Formal analysis of narrative descriptions of events allows the researcher to rigorously examine processes of organizational change. Event-structure analysis (ESA), a rule-driven formal technique of narrative analysis, is applied to a narrative description of an environmental dispute. Various organizations and government agencies engaged in this dispute. ESA is applied to the narrative to clarify the causal linkages among the events and to demonstrate the advantages of studying organizational change through the formal analysis of narratives.

This paper provides a review of research into the relationships between psychological types, as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and managerial attributes, behaviors and effectiveness. The literature review includes an examination of the psychometric properties of the MBTI and the contributions and limitations of research on psychological types. Next, key findings are discussed and used to advance propositions that relate psychological type to diverse topics such as risk tolerance, problem solving, information systems design, conflict management and leadership. We conclude with a research agenda that advocates: (I) the exploration of potential psychometric refinements of the MBTI, (2) more rigorous research designs, and (3) a broadening of the scope of managerial research into type.

This study examines how firms in the pharmaceutical industry responded to the R&D tax credit which was enacted in 1981. The change in research intensity (research/sales) subsequent to the tax change was estimated for the firms. An increase in research intensity was associated with the adoption of the tax credit. The strong response by the firms to the tax credit and the effort to maintain their relative position in research intensity indicate that research intensity is an important strategic dimension and driving force in the industry.

This article introduces and explores the construct of pro-social rule breaking. Pro-social rule breaking is rooted in a desire to promote the welfare of the organization or one of its stakeholders. The first two studies used interview data to identify three primary types of pro-social rule breaking: rule breaking to perform one’s responsibilities more efficiently, rule breaking to help a subordinate or colleague, and rule breaking to provide good customer service. A third study used a scenario-based laboratory experiment. It found that the likelihood of pro-social rule breaking was positively related to job autonomy, coworker behavior, and risk-taking propensity.

The author predicts that the interaction between individual- and team-level autonomy influences team performance and that their combined effects are contingent on the level of task interdependence. Multiple regression analysis of data from 89 teams in a manufacturing setting confirm these expectations, demonstrating that team performance depends on the combination of individual and team autonomy. These findings suggest that the optimal combination of individual and team autonomy depends on the level of task interdependence in a team. Implications for future research, particularly in the areas of cross-level analyses and contingency theory, are discussed as well.

This article evaluates the emergent academic field of entrepreneurship to better understand its progress and potential. We apply boundary and exchange concepts to examine 97 entrepreneurship articles published in leading management journals from 1985 to 1999. Some evidence was found of an upward trend in the number of published entrepreneurship articles, although the percentage of entrepreneurship articles remains low. The highly permeable boundaries of entrepreneurship facilitate intellectual exchange with other management areas but sometimes discourage the development of entrepreneurship theory and hinder legitimacy. We argue that focusing entrepreneurship research at the intersection of the constructs of individuals, opportunities, modes of organizing, and the environment will define the field and enhance legitimacy. Decision theory, start-up factors of production, information processing and network theory, and temporal dynamics are put forward for entrepreneurship scholars to explore important research questions in these intersections.

This field study examined the relationships among a set of feedback seeking, social cognitive, and goal setting constructs and the work performance of one hundred thirty-six sales and customer-service representatives. As hypothesized, feedback seeking and self-efficacy related to two dimensions of work performance (i.e., work quantity and work quality) through feedback-based goals. In addition, self-efficacy and feedback seeking mediated the relationship between two individual differences (viz., personal control perceptions and external feedback propensity) and both dimensions of work performance. The findings extend research on work performance by underscoring the importance of incorporating feedback into work-related improvement goals when investigating the relationship between feedback seeking and work performance. The findings also provide insight into the motivational processes underlying the relationship among personal control perceptions, external feedback propensity, and work performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study examined whether the psychological climate for service friendliness correlated positively with employee displayed positive emotions, and whether such positive emotional displays influenced customer purchase decision and customer reactions concerning an organization. Data were collected from 290 sales clerks in 156 retail shoe stores in Taiwan, and from 284 customers who were served by one of the sales clerks. Results indicated a positive relationship between psychological climate for service friendliness and employees’ displayed positive emotions. The study also indicated that employees’ positive emotional displays would increase customer willingness to return to the store and pass positive comments to friends.

The purpose of this paper is to draw together the many different facets of corporate governance that have been examined in the extensive literature in both strategic management and finance. In particular, we are interested in the relationship between the typical agency theory constructs of monitoring, incentives and ownership structure, with financial performance. First, we catalog this large body of work to see where there are still unanswered questions. We find that previous work has generally focused on examining subsets of governance mechanisms, typically studying one or two governance variables in any one study. Our view is that the most critical issue still to examine, is the ability of firms to choose among a number of different governance mechanisms in order to create the appropriate structure for that firm, given the environment in which it operates. We identify a sample of firms and examine CEO compensation, CEO tenure, board composition, leadership structure and ownership structure and their contribution to both market performance, Market Value Added, and risk-adjusted accounting performance, Economic Value Added. In addition, we control for ownership by block-holders, industry performance, and firm size. We examine these measures both individually and as interactions. Our results indicate that while some of the traditional agency variables do impact performance, both individually and as interactions, industry performance is a strong and significant driver of performance for our sample of firms. We conclude that, while there is evidence to support that firms may use governance packages to deal with agency issues, further research could provide important evidence on these issues by focusing on examining a more refined, industry-level context.

This sturdy examines factors that influence the creativity of managers' decisions. A domain-based, evolutionary model that describes the influence of context on creative action is combined with a teleological model of creative managerial decision making derived from the strategy formulation and organizational decision process literatures. Results show that two key dimensions of managerial creativity, the novelty and the value of choices, were affected by markedly different factors. Surprisingly influences on the novelty of managers' choices were essentially independent of influences on the value of those choices. Overall, this study represents an initial attempt to describe and empirically, examine processes that affect the creativity of executives' choices. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.