Beautiful Action in Organizations

Brett Jordan (CC BY 2.0)

They’re not always readily apparent, but they make an impact: those small moments in organizations when everything works perfectly and something beautiful is created.

A new study in the Journal of Management Inquiry (JMI) argues that researchers need to understand these moments of beauty– and the unique skills in which they are rooted–in order to advance management practice and address complex problems in the field. Steven S. Taylor of Worcester Polytechnic Institute published “Little Beauties: Aesthetics, Craft Skill, and the Experience of Beautiful Action” on May 17, 2012 in JMI. To see other OnlineFirst articles, click here.

The abstract:

Beautiful action in organizations comes from exceptional craft skill and focuses us on exceptional management skill. Beautiful management action tends to be particular and local—It may only be experienced by a single person within the organization. I call such small moments “little beauties” and offers three examples from a small organization. I conclude that little beauties provide a way to find and inquire into instances of exceptional craft skill and thus offer a Positive Organizational Scholarship approach to practice.

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 online? Then click here!

New Human Resource Development Review OnlineFirst Articles

Human Resource Development Review has four new articles available on OnlineFirst! They can be viewed here.

The most recent article, “Reverse Mentoring: A Social Exchange Tool for Keeping the Boomers Engaged and Millennials Committed” was published by Sanghamitra Chaudhuri, University of Minnesota, and Rajashi Ghosh, Drexel University Philadelphia, on August 23rd, 2011.

The abstract:

The aging of the workforce and the concurrent advent of the Millennials represent a major demographic and sociological phenomenon that can have dominant implications for organizations, as a whole. This presents a situation, where the Boomers and Millennials will be working together for the next decade or so. In the wake of mass scale retrenchments and economic upheaval, this is creating a greater urgency for HRD professionals to focus more attention on not only retaining this amalgamated workforce but also on keeping them actively engaged. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to propose reverse mentoring as a social exchange tool, which will leverage the expertise of both generations, that is, Boomers and Millennials, respectively, by being perceptive of their different needs, value systems, and work demands. We conclude by emphasizing different outcomes of reverse mentoring program for Boomers and Millennials and identify areas for future research.

To view this article, and others in OnlineFirst, please follow this link. The most recent issue, September 2011, of Human Resource Development Review can be seen here.