Review of Rethinking the Knowledge Controversy in Organization Studies: A Generative Uncertainty Perspective by Walter R. Nord and Ann F. Connell.

This research was supported by a grant from the Organizational Effectiveness Program of the Office of Naval Research under grant N00014-84-K006, the Busines~ Associate Funds of the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, and the Control Data Corporation. The author would like to thank the following individuals for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript: Susan Ashford, Larry Cummings, Michael Hitt, Mike Keeley, Lyman Porter, Keith Weigelt, and Ray Zammuto. Finally, a special appreciation is extended to Associate Editor Marshall Meyer and three anonymous reviewers for their many insightful comments and constructive suggestions in refining the ideas in this paper. Using the human resource (HR) subunit as the focus for assessment, several core postulates of the multiple constituency model of effectiveness were examined empirically. Results supported the theoretical efficacy of the model. First, the relevant constituencies reported by the HR subunits were conceptually meaningful. Second, the subunit's effectiveness was influenced by both its adaptive responses, such as the use of human resource committees and control of employee absenteeism, and environmental context variables, such as assistance from corporate human resource groups and heterogeneity in the demographics of the constituents. Third, different adaptive response variables were associated with the effectiveness assessment of different constituencies, supporting the key postulate that effectiveness models of multiple constituencies are nonequivalent. The paper concludes with many suggestions for future research and conceptual extensions to the multiple-constituency model.'

Maryan S. Schall This paper suggests that organizations, cultures, and cultural can be synthesized as communication phenomena, using a communication-rules perspective. The synthesis is operationalized by an inductive, multifaceted method designed to test the effectiveness of describing an organizational culture through a composite of its operative communication rules. A feasibility study used the method to describe two work groups of a large organization as cultures. Findings from five sources were summarized to create group-culture descriptions that were then submitted to insiders for evaluation. Members of both groups evaluated the descriptions based on their own group's operative communication rules as the most accurate description of their group as culture and more accurate than descriptions based on the formally sanctioned rules espoused by top management.

Albert S. King The experiment reported here was conducted at four plants owned by the same company during a 12-month period. Managers were given artificial reports about previous findings obtained in implementing job enlargement and job rotation programs. Led to expect higher productivity as a result of these organizational innovations, the managers increased their plant output during the experiment period.

Professionals serving in top-level positions of organizational leadership can have differing emphasis on orientation to their profession and to the organization. The two perspectives and the ways of combining them are analyzed in relation to leadership effectiveness and work satisfaction. The organizational perspective was more important for determining effectiveness than the professional perspective. Both perspectives contributed to satisfaction. The study was done on the parish ministry, with a sample of fifty-six ministers and their Protestant congregations.

Two models are presented to explain the relationship between the size of organizations and the percentage of staff personnel. In the first model, an interaction model, the effect of size is partially dependent on the level of functional differentiation or complexity in an organization. Product terms between size and complexity are therefore included in this model, in accordance with previous research and theory, suggesting that the effects of functional differentiation on the size-staff relationship may not be linear. The product terms are found to be significant and to increase significantly the amount of variance explained by an additive model, but the two independent variables are confounded, and a great deal of variance is not explained. This interaction model has the advantage of theoretical relevance, but is not simple to construct nor to interpret. In the second model, a simpler logarithmic model, size decreases the staff component at a decreasing rate, explaining slightly more variance than the interaction model. It is simple and parsimonious but has no theoretical basis, therefore it does not explain the social processes involved. In the absence of a theory that treats the rate of change in the staff component as a decreasing function of size, the interaction model is considered preferable.

The risk propensity of business and public school administrators was compared on qualitative and realistic decision problems. Each problem was combined with a quantitative decision matrix to make it consonant with the expected value of utilities concept of decision theory in economics. Relevant organizational and personality variables were measured to determine their relationship to the findings if either occupational group proved to be greater risk takers. Business administrators were found to be greater risk takers than public school administrators.