Dorothy Olshfski

Friends at Work A Comparative Study of Work Attitudes in Seoul City Government and New Jersey State Government

Managers and scholars have always been ambivalent about the value of friendships among employees to the organization, although anyone who has worked in an office setting knows that working in a friendly place is much more preferable than the alternative. The major focus on office friendship has been on the negative side: Friendship can be related to nepotism; favoritism; gossip; displacement of loyalty; and negative, time-consuming organizational politics. This article offers a more balanced assessment of friendship. The authors examine the opportunity to form friendships and the strength of friendship between employees and their manager and their relationship to a positive work attitude. While examining two countries (South Korea and the United States), the authors find that although the opportunity to form friendships and the strength of that relationship vary by country, friendships between superior and subordinate can positively affect work attitudes.

The Empowerment Construct in Manager-Executive Relationships

Empowerment is common to both the scholarly and the popular management literature. However, empowerment’s many interpretations have dulled the concept as a research tool. Here, empowerment is separated into perceived environment and individual behavior components. The linkage between organization environment and managerial behavior is tested with a population of 23 effective managers. It is found that an accepting or empowering environment increases the probability that the effective manager will undertake activities outside the job description, but that an empowering environment is not necessary for effective middle-manager behavior.

An Examination of Variations in the Nature of Employee Commitment: The Case of Paid and Volunteer Firefighters

Organizations depend heavily upon employees’ willingness to make an extra effort. As such, employee commitment is very important to the effective operation of any organization. We argue that the previous concept of organizational commitment may not capture some important aspects of the organizational commitment construct. We identify three dimensions of commitment: commitments to the supervisor, the work group, and the organization. We examine differences in the foci of commitment comparing the organizational commitment configuration of a sample of paid and volunteer firefighters in Northern New York. All firefighters perform the same work and must meet the same job requirements so we anticipate any differences in the configuration of the organizational commitment construct to be a function of whether they are getting paid or not. We found significant differences between the two groups of firefighters in the foci of their commitment: paid firefighters are higher on their commitment to their supervisor, while volunteers were higher on commitment to the organization. We argue that conceiving organizational commitment as multi-focused construct offers more useful information to researchers and managers.

Interpreting State Administrator- Legislator Relationships

trator and legislator. State legislators and administrators are responsible jointly for the health, safety, and well-being of their citizens. State level bureaucracy is an important information source upon which the legislature depends when making decisions. Present costs and future projections of prison inmates, college students, food stamp recipients, and state unemployment generally come from the bureaucracy. After the elected representatives enact legislation and authorize expenditures, the bureaucracy must implement the decisions. The legislature has the power to appropriate funds and to define actions

Comparing Personal and Professional Characteristics of Men and Women State Executives 1990 and 1993 Results

Using information drawn from biographical statements and resumes, first gathered in 1990 then again in 1993, this paper reports on the types of professional experience that appointed executives brought to the job of state department head. While most demographic, political and decision criteria characteristics fail to differentiate men and women, there are a few noteworthy differences. Women executives differ in political experience, age, substantive work experience, and number of dependent children from their male counterparts. The comparison of 1990 findings and those for 1993 showed a closing of the gap between men and women state department heads.

Establishing Assessment Center Validity: An Examination of Methodological and Theoretical Issues

Methodological and theoretical questions of validity for assessment centers revolve around three related issues: the concept of manager competence, the assessment exercises, and the role of assessors. The authors contend that attempts to establish validity for assessment centers using quantitative methods may be premature. Quantification prior to resolution of theoretical and conceptual problems can lead to rejection of an important management evaluation tool. Conceptual clarification, the present major need, is more likely achieved by an open design.

Paradoxes of Collaboration Managerial Decision Styles

Collaboration is a warm, friendly word currently used to describe a cooperative manager—subordinate relationship. In this study, the authors first specify a meaning for collaboration and then, from stories told by competent cabinet members at the state level, extract evidence of collaborative and directive managerial relationships in problem solving. Based on these stories, collaboration is usefully seen as one tool among several (directive, devolution, collaboration) rather than as a consistent manager style. Therefore, from the perspective of style, managerial behavior is more paradoxical than consistent. As a sidebar, devolution emerges as closer to directive behavior than to collaborative behavior as a way of relating to subordinates.

Teaching Public Administration by Exploiting Managerial Experience

2. The main sources for these video clips were the ABC News interactive discs, Powers of the Congress, Powers of the President, and Powers of the Supreme Court; a preproduction video disc designed to accompany Ken Jandas American government text, The Challenge of Democracy, Houghton Mifflin Publisher; an American government disc marketed by Harper-Collins; and various VHS clips collected by members of the department over the years. 3. Statistically this creates a one-tail test for significance. 4. The fact that the students in the video

Aggressive Action: In Search of a Dominant Narrative

The idea of “going to war” seemed obvious enough at first blush. We had been attacked, and we planned to respond in kind. It was that simple. Or was it? Despite the analogies drawn to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the decision to enter a “state of war” after September 11, 2001 was a unique event in American history. Although other American wars are associated with “triggering” events (e.g., the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the sinking of the Battleship Maine, Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Kuwait), none of those past instances occurred in a “narrative vacuum.” In each previous case, the road to war had been well paved materially, politically, and psychologically over an extended period of time. The shelling of Fort Sumter by South Carolinian troops was the culmination of events that had unfolded over several months after the election of Lincoln and after many years of heated discussion and debate.2 The public clamor for war with Spain was already several years old when the battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana in February 1898, but even then two months passed before Congress declared war.3 The U.S. entry into the First World War is often associated with the loss of American lives when the Lusitania was sankh—but nearly two years and a great deal of preparation passed between that event and the declaration of war.4

The leadership environment of public sector executives

Olshfski uses critical incident methodology to describe the leadership environment of state cabinet officials. The rich data set offers insight into how state executives (1) learn about their jobs, (2) exercise discretion to determine their policy agenda, and (3) operate in the political environment of state administration. She concludes by pointing out discrepancies in our understanding of leadership and offers suggestions for leadership, research, and teaching. Somerset Maugham is said to have begun all his lectures by saying there are only three things that one must know in order to be a good writer: the only problem being that no one knows what those three things are. The same might be said of leadership research. For example, Stogdills survey of leadership research contains over 3,000 references and Basss revision documents over 5,000 references.(1) The preface to Stogdills survey assesses the status of leadership research: “four decades of research on leadership have produced a bewildering mass o...