家族企业：权杖交给谁？

如今,对第一代富豪尚不知如何看待是好的国人,突然发现社会上又冒出来一批"富豪二代". 很自然,仅靠继承财产而轻松富有,并且顺畅接过父辈手中权杖的人,肯定很快就会进入人们的视线.李海仓之子李兆会已出任海鑫集团"掌门";鲁冠球之子鲁鼎伟,已出任万向总经理;刘永好之女刘畅,已出现在民生银行和金鹰成长基金的股东名单中:左宗申之女左颖,已居ST宗动第一大股东之位,成为中国最年轻的亿万富翁.     

Unfair to whom? Discipline and dismissal in small establishments

This article draws on data collected as part of a project investigating the role of workplace disciplinary and grievance procedures and their influence, if any, on employment tribunal claims of unfair dismissal. It focuses specifically on small firms and small sites of larger firms and examines the question of fairness from two perspectives first, in relation to the managerial treatment of employees in matters of discipline, and secondly, by consideration of whether employment tribunals are unfair to small employers who defend claims.     

Residual affective commitment to organizations: Concept,causes and consequences

Research on affective organizational commitment has largely been conceptually restricted by the temporal boundaries of organizational membership, while only few authors have addressed how individuals may commit to an organization before becoming members. Given that individual careers increasingly span across a greater number of organizations, this restriction limits our ability to capture how employees experience their workplaces throughout their careers. Addressing this gap, this article contributes to the literature on affective commitment by arguing that individuals may remain affectively committed to an organization after having left it. We extend the temporal structure of affective commitment beyond separation by introducing the concept of residual affective commitment, and present a model of how such commitment is formed. We elucidate the interplay between residual and current affective commitment, complementing research on organizational newcomers. Finally, we open up new avenues for research by discussing theoretical consequences of the introduction of residual commitment.     

On the way to creativity: Engineers as intrapreneurs in organizations

Organizations often hide creativity and talent. This paper describes how to make engineers active in the field of intrapreneurship within large firms where they often are employed in R&D. This development is seen, in Europe at least, most desirable by the companies today. Technology has an extensive impact on the society and economy nowadays, and it is important to study how technological innovations appear and who is behind them. Entrepreneurship and organizational intrapreneurship are, in many cases, the basis of technological innovations and firm renewal. Engineers are the company's special professional workforce that has the role to produce and develop innovations. Since the world of high-tech companies needs the cooperation of many experts, engineers must be able to cooperate well with other fields of expertise such as marketing, research and development as well as external suppliers and service providers. Also, innovations today often ask not only for unique technical knowledge but also social knowledge to make these innovations meaningful. In this sense, social innovation parallels technical innovation. Thus, in this paper we explore the origins of the intrapreneurship capacity in engineering settings of hightech firms, thereby concentrating on three issues: Who is the intrapreneur and the engineer-intrapreneur in particular? What kind of managerial and organizational support is required to facilitate the intrapreneur's upcoming? What are the educational and work related consequences for practical intrapreneurship tool development?     

Optimal information transmission in organizations: search and congestion

We propose a stylized model of a problem-solving organization whose internal communication structure is given by a fixed network. Problems arrive randomly anywhere in this network and must find their way to their respective specialized solvers by relying on local information alone. The organization handles multiple problems simultaneously. For this reason, the process may be subject to congestion. We provide a characterization of the threshold of collapse of the network and of the stock of floating problems (or average delay) that prevails below that threshold. We build upon this characterization to address a design problem: the determination of what kind of network architecture optimizes performance for any given problem arrival rate. We conclude that, for low arrival rates, the optimal network is very polarized (i.e. star-like or centralized), whereas it is largely homogenous (or decentralized) for high arrival rates. These observations are in line with a common transformation experienced by information-intensive organizations as their work flow has risen in recent years.     

Researching with whom? Stability and manipulation

This paper explores the existence of stable research teams, when the preferences of each agent depend on the set of researchers who are collaborating. We introduce a property over researchers’ preferences, called top responsiveness, guaranteeing the existence of stable research teams configurations. We also provide a stable mechanism, induced by the so-called top covering algorithm, which is strategy-proof when researchers preferences satisfy top responsiveness. Furthermore, we find that, in this framework, the top covering mechanism is the only strategy-proof mechanism that always selects stable allocations.     

Antecedents to ambidexterity competency in high technology organizations

High tech organizations confront dual demands of exploring new products/processes and exploiting existing products/processes. Research shows that ambidextrous organizations can better manage these dual demands, but our understanding of the antecedents that lead to ambidexterity is still emerging. In addition, previous research has taken a piecemeal approach to understand ambidexterity and does not fully consider its multilevel nature. This research takes a multilevel perspective and argues that a competency in ambidexterity involves three capabilities at different organizational levels: decision risk (strategic level), structural differentiation (project level), and contextual alignment (meso level). After correcting for endogeneity we empirically examine the relationship between these antecedents and ambidexterity competency by collecting multi-level data from 34 high tech business units and 110 exploration and exploitation R&D projects. The results indicate that decision risk and contextual alignment affect ambidexterity competency for high tech organizations. Structural differentiation does not affect ambidexterity competency but has mixed effects on R&D project performance.     

Distance in organizations

There is perhaps no construct that is so fundamental to interpersonal interactions in organizations, yet so incompletely understood, than distance. Part of the difficulty in developing a comprehensive and informed understanding of the role distance plays in organizations is that theory and research in this area have been quite fragmented, focusing on narrow aspects of the construct and lacking the integration necessary to build a more general knowledge base. For example, Graen (1976) has contributed greatly to our understanding of one aspect of distance, presenting a model based on role theory whereby in-group and out-group members are hypothesized to enjoy different rewards, benefit from different leadership behaviors, and experience different levels of satisfaction and performance ratings based on relative closeness (or distance) in their working relationship with their supervisor. Other researchers have explored the phenomena of psychological distance (Rothaus, Morton, & Hanson 1965), spatial distance (Kerr & Jermier 1978; Ferris & Rowland 1985), and physical distance (Sundstrom, Burt, & Kamp 1980; Sundstrom 1986) in the supervisor-subordinate relationship. This research, although a good starting point, does not adequately define or integrate the various aspects of distance in organizations. This article represents an effort to develop a broader and more extensive understanding of the role distance plays in organizations by integrating the various types of distance into a theoretical model. A model of Dyadic Distance in the supervisor-subordinate relationship is presented which develops the new constructs of Dyadic, Psychological, Structural, and Functional Distance, examines their process dynamics and impact on Human Resource Management issues such as performance evaluations and turnover, and proposes needed directions for future research in this important area.     

A decade of change: Managers' attachment to their organizations and their jobs

In this study geographically mobile managers in 1978 were compared to mobile managers in 1989 and significant changes were found in career patterns and attachment to the organization and the job. The managers in 1989 were changing jobs and relocating more frequently than were the 1978 managers. They were also less satisfied with their companies. Job involvement and job satisfaction, however, were higher among the 1989 managers than among the 1978 managers. Retrospectively, the 1989 managers thought they were less loyal to their companies than they had been five years previously. Managers' attachment to their organizations may be tied to challenging jobs that provide career development opportunities; those organizations unwilling or unable to provide such jobs may experience higher managerial turnover.     

The expansive executive: How the drive to mastery helps and hinders organizations

What drives executives has a great deal to do with how they lead. Executives generally are highly motivated to attain mastery—to achieve at a high level, to be exceptionally capable, to be acknowledged as masterful, and so on. An intense drive to mastery is certainly a prerequisite to effective executive leadership. But in some executives there can be virtually no limit to the extent of their ambition for themselves and their organizations. These driven individuals are capable of going to counterproductive extremes to satisfy their appetites for mastery. So, based on intensive research on character and leadership on senior managers, this article shows how the “expansive” temperament can be a boon or a bane to an organization's existence.     

Managing change in South Africa: developing people and organizations

The interaction of Western and non-Western management practices is a growing issue in transitional and emerging economies through the world, not least within the multicultural context of South Africa. This is characterized in this article as an antithesis between instrumental and humanistic views of people in organizations, which is fundamental to the way change is being managed. In order to better understand how the management of people and change may be related to this antithesis, the results of an exploratory study, involving focus-group methods with thirty managers, and of a survey of some 200 employees in participating organizations are presented. Indicative results suggest that, despite best efforts from organizations which may represent best management and development practice, issues concerning the value attached to people in these organizations are still not being properly addressed. It may be only through understanding and reconciling this antithesis that change concerning the development of people, in South Africa as well as in other emerging economies, may be successfully achieved.     

Market conditions and worker training: How does it affect and whom?

This paper analyses the impact of labor market conditions on a firm's incentive to train its workers. In an equilibrium model of the labor market in which firms use both untrained and in-house-trained workers, we show that the incidence of training increases with the tightness of the labor market. In a multi-sector framework, the usual threat of hold-up by a trained worker is more severe for workers who change their sector of work; during downturns, this serves to bias firms' incentives in imparting training away from such workers and towards workers already in the firm and those new workers coming from the same sector. Evidence from the NLSY confirms both predictions—the incidence and duration of company-sponsored training is adversely affected by higher unemployment rates; furthermore, this negative effect is much stronger for workers who change industries as compared to those who do not.