Knowledge that Transforms

The application of the Bern Sex-Role Inventory in a study of 684 business students failed to support the hypothesis that a good manager would be seen as androgynous (possessing both masculine and feminine characteristics). Instead, the good manager was described in masculine terms. Graduate women also described themselves in masculine terms.

To test the utility of a dyadic approach to the study of leadership, conditions specified by Fiedler?s contingency model of leadership effectiveness were created for Air Force personnel. A set of dyadic predictions was tested with ANOVA and correlational techniques. Results provided mixed support for a dyadic approach to the study of leadership.

This article examines the effects of holding goal difficulty constant on assigned and participatively set goals. Several experiments regarding employee goal acceptance and commitment were discussed. The experiments provided various arguments about the productivity of employees that are randomly assigned to participative goal setting conditions. It was inferred that the employees in the participative condition set significantly higher goals than individuals in the assigned goal condition. In concludes that employee participation in goal setting is irrelevant to the extent that it leads to higher goals being set than a manager sets unilaterally.

An integrative and expanded contextual model for investigating employee intentions to stay or leave an organization is proposed. Four structural/process variables (upward mobility, distributive justice, communication and routinization), one environmental variable (opportunity), one mediating variable (job satisfaction), and four demographic variables (occupation, age, education, and sex) are significant.

The article discusses patterns of and desires for employee participation in management and decision making after an organization has converted to employee ownership. The author notes a number of reasons why an increased level of employee participation in decision making is significant. According to the author, a significant number of nonmanagers believe that job and departmental participation in decision making had increased to due voluntary shift in management styles by supervisors. Also noted is the authors belief that nonmanagers may have little confidence in their ability to affect managerial decisions.

This study of project engineers investigated the direction and causal influence of a number of performance- satisfaction relationships. For the high task stimulation jobs, it was found that high intrinsic satisfaction caused decreases in subsequent supervisory performance rating and cost performance. For the low task stimulation jobs, extrinsic satisfaction was inferred to be the cause of increased supervisory ratings and cost performance.

This article presents information on empirical research on how organizations actually utilize assessment center results. It infers that majority of organizations have used assessment centers for only a few years and few follow administrative practices which deal with the long-term utilization of results. Based on the research, assessment centers are perceived to be valid predictors of subsequent managerial performance and that they require a great deal of planning, time and effort to effectively utilize results.