The time and attention of top management in an organization are critical, but limited, resources. This article develops insights on issue selling as a process that is central to explaining how and where top management allocates its time and attention. We see issue selling as a critical activity in the early stages of organizational decision-making …
Tag Archives: Management
Sonenshein, S. (2006). Crafting social issues at work. Academy of Management Journal, 49(6), 1158-1172.
I present and test a model of issue crafting, in which individuals shape the meaning of social issues by intentionally using language in public that portrays those issues in ways that differ from the individuals’ private understandings of the issues. Using statements collected with an experimental design, I found that the public language individuals used …
Dutton, J. E., Ashford, S. J., O& #39;Neill, R. M., & Lawrence, K. A. (2001). Moves that matter: Issue selling and organizational change. Academy of Management journal, 44(4), 716-736.
In this study, we examined 82 accounts of “issue selling” to better understand managers’ implicit theories for successfully shaping change from below by directing the attention of top management. The study reveals the importance of various issue-selling moves, including packaging, involvement, and timing. Managerial accounts uncover three kinds of contextual knowledge that are critical to …
Reay, T., Golden-Biddle, K., & Germann, K. (2006). Legitimizing a new role: Small wins and microprocesses of change. Academy of Management Journal, 49(5), 977-998.
How do individual actors institute changes in established ways of working? Longitudinal research is the basis for our theoretical model showing how actors legitimize new practices by accomplishing three interdependent, recursive, situated “microprocesses”: (1) cultivating opportunities for change, (2) fitting a new role into prevailing systems, and (3) proving the value of the new role. …
E. Ashforth, B., E. Kreiner, G., A. Clark, M., & Fugate, M. (2007). Normalizing dirty work: Managerial tactics for countering occupational taint. Academy of Management Journal, 50(1), 149-174.
Dirty work refers to occupations that are viewed by society as physically, socially, or morally tainted. Using exploratory, semistructured interviews with managers from 18 dirty work occupations, we investigated the challenges of being a manager in tainted work and how managers normalize taint–that is, actively counter it or render it less salient. Managers reported experiencing …
Van Dyck, C., Frese, M., Baer, M., & Sonnentag, S. (2005). Organizational error management culture and its impact on performance: a two-study replication.
The authors argue that a high-organizational error management culture, conceptualized to include norms and common practices in organizations (e.g., communicating about errors, detecting, analyzing, and correcting errors quickly), is pivotal to the reduction of negative and the promotion of positive error consequences. Organizational error management culture was positively related to firm performance across 2 studies …
Grant, A. M. (2007). Relational job design and the motivation to make a prosocial difference. Academy of management review, 32(2), 393-417.
This article illustrates how work contexts motivate employees to care about making a positive difference in other people’s lives. I introduce a model of relational job design to describe how jobs spark the motivation to make a prosocial difference, and how this motivation affects employees’ actions and identities. Whereas existing research focuses on individual differences …
Kyriacou, A. P. (2006). Functional, Overlapping, Competing, Jurisdictions and Ethnic Conflict Management. Kyklos, 59(1), 63-83.
By allowing ethnic groups to organize areas important to them regardless of their geographic distribution, functional, overlapping and competing jurisdictions (FOCJ) have an important role to play in the management of ethnic conflict in plural societies. The functional devolution of powers which is intrinsic to FOCJ may be preferable to territorial devolution when minority groups …