Employees communicate more easily and are more committed to the organization when beliefs and values are shared. Explores the phenomenon of sudden “lost meaning” – a situation in which individuals who strongly share the organization′s culture appear suddenly to cease to identify with the...

This article identifies the psychological and behavioural effects associated with corporate downsizing and the managerial challenges they present. These challenges include renewing psychological contracts, reversing threat‐rigidity tendencies, building post‐downsizing teams, and creating new...

Emerging in the literature on organizational design is the question of the efficacy of self‐managed work groups. From task‐forces and matrix prescriptions of the 1970s, imperatives towards de‐centralization, networked capabilities and self‐managed teams seem to be part of the IT‐driven...

Today it is more important than ever to get a “pay‐off” from management training and development in terms of improved organisational performance. An initiative in W.H. Smith is described which focuses on helping managers improve performance and learn in so doing. The key issues facing...

Reintroduces the concept of an integration phase in an organization′s social system to bring together its economic and technical sub‐systems, and to synthesize individual and organizational eeds. Details the basic principles and values inherent in such a phase, relates it to business‐led...

Correlates discrepancies between the importance attached to particular cultural values and their presence within a large professional services firm. Considers three types of correlates: personal demographics, work setting factors and affective responses to work. Data were collected from 1,608...

Organizations benefit from workforce diversity and also benefit from cultural cohesion. Individuals benefit from job/person fit. However, not only do individuals with diverse behavioral styles often have differing values and interests, they also tend to prefer different types of job assignments...

Describes the author′s distinctive approach to facilitating empowerment in organizations and helping managers enhance their capacity to learn and respond to change more effectively. Expresses the author′s views on how the culture of organizations need to change (and the specific changes in...

Leadership needs to be seen within the organizational context of managing change (i.e. transformational leadership). The most useful approach is through the use of the vision‐commitment‐management model. Discusses both how leaders emerge in society, and how they can flourish within a...