The Social Psychology of Organizations.

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Arguably, the most critical time frame for organizational participants to develop trust is at the beginning of their relationship. Using primarily a cognitive approach, we address factors and processes that enable two organizational parties to form relatively high trust initially. We propose a model of specific relationships among several trust-related constructs and two cognitive processes. The model helps explain the paradoxical finding of high initial trust levels in new organizational relationships.

Initial Trust Formation in New Organizational Relationships

\"What are your assumptions (implicit as well as explicit) about the most effective way to manage people?\" So began Douglas McGregor in this 1960 management classic. It was a seemingly simple question he asked, yet it led to a fundamental revolution in management. Today, with the rise of the global economy, the information revolution, and the growth of knowledge-driven work, McGregor's simple but provocative question continues to resonate-perhaps more powerfully than ever before. Heralded as one of the most important pieces of management literature ever written, a touchstone for scholars and a handbook for practitioners, The Human Side of Enterprise continues to receive the highest accolades nearly half a century after its initial publication. Influencing such major management gurus such as Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, McGregor's revolutionary Theory Y-which contends that individuals are self-motivated and self-directed-and Theory X-in which employees must be commanded and controlled-has been widely taught in business schools, industrial relations schools, psychology departments, and professional development seminars for over four decades. In this special annotated edition of the worldwide management classic, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Senior Research Scientist in MIT's Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, shows us how today's leaders have successfully incorporated McGregor's methods into modern management styles and practices. The added quotes and commentary bring the content right into today's debates and business models. Now more than ever, the timeless wisdom of Douglas McGregor can light the path towards a management style that nurtures leadership capability, creates effective teams, ensures internal alignment, achieves high performance, and cultivates an authentic, value-driven workplace--lessons we all need to learn as we make our way in this brave new world of the 21st century.

The Human Side of Enterprise.

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

Boundaryless career theories are increasingly prominent in career studies and management studies, and provide a new ‘status quo’ concerning modern careers. This paper contextualizes the boundaryless careers literature within management studies, and evaluates its contributions, including broadening concepts of career and focusing interorganizational career phenomena. It acknowledges the considerable stimulus given to career studies by this literature, but also offers a critique based on five issues: inaccurate labelling; loose definitions; overemphasis on personal agency; the normalization of boundaryless careers; and poor empirical support for the claimed dominance of boundaryless careers. Because these problems render the boundaryless career concept increasingly obsolete as a ‘leading edge’ construct in career studies, we offer new directions for theory and research. In particular we re-examine the role of career boundaries, and suggest the development of new, boundary-focused careers scholarship based o...

Boundaryless Careers: Bringing Back Boundaries:

A cursory search of the literature yields literally thousands of books and articles about career success in one form or another. Even when the search is narrowed to social science journal articles combining ‘career’ and ‘success,’ well over 1000 ‘hits’ can be obtained from sources such as ISI’s Social Sciences Citation Index and PsycINFO. Perhaps this should not be any great surprise, considering how central the word ‘success’ is to life in Western society. Few questions stop one in one’s tracks as effectively as: ‘Am I successful?’, ‘Have I been a failure?’, or ‘What has been the price of my success?’ Career success, then, looks as if it is much studied and well understood. So why this special issue? One reason is hinted at by the quotation at the head of this introduction. Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘success’ is ambiguous, as befits its derivation from the Latin: succedere, to succeed or follow (Webster, 1996). This ambiguity has been with it since at least the sixteenth century (OUP, 1989). Success, in the sense of ‘follow,’ can be that which happens, in other words the upshot of events, either good or bad. But, also since the sixteenth century, it has also meant something more explicitly positive: ‘[t]he prosperous achievement of something attempted; the attainment of an object according to one’s desire: now often with particular reference to the attainment of wealth or position’ (OUP, 1989). Success, then, can either be a consequence or a favorable outcome, two very different things. Most people probably think of it in its latter sense, with the implication that lack of success is something they don’t want to experience. But it is important not to forget its broader meaning. It is well known that what is seen by some people as success in the sense of a good outcome can look quite the opposite to others (cf. Bartolome & Evans, 1980). So while it is certainly interesting to study the factors that lead to career success in the sense of prosperity, it is every bit as interesting, if not more so, to study how people decide that a given outcome was, indeed, ‘prosperous.’ Success as outcome, therefore, is arguably the meta-concept to success as prosperous achievement, and although ‘success’ will typically be used here in its sense as the antonym of ‘failure,’ the context in which the discussion takes place is of success as the outcome of one’s career. Things happen to people in their working lives; the interesting thing is how they and others evaluate these outcomes as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and how these evaluations might shift over time.

Reconceptualizing career success

Handbook of career studies

Career Boundaries in a "Boundaryless" World

This article examines the link between managers' careers and the strategic behavior of the companies they manage. We argue that despite the theoretical and practical importance of this topic for the strategic management of organizations, the results of research to date have been contradictory and confusing, partly because of two substantial gaps in the underpinning theory. Implicit theories about the impact of work history on managerial characteristics are not made explicit, and a conceptual bridge is needed between individual and organizational levels of analysis. Ideas from research on decision-making studies, top management team behavior, and the strategic management literature are reviewed to yield an integrative model that specifies a set of propositions defining a program of research designed to shed light on the nature of the link.

Hugh Gunz

Papers

Boundaryless Careers: Bringing Back Boundaries:

Reconceptualizing career success

Handbook of career studies

Career Boundaries in a "Boundaryless" World

Managerial Careers and Business Strategies