Management and Marketing - Research Publications
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ItemBetween fit and flexibility? The benefits of high-performance work practices and leadership capability for innovation outcomes(Wiley, 2021-04-01)The idea that human resource management (HRM) plays a strategic role in generating sustainable competitive advantage for organisations or intermediate outcomes such as innovation is a central tenet in HRM theory and research. Yet, the explanation for this relationship remains unclear. We contribute to understanding how HRM plays a role by integrating insights drawn from HRM and strategic management. We explore how configurations of high‐performance work systems (HPWS) and leadership competence (LC) provide micro‐foundations for organisational capabilities associated with innovation. We also examine the moderating role of external environmental conditions. We find support for the proposition that HPWS and LC contribute to capabilities associated with innovation. Importantly, in stable environments, the formation of the capabilities required for innovation is more strongly associated with HPWS, whereas in more dynamic environments, LC plays a more pronounced role. These findings have implications for understanding the strategic role HRM plays and for management practice.
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ItemBringing the Leader Back in: Why, How, and When Leadership Empowerment Behavior Shapes Coworker Conflict(SAGE Publications, 2020)With the diffusion of team-based work organizations and flatter organizational hierarchies, many leaders empower employees to perform their work. Empowerment creates an interesting tension regarding coworker conflict, enhancing trust and giving employees more autonomy to prevent conflict, while also increasing workload and the potential for coworker conflict. Recent conflict research has focused on how characteristics of individuals, groups, and tasks contribute to conflict among coworkers. We extend this work by exploring the role of leader empowerment behavior (LEB) in influencing coworker conflict. Our model integrates research on LEB and coworker conflict to help organizations manage coworker conflict effectively. To test our model at the workplace level, we utilize data drawn from matched surveys of leaders and employees in 317 workplaces. We find that LEB relates negatively to relationship and task conflict through affective and cognitive trust in leaders. We further find that LEB relates negatively to relationship and task conflict through reduced workload, but only when employees have a clear role description. In contrast, if employees have unclear roles, LEB has a U-curve relationship with workload: a moderate level of LEB reduces workload, but a high level of LEB increases workload, in turn increasing coworker conflict. Finally, relationship conflict has a direct negative effect on task performance, whereas task conflict has an indirect negative effect through relationship conflict.
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ItemConfronting the Crisis of Confidence in Management Studies: Why Senior Scholars Need to Stop Setting a Bad Example(Academy of Management, 2019-06-01)There is an emerging crisis of confidence in management studies. This is expressed in growing disquiet about the lack of value in our research outputs and increasing frustration about the nature of teaching in business schools. This crisis of confidence can be understood as a response to a series of developments, including an apparent lack of practical or academic impact from most published research, a narrowing of focus in the field, increases in unethical behaviour, a downgrading of teaching and increased pressure in both publishing and teaching. Traditional academic values are coming into conflict with processes of rationalisation in business schools and universities. The changes driving these outcomes are long-run and reflect powerful institutional pressures, rendering them difficult to change. Nonetheless, established management studies scholars have a responsibility to address them. One way that they can show leadership in this regard is by setting a good example. Three suggestions can be made about how to do this: a rejection of the fiction that what we do is analogous to laboratory science; a rejection of the myth of what this essay calls ‘the heroic workaholic publishing machine’; and a refusal to promote flawed approaches to assessing academic success.
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ItemEmployee responses to 'high performance work system' practices: an empirical test of the disciplined worker thesis(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2010-12)This article considers the possibility that ‘high performance work system’ (HPWS) practices generate positive outcomes for employees by meeting their interests (specifically their interest in an orderly and predictable working environment). Utilising survey data on employees working in the Australian aged-care industry, statistical analysis is used to test the mediating effect of order and predictability on associations between HPWS practices and employee experience of work. The results suggest that positive outcomes arise in part because HPWS practices contribute to workplace order and predictability. In explaining this finding, the article highlights the importance of contextual factors, notably industry and employee characteristics, in shaping outcomes. The article concludes that socio-logically oriented analyses which apprehend the importance of employee interests provide a useful supplement to conventional psychologically oriented accounts of HPWS and provide a basis for continued development of labour process theory.
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ItemWork, organisation and Enterprise Resource Planning systems: an alternative research agenda(WILEY, 2006-11)This paper reviews literature that examines the design, implementation and use of Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs). It finds that most of this literature is managerialist in orientation, and concerned with the impact of ERPs in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and business performance. The paper seeks to provide an alternative research agenda, one that emphasises work‐ and organisation‐based approaches to the study of the implementation and use of ERPs.
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ItemOnline consultation: E-Democracy and E-Resistance in the Case of the Development Gateway(SAGE Publications, 2005-01-01)To explore the implications of the Internet for the relationship between organizational communication and power, this article compares two online forums established in response to the introduction of a new e-organization: the Development Gateway. The article analyzes postings to the forums to explore the capacity of the Internet to foster democracy, and to investigate how power and resistance are exercised through this medium. Findings show that, rather than equate resistance with participation, as some models of democracy do, the dynamics of power and resistance are more complex, and resistance and power can take participative and nonparticipative forms.!
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ItemManagement Reactions to Technological Change The Example of Enterprise Resource Planning(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2006-03)This article explores how different types of managers respond to large-scale organizational change and what factors underpin differences in management attitudes and reactions. Through qualitative analysis of the introduction of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in two case study organizations, the authors argue that variations in managerial responses to organizational change relate to both the structural position of individual managers and their level of involvement in the implementation of change. Managers are also shown to exhibit agency in interpreting, influencing, and negotiating the impact of organizational change. The analysis emphasizes the need to incorporate more critical perspectives informed by labor process theory with existing insights from conventional organizational change literature.
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ItemHigh performance work systems and employee experience of work in the service sector: The case of aged care(WILEY, 2007-09)Abstract In spite of the growing body of research on high performance work systems (HPWS), there is little evidence on their application in the service sector. It is commonly argued, however, that occupational segmentation in services is a barrier to HPWS. Analysis of data from aged‐care workers indicates that: HPWS have positive outcomes for workers; highly skilled nurses are no more likely than lowly skilled personal care workers to be subject to HPWS; and in some cases, HPWS are associated with more positive outcomes for low‐skilled than high‐skilled workers. These findings suggest that HPWS may well be widely applicable in service settings.
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ItemFiring blanks? An analysis of discursive struggle in HRM(WILEY, 2004-05)ABSTRACT We revisit Karen Legge's (2001) critique of HRM in which she argues that the attempt of modernist/positivist HRM research to show that HRM improves organizational performance is a ‘spent round’. We note that despite spirited challenges by Legge and others, the discourse of HRM is becoming increasingly dominant. Accordingly, we use discourse analysis to examine why this might be the case. Specifically, we analyse the texts produced in the engagement between Karen Legge and David Guest to show how modernist/positivist texts like those of Guest have been successful in constructing an identity for HRM and embedding it in the broader academic discourse concerning the employment relationship, while critical researchers like Legge face a number of difficulties in producing ‘counter‐texts’.