In recent decades sweeping re-engineering, digitization, and agile initiatives—and lately the move to remote work—have dramatically transformed the job of managers. Change has come along three dimensions: power, skills, and structure. Managers now have to think about making their teams successful, rather than being served by them; coach performance, not oversee tasks; and lead in rapidly ch…
The concept of managerial discretion provides a theoretical fulcrum for resolving the debate about whether chief executive officers (CEOs) have much influence over company outcomes. In this paper, we operationalize and further develop the construct of managerial discretion at the national level. In an empirical examination of 15 countries, we find that certain informal and formal national insti…
The aim of this study was to investigate which leadership behaviors mediate the relationship between leader expectations and employee engagement in learning activities. Based on Rosenthal's Pygmalion model, five potential mediators of the Pygmalion effect were distinguished: leader-member exchange relationship, goal setting ( i.e. goal specificity, goal difficulty), providing learning opportuni…
Rousseau and McCarthy (2007) performed a significant service to management education by outlining the history of and current circumstance for the use of evidence-based management (EBM) by U.S.-educated and trained managers: "EBM means managerial decisions and organizational practices informed by the best available scientific evidence" (84). Although these authors contrast practices in medicine …
Chefs at even the highest-end restaurants were still using frozen meat and produce in 1971, the year that Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California. It was the perfect moment to break culinary ground with her fresh, simply prepared food. Influenced by dishes she had tasted in Europe and Turkey, and featuring local ingredients, her style of cooking became known as California cui…
This article introduces managers' personal risk considerations into the relationship between organizational decline and innovation. The agency-based perspective is used to complement threat rigidity theory and prospect theory in examining how managerial ownership and slack resources affect managers' innovation decisions when firms experience poor performance. The findings indicate that more man…
Sergio Marchionne describes how he changed the way Fiat SpA was run by abandoning the Great Man model of leadership that had long characterized Fiat and created a culture where everyone is expected to lead..Printed journal
This study addresses an apparent disconnect between two views of strategic action: the 'economic view,' which contends that industry structure is the primary influence on strategic action, and the 'cognitive view,' which suggests that managerial cognition drives strategic action. We argue that this disconnect has created artificial boundaries between the two perspectives and has limited our abi…
During his nearly 14 years at the helm of networking giant Cisco Systems, John Chambers has developed an uncanny ability to sense market trends long before others do. He predicted, for instance, that voice transmission would become free long before computer networks could even carry it. And Cisco was one of the first to shift from call centers to web-based customer service. Seeing the future is…
After Kaufman became a CEO, he was struck by how perfunctory the board was in its feedback on his performance. The chair of the compensation committee would pop by his office following the year-end board meeting, congratulate him on the company's making its numbers, and then hand him an envelope containing the details of his comp package before walking out the door. That sort of review was a bi…
Research on top managers' strategizing behavior has addressed how they shape either the structural context or the interpretations of organization members. I offer a structuration theory framework integrating these two partial explanations and treating strategy shaping as socially dynamic. A qualitative seven-year analysis of top managers in three universities shows a sequential pattern of shapi…
The notion that some people are simply born artistic - and that there is a profile that can help organizations identify them - is quite firmly entrenched. Significantly, the people least likely to buy into the idea that creativity is preordained are the creative geniuses themselves. Choreographer Twyla Tharp, for one, doesn't subscribe to any notion of effortless artistry. As someone who has ch…
We unpack the concept of managerial risk-taking, distinguishing among three of its major elements: the size of the outlay; the variance of the potential outcomes; and the likelihood of extreme loss. We then apply our framework in hypothesizing the effects of CEO stock options on strategic behavior and company performance. We find that CEO stock options engender high levels of investment outlays…
In the Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers summarizes voluminous research showing that the adoption of new ideas of ways of doing things follows a nonlinear progression. Specifically, the adoption of new ideas follows an S-shaped diffusion curve, with only a small number of highly innovative individuals adopting a change in the beginning. However, once a small number of "opinion leaders" a…
In their keynote article for this editors' forum, Rynes, Giluk, and Brown show that practitioner journals cover very little of the most robust research related to human resources management (HRM). The authors express concern about this disconnect and propose that this ongoing gap has negative consequences for both HRM practice and research. As a research-based practitioner within a corporation,…
As Rynes, Giluk, and Brown make all too clear in their "separate worlds" study, there is a gap between research and practice. Factoring in the other commentaries accompanying that study, readers must wonder whether "gap" is a tad understated. Since there is almost no evidence-informed management or management-informed evidence, more accurate terms are probably "chasm" and "fault line." Chasm ca…
The difference between the academic literature and the practitioner literature on human resource management is an indicator and one cause of the major separation that exists between research and practice in human resource management. A great deal of what passes as "best practice" in HRM most likely is not. In some cases, there is simply no evidence that validates what are thought to be best pra…
The challenge of communicating scientific knowledge to practitioners confronts all fields of science. In the past decade, with significant contributions from leading figures, this debate has entered the discourse of management research. The Rynes, Giluk, and Brown "separate worlds" study takes this debate a step further by exploring the role of a distinctive group of communicators of knowledge.…
In their lead article for this forum, Rynes, Giluk, and Brown take a stab at an important topic and raise some significant questions. The article is well written and for the most part, fairly presented. Their argument that the gap between practice and science is so pervasive that some have despaired of its ever being narrowed is compelling. Similarly, the discussion of the need for "evidence-ba…
In the marketplace for ideas in the broad field of management, and in human resource management in particular, academics are jostling for position along with consultants, journalists, and practitioners. The most fundamental question that each party seeks to answer is this: "What does it take to get ahead of the competition?" Presented are some possible answers from the perspectives of the vario…