We tested the job demands-job control model of stress with a group of 136 registered nurses. Significant interactions between subjective and objective measures of work load and a measure of perceived control predicting physiological and attitudinal outcomes indicated support for the model. In addition, objectively assessed job demands were significantly associated with blood pressure and Cortisol levels. The model also predicted elevations in physiological responses after individuals left work, suggesting that potentially health-impairing reactions to jobs that have high demands and low controllability might carry over to home settings and thus pose a high risk of long-term health impairment. The results have implications for the role of personal control in occupational stress generally and for nurse-management practices specifically.

The 1993 Special Research Forum on Configurations is dedicated to the proposition that configurational theory and research can significantly advance understanding of people, groups, and organizations. In this introductory essay, we define configurational approaches to organizational analysis, trace the history of configurational thinking, distinguish the contingency approach from the configurational approach, and highlight key contrihutions of the five empirical articles that make up the special research forum. Most of these articles report research conducted at the organizational level of analysis, hut we argue that the configurational perspective has unrealized potential at other levels as well and suggest some configurational approaches to revitalizing theory and research at the individual and group levels.

Prior attempts to explain the departure rates of the executives of acquired firms, primarily through strategic and economic logics, have yielded limited results. This study drew on the concept of relative standing, or local social status, to explain why some acquired executives depart. Using a dynamic modeling methodology to study 430 executives in 97 acquired firms, we present evidence to support this new perspective on executive departure. Implications and directions for future research on postacquisition outcomes are discussed.

The associations between interviewer and applicant behavior during simulated employment interviews were examined in a laboratory experiment. As hypothesized, applicant self-esteem, interviewer behavior, and their interaction significantly affected applicants' verbal and nonverbal behavior during interviews, as rated by independent judges.

In this article, we examine the use of the key informant methodology by researchers investigating interorganizational relationships. Authors have advocated the use of multiple informants to increase the reliability and validity of informant reports. However, interorganizational research still tends to rely on single informants. We investigated informant selection and obtaining perceptual agreement among multiple informants, two problems that may have inhibited widespread use of multiple informants. We suggest procedures for dealing with those problems and provide an illustrative application of our proposals.

This study reviews the use of outside informants-individuals not employed in the firm being studied-in strategy research reported in major journals. We empirically explored the expertness of these informants in terms of interrater reliability and accuracy of their ratings compared to those provided by insiders. Four groups of outside informants in the airline industry-consultants, security analysts, stakeholders, and academics- and senior airline executives whose companies initiated certain competitive moves rated strategic attributes associated with those moves. Informants in each group manifested high interrater reliability. Of the outsiders, analysts were the most accurate and were highly reliable, and academics were highly reliable and as accurate as consultants and stakeholders.

Two major approaches to examining the relationship between organizational configurations and performance are found in the strategic management literature. The first, rooted in the concept of strategic groups, is inductive and focuses on a posteriori examinations of industry-specific configurations and their relative performance. The second, a deductive approach, focuses on theory-based predictions. We compared the two approaches using a single set of organizations. The two approaches generated different configurations to describe the hospital industry. The deductively defined configurations explained performance better than the inductively defined configurations, and the deductive approach allowed prediction of the performance differences among configurations. We draw theoretical and methodological implications for future research.