Cross-understanding will help complex and diverse teams achieve mutually agreeable solutions

Teams whose members have diverse backgrounds can experience differences in task knowledge, sensitivities to various aspects of the task system, as well as beliefs and preferences about how to best approach or solve a problem. How might managers deal with this? Niranjan Janardhanan, Kyle Lewis, Rhonda R. Reger, and Cynthia K. Stevens write that, rather than focusing on common ground, team leaders should emphasise cross-understanding. Understanding the bases of someone’s views will help get to the real reasons behind differences in opinion, and therefore help to achieve mutually agreeable solutions

Getting to know you: motivating cross-understanding for improved team and individual performance

Many contemporary organizations depend on team-based organizing to achieve high performance, innovate services and products, and adapt to environmental turbulence. Significant research focuses on understanding how teams develop, assimilate, and apply diverse information; yet, organizational practices have evolved in new ways that are not fully explored in the teams literature. Individuals with diverse motivations, knowledge, and perspectives are often assigned to teams, creating burdens for members to develop effective ways to work together, learn from each other, and achieve goals amid the complexity of today's organizational contexts. In this paper, we examine a multilevel model of how team goal orientation affects cross-understanding-the extent to which team members understand the other members' mental models-which in turn, affects team and individual performance. We examine these effects using 160 teams of 859 participants who completed a semester-long business simulation. Findings show that the more team members are motivated by learning goals, the greater a team's cross-understanding and subsequent team and individual performance. These effects are dampened when members are motivated by performance goals-to avoid mistakes or prove competence. This study expands the cross-understanding literature, revealing motivational antecedents that explain why some teams develop higher cross-understanding than others. We also contribute to the goal orientation literature by demonstrating that team goal orientation influences members' learning about other members and in so doing, also affects team and individual performance. Because team motivation can be influenced by organizational practices, our findings also contribute practical insights for organizational leaders

A rhetoric-in-context approach to building commitment to multiple strategic goals

There are still few explanations of the micro-level practices by which top managers influence employee commitment to multiple strategic goals. This paper argues that, through their language, top managers can construct a context for commitment to multiple strategic goals. We therefore propose a rhetoric-in-context approach to illuminate some of the micro practices through which top managers influence employee commitment. Based upon an empirical study of the rhetorical practices through which top managers influence academic commitment to multiple strategic goals in university contexts, we demonstrate relationships between rhetoric and context. Specifically, we show that rhetorical influences over commitment to multiple goals are associated with the historical context for multiple goals, the degree to which top managers' rhetoric instantiates a change in that context, and the internal consistency of the rhetorical practices used by top managers. Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications

Managerial models of competitive dynamics : addressing the relevance issue in game theoretic modeling

Includes bibliographic references (p. 32-37)

A Review of Strategic Process Research

This article reviews research on the process of strategic management reported over the last six years in seven leading journals. Nine "streams" of work are identified and critiqued. The field is described as giving continuing attention to the possibilities and problems of strategic planning and decision making, but also moving into new areas of research - especially the problem of how the attention of decision makers is directed toward specific agendas for action. We recommend more studies that simultaneously consider strategy formulation and implementation and more studies that attempt to integrate methods and concerns across the various areas of process research. Finally, we recommend that future research give simultaneous attention to the content as well as the process of strategy

Research Themes, Data Sources, and Methodological Refinements A Content Analysis of the Content Analysis Literature in Organization Studies: On behalf of: The Research Methods Division of The Academy of Management can be found at: Organizational Research

We use content analysis to examine the content analysis literature in organization studies. Given the benefits of content analysis, it is no surprise that its use in organization studies has been growing in the course of the past 25 years Keywords: content analysis; theoretical frameworks; methodologies; analytical techniques T he past two decades have seen an increasing scholarly interest in qualitative methodologies to study complex business phenomena, borrowing and adapting from more established disciplines Our interest centers on three major questions: (a) What have been the contributions of content analysis to management research? (b) What can be learned from the way the methodology has been implemented in organization studies? and (c) How has this literature evolved through time? We conclude our investigation with a discussion of the issues and opportunities of using content analysis for management research in the future. Principles of Content Analysis A wide range of theoretical frameworks, methods, and analytical techniques have been labeled content analysis Central to the value of content analysis as a research methodology is the recognition of the importance of language in human cognition Content analysis advocates have noted several advantages of this class of methods over competing choices. Foremost to management research, content analysis provides a replicable methodology to access deep individual or collective structures such as values, intentions, attitudes, and cognitions Another key strength is the analytical flexibility allowed. For instance, analysis of content can be conducted at two levels Third, longitudinal research designs can be implemented because of the availability of comparable corporate information through time, such as annual reports or trade magazines Several additional methodological and practical benefits have been noted in implementing content analysis Finally, costs can be kept low and the method easily can be used for small-scale studies with minimal requirements Content Analysis in Management Research Given these benefits, it is no surprise that the use of content analysis in organization studies has been growing in the course of the past 25 years Methods Sample. To survey articles comprehensively using content analysis in the management literature, we used a two-stage strategy. First, we searched the major academic and practitioner journals in the Proquest and Ebsco databases using the keywords content analysis and text analysis for the period from 1980 to the present (October 2005). This time frame was selected because it corresponds to the period during which content analysis gained its legitimacy as a methodology in the management fiel

Media Coverage of US Wind Power Plants: Does it Generate Electricity?

This paper focuses on how media coverage influences innovation adoption. Specifically, we examine the effects of news media: (1) attention, (2) tenor (or affective content), (3) diversity of issues and (4) specific content areas on the likelihood and speed of adoption of wind power plants in the US. The theory developed in this paper suggests that news media both affects and reflects the cognitive appraisals of various primary stakeholders as they seek to make sense of the value of a proposed innovation. We add to the nascent infomediaries research literature in four important ways: providing additional empirical evidence for decreasing returns to media attention, examining the effect of specific content areas, providing further empirical evidence of the importance of tenor alone and in interaction with content, and demonstrating the effect of media on a new dependent variable not previously studied in media effects on market outcomes research. This study adds to the innovation literature by highlighting an important non-market actor, the media, on the diffusion of innovations, and to the managerial and organizational cognition literature by suggesting that affective content (emotions) and specific aspects of content (cognition) on the part of third party infomediaries is associated with innovation diffusion