Joseph E. McGrath (1927-2007)

Presents an obituary for Joseph E. McGrath (1927–2007). Joseph E. McGrath, who died on April 1, 2007, often described himself as a “conceptual carpenter.” It was an apt description: Joe conceived and built the frameworks within which a remarkable number of students and colleagues designed their studies, chose their methods, and developed their theories. He was not one to promote the flashy new concept, to generate the gasp-provoking empirical demonstration, or to concoct the unheard of new measure or manipulation. Instead, Joe created elegant conceptual and methodological platforms on which he, along with his many students and colleagues around the world, productively explored an extraordinarily diverse set of scientific and social problems.Psycholog

Rethinking Leadership, or Team LEaders Are Not Music Directors

Let us begin with a thought experiment. Think for a moment about one of the finest groups you have every seen—one that accomplished its work superbly, that got better and better as a performing unit over time, and whose members came away from the group experience wiser and more skilled than they were before. Next, think about a different group, one that failed to achieve its purposes, that deteriorated in performance capability over time, and whose members found the group experience far more frustrating than fulfilling

Repairing Pairs

Psycholog

Not What It Was and Not What It Will Be: The Future of Job Design Research

This summary commentary explores the likely future directions of research and theory on the design of organizational work. We give special attention to the social aspects of contemporary work, the process by which jobholders craft their own jobs, the changing contexts within which work is performed, and the increasing prominence of work that is performed by teams rather than individualsPsycholog

Leading Teams When the Time is Right: Finding the Best Moments to Act

Psycholog

Behind the Seniors

HR can give chief executives some invaluable prompts from the wings as they take to the stage with a new top team, Harvard researchers have found.Psycholog

Motivation through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory

A model is proposed that specifies the conditions under which individuals will become internally motivated to perform effectively on their jobs. The model focuses on the interaction among three classes of variables: (a) the psychological states of employees that must be present for internally motivated work behavior to develop; (b) the characteristics of jobs that can create these psychological states; and (c) the attributes of individuals that determine how positively a person will respond to a complex and challenging job. The model was tested for 658 employees who work on 62 different jobs in seven organizations, and results support its validity. A number of special features of the model are discussed (including its use as a basis for the diagnosis of jobs and the evaluation of job redesign projects), and the model is compared to other theories of job design

Live to cheat another day: bacterial dormancy facilitates the social exploitation of beta-lactamases

The breakdown of antibiotics by β-lactamases may be cooperative, since resistant cells can detoxify their environment and facilitate the growth of susceptible neighbours. However, previous studies of this phenomenon have used artificial bacterial vectors or engineered bacteria to increase the secretion of β-lactamases from cells. Here, we investigated whether a broad-spectrum β-lactamase gene carried by a naturally occurring plasmid (pCT) is cooperative under a range of conditions. In ordinary batch culture on solid media, there was little or no evidence that resistant bacteria could protect susceptible cells from ampicillin, although resistant colonies could locally detoxify this growth medium. However, when susceptible cells were inoculated at high densities, late-appearing phenotypically susceptible bacteria grew in the vicinity of resistant colonies. We infer that persisters, cells that have survived antibiotics by undergoing a period of dormancy, founded these satellite colonies. The number of persister colonies was positively correlated with the density of resistant colonies and increased as antibiotic concentrations decreased. We argue that detoxification can be cooperative under a limited range of conditions: if the toxins are bacteriostatic rather than bacteridical; or if susceptible cells invade communities after resistant bacteria; or if dormancy allows susceptible cells to avoid bactericides. Resistance and tolerance were previously thought to be independent solutions for surviving antibiotics. Here, we show that these are interacting strategies: the presence of bacteria adopting one solution can have substantial effects on the fitness of their neighbours