The Social Psychology of Organizations.

\"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.

The authors conducted a qualitative study of the motivations and contextual factors that induce corporate ecological responsiveness. Analytic induction applied to data collected from 53 firms in the United Kingdom and Japan revealed three motivations: competitiveness, legitimation, and ecological responsibility. These motivations were influenced by three contextual conditions: field cohesion, issue salience, and individual concern. In this article, the authors also identify the conditions that likely lead to high corporate ecological responsiveness.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1556363.pdf

Why Companies Go Green: A Model of Ecological Responsiveness

While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

The Act of Creation

Knowledge-intensive firms are composed of multiple communities with specialized expertise, and are often characterized by lateral rather than hierarchical organizational forms. We argue that producing knowledge to create innovative products and processes in such firms requires the ability to make strong perspectives within a community, as well as the ability to take the perspective of another into account. We present models of language, communication and cognition that can assist in the design of electronic communication systems for perspective making and perspective taking. By appreciating how communication is both like a language game played in a local community and also like a transmission of messages through a conduit, and by appreciating how cognition includes a capacity to narrativize our experience as well as a capacity to process information, we identify some guidelines for designing electronic communication systems to support knowledge work. The communication systems we propose emphasize that narratives can help construct strong perspectives within a community of knowing, and that reflecting upon and representing that perspective can create boundary objects which allow for perspective taking between communities. We conclude by describing our vision of an idealized knowledge intensive firm with a strong culture of perspective making and perspective taking, and by identifying some elements of the electronic communication systems we would expect to see in such a firm.

Perspective Making and Perspective Taking in Communities of Knowing

This article examines the historically constituted dimensions of anthropocentrism, tracing the emergence of linear perspective, a camera theory of knowledge, and the human-nature dualism. These epistemological conventions are socially reproduced in organization science and management practice in their more contemporary anthropocentric forms: a disembodied form of technological knowing conjoined with an egocentric organizational orientation. Following this critique, the paradigmatic differences between anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches for dealing with issues related to the natural environment are discussed in what is referred to respectively as the environmental management and ecocentric responsibility paradigms. Our analysis suggests that corporate environmentalism and so-called “greening-business” approaches are grounded in the environmental management paradigm. It is argued that environmental management approaches are incommensurable with the ecocentric responsibility paradigm. The tensions bet...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258965.pdf

Limits to Anthropocentrism: Toward an Ecocentric Organization Paradigm?

This essay explores the social dimensions of creativity through a discussion of the "myth of the lone genius" and an outline of existing research. The authors argue thatAmerican individualism and m...

Deconstructing the Lone Genius Myth: Toward a Contextual View of Creativity

Recent scholarship on mindfulness has narrowly focused on attention enhancement, present-moment awareness, and its stress reduction effects. Moreover, current operational definitions of mindfulness...

Mindfulness Revisited A Buddhist-Based Conceptualization

The influence of deliberations on learning in new product development teams

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs12671-014-0373-4.pdf

Ronald E. Purser

Papers

Limits to Anthropocentrism: Toward an Ecocentric Organization Paradigm?

Deconstructing the Lone Genius Myth: Toward a Contextual View of Creativity

Mindfulness Revisited A Buddhist-Based Conceptualization

The influence of deliberations on learning in new product development teams

Clearing the Muddled Path of Traditional and Contemporary Mindfulness: a Response to Monteiro, Musten, and Compson