Deborah A. O'Neil

Women's career development phases

Purpose – This study aims to explore the nature of womens career experiences over the life course by examining career patterns, career locus, career contexts, and career beliefs.Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative, inductive approach to data gathering and analysis was employed, using life story surveys, semi‐structured interviewing, thematic analysis, grounded theory, code development and descriptive statistics.Findings – The data revealed distinct patterns of how womens careers develop over time, particularly with regard to the impact of career contexts (societal, organizational, and relational) and womens own changing images of their careers and career success. A three‐phase, age‐linked model of womens career development is proposed: the idealistic achievement phase; the pragmatic endurance phase; and the reinventive contribution phase.Research limitations/implications – Future studies should test replicability of these findings to determine whether this three‐phase model is embedded in the ...

Women's career types: attributions of satisfaction with career success

This study, examines womens career types and their effects on womens satisfaction with their career success and their attributions of the sources of this career success. The study proposes a typology of four career types that are determined by the manifestation of a womans career pattern and career locus. It finds empirical evidence of three distinct career types for women: achievers, navigators and accommodators. Women having accommodator career types are significantly less satisfied with their career success than women having navigator career types and achiever career types.

Do women's networks help advance women's careers?

Purpose – The use of womens networks is emerging as one method of advancing womens careers within organizations. However, the value of these networks has been questioned. The purpose of this study is to examine how potential differences in the perceptions of network members and the firms executive leadership about the purposes and anticipated outcomes of a womens network may impact womens career advancement.Design/methodology/approach – The authors interviewed 21 members of an intra‐firm womens network and six members of the executive leadership team of a global organization. To examine the qualitative data, they used a process of thematic analysis to discover prevalent themes in the transcribed interviews.Findings – Both members of the womens network and the executive leadership team placed responsibility for womens career advancement upon the individual; the firms male‐dominated culture and organizational constraints were not emphasized. While members of the womens network recognized how the n...

Both‐and, not either‐or: knowledge and service‐learning

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to expand the understanding of outcomes of service‐learning/community engagement. The current study explored the efficacy of service‐learning as a pedagogical tool to support content mastery by undergraduates in a management class.Design/methodology/approach – The study involved a classroom experiment with 120 students randomly assigned to complete a service‐learning or a research project as a class requirement. Data regarding mastery of course content was collected through a multiple‐choice assessment at the end of the course, and analyzed using statistical methods.Findings – Results showed that service‐learning can be a better mechanism for student mastery of course concepts than a traditional research project. However, the benefits of service‐learning appeared to accrue disproportionately to women.Research limitations/implications – Results suggest that educators should incorporate service‐learning into their classrooms to enhance content mastery, and that future ...

Organizational Diagnosis: An Evidence-based Approach

Organizational diagnosis plays a critical role in organizational change initiatives in terms of both choosing appropriate interventions and contributing to readiness-to-change within an organization. Although numerous authors identify diagnosis as an integral component of the change process and many have recommended specific theories and models that should be used in diagnosis, little attention has been given to the diagnostic process itself. The lack of rigour in the diagnostic process and the misdiagnoses that follow are likely to be significant factors in the high failure rate of change initiatives reported in the literature. This article reviews evidence-based diagnosis in engineering and medicine, summarizes the basic steps found in those diagnostic processes, identifies three cause–effect relationships that underlie evidence-based diagnosis, and suggests four spheres of knowledge that must intersect to guide the diagnostic process. Based upon that review, an evidence-based approach is proposed for organizational diagnosis with the goals of bringing more scientific rigour to the diagnostic process, improving the appropriateness of interventions chosen for a given situation and contributing to readiness-to-change among organizational members. Finally, specific steps are recommended for advancing the state of organizational diagnosis in the field of organization development and change.

Distinguishing competencies of effective physician leaders

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine the particular competencies demonstrated by effective physician leaders. Changing organizational and environmental dynamics present unique challenges to leaders in the field of healthcare. An accelerated emphasis on increasing the quality of health care delivery, containing costs, and restructuring the delivery of health care itself are redefining the very nature of healthcare and the roles of physicians as leaders. Given this context, the authors propose to identify the essential competencies for twenty-first century physician leadership. Design/methodology/approach – In all, 53 critical incident interviews from 28 physicians identified as emerging leaders at the Cleveland Clinic, a top-rated US academic healthcare institution, were examined in two ways: an existing leadership competency model was applied to each critical incident and inductively derived themes were identified through thematic analysis of the incidents. Findings – The predominant distinguishing leadership competencies demonstrated by the physician leaders included: Empathy, Initiative, Emotional Self-Awareness and Organizational Awareness. Communicating deliberately, getting buy-in from colleagues, focussing on the mission of the organization and showing respect for others were also discovered through thematic analysis to be essential practices of these effective physician leaders. Over 90 percent of the critical incident stories dealt with colleague-to-colleague interactions. Research limitations/implications – The research was conducted in one academic healthcare organization, thus limiting the generalizability of the results. Additional research testing these results in a variety of healthcare institutions is warranted. Originality/value – This study identified specific competencies that distinguish effective physician leaders. These leaders actively sought to work with colleagues to obtain their input and consensus in order to enact organizational change and improve health care delivery in their institution. Importantly, their intentions were neither self-focussed nor self-promoting but strongly mission driven. The identification of physician leader competencies will assist incumbent and emerging physician leaders in their ability to be effective leaders, as well as inform the design of training and development programs for physicians.

Leadership and organization development in health-care: lessons from the Cleveland Clinic.

Leaders in health-care today are faced with a wide array of complex issues. This chapter describes an innovative physician leadership development program at the Cleveland Clinic intended to enhance the leadership capacities of individuals and the organization. Propositions regarding the programs impact on organizational innovation, organizational commitment, social capital, and the human element of physician practice are offered for future examination.

Gender in the Management Education Classroom: A Collaborative Learning Journey.

In this article, the authors describe a classroom incident and their subsequent learnings about effectively managing issues of gender diversity in an MBA course titled “Women in Organizations.” The authors employ Kolb’s learning cycle as a framework for describing the incident (concrete experience), reflecting on and discussing what occurred (reflective observation), examining pertinent literature for possible explanations (abstract conceptualization ), and devising practical strategies to mitigate such incidents in the future (active experimentation). The study describes the collaborative learning journey in which the authors engaged as a team of instructors and researchers to make sense of this incident and refine their pedagogical practices. The article concludes by offering practical suggestions for improved pedagogy in management education settings, specifically fostering greater gender reflexivity in the classroom, and using functional subgrouping to encourage understanding and integration of differences.

What could an Executive Coach do for an Association Football Manager? A Commentary

Margaret M. Hopkins1, Deborah A. O’Neil2, and Diana Bilimoria3 1College of Business Administration, The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA E-mail: margaret.hopkins@utoledo.edu 2College of Business Administration, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403-0001, USA E-mail: oneild@bgsu.edu 3Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA E-mail: diana.bilimoria@case.edu

WOMEN'S WAYS OF INSTITUTING CAREERS: A TYPOLOGY OF WOMEN'S CAREER DEVELOPMENT.

This article discusses a study which examined womens ways of instituting careers. The researchers explored the relationship between career types and the satisfaction women felt with their career success. Career theorists have repeatedly called for new definitions of career success, proposing that womens definitions of success are more broadly defined than traditional, objective measures such as income and organizational level. The main contribution of this study is the finding that womens careers can be distinguished into three distinct types. By this differentiation, the researchers advance the extant literature by showing that womens careers are not monolithic or random. Rather, there is an underlying structure to womens careers, which can be represented by specific combinations of career patterns and career loci. A second major contribution of the study is the counter-intuitive finding that the Accommodator career type yielded the most negative levels of satisfaction with career success. This find...