Services Organization (services + organization)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Approaches to career success: An exploration of surreptitious career-success strategies

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2006
Lloyd C. Harris
Theorists have forwarded a vast range of career-success determinants, including sociodemographic, social capital, personality, and other behavioral factors. We suggest that existing studies have overconcentrated on the overt behavioral determinants of career success to the detriment of the covert, clandestine, and concealed. Our analysis of two detailed qualitative case studies involving 112 indepth interviews with executives, managers, supervisors, and front-line staff in a large financial services organization and a medium-sized fashionable restaurant group uncovered five main strategies of surreptitious career success. These strategies are obligation creation and exploitation, personal-status enhancement, information acquisition and control, similarity exploitation, and proactive vertical alignment. Our findings indicate that just over 79% of those interviewed (88 of 112) referred to, at some point in their careers, premeditated strategies to enhance their careers that they concealed from coworkers. Consequently, we argue that surreptitious actions are central to employee career-focused activities and fundamental to a more complete understanding of the complexities of career-oriented employee behavior. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]


Implementing interdisciplinary practice change in an international health-care organization

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NURSING PRACTICE, Issue 4 2009
Anita C Reinhardt PhD RN
The current emphasis on adopting evidence-based practice often results in the need to change interdisciplinary practice. This article describes the successful system-wide change to evidence-based wound care practices in a large, Middle-Eastern health services organization using a multinational workforce. Elements within this change initiative are identified that stimulated experimentation and collaboration among members of this organization's workforce while also preserving culturally determined expectations for authority and decision-making. The result was a system-wide practice change accomplished through consensus-building and interdisciplinary learning while also utilizing the strengths to be found in an established organizational hierarchy. This description of practice change among the members of a multicultural, multinational workforce provides lessons for managing a diversity of perspectives, creating consensus and accomplishing change in an environment where multiple cultural values intersect. [source]


An examination of the curvilinear relationship between leader,member exchange and intent to turnover

JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Issue 4 2005
Kenneth J. Harris
Based on the theoretical identification of three different motivational forces for voluntary turnover,affective, calculative, and alternative,we hypothesize that the relationship between supervisor,subordinate relationship quality (i.e., leader,member exchange) and turnover intentions is best represented as curvilinear as opposed to linear. We test this hypothesis in two organizational samples consisting of 402 employees from a water management district and 183 employees from a distribution services organization. We found support for the hypothesis in both samples. We offer directions for future research. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Implementation Studies: Time for a Revival?

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2 2004
Personal Reflections on 20 Years of Implementation Studies
This paper presents a review of three decades of implementation studies and is constructed in the form of a personal reflection. The paper begins with a reflection upon the context within which the book Policy and Action was written, a time when both governments and policy analysts were endeavouring to systematize and improve the public decision-making process and to place such decision-making within a more strategic framework. The review ends with a discussion about how public policy planning has changed in the light of public services reform strategies. It is suggested that as a result of such reforms, interest in the processes of implementation have perhaps been superseded by a focus upon change management and performance targets. It is further argued that this has resulted in the reassertion of normative, top-down processes of policy implementation. The paper raises points that are important ones and indeed are reflected throughout all four papers in the symposium issue. These are: (1) the very real analytical difficulties of understanding the role of bureaucratic discretion and motivation; (2) the problem of evaluating policy outcomes; and (3) the need to also focus upon micro political processes that occur in public services organizations. In conclusion, the paper emphasizes the continued importance of implementation studies and the need for policy analysts to understand what actually happens at policy recipient level. [source]