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Data were collected from the managers of 77 groups in a large service organization and a large manufacturing organization. The results revealed that the relation between group control over decision making and group performance became more positive with increased levels of task interdependence. The main implication of the findings is that increasing group control over decisions may result in high performance only for groups that are highly task interdependent. The performance of groups that are low in task interdependence may suffer when provided with group-level control of decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While cultural fit has been acknowledged to be a potentially important factor in mergers and acquisitions, the concept has been ill-defined. Hence, its relationships to other human aspects in mergers have not been rigorously examined. Further, the relationships between cultural differences and other human factors to the effectiveness of the integration process and financial performance have not been subject to rigorous research that use relatively large samples of mergers and acquisitions. The present study assesses the role of corporate cultural fit, autonomy removal, and commitment of managers to the merger in predicting effective integration between merger partners in different industry sectors. The relationships between, and role of, these variables are found to be complex; they vary across industries and have different relationships with different measures of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the controversy between universal and contingent approaches to corporate change, a study was undertaken of 13 service sector organizations. The study used the Dunphy/Stace contingency model of organizational change strategies, developing measures to place the organizations within the model. Results indicate that universal models of change management are inadequate to describe the diversity of approaches actually used by these organizations. In particular, the traditional Organizational Development model is unrepresentative of how change in many contemporary organizations is actually made. The traditional OD model prescribes incremental change combined with a participative management style but most organizations in the study made rapid transformative change using a directive leadership style. The OD model is also inadequate as a prescriptive model because very different change strategies, some dramatically different from OD, resulted in successful financial performance. Four case studies are presented to illustrate how each of the major contingencies in the model can operate to create effective organizational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a model of executive leadership consisting of four competing roles: Vision Setter, Motivator, Analyzer, and Task Master. These four roles are operationalized and hypotheses are then tested concerning their relationships to three dimensions of firm performance using data collected from a sample of 916 top managers. Results suggest that CEOs with high "behavioral complexity"-the ability to play multiple, competing roles-produce the best firm performance, particularly with respect to business performance (growth and innovation) and organizational (stakeholder) effectiveness. Executive leadership role had little to do with firms' financial performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the behavior of managers of sub-units in a hospital using their subordinates as untrained observers. The study was conducted in a large hospital in the southwestern U.S. administered by a governmental agency. The hospital is divided into approximately 15 different divisions. The size of the sub-units varies from 2-34. All 93 sub-units of the hospital were included in the study. Due to the lack of performance data for a number of sub!units including all the administrative staff sub-units, only 68 sub-units were available for analysis when performance was used as the criterion variable. The procedure used for collecting the observational data of the mastery and frequency of managerial behaviors was a structured questionnaire distributed to all employees. For the analysis herein, only the data from the subordinates is used for both empirical and theoretical considerations. Empirically, the use of subordinate or superior reports could avoid the introduction of inaccuracies associated with bias self-reports. Furthermore, subordinate observations have previously been found to be more discriminating than either self- or superior observations relative to effectiveness. Theoretically, subordinates normally have more opportunities to observe the array of managerial behaviors of interest in this study than superiors. In addition, a manager's behavior may change depending on whether the observer is the superior or the subordinates.