Our task is to adopt a multidisciplinary view
of trust within and between firms, in an effort to
synthesize and give insight into a fundamental
construct of organizational science. We seek to
identify the shared understandings of trust
across disciplines, while recognizing that the
divergent meanings scholars bring to the study
of trust also can add value.

Not So Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View Of Trust

Recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Nevertheless, organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work practice. We examine one such study. We then relate its conclusions to compatible investigations of learning and of innovation to argue that conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also significant learning and innovation generated in the informal communities-of-practice in which they work. By reassessing work, learning, and innovation in the context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the connections between these three become apparent. With a unified view of working, learning, and innovating, it should be possible to reconceive of and redesign organizations to improve all three.

/pdf/organizational-learning-and-communities-of-practice-toward-a-5d5ay5q3oh.pdf

Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation

This paper presents a model of team learning and tests it in a multimethod field study. It introduces the construct of team psychological safety—a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking—and models the effects of team psychological safety and team efficacy together on learning and performance in organizational work teams. Results of a study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company, measuring antecedent, process, and outcome variables, show that team psychological safety is associated with learning behavior, but team efficacy is not, when controlling for team psychological safety. As predicted, learning behavior mediates between team psychological safety and team performance. The results support an integrative perspective in which both team structures, such as context support and team leader coaching, and shared beliefs shape team outcomes.

/pdf/psychological-safety-and-learning-behavior-in-work-teams-igq2jhsmtc.pdf

Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams

The ability to transfer best practices internally is critical to a firtn's ability to build competitive advantage through the appropriation of rents from scarce internal knowledge. Just as a firm's distinctive competencies tnight be dificult for other firms to imitate, its best prczctices could be dfficult to imitate internnlly. Yet, little systematic attention has been pcrid to such internal stickiness. The author analyzes itlterrzal stickiness of knowledge transfer crnd tests the resulting model using canonical correlation analysis of a data set consisting of 271 observations of 122 best-practice transfers in eight companies. Contrary to corzverztiorzrzl wisdom that blames primarily motivational factors, the study findings show the major barriers to internal knowledge transfer to be knowledge-related factors such as the recipient's lack oj absorptive capacity, causal anzbiguity, and an arciuous relationship between the source and the recipient. The identification and transfer of best practices cally are hindered less by confidentiality and legal is emerging as one of the most important and obstacles than external transfers, they could be widespread practical management issues of the faster and initially less complicated, all other latter half of the 1990s. Armed with meaningful, things being equal. For those reasons, in an era detailed performance data, firms that use fact- when continuous organizational learning and based management methods such as TQM, bench- relentless performance improvement are needed to marking, and process reengineering can regularly remain competitive, companies must increasingly compare the performance of their units along resort to the internal transfer of capabilitie~.~ operational dimensions. Sparse but unequivocal Yet, experience shows that transferring capaevidence suggests that such comparisons often bilities within a firm is far from easy. General reveal surprising performance differences between Motors had great difficulty in transferring manuunits, indicating a need to improve knowledge facturing practices between divisions (Kerwin and utilization within the firm (e.g., Chew, Bresnahan, Woodruff, 1992: 74) and IBM had limited suc

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/smj.4250171105

Exploring internal stickiness: Impediments to the transfer of best practice within the firm

The Social Psychology of Organizations.

Organizational Effectiveness: Theory, Research, and Application.@@@New Perspectives on Organizational Effectiveness.

Teams and Technology: Critical Issues for Research and Practice

Experiments, Institutional Arrangements, and Organizational Design

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the consequences of absenteeism. Instead of asking what causes absenteeism, we want to identify the causal effects of absenteeism: that is, what effect does absenteeism have on the individual worker, adjacent workers, the work group, the organization, other social organization, and society? Our goal is to provide a better theoretical understanding of these questions. The literature in this area is quite sparse. While there are probably thousands of studies examining the determinants of absenteeism, there are probably less than twenty studies that directly examine the effects of absenteeism on other criteria such as productivity, safety, and so on. Therefore, our focus in this chapter is more on understanding the theoretical issues underlying this question rather than on making sense of a robust literature.

Consequences of Absenteeism

This research presents a new concept -- Organizational Learning Contracts (OLC). These "contracts" represent shared understandings among faculty, students and staff about what is to be learned and how.  OLC can vary from being low in shared understandings and quite general (weak) to very detailed and specific understandings about what is to be learned and the multiple learning environments needed to achieve the desired learning (strong).  Data are presented to illustrate the positive impact of strong learning contracts on students' attitudes about their learning environment, models of learning and identification toward their institution in engineering schools.

Paul S. Goodman

Papers

Organizational Effectiveness: Theory, Research, and Application.@@@New Perspectives on Organizational Effectiveness.

Teams and Technology: Critical Issues for Research and Practice

Experiments, Institutional Arrangements, and Organizational Design

Consequences of Absenteeism

Learning Contracts and Engineering Education