Who Is a Leader?

As SIOP 2013 draws near, we’re highlighting industrial-organizational psychology perspectives on management topics. Today, we look at “Five Perspectives on the Leadership– Management Relationship: A Competency- Based Evaluation and Integration,” published by Daniel V. Simonet and Robert P. Tett, both of the University of Tulsa, in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies on December 12, 2012:

How management and leadership are best conceptualized with respect to each other has been a frequent topic of debate. Five distinct perspectives are identified in the literature, including bipolar, unidimensional, bidimensional, hierarchical— management within leadership, and hierarchical—leadership within management. We assessed the viability of these perspectives by having Academy of Management and Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology experts (N = 43) map a comprehensive set of 63 managerial and leadership competencies, as a “common language,” onto defined and undefined management and leadership dimensions. Results reveal interpretable patterns of uniqueness and overlap, suggesting a hybrid co-dimensional/bidimensional configuration. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of the precedence of “what” over “how” in developing leadership and management theory.

Click here to continue reading “Five Perspectives on the Leadership– Management Relationship: A Competency- Based Evaluation and Integration,” published by Daniel V. Simonet and Robert P. Tett in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, and stay tuned for more related research ahead of #SIOP13.

Why Status Matters In Organizations

In the latest issue of Administrative Science Quarterly, Rodrigo Canales of the Yale School of Management published a book review of “Status in Management and Organizations,” edited by Jone L. Pearce:

That people and organizations care about status should not be a controversial assertion. In many cases, status is important because it arises directly from merit: a Nobel Prize is a powerful signal of status that grants the recipient visibility and respect, but it also recognizes “objective” merit. Yet status is not only and not always a consequence of merit. Examples of companies that benefit from high status yet offer relatively lower quality products abound. Teams often neglect their most experienced members and rely disproportionately on members with less relevant experience but higher status on other, less relevant characteristics.

If status matters for individuals, for groups, and for organizations, then it is not a surprise that scholars from a number of disciplines have studied it. The sheer variety of settings, methodologies, and theoretical groundings that have been used to demonstrate its impact on important outcomes confirms status as a critical element of organizational life. The same variety also makes it extremely difficult for researchers, let alone for practitioners, to navigate the concept and, more important, to develop a comprehensive intuition for why, when, and how it should matter. For that reason alone, Pearce’s edited volume, Status in Management and Organizations, is a welcome contribution.

Click here to read on in Administrative Science Quarterly, and follow this link to receive e-alerts about new book reviews and the latest theoretical and empirical papers on organizational studies from ASQ.

Still Crazy After All These Years: JMI Turns 20

The Journal of Management Inquiry (JMI) is turning 20!

To celebrate the occasion, JMI released a special anniversary issue in December 2011, featuring a selection of reprinted articles that are meant to capture the journal’s identity. Representing a range of genres and topics from the world of scholarship, education, and practice, the articles are accompanied by commentaries from scholars who are connected with their respective themes or ideas.

Reflecting on the history and impact of JMI, Kimberly B. Boal and Christine Quinn Trank authored the introductory essay, “Journal of Management Inquiry at 20: Still Crazy After All These Years.” To access all articles in this special issue, please click here.

From the essay:

We think it makes sense to use this anniversary to make note of the love and forbearance required to get to 20 because JMI is hard. In the thicket of journals participating in the citation chase, JMI is resolutely different. We won’t pretend that citations aren’t just as important to us as they are to other journals, but there is something about JMI and the people who publish in it, edit it, review for it, and read it that tells us that these people who virtually populate JMI care deeply about the issues that are discussed in her pages, and willingly participate in the work and courage it takes to break frames. That’s why JMI is hard. Our authors often go out on a limb and take the editors with them (and sometimes authors aren’t far enough out on a limb, and the reviewers and editors must nudge them further).

To learn more about the Journal of Management Inquiry, please follow this link.

Are you interested in receiving email alerts whenever a new article or issue becomes available? Then click here!

Free Trial to SAGE Marketing Content

To celebrate the Winter Marketing Educators’ Conference of the American Marketing Association, SAGE is pleased to offer access to our Marketing journals via a free trial through March 19th, as well as links to our other Marketing and Management products. See below for details.

Register for a free trial to SAGE journals in Marketing and Hospitality.

Calls for Papers – View a full list of SAGE journals to read Aims & Scope and manuscript submission guidelines by journal.

SAGE Business and Management Journals, includes Marketing, in the 2010 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2011) – View highlights from the 2010 report.

SAGE Open – a new open-access publication from SAGE – publishes peer-reviewed, original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities.

Marketing Journals: Click to Access Marketing Journals

Marketing Journal Rankings: Read the most-viewed post on Management INK from the Journal of Marketing Education.  Source: “A Comprehensive Analysis of Marketing Journal Rankings” by Michelle D. Steward and Bruce R. Lewis.

Marketing Books: Click to Access Marketing Books

Don’t miss these new texts: International Marketing by Daniel W. Baack, Eric G. Harris and Donald Baack; and Social Marketing: Influencing Behaviors for Good, Fourth Edition by Nancy R. Lee and Philip Kotler

Management Journals:

Click to Access Management Journals

Management Books:

Click to Access Management Books

Additional Resources:

SAGE Leadership Solutions

SAGE Research Methods

We hope to see you at the AMA Winter Marketing Educators’ meeting. Whether you’re able to attend or not, feel free to use these resources with our compliments.

Faster Route to the CEO Suite: Nepotism or Managerial Proficiency?

Carlo Salvato, Alessandro Minichilli and Raffaella Piccarreta, all of Bocconi University, published “Faster Route to the CEO Suite: Nepotism or Managerial Proficiency?” on December 5th, 2011 in Family Business Review. To view other OnlineFirst articles, please click here.

The abstract:

The aim of this article is to investigate the differences between the careers of CEOs in family and nonfamily firms and the differences between the careers of family and nonfamily CEOs within family firms. Extant literature focuses on the family or nonfamily nature of firm leadership, especially around CEOs’ transitions. It predicts that agency considerations prevail in favoring the appointment of family members and insiders as CEOs and in granting them faster and quicker careers. In contrast, detailed analysis of the entire careers of 100 CEOs—from their graduation to their first appointment as CEO—shows that the accumulation of human capital throughout a manager’s career prevails over agency considerations in predicting CEO appointments.

To learn more about Family Business Review, please follow this link.

Are you interested in receiving email alerts whenever a new article or issue becomes available? Then click here!

Part 3 of 5: “What is Work-Life Balance?”

Today we’re continuing our special series of posts on Work-Life Balance. We hope you find the series insightful and thought-provoking.

How can we define “Work-Life Balance?” See the articles below from SAGE’s management portfolio to find the answer.

Cynthia A. Thompson, Baruch College, published “Managing the Work-Life Balancing Act: An Introductory Exercise” in the April 2002 issue of the Journal of Management Education.

Although work-life balance is an important issue for individuals and organizations, most organizational behavior textbooks devote only a few paragraphs to the topic or do not include it at all. This activity was designed to introduce or complement a lecture on work-life balance and does so by asking the students to consider work-life balance from both a personal and managerial point of view. The objective of the exercise is to demonstrate that employees’needs and interests are not necessarily in opposition to the organization’s interests and that working together to resolve work-life conflict can benefit both the employee and the organization.

Natalie Reiter, Roy Morgan Research, published “Work Life Balance: What DO You Mean? The Ethical Ideology Underpinning Appropriate Application” in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.

This article categorizes definitions of work life balance (WLB) according to a framework of ethical ideologies. By understanding what perspective the definition of WLB is framed within, practitioners and academics will be better able to assess the suitability of that definition for a particular application. Although many current definitions are absolutist in nature, dictating a “right” balance that all should aspire to, the author argues that definitions reflecting a situationalist perspective are most valuable to academics and practitioners. Definitions from a situationalist perspective offer an opportunity to explore what factors contribute to attainment of WLB for particular groups of people. Once there are broadly agreed definitions of WLB for groups of people, relevant measures of WLB and WLB initiatives that respond to these definitions can be developed. This will provide a baseline for the comparative analysis of WLB programs. Implications for organization development interventions and change management practice are explored.

Heather S. McMillan, Southeast Missouri State University, Michael Lane Morris and E. Kate Atchley, both of University of Tennessee, published “Constructs of the Work/ Life Interface: A Synthesis of the Literature and Introduction of the Concept of Work/Life Harmony” in the March 2011 issue of Human Resource Development Review.

The purpose of this article is to identify construct definitions and measurement tools for the work/life interface concepts: conflict, enrichment, and balance. An understanding of these concepts is critical to HRD professionals because interventions designed to counter work/life interface issues cannot be strategically created, and culture changes cannot be effectively addressed until the discipline understands the nature and the organizational implications of employees’ work/life interface. A new construct called work/life harmony and the work/life harmony model are introduced to aid in the understanding of the work/life interface.

Carl P. Maertz, Jr., Saint Louis University, and Scott L. Boyar, University of Alabama at Birmingham, published “Work-Family Conflict, Enrichment, and Balance under ”Levels” and ”Episodes” Approaches” in the January 2011 issue of Journal of Management.

In this review, the authors differentiate work–family (WF) research that conceptualizes and measures conflict as a consolidated level versus as a conflict event or episode. They critique the “levels” literature in the areas of conflict, enrichment, and balance. They next review the WF “episodes” literature for the first time. They then introduce a framework that clarifies definitional inconsistencies and integrates the key constructs in the WF literature in a new way. This framework proposes that an employee’s mental conceptualizations relevant to WF roles can be discrepant with actual role enactment or with another mental conceptualization. These discrepancies form one’s level of WF balance or imbalance. The authors recommend that researchers adopt WF balance as the central levels construct, which changes primarily through the occurrence of WF conflict episodes and WF enrichment episodes. They finally discuss research and practical implications of this framework.

Joseph G. Grzywacz and Dawn S. Carlson published “Conceptualizing Work–Family Balance: Implications for Practice and Research” in the November 2007 issue of Advances in Developing Human Resources.

The problem and the solution. Systematic theorizing about work–family balance has not kept pace with interest, which undermines organizations’ abilities to effectively monitor work–family balance and to use work–family balance strategically. The goal of this article is to develop a better conceptual understanding of work–family balance.Work–family balance is defined as accomplishment of role related expectations that are negotiated and shared between an individual and his or her role-related partners in the work and family domains. This article elaborates on how this definition of work–family balance addresses limitations of previous conceptualizations and describes areas for human resource development research and implications for using work–family balance strategically in management practice.

See the next section for specific examples of work-life balance in action!

Academy of Management Africa Conference

Join the Academy of Management on January 7-10, 2013 for their Africa Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Gordon Institute of Business Science at the University of Pretoria will be hosting this conference.

The purpose of this conference is to bring Africa’s unique capabilities and needs to the attention of the world’s organization and management scholars and at the same time, to provide an opportunity for interested colleagues to collaborate and work on the many interesting theoretical and practical problems presented in Africa.

Conference themes:

• Navigating Institutions: Business, Government, and Civil Society
• Emerging Market Firms and MNCs: Characteristics and Global Aspirations
• Base of the Pyramid: Emerging Market Consumers, Workers, and Managers
• Cultural Diversity and Transformational Societies

Much of the time together will be spent exploring and experiencing many of the region’s challenges first hand. Conference participants will spend one and half days of the four day conference “in the field” directly experiencing South Africa and the phenomena that interest them. The conference themes will orient that exploration through “Experiential Learning Journeys.”

Please look for the Call for Papers in January.

To learn more about this conference, please click here.

Faster Route to the CEO Suite: Nepotism or Managerial Proficiency?

Carlo Salvato, Alessandro Minichilli and Raffaella Piccarreta, all of Bocconi University, published “Faster Route to the CEO Suite: Nepotism or Managerial Proficiency?” on December 5th, 2011 in Family Business Review’s OnlineFirst section. To read other OnlineFirst articles, please click here. Professor Salvato kindly provided the following responses to the article.

What inspired you to be interested in this topic?

Interest in contrasting the careers of CEOs in family vs. non-family firms was prompted by our discomfort with the prevailing view on the drivers of executive promotions in closely-held firms. This view, in our opinion, is founded on wrong assumptions and negative biases against the family firm, which lead to interpret promotions to the top posts as driven more by kinship and nepotism, than by the will to professionalize the firm. Mounting evidence on the superiority of family business performance in some circumstances, and our own experience, prompted us to try to prove these interpretations wrong.

 Were there findings that were surprising to you?

We were extremely surprised by discovering that in our sample the likelihood that a CEO had spent his or her entire career within the same firm was much higher in non-family, than in family firms. This empirical evidence contradicts years of bias against family firms that are too often seen as promoting paternalistic hiring and promotion practices. More broadly, it was surprising to discover that no peculiar career patterns of executive careers could be devised in family firms. Rather, it seems that family firms promote promotion practices at the executive level that are very similar to those of their non-family counterparts, and that are driven more by the need to grow competent human resources, than to favor insiders and kinship members.

How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?

As we highlight in our concluding remarks, we believe our results may contribute to offering a more balanced view of hiring and promotion practices at the executive level in family firms. More specifically, we believe scholars may be inspired by our results to consider a broader palette of variables in investigating executive appointments in family firms. In particular, besides the usual variables related to family ownership, kinship relationships and tenure, scholars should explicitly consider the endowment of human capital and managerial experience of those who are promoted to top posts, comparing it explicitly with non-family business practices. Related to this, we think our study should prompt scholars to analyze executive careers in a more detailed way, by systematically tracking a large number of career features in each of the years in which the career unfolds.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and do this study again?

 Our research could have been expanded in at least two directions, as it would still be possible in future research. First, we could have tried to collect data on CEO careers in smaller firms than those included in our sample. Although firms in our sample vary in terms of size, and we do consider size as a determinant of career patterns, all firms in our sample are of a relatively large size, and a significant proportion are listed on the stock exchange. Second, we could have incorporated performance measures, linking different career patterns of family and non-family CEOs to their performance as corporate heads, or to the performance of their firms during their tenure.

If you would like to learn more about Family Business Review, please click here.

Are you interested in receiving email alerts whenever a new article or issue becomes available? Then follow this link!

Free SAGE Management Books Giveaway through Monday, December 5th

Just before the holidays, we’d like to brighten your day by offering you the chance to win one of five top SAGE management books.  Whether you’re a researcher, teacher or practitioner— in HR, management, marketing research, leadership, strategy — or a host of other areas, you’ll find these books offer invaluable content from top-notch scholars and practitioners.

Entering the contest is easy. Visit Twitter @SAGEManagement and retweet the relevant tweets for the following books to enter for a chance to win.

Making Strategy: Mapping Out Strategic Success, 2/e by Fran Ackermann and Colin Eden, both at University of Strathclyde, UK • Read a sample chapter

The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, 2/e by James M. Hunt and Joseph R. Weintraub, both at Babson College • Read a sample chapter

Leading Edge Marketing Research: 21^st Century Tools and Practices by Robert J. Kaden, The Kaden Company; Gerald Linda, Gerald Linda & Associates; and Melvin Prince, Southern Connecticut State University • Read a sample chapter

The Humanitarian Leader in Each of Us: 7 Choices That Shape a Socially Responsible Life by Frank LaFasto, Sr. VP Cardinal Health, Retired and Carl Larson, University of Denver • Read a sample chapter Extra: Click here to watch Frank LaFasto, Susie Scott Krabacher and other contributors to the book in conversation at the World of Children awards, hosted by UNICEF, November 1st, 2011 in New York.

The Essential MBA by Susan Miller, University of Durham, UK • Read a sample chapter

Remember to visit Twitter @SAGEManagement to enter for a chance to win one of these excellent resources. And become a follower  of @SAGEManagement for the latest news on SAGE products, as well as general management news items of interest.

Good luck – and thank you for following Management INK.

 

Free SAGE Management Books Giveaway through Monday, December 5th

Just before the holidays, we’d like to brighten your day by offering you the chance to win one of five top SAGE management books.  Whether you’re a researcher, teacher or practitioner— in HR, management, marketing research, leadership, strategy — or a host of other areas, you’ll find these books offer invaluable content from top-notch scholars and practitioners.

Entering the contest is easy. Visit Twitter @SAGEManagement and retweet the relevant tweets from Friday, Dec. 2nd for any of the following books to enter for a chance to win.

Making Strategy: Mapping Out Strategic Success, 2/e by Fran Ackermann and Colin Eden, both at University of Strathclyde, UK • Read a sample chapter

The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, 2/e by James M. Hunt and Joseph R. Weintraub, both at Babson College • Read a sample chapter

Leading Edge Marketing Research: 21^st Century Tools and Practices by Robert J. Kaden, The Kaden Company; Gerald Linda, Gerald Linda & Associates; and Melvin Prince, Southern Connecticut State University • Read a sample chapter

The Humanitarian Leader in Each of Us: 7 Choices That Shape a Socially Responsible Life by Frank LaFasto, Sr. VP Cardinal Health, Retired and Carl Larson, University of Denver • Read a sample chapter Extra: Click here to watch Frank LaFasto, Susie Scott Krabacher and other contributors to the book in conversation at the World of Children awards, hosted by UNICEF, November 1st, 2011 in New York.

The Essential MBA by Susan Miller, University of Durham, UK • Read a sample chapter

Remember to visit Twitter @SAGEManagement to enter for a chance to win one of these excellent resources. And become a follower  of @SAGEManagement for the latest news on SAGE products, as well as general management news items of interest.

Good luck – and thank you for following Management INK.