Organizational Behavior

77: Job Design – Hackman & Oldham

June 8, 2021 Pedro Monteiro
We discuss a 1975 article by J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham in the Journal of Applied Psychology titled, “Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey.” The purpose of the instrument was to help managers increase the motivational potential of jobs. They developed the JDS through the studies of existing jobs to determine what makes a job motivating and also how to improve the motivating potential of jobs from how they are defined and described. It remains a seminal reading in job design today. With Special Guest Lisa Cohen from McGill University.

68: Globalization and Culture Clashes — “American Factory” (Documentary)

September 8, 2020 Tom Galvin
For this episode, we cover a documentary that presents a compelling picture about culture clashes in the workplace. American Factory is an important and powerful documentary, telling the story of cultural clashes and labor-management relations as a Chinese firm re-opened and re-purposed a close automotive plant in Ohio.

66: Workplace Isolation – Forester

July 16, 2020 Ella Hafermalz
In this episode (which took place in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic), we explore the social and emotional impacts to the worker on having to work from home. For some workers, the concept of telework is hardly new. But many other vocations place great value on regular social contact with clients and customers. These include teachers, doctors, lawyers, public servants, and many others. The sudden thrust to teleworking for an unknown period of time has raised questions as to how these workers are coping with the new normal.

64: Disasters and Crisis Management – Powley and Weick

May 12, 2020 Ralph Soule
Crises and disasters are regular occurrences in organizational life, putting leaders into the spotlight and organizations under tremendous pressure to respond appropriately -- whether it is to preserve life or salvage reputations. With the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, we wanted to discuss some important texts on organizational crises and their management, and in this episode we present two -- from Karl Weick studying the Tenerife air disaster and Edward Powley on activating organizational resilience.

61: Power & Influence in Organizations — Dan Brass

February 11, 2020 Pedro Monteiro
What is power and influence? Although power appears as a multilevel concept, the early organizational literature tended to view it as wielded by people--measured as skills, traits, or competencies. This would change in the 1980s, in large part to a classic empirical study providing evidence that one's position within an organizational structure was more likely to translate into one's source of power. Dan Brass' article, "Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an Organization" from Administrative Science Quarterly is the subject of this episode.

59: Theory X and Y – Douglas McGregor

December 2, 2019 Tom Galvin
In this episode, we examine Douglas McGregor's most famous work, The Human Side of Enterprise, that proposed two "theories" encapsulating management assumptions about human behavior. His Theory X described the dominant thinking of the 1950s, where managers held a dim view of employees, who were assumed to be disinclined to work and had to be coerced into doing so. McGregor felt that Theory X led to adversarial relationships between managers and workers, resulting in poorer performance and an unhealthy environment. His Theory Y saw employees as wishing to be challenged and fulfilled if properly empowered and engaged.

57: Reward Systems – Steven Kerr

October 21, 2019 Tom Galvin
Why do organizations espouse one thing but do another? This is essentially what Steven Kerr asks in his popular 1975 article in the Academy of Management Journal, "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B," on reward systems. Using examples ranging from politics and war to business and public sector settings, Kerr found a common pattern: that the organization's goals are too often not supported by the things they actually reward and encourage.

56: Cooperative Advantage – Charles Clinton Spaulding

July 16, 2019 Pedro Monteiro
In this episode, we acknowledge the extraordinary contributions of Charles Clinton Spaulding, an important management thought leader who, like many African-Americans prior to the U.S. civil rights movement, has been sadly overlooked in the management canon. In 1927, with the U.S. in recession, Spaulding wrote a reflection of his experiences as a business leader in the Pittsburgh Courier, a widely-read newspaper, hoping to help fellow African-American business leaders overcome the economic downturn.

55: Group Dynamics and Foundations of Organizational Change – Kurt Lewin

May 22, 2019 Tom Galvin
We discuss Kurt Lewin's article, "Frontiers in Group Dynamics," that makes a strong case for treating the social sciences on the same level with the natural sciences--previously, social science was considered neither rigorous nor valid. Using metaphors from physics, Lewin explains social phenomena in tangible, physical terms and explains how individuals within a social space interact in ways that could be measured similarly to physical or chemical phenomenon.

54: Measuring Organizational Cultures – Hofstede

May 2, 2019 Tom Galvin
We cover Hofstede's classic 1990 paper, "Measuring Organizational Cultures: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study Across Twenty Cases." Through surveys and interviews among members of twenty units within ten large organizations, Geert Hofstede's team proposed six distinct determinants of organizational culture that could be compared and contrasted across all organizations.