Knowledge that Transforms

This paper focuses on various aspects of a decision made by a Norwegian firm in order to export fresh water to Spain. Based on a broad description with various perspectives of organizational learning in mind, the case was analysed and interpreted. It was found that both individual and structural factors attributed to incomplete and biased learning and lack of adequate adaption to the circumstances.

Seventeen intact collegiate groups of managers from eight companies and two publicly owned organizations described the organizational climates in which they worked. Their perceptions ranged from highly favourable to highly unfavourable. Did the occupational histories of the 134 managers influence their perceptions? Could the differences in their evaluations have arisen from other features of the environment, for which unobtrusive measures were available? Or was the level of each group in the hierarchy the prime determinant? All of these explanations have some plausibility in relation to the data presented. It is probably impossible to create‘the right climate’for management development by piecemeal strategies which ignore the significance of market success and deal only with the immediate experience of managers. On the other hand, a global strategy which concentrates on external factors and minimizes the importance of the individual's contribution in his particular location is likely to be equally defective. The major moderating variable in this study between the perceived developmental climate of the organization and the manager's occupational history was the salary he was paid.

The relationship between internal-control, self-esteem and self-respect measures of the effort-performance and performance-outcome beliefs – the two major beliefs of the expectancy model of work motivation – were examined in a sample of forty-two white and thirty-eight black managers in South Africa. The correlations between self-esteem and the effort-performance belief and between internal-control and the performance-outcome belief were both significant in the white group but not in the black group. The white managers were significantly more internally oriented and had significantly higher levels of self-esteem than the black mangers. The white-black differences are explained in terms of features of the current socio-political systems in South Africa. The fact that in both groups the two beliefs correlated significantly together and equally with the self-esteem and internal-control suggests that the two beliefs may not be as independent as is implied by expectancy theory.

The paper describes a study of the effects of a training course in performance appraisal interviewing. Managers who had attended the course were asked, by means of a postal questionnaire, to compare their pre-training and post-training interviewing performances. There were three important findings. First, that the trainees had improved on almost every aspect of appraisal interviewing; secondly, it is not just the skill of interviewing which is important, but also an understanding of the role of performance appraisal; and finally, managers in mid-career may have most to gain from training of this type.

This study represents an analysis of the changes in the environment, context and structure of an organization, using the full Aston Interview Schedule.2 The limitations of generalizing from a single case are acknowledged, but the longitudinal analysis provides support for the notion that organizations can and do develop self-evaluative capacities when threatened by external change. The results of the process of self-evaluation on the part of the organization are shown as changes in the organization's scores on the various scales of organizational context and structure developed by the Aston school, at two points in time. These changes provide support for a number of conjectures arising from previous analyses of the relationships among the structural dimensions of organizational form displayed by the Aston methodology; notably the relationship between size/standardization and centralization/standardization. The analysis also suggests that the centralization scale can be viewed as having two components – one related to policy decisions, the other to operational decisions.