Entry

Central Management Insight

Academic-Practitioner Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

It is possible to create more insightful knowledge for theory and practice if academics and practitioners collaborate.

Acculturation Theory

People’s cultural beliefs and behaviors need to be understood and incorporated into organizational policies and practices in order to achieve effective operations.

Achievement Motivation Theory

Acquired motives—achievement, affiliation, and power—are important for managerial performance and should be used for global selection and assessment of managers.

Action Learning

It is possible to develop organizational members’ competencies in the process of solving real, difficult management issues.

Action Research

Actionable knowledge is most effectively produced through deep inquiry into a group’s practices via systematic, iterative processes of data gathering, reflection, and action.

Actor-Network Theory

Human and nonhuman organizational actors are generated and “held together” by interactive, continuous, and heterogeneous network forces and strategies.

Adaptive Structuration Theory

Information technologies do not automatically change behavior or improve effectiveness; this depends on how effectively managers facilitate the appropriation of information technology (IT) by users.

Affect Theory

If jobs are structured as joint tasks in which responsibility for results is shared, then employees develop stronger affective commitments to the organization.

Affective Events Theory

Work and life experiences are proximal influences on people’s subjective mood and emotional episodes, which in turn are related to work performance and job attitudes.

Agency Theory

The interests of shareholders and managers tend to differ but can be aligned to achieve the maximization of shareholder value.

Analytic Hierarchy Process Model

Managers can utilize a relatively easy and robust process for establishing priorities in multicriteria decision settings.

Analytical and Sociological Paradigms

The study of organizations, and the body of knowledge about them, is shaped by researchers’ implicit assumptions and training, which reflect a range of orthodox and heterodox “paradigms.”

Appreciative Inquiry Model

Teams, organizations, and society evolve in whatever direction people collectively, passionately, and persistently ask questions about.

Architectural Innovation

Significant competitive advantage can be gained from innovations that change the linkages between product components.

Asch Effect

Social pressure can convince group members to falsify their beliefs in order to achieve group consensus.

Attraction-Selection-Attrition Model

People make organizations through a process of attracting and selecting matching employees and attritioning out nonmatching employees.

Attribution Model of Leadership

Leaders’ and employees’ causal explanations for employee performance uniquely and interactively influence performance responses including future expectations and behaviors.

Authentic Leadership

Leaders who remain true to their personal values and convictions and display consistency between their words and deeds will foster elevated levels of follower trust and performance.

Bad Theories

Academia perpetuates a number of bad management theories that promote detrimental business practices, and those theories must be carefully reexamined.

Balanced Scorecard

Strategy development and execution can be enabled by a balanced set of performance measures focusing on organizational goals—financial, customer, processes, and learning and growth.

BCG Growth-Share Matrix

The basis of competitive advantage and growth is derived by managing the relationship of the company’s portfolio of product lines or business units.

Behavioral Perspective of Strategic Human Resource Management

Human resource (HR) management systems are most effective when they are designed to support strategic business objectives.

Behavioral Theory of the Firm

Managers will behave differently from what is assumed in rational actor views of the organization both with respect to internal processes and relations to the environment.

Big Five Personality Dimensions

Individual differences along five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to experience) affect many management issues.

Bounded Rationality and Satisficing (Behavioral Decision-Making Model)

The concept of rational economic man must be reconciled with the many cognitive, perceptual, situational, and other limits on rationality that influence decision makers to make satisfactory rather than optimal choices.

Brainstorming

Efforts at creative idea generation deserve focused attention and can benefit from adopting a formalized structure.

Bureaucratic Theory

Bureaucracy remains the dominant, albeit an imperfect and double-edged, system of administration for shaping intendedly rational, goal-oriented human interactions through objective knowledge and scientific analysis.

Business Groups

Firms in many parts of the world are part of business groups and derive unique advantages as well as disadvantages from their affiliation.

Business Policy and Corporate Strategy

Companies can create value through the configuration and coordination of their multibusiness activities by aligning vision, resources, businesses, and role of the headquarters.

Business Process Reengineering

Dramatic business improvement can be accomplished with radical process redesign that is supported by information technology.

BVSR Theory of Human Creativity

Human creativity requires individuals to generate and test low-probability ideas whose utilities are unknown in advance.

Career Stages and Anchors

Career choice should be seen as an ongoing journey of exploration and self-construction driven by patterns of self-perceived competence, motivators, and values that guide and constrain development.

Causal Attribution Theory

The behaviors and emotions of leaders and followers are driven by their beliefs about the causes of their own as well as others’ successes and failures.

Charismatic Theory of Leadership

Charismatic leadership is an attribution based on followers’ interpretations of their leader’s behavior; a set of distinct behaviors leads to this attribution.

Circuits of Power and Control

Power is not a thing that people have but a social relation that is dynamic, potentially unstable, and resisted.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Individuals’ deep-seated desire for consistency can have profound consequences, including shifts in attitudes, behavioral changes, and self-justification of decisions.

Cognitive Resource Theory

Leaders tend to use their raw intelligence to make decisions; however, in some situations, leaders’ relevant experience strongly contributes to effectiveness.

Competing Values Framework

In every organization, competing and contradictory values exist; the most effective organizations, as well as the most effective leaders, are paradoxical—they simultaneously represent and display competing values.

Competitive Advantage

The primary objective of a firm’s strategy is to identify, create, and sustain a competitive advantage over its industry rivals by identifying a unique position so as to reduce or counter the profit-reducing effect of the forces in that industry.

Complexity Theory and Organizations

Managers need to understand how individuals and firms interact and not only how they perform individually; organizational performance depends on interdependent interactions within the system as a whole.

Compliance Theory

Management “styles”—good practices, patterns of achievement—cannot be transferred; each kind of organization needs a form of management tailored to its special kind of hierarchy, rewards, incentives, and possible sanctions.

Componential Theory of Creativity

The work environment can be as important for creativity as employee talent; creativity should be highest when intrinsically motivated, expert, creative thinkers work in a social environment that supports creativity.

Conflict Handling Styles

Managers can choose from a variety of conflict styles, varying in concern for self and for others, which will be most effective in different situations.

Contingency Theory

There is no one best way to manage people or to design an organization; rather, the choices which are made must fit the situation faced.

Contingency Theory of Leadership

Leadership behaviors will not necessarily yield the same results in all situations; a fit between leadership style and contingency variables is positively related to leadership effectiveness.

Continuous and Routinized Change

Revolutions are not necessary for organizational development; continuous, routinized change shifts the focus from “change” to “changing” through an ongoing mixture of reactive and proactive modifications guided by purposes at hand.

Cooptation

Organizations reflect not only the aim of its principals but also to some degree other stakeholders’ aims, such as external collaborators, professional groups, and senior management.

Core Competence

Core competence—firm-specific bundles of skills, insights, and capabilities gained from accumulated knowledge, learning, and investment—enable organizations to create, innovate, and deliver value to its stakeholders.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Business is embedded in society; therefore, every business decision must consider the resulting direct or indirect social impacts.

Critical Management Studies

Management and organization need to be assessed broadly; in their operations and in outcomes, there are dark aspects calling for careful scrutiny and exploration.

Critical Theory of Communication

Organizations and the various forms of knowledge and the human identities of members are products of complex interaction processes conducted under conditions of inequality.

CSR Pyramid

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) embraces four distinct but overlapping responsibilities: economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic.

Cultural Attitudes in Multinational Corporations

The seemingly limitless ways that firms seek to internationalize can be compared and meaningfully understood by examining the cultural mind-sets of senior organizational decision makers.

Cultural Intelligence

Managers’ adjustments in new cultural contexts can be explained by a faceted model of cultural intelligence (CQ) that considers cognitive/metacognitive, motivational, and behavioral elements.

Cultural Values

To fit in with emerging globalization challenges, managers should try to understand the meaning of value systems and how they may affect the business environment.

Decision Support Systems

People can make better decisions with computer support that uses data access and models to aid learning about decision environments.

Decision-Making Styles

Managers should be mindful of differences in individuals’ preferred ways of perceiving and responding to problem-solving situations and understand their impact on decisions made.

Dialectical Theory of Organizations

Organizational structures and practices are shaped by complex and contradictory social forces only partially controlled by rational decisions.

Diamond Model of National Competitive Advantage

A number of structural factors work together to create the conditions for the competitiveness of industries and firms within particular nations which can derive benefits from their “home base.”

Differentiation and the Division of Labor

The distribution of work into specialized tasks, roles, and functions are key characteristics of modern management; however, this must be balanced with integration, control, and organizational flexibility needs.

Discovery Theory of Entrepreneurship

There are reasons—such as position, cognition, and deliberation—why some people may be more likely to discover entrepreneurial opportunities than others.

Diversification Strategy

Expanding the scope of the business segments where the firm competes can be a value-enhancing strategy.

Double Loop Learning

Entrenched assumptions and governing values inform peoples’ theory-in-use which influences their action strategies; deep reflection on this underlying reasoning process questions the status quo and enables productive change.

Dramaturgical Theory of Organizations

The organization can be seen through metaphor as an acting unit that presents strategies and tactics designed to enhance the power and authority of the organization.

Dual-Concern Theory

Managers can often achieve good outcomes if they care not only about their own interests but also other’s interests and seek outcomes of negotiation that maximize collective welfare.

Dual-Core Model of Organizational Innovation

Organizations implement administrative and technical innovations via different organizational groups and management processes.

Dynamic Capabilities

Top management needs to add and shed organizational resources as it detects opportunities, threats, and changes in the business environment.

Emotional and Social Intelligence

Emotional and social capabilities are direct characteristics of an individual that lead to or cause effectiveness in management, leadership, and other occupations.

Empowerment

When individuals feel psychologically empowered—through meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact—their intrinsic motivation and personal efficacy expectations are strengthened.

Engaged Scholarship Model

Collaborative inquiries between universities, practitioners, and other relevant community partners help bridge the theory-practice gap and yield more relevant solutions to societal issues.

Entrepreneurial Cognition

Entrepreneurs use mental models to connect seemingly dissimilar pieces of information in thinking through new opportunities and making decisions.

Entrepreneurial Effectuation

Effectual action inverts predictive strategies to offer entrepreneurs a learnable method for shaping their environment and better controlling situations.

Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Entrepreneurs should match the type of opportunity they are trying to exploit with the appropriate processes to increase their chances for successful exploitation and wealth creation.

Entrepreneurial Orientation

An organization can be considered more (or less) entrepreneurial as a collective entity; it may develop a strategic orientation toward entrepreneurial activity and behavior.

Environmental Uncertainty

Managers should adjust their attitudes toward environmental uncertainty, analyze its multidimensional sources and attributes, and then manage direct and moderating effects accordingly.

Equity Theory

Employees feel fairly compensated based on perceptions of rewards relative to contributions as compared with a benchmark rewards/contributions ratio.

ERG Theory

Three types of human needs—existence, relatedness, and growth—influence behavior and highlight the necessity of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivational options.

Escalation of Commitment

Decision makers should understand and reduce the danger of becoming increasingly committed to courses of action that have become unprofitable.

Ethical Decision Making, Interactionist Model of

Ethical decision making in organizations is driven largely by the individual’s cognitive moral development but also results from its interaction with other individual differences and contextual features.

European Model of Human Resource Management

Managing people, more than most other areas of management, is contextual; HR managers should consider factors such as culture, stakeholders, decision processes, markets, organization, and the state.

Evidence-Based Management

To the extent that research findings are incorporated into practice, managers at all levels will decrease inefficiencies; currently, many optimal solutions are being neglected.

Excellence Characteristics

Excellence is not a static destination; rather, it is an attitude and a pursuit where there are many ways individual or organizational actors can realize their potential and grow continuously.

Expectancy Theory

Aligning individual goals with organizational objectives is critical to effective management; there are several components of successful alignment: expectancy, instrumentality, and valence.

Experiential Learning Theory and Learning Styles

The management process involves creative tension among four learning modes—based on dual dialectics of grasping and transforming experience— within a dynamic learning cycle that is responsive to contextual demands.

Fairness Theory

Actions seem unfair when people feel that those actions would have been better if the relevant person could have and should have acted differently.

Firm Growth

The administrative and management structures of a firm play vital roles in configuring and utilizing its resources, which in turn enables and constrains its growth trajectory.

First-Mover Advantages and Disadvantages

Being first to market carries a host of threats and opportunities; understanding the underlying mechanisms is essential for positive economic performance in new or substantially reorganized markets and industries.

Force Field Analysis and Model of Planned Change

The composition of a dynamic “field” with driving and resisting forces influences intended, rational change on multiple levels and across different stages—unfreezing, movement, and refreezing.

Functions of the Executive

Individuals cannot achieve their aspirations independently; organizations are formed for cooperative purposes through inducements and contributions, communication and interaction, and accepted or legitimated authority relationships.

Game Theory

Managers need to behave strategically when their own rewards depend on decisions made by competitors or partners.

Gantt Chart and PERT

Various forms of critical path analyses can assist in effectively scheduling, organizing, and coordinating activities in time-constrained projects.

Garbage Can Model of Decision Making

Decisions that might appear arbitrary and chaotic should be understood in the context of disconnected problems, solutions, opportunities, and decision makers.

Genderlect and Linguistic Styles

Understanding how communication patterns are shaped by gender-related characteristics, and how they influence performance, is important for managers when interacting with internal and external stakeholders.

GLOBE Model

In each society, leaders are expected to act in ways that are compatible with the society’s cultural values.

Goal-Setting Theory

A powerful way to motivate employees is to give them specific, challenging goals.

Group Development

To be most effective, small groups must progress through a series of developmental stages each with their own tasks and challenges.

Group Polarization and the Risky Shift

Group interactions will often enhance, rather than moderate, the average preexisting tendency of individual members, yielding more extreme decisions and actions.

Group Punctuated Equilibrium Model

Timing is important when introducing changes to a team; habitual behavioral patterns are established in the first meeting, and groups are not susceptible to change until temporal milestones come up for review.

Groupthink

There are potential sources of dysfunctions in cohesive groups facing stressful decision situations as well as potential remedies for these dysfunctions.

High- and Low-Context Cultures

There are cross-cultural differences in the way people communicate meaning, which is a combination of information and inextricably bound up context.

High-Performance Work Systems

Human resource practices can be configured in a specific way to attain horizontal and vertical alignments and improve individual and organizational effectiveness.

High-Performing Teams

Applying a clinical approach to the study of teams allows us to develop a more in-depth understanding of potentially counterproductive interpersonal, intrapersonal, and organizational dynamics.

High-Reliability Organizations

A more mindful approach to managing structures, practices, and processes is advisable for an increasing number of organizations that must perform in complex, dynamic, and error-intolerant environments.

Human Capital Theory

People are as important as other types of resources; proper investments in human capital can result in improved performance at the individual, group, organization, and country levels.

Human Resource Management Strategies

Human resource management strategies will have greater positive impact when they elicit the workforce characteristics required to support the strategy of the organization.

Human Resources Roles Model

There are five roles that define expectations of what HR professionals should be, know, and do to deliver value: employee advocate, human capital developer, functional expert, strategic partners, and leader.

Humanistic Management

Managers need to treat workers and other stakeholders with dignity and sensitivity, attending to their psychological needs and “informal” social dynamics, to achieve ethical and sustainable success.

Hypercompetition

Competitive moves and responses can escalate to the point where traditional advantages, such as positioning and resource superiority, are no longer effective.

Image Theory

Professional managers create an image of what they want their organization’s future to be, and decisions and subsequent actions are directed toward ensuring that the image becomes reality.

Individual Values

Individuals’ value priorities relate to their attitudes, behaviors, and roles; by developing greater awareness of one’s own and others’ values, it is possible to influence people in desirable directions.

Influence Tactics

Organizational participants employ a finite and identifiable set of behaviors which are more successful at gaining compliance from others when appropriately matched to their circumstances.

Informal Communication and the Grapevine

Emergent, unofficial, and unsanctioned information flows, notably gossip, occur in predictable ways to serve different functions which have the potential to be managed.

Information Richness Theory

Information channels differ in information carrying capacity; effective managers select channels to fit the messages that they want to convey.

Innovation Diffusion

Forces within organizational or individual collectivities cause management ideas, practices, or techniques to be perceived as innovations and to spread more or less quickly, extensively, and effectively among collectivity members.

Innovation Speed

Managers should embrace time orientation and, when appropriate, align their innovation strategy, process, staff, and structure to prudently speed up.

Institutional Theory

The adoption and retention of many organizational practices is often more dependent on powerful social pressures for conformity and legitimacy than technical pressures for economic performance.

Institutional Theory of Multinational Corporations

Organizations’ success in the management of cross-border operations is often determined by their ability to adapt to the institutional environments in which they operate.

Integrative Social Contracts Theory

Confronting ethical problems in business demands the integration of universally applicable norms with specific standards that are voluntarily accepted in economic communities.

Interactional Model of Cultural Diversity

The existence of cultural diversity presents specific challenges and opportunities which, depending on several climate factors, can produce either positive or negative effects on organizational performance and societal well-being.

Interactionist Model of Organizational Creativity

Managers can have the most positive impact on organizational creativity by designing the work setting in such a way as to enhance individual and team creative behavior.

Interorganizational Networks

Favorable structural positions within a group of organizations connected by common affiliations or exchange relations bring advantages, including greater social capital, over others of similar ability.

Intuitive Decision Making

Under the right conditions, intuition—or “trusting your gut”—can result in both fast and effective judgments.

Investment Theory of Creativity

Creativity is itself an investment activity in which personal and environmental resources are deployed to achieve novel, appropriate valued outputs.

Job Characteristics Theory

Employees’ psychological states and work effectiveness can be enhanced by designing jobs high in five key characteristics and ensuring that employees with appropriate personal qualities are assigned to these jobs.

Job Demands–Resources Model

Job resources can buffer the impact of job demands on strain, stress, and burnout and may foster employee engagement and performance.

Kaizen and Continuous Improvement

Organizations should engage in a continuous, meticulous drive for excellence across the enterprise to achieve lowest cost, highest quality, and best service to the customer.

Knowledge Workers

Knowledge workers play a central role in modern, technology-driven organizations; these highly trained, specialized, and connected employees must be managed appropriately.

Knowledge-Based View of the Firm

Firm-wide tacit capabilities form a firm’s core; cultivation and refinement of these capabilities determine current and future firm vitality.

Large Group Interventions

Changing complex systems is more effective when system stakeholders, internal and external, are engaged in all aspects of the change process.

Lead Users

It pays to carefully identify, through a defined methodology, those cutting-edge users who really can foster a firm’s ideation and new product development efforts.

Leader–Member Exchange Theory

A leader develops different exchange relationships with his or her subordinates which vary in quality and impact important outcomes.

Leadership Continuum Theory

The range of managerial choices during decision-making efforts can be conceptualized along a continuum, from autocratic to democratic approaches, and are more or less appropriate under different conditions.

Leadership Practices

Leadership is a set of identifiable skills and abilities that are available to anyone; leadership is not about who you are; it’s about what you do.

Lean Enterprise

The application of seven core “lean” principles to complex enterprises requires a focus on the enterprise value proposition across all key stakeholders.

Learning Organization

Learning involves more than transferring information; it is embedded in ongoing social interactions and cyclical, multilevel practices and routines by which organizations notice, interpret, and manage their experience.

Level 5 Leadership

The pinnacle of executive leadership styles is that of a “Level 5” leader who embodies personal humility and strong and willful persistence in pursuing common goals and objectives.

Locus of Control

Managers can use their understanding of an individual’s source of perceived power to effect an outcome to influence the individual’s behavior, especially toward empowerment and planned change.

Logical Incrementalism

Strategic decisions are rarely brought about deliberately; they often emerge from an iterative yet logical process of proactively developing a course of action and reactively adapting to unfolding circumstances.

Management (Education) as Practice

Learning how to manage is best done by reflecting on current experience, informed by concepts, and usually in conversation with other managers.

Management by Objectives

All employees, in all levels of an organization, should know explicitly what they need to do to accelerate the implementation of their organization’s strategic plan.

Management Control Systems

Organizational structure, procedures, practices, and norms—that is, controls—are integral to organizational functioning, effectiveness, and goal achievement.

Management Roles

How managers behave at work is influenced by predictable, multidimensional roles related to the context, content, and forms of managerial jobs that specify rights, duties, expectations, and norms.

Management Symbolism and Symbolic Action

Focusing on symbolic action reveals the importance of meaning making within processes of organizing and the related understanding of management as cocreating meaning.

Managerial Decision Biases

Systematic and predictable biases can lead to irrational decisions that are oftentimes outside of the individual’s own awareness.

Managerial Grid

There are two primary dimensions or orientations in leaders’ behavior— concern for production and concern for people—and this resultant leadership style impacts organizational effectiveness.

Managerialism

Managers wield great power and control over firms to the potential detriment of both narrow shareholder and broader societal interests.

Managing Diversity

Effective management of a demographically diverse workforce requires an integrated strategic approach incorporating recruitment, development, and retention initiatives.

Matrix Structure

Complex organizational structures can be designed to achieve goals of both specialization and scale economies along with coordination and product focus.

Meaning and Functions of Organizational Culture

People’s behavior in organizations is guided by relatively shared meaning structures that influence how they make and give sense of themselves, their organization, and their workplace reality.

Modes of Strategy: Planned and Emergent

Strategic execution contains uncertainty that necessitates the balanced use of both proactive, explicitly planned strategy and flexible, reactive emergent strategies.

Moral Reasoning Maturity

Individual cognitive dynamics determine how people—including managers— understand, and make judgments and decisions in, ethical problems and issues involving moral dilemmas.

Multicultural Work Teams

Potential coordination difficulties between team members separated by culture, distance, and time zones need to be addressed and actively managed for optimal multicultural work team performance.

Multifirm Network Structure

A great deal of activity in the global economy is performed by groups of firms working together in well-defined network structures.

Multilevel Research

Organizational outcomes are the result of a confluence of effects emanating from different levels of analysis; managers must consider factors at multiple levels to improve understanding and influence.

Narrative (Story) Theory

Linear narratives are in interplay with other forms of storytelling, such as living stories and antenarratives, as one of the preferred sensemaking currencies of management and organizations.

Needs Hierarchy

Humans are motivated by unmet needs; these needs vary along a universal, prepotent hierarchy according to different stages in their lives and careers.

Neo-Institutional Theory

Managers need to be conscious of social pressures to follow other organizations in adopting new structural arrangements and assess their conditions and impact before making their own decisions.

Norms Theory

An individual’s attitudes and behaviors are fundamentally shaped and guided by the attitudes and behaviors of other actors in that individual’s social world.

Occupational Types, Model of

Analyzing fit between attributes of individuals and attributes of jobs and careers provides a system to parse a complex entity into categorized, manageable attributes to improve occupational congruence.

Open Innovation

Companies must open their innovation process to inflows and outflows of knowledge in order to leverage their research and development (R & D) competencies and speed up their product, process, and technology development.

Organic and Mechanistic Forms

Mechanistic management systems, which facilitate decision making bureaucratically, are better suited for stable environments whereas organic management systems, applying more decentralized and fluid practices, are more appropriate for dynamic environments.

Organizational and Managerial Wisdom

A wisdom-based management paradigm goes beyond traditional information- and knowledge-based perspectives by applying philosophic insights across organizational levels to facilitate personal and professional success and enable it for others.

Organizational Assimilation Theory

The processes by which newcomers become integrated into an organization is neither simple nor guaranteed and therefore should be properly facilitated to better anticipate and facilitate successful assimilation.

Organizational Commitment Theory

Employees with greater organizational commitment (i.e., attachment to the work organization) are more effective, more motivated, and more likely to remain with the organization.

Organizational Culture and Effectiveness

The cultural systems that evolve over time within organizations have important consequences for an organization’s survival and effectiveness.

Organizational Culture Model

Organizational culture is a powerful, yet largely invisible, multilayered (deep assumptions, intermediate values and principles, visible artifacts) social force that is not easily understood or changed.

Organizational Culture Theory

To understand how and why organizations function and the nature of employees’ work experiences, researchers have to go beyond structure, size, technology, job descriptions, reporting relationships, and so on to also study culture.

Organizational Demography

Demographic composition—for example, the gender, tenure, and functional backgrounds—of organizational units matter for understanding organizational dynamics.

Organizational Development

Organizational change can occur successfully provided it is planned, supported by organizational leaders, and involves organizational members and intensive effort to sustain the transition.

Organizational Ecology

Organizational dynamics can be fully understood only when all like organizations in a market are examined over time; evolving interdependence among organizations shapes and is shaped by social structure.

Organizational Effectiveness

There is no one single theory of effectiveness; rather, there are multiple models, each of which has a legitimate claim to being the key approach for defining and determining the effectiveness of an organization.

Organizational Identification

The sense of “us-ness” associated with self-definition in terms of shared organizational or subunit identity provides a strong and distinct basis for key forms of organizational behavior.

Organizational Identity

A shared understanding of “who we are” as an organization—what is central, enduring, and distinctive—is essential for effective organizational self-management, over time and across situations.

Organizational Learning

Managers need to recognize the many complications brought by the experiential nature of organizational learning and their implications for risk taking, feedback, interpersonal networks, and learning curves.

Organizational Socialization

Socialization processes that are strategically aligned and properly executed to integrate new members and influence existing members can benefit both employee well-being and organizational effectiveness.

Organizational Structure and Design

To attain its goals, an organization has to have an organizational structure to provide coordination and control; core structural dimensions must be designed to fit multiple contingency factors.

Organizationally Based Self-Esteem

An individual’s self-esteem can be shaped by the work setting, affecting the individual’s view of how capable and valuable he or she is as a member of the organization.

Participative Model of Decision Making

The degree of participation in decision making can be determined by applying multidimensional criteria that, when assessed, result in different approaches for soliciting and using employees’ input.

Path-Goal Theory of Leadership

Situational factors determine the choice of optimal leader behaviors designed to help remove obstacles and motivate employees as they strive to achieve work-related goals.

Patterns of Innovation

Firms shift from product to process innovation as their industries evolve and their productive processes become increasingly specialized.

Patterns of Political Behavior

Recognizing the patterns of political behavior in organizations, frequently undervalued by management theories, helps managers understand and influence a wide range of organizational phenomena.

Personal Engagement (at Work) Model

Workers invest degrees of themselves into role performances based on the extent to which certain psychological conditions are met.

Positive Organizational Scholarship

Human, organizational, and societal well-being is facilitated by focusing on the generative organizational dynamics that lead to developing human strength, producing resilience and restoration, fostering vitality, and cultivating extraordinary individuals.

Practice of Management, The

The practice of management is a polycentric configuration of related elements that should be viewed as a whole so that it can be taught, learned, institutionalized, and executed systematically.

Principled Negotiation

Parties in a negotiation can follow a specified integrative process manifest in five major components—such as focusing on interests, not positions—to achieve an agreement that maximizes joint gain.

Principles of Administration and Management Functions

Management consists of the same fundamental functions and activities— planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, controlling—in all kinds of organizations irrespective of their production or formal affiliation.

Process Consultation

Building a collaborative relationship between consultant and client helps the client perceive, understand, and act on process events to think out and work through problems.

Process Theories of Change

Managers need to understand how and why organizational change unfolds over time and the different motors or mechanisms that drive the process.

Product Champions

The product champion role of identifying with an innovation and pushing it through despite personal risks is important to mediate the political process of change in complex organizations.

Product-Market Differentiation Model

Managers need to relate a firm’s product-market engagements with its general strategic direction; growth strategies include expanding or developing markets and diversifying or developing new products.

Profiting From Innovation

An innovator must develop a commercialization strategy that avoids the sharing of undue value with the owners of key complementary assets.

Programmability of Decision Making

Some decision situations faced by managers can be programmed (routinized and modeled) whereas others involve some fundamental uncertainties and are not amenable to processing by computer systems.

Prospect Theory

People evaluate the potential outcomes of risky choices as changes from their current situation and take more risk when facing potential losses than when facing potential gains.

Protean and Boundaryless Careers

The changing workplace and nature of work necessitates new ways for individuals to manage their careers and new ways for organizations to offer career management options.

Psychological Contract Theory

Understanding of employees’ beliefs about their exchange relationship with the employer is important in fostering positive employee attitudes and behaviors.

Psychological Type and Problem-Solving Styles

People with different personality preferences may have complementary strengths (and weaknesses) that lead to distinctive, potentially valuable approaches to problem solving.

Punctuated Equilibrium Model

The process of organizational change is marked by long periods of incremental or evolutionary change “punctuated” by sudden bursts of radical or revolutionary change; each needs to be managed differently.

Quality Circles

Voluntary improvement activities in groups are powerful tools for quality management in an integrated system oriented toward the development of the enterprise.

Quality Trilogy

Managers need to plan for quality, control performance variations, and enhance systems’ capability to excel on all dimensions of quality all the time.

Quantum Change

Large-scale change should be carried out rapidly across an organization’s structures, systems, and values when initiating or responding to a transformative event.

Reinforcement Theory

Employee behavior is a function of both antecedents (e.g., training, job redesign) and contingent consequences (e.g., rewards, punishment); behavior increases in strength and/or probability when positively reinforced.

Resource Dependence Theory

To understand organizational choices and actions, consider its environment and particularly the constraints emanating from transaction partners.

Resource Orchestration Management

Managerial actions of structuring, bundling, and leveraging resources, along with the synchronization of these actions, affect competitive advantage.

Resource-Based View of Firm

Managers can attain competitive advantages by exploiting the unique resources and capabilities to which their firms have access.

Role Theory

Roles, created at the intersection of social structure and individual behavior, enable consistent performances across individuals and situations.

Schemas Theory

Individuals interpret, evaluate, and apply information and knowledge by organizing them into cognitive structures which can be managed to facilitate understanding and shape behavior.

Scientific Management

Conflicts between managers and/or employers and employees need to be economically resolved through proper incentives and precisely designed job structures, content, processes, and targets.

Self-Concept and the Theory of Self

Construals and understandings of self play important functions in individual and organizational behavior.

Self-Determination Theory

Two different motivation types—autonomous and controlled—have very different consequences and are prompted by different managerial behaviors.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Managers get the employees they expect; managers can boost effectiveness by expecting more of their subordinates.

Sensemaking

Developing retrospective images and words that rationalize what people are doing makes meaningful the social action taking place in an organization and illuminates how organizations work, change, and grow.

Servant Leadership

Leaders must make their top priority that of providing followers with the tools and support they need to develop mutual trust and reach their full potential.

Seven-S Framework

Conceptualizing organizations’ main elements in terms of interdependent, mutually reinforcing soft- and hard factors provides a powerful tool for diagnosing and analyzing organizational performance.

Situational Theory of Leadership

Managers can best lead and develop subordinates by using specified leadership styles to match a subordinate’s level of ability and commitment.

Six Sigma

Through a specified process of variation and defect reduction, organizations can simultaneously improve the quality of process outputs, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce waste, time, and costs.

Social Cognitive Theory

Human agency operates in concert with social and structural factors in determining organizational well-being and productivity.

Social Construction Theory

Social interaction influences the creating and institutionalizing of taken-for-granted knowledge, practices, and structures that can both enable and constrain activities.

Social Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship principles are applicable to multiple forms of (social) value creation which are not necessarily independent of or contrary to but instead can complement economic value creation.

Social Exchange Theory

Social systems can be understood as sets of interdependent economic and noneconomic transactions and relationships; managers can facilitate positive, cooperative exchange relations to produce benefits and limit costs.

Social Facilitation Management

The social context created by managers and coworkers can augment or reduce employee performance.

Social Identity Theory

Individuals’ identities are influenced by their perceived social group memberships; classifications and comparative perspectives of in- and out-groups generate meaning and shape members’ self-concept, attitudes, values, and behavior.

Social Impact Theory and Social Loafing

The magnitude of social impact is based on the strength, immediacy, and number of sources of social influence; managers need to particularly understand and reduce factors for social “loafing.”

Social Information Processing Model

People’s attitudes and behavior at work are affected both by what others do and say as well as by the need to rationalize their own past behavior.

Social Movements

Challenger groups are often sources of innovation in organizations, influencing managers to overcome the status quo and developing the energy and resources needed for transformative change.

Social Network Theory

Organizations generally exist for the purpose of establishing interaction and exchange with other entities, and they do so by bounding and coordinating the interactions of multiple individuals to achieve ends not achievable separately.

Social Power, Bases of

Managers must appropriately acquire and use bases of power—referent, expert, legitimate, reward, and coercive—if they are to exercise effective leadership.

Sociotechnical Theory

People and technology interact in complex ways such that their implications must be considered together to optimize performance.

Stages of Creativity

Creativity results from a process, each stage of which can be facilitated or frustrated by managers.

Stages of Innovation

The process of developing and implementing new ideas cannot be controlled, but managers can learn to maneuver the process.

Stakeholder Theory

Effectively managing relationships with internal and external parties who impact and are impacted by an organization is a primary responsibility of managers and is central to value creation.

Stewardship Theory

By pursuing cooperative, pro-organizational outcomes, stewards maximize their own utility as well as the performance of the organization.

Strategic Alliances

Strategic alliances can facilitate effective cooperation between firms by combining needed resources to achieve mutually compatible objectives.

Strategic Contingencies Theory

Intraorganizational power is derived from a subunit’s ability to support the critical tasks of other subunits in a way that no others can.

Strategic Decision Making

Managers can improve the chances of making successful strategic decisions by choosing the right decision-making processes across various levels of the organization.

Strategic Entrepreneurship

Strategy and entrepreneurship go together—successful entrepreneurship requires attention to strategy, and strategy is inherently entrepreneurial; opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking are processes that should be considered jointly.

Strategic Flexibility

In a rapidly changing business environment, an organization’s capability for attention, assessment, and action in balancing commitment and timely change contributes to sustainable, positive performance.

Strategic Frames

Strategic frames—distinct cognitive constructs anchored in social schema and sensemaking—organize collective interpretations and support prospective guides to action.

Strategic Groups

By identifying the emergence and persistence of competitive structure within an industry, members of a strategic group can formulate their own strategies to remain competitive.

Strategic Information Systems

The strategic application of information systems to align investments and support an organization’s business model can provide a source of competitive differentiation.

Strategic International Human Resources Management

An integrative framework of five major factors explains how human resource management issues affect the success of a firm that is operating in an international environment.

Strategic Profiles

An accurate, comprehensive profile of a firm’s configuration, competitive strategy, and its industrial environment is useful in making strategic decisions.

Strategies for Change

Gaining organizational alignment with an external environment where change seems the only constant requires managers and leaders to implement systematic strategies for change.

Strategy and Structure

The relationship between strategy and structure is a reciprocal one where each should fit and complement one another optimally.

Strategy-as-Practice

Strategy is a kind of work; it is something that people do, rather than something that organizations have.

Structuration Theory

While structural properties of societies are real, they depend upon regularities of social reproduction; structure exists only in and through the activities of human agents.

Substitutes for Leadership

There are multiple contextual factors that enhance, neutralize, or substitute for relationship-oriented versus task-oriented leadership across three categories: subordinate, task, and organizational characteristics.

SWOT Analysis Framework

Assessing internal and external strategic issues enables managers to understand how current and future strengths can be leveraged to realize opportunities and how weaknesses can slow progress or magnify organizational threats.

Systems Theory of Organizations

Interventions to one part of an organizational system can affect other interrelated, interacting parts in intended as well as unintended ways, possibly undoing or otherwise altering the original interventions.

Tacit Knowledge

All knowledge used (in organizations) has a tacit dimension that carries implications for creating, storing, transferring, coordinating, and applying knowledge.

Technological Discontinuities

Nonparadigmatic changes in value creation and capturing pose fundamental challenges to incumbent organizations and can radically reshape industry structures.

Technology Acceptance Model

The use of a technology is significantly and primarily influenced by the user perceptions of its ease-of-use and usefulness.

Technology Affordances and Constraints Theory (of MIS)

The uses and outcomes of information systems are best understood in terms of dynamic relationships between the individual or organizational users and the technology features.

Technology and Complexity

Effective organizational responses to complex challenges are achieved through dynamic and holistic technologies cocreated by designers, implementers and users, which in turn influence organizational structure and social processes.

Technology and Interdependence/Uncertainty

Managers need to protect an organization’s technical core from environmental uncertainty and optimize coordination by matching its structure to technological and inter-unit interdependencies.

Technology and Programmability

The nature of technology used by a firm—the degree to which the production system is controllable and predictable—has important ramifications for how it should be structured.

Technology S-Curve

The management of, and transition from, a technology is influenced by multiple actors over time that affect technology performance through slow initial improvement, rapid increase, and eventual maturity.

Theory Development

Strong theories offer better causal explanations of important outcomes; for the majority of management theorizing, the objective is to answer, within specified contextual conditions, What causes what and why?

Theory of Constraints

Managers can structure their thinking about how to improve system performance by examining its component processes and sequentially addressing the most significant constraints.

Theory of Cooperation and Competition

Management involves creating and facilitating cooperation among the organization’s members while minimizing competitive and individualistic efforts.

Theory of Emotions

Emotion is a diverse multistage process, not a unitary experience, with each stage having important implications for organizational life.

Theory of Organizational Attractiveness

An individual’s perception of and desire to work for an organization is influenced by organizational, individual, and job or task characteristics; organizations can manage these to increase their attractiveness to potential applicants.

Theory of Reasoned Action

Behavioral intentions, influenced by subjective norms and attitude toward the act, are the most proximal and reliable predictors of whether a person will engage in a specific volitional act.

Theory of Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is a complex construct that is potentially developable and may be related to a number of important work-relevant variables.

Theory of the Interesting

It is more important for a theory to be interesting than true; challenging some assumptions can help achieve this.

Theory of Transfer of Training

To achieve transfer of training, designers and trainees must actively pursue those training elements and activities known to foster generalization, maintenance, and adaptation of learned skills and knowledge.

Theory X and Theory Y

Manager’s assumptions about human behavior, whether pessimistic (theory x) or optimistic (theory y), tend to result in corresponding patterns of behaviors; managers should assist employees in reaching their full potential.

Total Quality Management

Organizations can apply the philosophy and specified principles of total quality management to reduce costs, improve reliability, and enhance customers’ and other stakeholders’ satisfaction.

Trait Theory of Leadership

Leadership emergence and effectiveness is a function of the exceptional qualities, abilities, or traits—such as personality and intelligence—which one possesses.

Transaction Cost Theory

Firms organize their relationships with customers, suppliers, employees, and partners to economize on the costs of transacting business; these relate to search, communication, bargaining and contracting, and enforcing activities.

Transfer of Technology

Effective transfer of technical, organizational, and operational knowledge between providers and recipients is a function of the engaged entities’ characteristics, their interactions and context, and technology and transfer mechanisms.

Transformational Theory of Leadership

Inspiring employees is a better way to achieve your goals than motivating them with rewards and punishments; this power comes from idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration.

Transnational Management

Managers must recognize the increased complexity and conflicting demands of the global environment to simultaneously cultivate multinational flexibility, global scale efficiency, and worldwide learning capability.

Triple Bottom Line

Value creation is multidimensional—comprising “people, planet, and profit” considerations—with money alone being a poor measure of both positive and negative externalities.

Trust

Trust can be defined and measured, has several key antecedents that apply to multiple organizational levels, and can be managed based on attention to several factors.

Two-Factor Theory (and Job Enrichment)

There are two clusters of variables that influence humans’ motivation to work; the first motivates, the second can potentially demotivate.

Type A Personality Theory

Managers who manifest unmitigated “Type-A” behavior of high-achievement workaholics, especially anger and hostility, can have a negative long-term impact on themselves as well as their subordinates, groups, and organizations.

Typology of Organizational Culture

Organizational success depends on creating an environment that shapes the norms and behavior of participants in ways that will serve the organization well as circumstances and competition change.

“Unstructured” Decision Making

Processes and models for decision making can be developed for unfamiliar or unprecedented conditions in which accepted decision-making methods and solutions are unsuitable.

Upper-Echelons Theory

Organizations are reflections of their most senior level managers; top management team characteristics and actions explain strategic and performance consequences of the organization as a whole.

Value Chain

A firm’s primary and support activities, from purchasing raw materials to distributing products, must be systematically analyzed, organized, selected, and optimized for customer value creation and competitive advantage.

Virtual Teams

Virtual teams, whose members are separated by distance and time and who use technology to communicate, face unique challenges and should not be managed just like proximate teams.

Work Team Effectiveness

Teams are multifaceted, complex, and dynamic entities that create unique management challenges but offer the potential for superlative performance.