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KEY WORDS: employment relations, performance paradox, organizational change, organizational learning, organizing, self-management
ABSTRACT
Changes in contemporary firms and their competitive environments translate into a new focus in organizational research. This chapter reviews organizational behavior research reflecting the shift from corporatist organizations to organizing. Key research themes include emerging employment relations, managing the performance paradox, goal setting and self-management, discontinuous information processing, organization learning, organizational change and individual transitions, and the implications of change for work-nonwork relations. Research into organizing is building upon and extending many of the field's traditional concepts. This chapter suggests that some assumptions of organizational behavior research are being superseded by those more responsive to the new organizational era.
INTRODUCTION
Contemporary organizations are changing, and the field of organizational behavior is changing with them. This chapter describes the shifts organizational research manifests as firms transition to a new era of flexible, lateral forms of organizing (Davis 1987, Miles & Creed 1995). It seeks answers to two questions. First, how are core features of organizational research influenced by the changes contemporary organizations are undergoing? Second, what new dynamics and features are emerging as important organizational research issues?
The central problems in organizational behavior are influenced by changes in organizations themselves (Barley & Kunda 1992, Goodman & Whetten 1995). Although Annual Review of Psychology (ARP) authors often have reported the durability of such traditional categories as work motivation and performance, absenteeism and turnover, climate and culture, and groups and leadership (e.g. O'Reilly 1991), other recent commentaries report more substantial shifts. The time frame used to review a body of research is probably the greatest determinant of whether we observe change or stability. For example, Barley & Kunda's (1992) investigation of trends in managerial thought ranged from the 1870s to the present and reported alternating cycles of rational (e.g. scientific management) and normative (e.g. human relations) thinking among managers and scholars predicated on the degree of expansion or contraction in the economy of the time. From their starting point in the 1950s, Goodman & Whetten (1995) noted an adaptive quality in the field's work that shifts attention toward particular applied problems firms face within a given decade: Organizational development was a theme in the 1950s and 1960s, and organizational decline and interorganizational...