Psychologists From The United States

"This study examines two alternative views—universal and contingency—of the human resources (HR)-performance relationship in manufacturing settings. Results from a survey of 97 plants primarily support a contingency approach to human resource management (HRM). An HR system focused on human capital enhancement was directly related to multiple dimensions of operational performance (i.e., employee productivity, machine efficiency, and customer alignment), but subsequent analysis revealed that this main effect was predominately the result of linking human-capital-enhancing HR systems with a quality manufacturing strategy. Other manufacturing strategies also moderated the HR-performance relationship."

"Adaptation is a crucial challenge for organizations, and an important theme in the strategy and organization theory literature. We still have much to learn, however, about the strategic processes by which adaptation is achieved. In this paper we focus on a basic element in the adaptation process, i.e. flexibility within the strategic decision-making process. We concentrate on strategic decisions because these choices are the most important adaptations the firm makes. We suggest that the core of all organizational adaptation is a decision-making process. Unless the decision-making process itself is flexible, it is unlikely the organization can be flexible enough to adapt."

"The increasing importance of advanced manufacturing technology, total quality management, and just-in-time to manufacturing firms raises some basic questions as to the strategic use of these techniques in manufacturing. Does strategic use of these techniques influence performance? How is the impact of these techniques influenced by the competitive environment? Are the techniques actually being used strategically? A study in a large sample of manufacturing organizations confirms that the use of integrated manufacturing techniques-particularly total quality-influences performance, and that these effects are magnified or diminished by both the competitive environment and manufacturing strategy. It also shows that, in some cases, firms are missing opportunities to combine integrated manufacturing and strategy in ways that would substantially impact their performance."

"The administrative function, therefore, insures the continuance of the existing order with a minimum of effort and risk. Its fundamental aim is to "carry on" rather than to venture along new and untried paths. Administrators are, therefore, the stabilizers of society and the guardians of tradition. They are stabilizers in both a positive and a negative sense, for not only do they make possible the continuance of the ideas which they convert into institutions: they also frustrate many innovations to which they deny their support. With the weight of their authority they confront every attempt to initiate a new development, and test it with a view to its effect on established interests. They resist change and stow down the rate of experimentation so that the main body of society can keep pace with it. The ponderous social machinery which is so irritating to the impulsive initiator is thus a safeguard against sudden changes which paralyze the Jess adaptable members of society and which would result in chaos if subjected to no check."

"The administrative function comes easily to conservatives for the principal requirement of administration is unquestioning conformity to the standards embodied by the particular institution."

"Professor Paul Pigors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology... feels that a primary function of administration is that of stabilizing social institutions. Interested not only in the leadership function of society's managers but also in the "followership" role of both the administrators and the "administered," industrial psychologists like Pigors have shown an abiding interest in administration as a means of keeping society in balance while its institutions are at the same time undergoing a process of change and adjustment."

"How did the innovations of yesterday become the institutions of today? An idea does not institutionalize itself. It has to be organized. When the initiator has proposed a plan and inspired a group of followers with the desire to pursue it, he must devise a way in which their joint purpose can be realized. It is this process of organization and management which I call administration. No group movement endures without it. The administrator just sets up a structure of laws, rules, mechanisms, that is designed to accomplish a specific purpose and then directs the working of all its constituent elements, so that an institution is comparable to a machine with standard parts. Each part is designed to perform a specialized purpose to which it is adapted. It is replaceable, and the demand is not so much for individuals with creative imagination as for trained functionaries with suitable abilities. Every part of the machine conforms to a standard pattern and professional schools or colleges turn out candidates to replace those who drop out of active service. In this way institutions are maintained from year to year. They aim at that balance between energy expended and results achieved, which we call efficiency"

"Although "loyalty" itself is a fertile relationship concept, its nuances have been lost in traditional brand loyalty research. Operationalizations relying on sequence or proportion of purchase perhaps better reflect a notion of inertia than loyalty with its full relational significance. Even well-intentioned attempts to consider loyalty as more than repeat purchase (Jacoby and Chestnut 1978) reduce the process to 'narrowly cognitive utilitarian decision-making' thus failing to capture 'the talismanic relationships consumers form with that which is consumed' (Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989, p.31)"

"While Paul Pigors contends that the main purpose of administration is to preserve the status quo in society, Brooks Adams regards administration as a chief agent of social change."

"If brand loyalty is ever to be managed, not just measured, it will have to be elaborated in a much more detailed description of cognitive activities."

"Chaos in Research-land: the sorry status of brand loyalty measurement."

"[Brand loyalty is] (1) the biased (i.e., nonrandom), (2) behavioral response (i.e., purchase), (3) expressed over time, (4) by some decision-making unit, (5) with respect to one or more alternative brands out of a set of such brands, and (6) is a function of psychological (decision-making, evaluative) processes"

"The present status of brand loyalty research can be characterized as that of a construct undergoing substantial revision and redirection in measurement orientation. From an overly behavioral macro approach, it is gradually making the transition to a more micro understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying choice behavior. If brand loyalty is ever to be managed, not just measured, it will have to be elaborated in a much more detailed description of cognitive activities."

"Before one could speak of brand loyal, one must have the opportunity of being disloyal."

"Our position is that a deterministic orientation can be meaningfully applied to a distinct subset of RPB, a subset we refer to as BL [Brand Loyalty]."

"Total Quality Management presents the basic principles and tools associated with TQ and provides many illustrations and end-of-chapter cases that can be used as the basis for class discussion. Many cases focus on large and small companies in manufacturing and service industries in North and South America, Europe, and Asia–Pacific. Unlike most books on TQ, this one is organized according to traditional management topics. This organization helps students to see the parallels between TQ and management theories in areas such as organizational design and leadership. TQ is often presented as new or different, which it clearly is not. This book has three objectives: to show students how these principles and methods have been put into effect in a variety of organizations, to illustrate the relationship between TQ principles and the theories and models studied in management courses and to familiarize students with the basic principles and methods associated with total quality."

"Total quality is a matter of survival."

"Building the house of quality requires six basic steps:"

"Quality management is ... an approach to management made up of a set of mutually reinforcing principles, each of which is supported by a set of practices and techniques."

"We introduce this theory-development forum by comparing total quality and management theory at both global and topic-specific levels. Our analysis suggests that management research could be enhanced by incorporating some insights of total quality into management theory. We also conclude, however, that management practice could be improved by incorporating insights from management theory into total quality efforts, and that, in fact, total quality has already incorporated many such insights. Finally, we suggest some directions for theory development and research on total quality."

"Management theory is a multidisciplinary academic field, whose links to practice are controversial (eg, Astley & Zammuto, 1992; Barley, Meyer, & Gash, 1988; Hambrick, 1994)."

"Brand loyal behavior is defined as the overt act of selective repeat purchasing based on evaluative psychological decision processes, while brand loyal attitudes are the underlying predisposition to behave in such a selective fashion."

"The succes of a brand on the long term is not based on a number of consumers that buy it once, but on the number of consumers who become regular buyers of the brand."

"Human relations today has its iconoclasts and believers, critics and supporters, detractors and zealots. This is not surprising; for during the past twenty years, numerous research groups have burgeoned, and many individual investigators have become most active in the field. There has been a fantastic outpouring of professional and popular books and articles, untold new or revised college and university offerings, a plethora of in-plant training courses, a growing number of training laboratories and seminars, and a seemingly ever-increasing schedule of meetings and speeches—all concerned, in whole or in part, with "human relations.""

"The term "human relations" is being used to denote a field of inquiry - one which cuts across the jurisdictional boundaries of traditional social sciences in an effort to avoid fragmented, compartmentalized, or partial approaches to human problems."

"[The human relations movement ] will bring to bear existing and newly developed theories, methods, and techniques of the relevant social sciences upon the study of inter- and intrapersonal phenomena, ranging fully from the personality dynamics of individuals at one extreme to the relations of cultures at the other."

"In recent years the areas of leadership, training, and organization have increasingly challenged theorists, researchers, and practitioners. Evidence of this has been a growing literature from many disciplines and approaches. Without self-consciously determining the long-range directions of our work, we have found ourselves challenged by these issues and contributing to this literature."

"If they can see them as forces that consciously or unconsciously influence their behavior, they can better understand what makes them prefer to act in a given way. And understanding this, they can often make themselves more effective."

"Each type of action is related to the degree of authority used by the boss and to the amount of freedom available to subordinates in reaching decisions. The actions seen on the extreme left characterize managers who maintain a high degree of control while those seen on the extreme right characterize managers who release a high degree of control."

"Leadership is interpersonal influence, exercised in a situation, and directed, through the communication process, toward the attainment of a specified goal or goals."

"The theme of this book, and the underlying premise of the external perspective on organizations, is that organizational activities and outcomes are accounted for by the context in which the organization is embedded."

"The criticality of a resource can be measured as the ability of an organization to function in the absence of the resource or in the absence of the market for the output."

"There is one word that best describes Jerry Salancik: mischievous. He was always full of mischief and brought an attitude and spirit of fun and playfulness to his research and colleagues that made life interesting and stimulating."

"The term rationalize refers to any situations in which a person's action is described with reference to some supporting reason or cause. The term “legitimate” refers to one criterion by which rationalizations are selected from the many possible explanations for action. Justifications or rationalizations are selected primarily when they are acceptable explanations in a given social context. This means they fit with the facts as known according to the rules of behavior generally followed."

"People as adaptive organisms adjust their behavior and beliefs to the social context and to the reality of their own past and present behavior and situation."

"Bob Tannenbaum’s intellectual work described organizational systems not as machines with interchangeable human parts, but as living communities that can be designed to enable people to grow and learn while achieving business goals. His writings, as well as his teaching and consulting, reflected the value he placed on people, and his belief that, to a great extent, leadership effectiveness derives from awareness of one’s own basic assumptions about human nature and the testing out and revision of those assumptions."

"BEHAVIORAL THEORIES OF THE FIRM: A turn from structure to internal processes was the theme of authors such as Richard Cyert and James March, Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn, and Karl Weick... All but one... was a psychologist by education, so it should not be surprising that their view of organization theory emphasizes internal processes and resembles the micro approach of organizational behavior. Another group of theorists, all but one educated as a sociologist, viewed organizations as a product of macro environmental forces. These behavioralists were Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik, Michael Hannan and John Freeman, and John Meyer and Richard Scott. Pfeffer (the only non-sociologist) and Salancik presented a resource-dependent theory that postulates that organizations require support from their external environment and can only survive to the extent that this support is forthcoming. Managers form coalitions to gather support in an open system of external relationships in which there are constraints that create either a munificent or scarce resource situation."

"The most frequently encountered view of commitment in organizations is one having to do with an individual's psychological bond to the organization."

"Two contributors to explicitness are the observability of the act and the unequivocality of the act. Some acts are not observable and we may know them only by inference from assumed consequences. You leave a dollar bill on a checkout counter, turn away for a moment, then find it missing. The consequence is obvious, but do you know if the customer next to you took it or if it was carried away by a draft from the open door? Acts themselves can be equivocal, forgotten, or otherwise intractable."

"Commitment is a state of being in which an individual becomes bound by his actions and through this actions to beliefs that sustain his activities and his own involvement."

"The effects of subunit power on organizational decision making and the bases of subunit power are examined in a large midwestern state university. It is hypothesized that subunits acquire power to the extent that they provide resources critical to the organization and that power affects resource allocations within organizations in so far as the resource is critical to the subunits and scarce within the organization. Departmental power is found to be most highly correlated with the department's ability to obtain outside grants and contracts, with national prestige and the relative size of the graduate program following closely in importance. Power is used most in the allocation of graduate university fellowships, the most critical and scarce resource, and is unrelated to the allocation of summer faculty fellowships, the least critical and scarce resource."

"Democratically elected worker representatives cannot get away with symbolic or partially diffused innovations; they will be thrown out of office. They will demand that the program be 39 either abandoned or institutionalized and spread to cover more of their constituents"

"The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge."

"The importance of top management commitment to organizational change is so well accepted that it is almost cliché to repeat the fact. We would therefore expect managerial values to be just as important in this area as in others that require strategic direction and leadership."

"Success ruins everything.Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Christina T. Fong. "The business school ‘business’: Some lessons from the US experience." Journal of management studies 41.8 (2004): 1501-1520."

"Unions are an essential part of the democratic fabric of society, but they are not necessarily desirable or acceptable `in my firm or on my property."

"Nearly fifty years ago... Douglas McGregor launched a debate over how to manage The Human Side of the Enterprise. By comparing what he called Theory X and Theory Y perspectives, he challenged the management profession to reexamine its assumptions about the motivations employees bring to their jobs. The question was: Could employees be trusted and empowered to do good work, or did they have to be closely directed, monitored, and controlled to act in the interests of the firm? While McGregor’s Theory Y sparked important innovations in human resource practices, it did not challenge fundamental assumptions underpinning the 20th Century organizational model. If, as is widely recognized, human capital and knowledge are the most important sources of value for the 21st Century organization, then fundamental assumptions about the relationship between work and organizations will also need to be challenged."

"This article outlines a approach to explain . In comparison with need-satisfaction and expectancy models of job attitudes and motivation, the social information processing perspective emphasizes the effects of context and the consequences of past choices, rather than individual predispositions and rational decision-making processes. When an individual develops statements about attitudes or needs, he or she uses social information - information about past behavior and about what others think. The process of attributing attitudes or needs from behavior is itself affected by commitment processes, by the saliency and relevance of information, and by the need to develop socially acceptable and legitimate rationalizations for actions. Both attitudes and need statements, as well as characterizations of jobs, are affected by informational social influence. The implications of the social information processing perspective for organization development efforts and programs of job redesign are discussed."

"Employee participation cannot and will not be divorced from other human resource practices and organisational strategies. The implication of this argument is that we need to look at the total set of organisational strategies and assess their effects on performance."

"In the organizational sciences (e.g., organizational behavior, organizational psychology), one of the more misunderstood terms is “organizational theory.” To some, organizational theory is a field of study; to others, it is the process of using metaphors to describe organizational processes... or it represents an attempt to determine the best way to organize work organizations. The term is used to indicate all of these things, but an “organizational theory” is really just a way of organizing purposeful human action. Given the diversity of purposeful human endeavors, there are numerous ways to organize them, and, hence, a great many organizational theories."