of how open innovation activities on digital platforms are governed in creating and capturing value from these activities, attracting and matching participants with problems or solutions, and monitoring and controlling the innovation process.
To unpack the mystery of open innovation governance, we propose a framework by synthesizing and integrating accreted knowledge from the platform governance literature that has been published in prominent journals over the past 10 years. Our framework is built around four key considerations for governance in open innovation: platform model (firm-owned, market, or community), innovation output ownership (platform-owned, pass-through, or shared), innovation engagement model (transactional, collaborative, or embedded), and nature of innovation output (idea or artifact). Further, we reveal promising research avenues on the governance of digital open innovation platforms.
Article
Guler Aras
Corporate governance is a central issue in business and economics. However, governance in financial institutions is more complicated than in other fields because of the nature of financial services and instruments. Financial organizations are similar to other businesses in terms of their purposes of establishment, but confidence in management and complex risk structures are more important in financial organizations than in other businesses. In financial institutions, there are various areas in which problems arise that are related to corporate governance, including the agency problem and stakeholder protection. The importance of good governance for sound performance of financial institutions was reconfirmed during the 2008 financial crisis, raising the need to understand the agency problems and the efficiency of various corporate governance mechanisms in mitigating them. International organizations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Basel Committee, the International Finance Corporation, and the International Organization of Securities Commissions, have been working with regulators and policy makers to improve corporate governance practices both in nonfinancial and financial institutions. Corporate governance, especially in financial institutions, is essential in guaranteeing a sound financial system, capital markets, and sustainable economic growth. Governance weaknesses at financial institutions can result in the transmission of problems across the finance sector and the economy. Consequently, the effectiveness of governance mechanisms of financial institutions and capital markets after financial crises had significant importance in a period that witnessed an intensive discussion of corporate governance issues with new regulations and the related academic works.
Article
Sophie Manigart, Miguel Meuleman, and Tom Beernaert
Private equity (PE) investors enhance the governance of portfolio companies by installing high-powered boards, structuring the senior management team, installing reward and performance management systems, and advising the portfolio company. The aim is to reduce agency risks and to increase shareholder value. A growing body of literature investigates the real effects of PE buyouts on their portfolio companies. Empirical evidence suggest that PE buyouts do not consider efficiency improvements as their main value-creating strategy, but PE enhances growth rather than efficiency. Researchers’ understanding of PE’s entrepreneurial growth approach to increase shareholder value is limited to date, although it is known that PE portfolio companies are active innovators and that PE portfolio companies extensively engage in acquisitive growth.
Financial performance of PE investors can also be driven by transferring value from other stakeholders to the portfolio company after buyout. Does PE buyout’s shareholder value creation come at the expense of other stakeholders, such as employees or customers, or do they also benefit? PE’s impact on employment and wages in portfolio companies has received considerable attention. The effect depends on the institutional setting and macroeconomic conditions and differs across PE groups and by type of buyout. PE buyouts do improve employees’ safety, well-being, and human capital. Research on the impact of PE on stakeholders other than employees is limited. Industry-specific studies uncovered fine-grained actions and mainly negative effects on various stakeholders beyond shareholders and employees. This highlights the tension between enhancing shareholder value at the expense of stakeholder value. Given the continuous development of practices in the PE industry, the governance roles of PE will remain a fertile ground for academic research.
Article
Sustainable corporate governance has been defined as corporate governance that ensures corporations are run in such a way that they are sustainable over the long term. Note that for corporations to be sustainable in the long run, they need to ensure the preservation, as well as possibly the enhancement, of their ecosystem. This not only includes establishing and maintaining good relations with their shareholders and stakeholders but also preserving their environment. Here, the term environment should be understood as taking on a broader meaning. Indeed, corporations preserving their environment should not be reduced to mere environmentalism but they should also operate in harmony with the broader economic and social system. Put differently, sustainable corporate governance should also ensure that corporations are run in such a way to avoid future crises, such as the Great Recession. This would require a move away from business models that focus on short-term shareholder value while endangering the survival of the corporation over the long term.
Whereas much of the existing literature suggests that corporations should merely maximize shareholder value and that a stakeholder approach will result in vague and often contradictory objectives for the management, long-term shareholder value creation is nevertheless compatible with the corporation looking after the interests of its immediate, as well as possibly more remote, stakeholders. Ultimately, sustainable business practices will not only benefit the corporation’s employees, customers, and the broader society but also its owners.
The key question that arises is whether there is a link between various types of owners and sustainable corporate governance. A number of related questions emerge. What different types of owners are there and how influential are they in putting their stamp on how their investee firms are managed? Attempting to answer these questions requires revisiting the premise of the principal-agent theory that owners are typically disinterested from engaging with their investee firms. The main critique of this premise is that, even within the Anglo-Saxon corporate governance system, firms tend to have block holders, and there exist activist shareholders. Further, since the 1980s there has been an emergence—as well as an increase in the prevalence—of activist shareholders. Are some types of owners or shareholders more likely to enhance and maintain sustainability than others?
A review of extant evidence on the effects of various types of shareholders on long-term financial and non-financial goals suggests the following. While some types of owners are found to promote and support sustainable corporate governance, the effect of other types is less clear or even negative. This difference in effects could be due to three reasons. First, context, including the national setting, is important. Second, some types of investors, such as sovereign wealth funds, show great diversity in their characteristics and objectives. Finally, the goalposts are shifting with an increasing number of investors embracing corporate social responsibility and environmental, social, and governance issues. Importantly, given the increasingly visible consequences of global warming and societal unrest caused by a worsening of wealth inequality, the transition to a more sustainable society should not merely be the responsibility of corporate owners. Others, including corporate executives and business schools, are key to achieving this transition.
Article
Dorien Kooij and Anja Van den Broeck
Work motivation is defined as a set of energetic forces, internal or external to individuals, that help to initiate work-related behavior and determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration. It is one of the most studied and discussed topics in industrial and organizational psychology and extensively documented in meta-analyses and literature reviews. The content approaches to motivation show that (a) both mastery- and performance-approach goals are related positively to performance (achievement goal theory); (b) a promotion focus is positively associated with positive worker outcomes, while a prevention focus has less beneficial outcomes and relates negatively or not at all to such outcomes (regulatory focus theory); and (c) intrinsic motivation and basic need satisfaction are positively related to positive worker outcomes (self-determination theory). Context motivational theories indicate that (a) extrinsic incentives are associated with poorer well-being and creativity yet better employee performance (reinforcement theory) and (b) job characteristics explain up to 87% of the variance in worker outcomes (work design theories). Finally, the process approaches to motivation reveal that (a) expectancy theory is more useful in explaining choice behavior rather than energy investment or persistence; (b) setting specific difficult goals increases performance, even more so when feedback is also given, and that goal commitment is particularly important for goal achievement (goal setting theory); (c) goals allow people to more effectively process information, but the role of self-efficacy is less clear (self-regulation theories); and (d) perceived behavioral control is essential for intentions to behave (theory of planned behavior). Most of this research on work motivation has employed rather traditional research methods, such as cross-sectional self-reported studies that disconnect with work motivation theory focusing on dynamic processes over time.
Therefore, to properly test motivational theory and advance the field of work motivation, future research should use longitudinal (experimental) field studies, person-centered approaches, and experience sampling method studies to allow for the evaluation of motivational and behavioral variability as a function of time, work events, and individual and situational factors. In terms of content, future research should go beyond the study of separate work motivation theories and integrate them to better understand the content, process, and context of work motivation. Such an integrated theory should include the work context in a more structured and explicit way, also taking into account that contextual variables may operate in isolation or interactively to affect motivation and that workers also influence the work context. As such, time and individual perspectives thereof should also be better incorporated in such integrated work motivation theories.
Finally, there are a few “do’s” and “don’ts” for practitioners to enable them to practice evidence-based human resource management. First, following self-determination theory, one should bear in mind that not all motivation is good: Some types, especially those reflecting autonomous motivation (i.e., related to intrinsic motivation or experienced meaningfulness), generally lead to better outcomes than other, more controlled types (e.g., based on rewards or guilt induction). Second, goal setting theory is a useful perspective when developing performance management systems.
Article
William M. Tsutsui
Tracking with Japan’s macroeconomic fortunes since World War II, global interest in Japanese management practices emerged in the 1950s with the start of Japan’s “miracle economy,” soared in the 1980s as Japanese industrial exports threatened manufacturers around the world, and declined after 1990 as Japan’s growth stalled. Japanese techniques, especially in labor and production management, fascinated Western scholars and practitioners in their striking divergence from U.S. and European conventions and their apparent advantages in creating harmonious, highly productive workplaces. Two reductive approaches to the origins of Japan’s distinctive management methods―one asserting they were the organic outgrowth of Japan’s unique cultural heritage, the other stressing Japan’s proficiency at emulating and adapting American models—came to dominate the academic and popular literature. As historical analysis reveals, however, such stylized interpretations distort the complex evolution of Japanese industrial management over the past century and shed little light on the current debates over the potential convergence of Japanese practices and American management norms.
Key features of the Japanese model of labor management—“permanent” employment, seniority-based wages and promotions, and enterprise unions—developed between the late 1800s and the 1950s from the contentious interaction of workers, managers, and government bureaucrats. The distinctive “Japanese Employment System” that emerged reflected both employers’ priorities (for low labor turnover and the affirmation of managerial authority in the workplace) and labor’s demands (for employment security and respect as full members of the firm). Since 1990, despite the widespread perception that Japanese labor management is inefficient and inflexible by international standards, many time-honored practices have endured, as Japanese corporations have pursued adaptive, incremental change rather than precipitous convergence toward a more market-oriented American model.
The distinguishing elements of Japanese production management—the “lean production” system and just-in-time manufacturing pioneered in Toyota factories, innovative quality-control practices—also evolved slowly over the first century of Japanese industrialization. Imported management paradigms (especially Frederick Taylor’s scientific management) had a profound long-term impact on Japanese shop-floor methods, but Japanese managers were creative in adapting American practices to Japan’s realities and humanizing the rigid structures of Taylorism. Japanese production management techniques were widely diffused internationally from the 1980s, but innovation has slowed in Japanese manufacturing in recent decades and Japanese firms have struggled to keep pace with latest management advances from the United States and Europe.
In sum, the histories of Japanese labor and production management cannot be reduced to simple narratives of cultural determinism, slavish imitation, or inevitable convergence. Additional research on Japanese practices in a wide range of firms, industries, sectors, regions, and historical periods is warranted to further nuance our understanding of the complex evolution, diverse forms, and contingent future of Japanese management.
Article
H. Michael Schwartz, Pooja Khatija, and Diana Bilimoria
The question of how to efficiently, holistically, and successfully develop leaders has been the focus of scholars and practitioners for several decades. Embedding the process of leader development in organizational contexts allows participants to develop and apply leadership knowledge, skills, and identity awareness. Embeddedness facilitates the holistic integration of the interactive processes of leader development (which focuses on increasing the leadership capacity of an individual) and leadership development (which focuses on increasing the leadership capacity of an organization), which is referred to in this article as leader(ship) development (LD). Two sub-processes involved in LD (i.e., general and situational identity development and knowledge/skill/social capital development) and four mechanisms of embeddedness that facilitate holistic LD (i.e., leader identity integration, opportunities to learn and develop in the organization, organizational support and feedback, and helping relationships) will be described. A discussion on the ways by which management education pedagogy can integrate and facilitate embeddedness and provide guidance for future research will follow.
