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A study examining the skills and practices used by boundary-shakers for managing changes like post-merger integration, across-business synergies and developing higher integration in organization structures is presented.

The issues like executive leadership and decision-making behaviors are discussed. The perspective on executive leadership and decision-making behaviors suggests a finer-grained conceptualization of the executive job demands construct and finer-grained conceptualization of executive decision behaviors.

The construct of executive job demands is developed by building work in industrial/organizational psychology. Some of the key implications for strategic choices and leadership behaviors and usefulness of this construct in advancing research on numerous fronts including agency theory, executive compensation, and upper echelons are proposed.

The analyses use several identification strategies and data sources to control for individual ability and determine the casual effect of marital status and computer usage on wages. The empirical results indicate that marital status and computer usage are not important causal determinants of earnings.

The skills required by entrepreneur for performing various tasks such as fund management, hiring workers and marketing are detailed. The educational aspects of entrepreneurs are analyzed.

This case study examines the question of whether or not a chief executive should be retained after one year of poor performance. The four expert commentators address issues such as the duties of a director.

Issues discussed concern organizational sociology and the process of entering and adjusting to a leadership position in a complex organization, focusing on the integration between organization and chief executive officer. The authors argue that this process leads to several types of integration, which are transformation, assimilation, accommodation, and parallelism.

All activities involve a combination of the exercise of skill and the exercise of judgment. This paper distinguishes these types of talent along three dimensions: the ease with which their exercise can be monitored, the delay before its effects are realised, and codifiability of the tasks involved. It then presents a two-period model of the allocation of multiple tasks within an organization. It shows that the incentives for bundling and separation of tasks within such an organization depend on the relative ease of monitoring of the two tasks, as well as on the extent of correlation between the talents they require. It demonstrates that organizations may rationally place 'too much' emphasis on routine tasks, provided these reveal information about talents that may be valuable in nonroutine tasks, and in spite of the fact that the incentives to perform the non-routine tasks well will thereby be blunted. The results are applied to the work of aid-giving agencies, to the role of banks in transition economies and to the structure of incentives within the economics profession.

The paper presents an alternative understanding of managerial work based upon a reconstruction of labor process theory. Drawing upon contemporary studies of management practice, the paper explores the relevance of poststructuralism and an attentiveness to subjectivity to articulate a view of managerial work as the subject and object of the contradictory organization and control of capitalist labor processes. This understanding is illustrated by reference to empirical studies of ICI and is supplemented by interview material drawn from a study of changing management practices in the U.K. KEY WORDS: managerial work; labor process analysis; organizational change; social theory; subjectivity; poststructuralism.

Top class managers achieve success via methods which are not always condoned in management science. Unwritten rules appear to feature often in good management practice even though they may not be officially recognized or encouraged. They very often appeal to others and are accompanied by a rise in status. The guru theory is discussed with relation to Scott-Morgan's (1994) report Unwritten Rules of the Game.

Good business leaders do not have to be strong to succeed. Indeed, managers encourage others to contribute valuable opinions and make fewer mistakes in management if they are open in leadership. Management visions should be flexible in nature and introduced in a mild manner. The team members who challenge the leader's strategy are often viewed as being potential leaders themselves.

Today, the most urgent challenge for most companies is to develop the managers who must operate in the new delayered, horizontal, networked organizations to deliver on their complex, multidimensional strategic priorities. It is here that most companies are facing the greatest difficulties. The reason lies in the historic 'Russian doll model of management' in which managers at each level are expected to play similar roles and have similar responsibilities, only for a different size and scope of activities. The underlying premise that there is a generic management role is being further reinforced by many companies currently engaged in the new fad of identifying a set of desired personal competencies as the anchor for their management development initiatives. This article challenges this Russian doll model of management to argue that managers at different levels of the organization play distinctly different roles and add value in fundamentally different ways. Based on field research in twenty major corporations, the authors identify the roles of front-line, senior, and top-level managers in the new organizational form, and they describe how companies can develop these new managerial competencies. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The quality of managers to be hired is dependent on the type of contracts companies will offer. High quality managers tend to accept contracts that offer lesser degree of dependence of pay on the performance of a company. Such phenomenon exist due to quality managers' confidence that company performance will improve under their management. Low quality managers, meanwhile, have the tendency to decline a performance contingent contract due to lack of confidence on their capabilities to enhance company performance.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals' report on high schools, 'Breaking Ranks: Changing an American Institution,' identifies the principal as the key to high school restructuring. Principals will have to use leadership skills to overcome the barriers of excessive management demands and their changing role.In selecting a principal, importance must be given to management skills, capability of bringing change and knowledge. Since skills alone cannot motivate teachers, schools must search for credible leaders who are capable of gaining teacher, parent and student trust.

Business leaders Richard Branson of Virgin, Percy Barnevik of ABB and Jack Welch of General Electric provide several insights into what makes an effective business leader and therefore a successful organisation. The three men seem to be very different in character and operational codes: Barnevik is an 'operator', Branson a 'builder' and Welch a 'transformer of organisations'. However, there are similarities, including deeply-held values and beliefs which motivate them to spread their vision. Each of the three men also aims to make a positive contribution to society.

The compensation committee of the board of directors is responsible for setting CEO compensation policy. Performance-based stock options have become a large component of most CEO compensation packages. This article satisfies the need for a compensation and performance study that is directed specifically toward corporate board members. Recent developments in stock option compensation are identified and discussed. The results of the empirical section of the article show the existence of a positive association between CEO compensation and corporate performance. Also, the article develops and illustrates a statistical methodology that can be used as a starting point in assessing the reasonableness of the compensation levels of individual CEOs., There is a vast academic literature investigating the association between executive compensation and corporate performance. Literature reviews are provided by Pavlik et al. (1993) and Tosi and Gomez-Mejia (1994). The [...]

The character and conduct of the manager has formed a central focus of attempts to govern economic life throughout the present century. And current programmes of organizational change involve radical attempts to reconstitute the nature and conduct of management. This is attempted through the identification and implementation of management competencies. Discourses of organizational reform such as human resource management, total quality management and business process re-engineering all place a critical emphasis on anti-bureaucratic, organic and flexible forms of organization, which are also seen to require the development of particular capacities and predispositions among managers. Essential to their vision of 'managerial work' is a composite of 'entrepreneurial' attributes. Management competencies appear to offer a congenial method for the reconstitution of the manager along 'entrepreneurial' lines, not simply because they are inherently founded on managers' self-management and self-presentation of identified behaviors, but also because they represent individualized forms of business functions (and are often associated with the establishment of market relations within the organization). (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

A study on CEO remuneration using a sample of UK building societies is presented. The study reinforces the potential for inefficiencies in mutuals. The study identifies age, rather than performance improvements, as the chief personal characteristic that determines an increase in remuneration for CEOs. The study suggests the absence of a mechanism that can align manager and owner interests in UK building societies.