Gedaliahu H. Harel

Achieving organizational effectiveness through promotion of women into managerial positions: HRM practice focus

Drawing on the literature of three streams of management studies - human resource management (HRM), women in management and organizational effectiveness - a model was developed bringing these perspectives together into a single comprehensive framework. The model suggests positive associations between HRM practices, fairness in promotion and organizational effectiveness. A survey was conducted among 102 Israeli organizations, which represented a 44 per cent response rate. The findings indicate a significant and positive association between high-quality HRM and fairness in the promotion of women in organizations. Fairness in the promotion of women into managerial ranks was also found to be associated with higher organizational effectiveness. Implications for management and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Gender-Based Wage and Promotion Discrimination in Israeli High-Technology Firms: Do Unions Make a Difference?

Little is known about the degree to which unions protect women against gender-based wage and promotion discrimination. Data were collected for scientists and professionals in two matched firms, one unionized, one not. Similar overall patterns of discrimination emerged, with gender having no less of an impact on earnings and promotion in the unionized firm than in the nonunion firm. However, our results suggest that women in the unionized firm might have been less exposed to the negative earnings-based consequences of promotion discrimination because hierarchical wage differentials were lower.

Teamwork in Modern Organizations: Implications for Technology Education

Characteristics of teamwork in modern organizations and workplaces are examined, in order to extrapolate the means for imparting teamwork skills within technology education. Goals and tasks for the team, team composition, team-player styles, phases of team development, communication and interpersonal skills, decision making, leadership, and evaluation of team performance are discussed. Teamwork skills are acquired gradually as a result of experience. Mere provision of a joint task to a group of people does not produce teamwork spontaneously. In order to promote teamwork, technological tasks at school need to include considerable degrees of freedom and decision-making by pupils. When the teacher becomes a facilitator of the process, instead of being primarily a source of knowledge and a decision-maker, team members can determine the assignment of roles in the group by themselves. Evaluation of teamwork in technology education is an integral part of ‘alternative assessment’.

Comparing the validity and utility of behavior description interview versus assessment center ratings

This research investigated the relationship between job performance ratings for 39 Israeli medical unit managers and two types of performance predictor: ratings from behavior description (BD) interviews and ratings from an assessment center. The BD validity 0.53 compared favorably with the 0.62 obtained by the assessment center. Utility analyses that table the financial return for investing in the more expensive assessment process under different levels of tenure, number of new hires, and selection ratio, reveal the conditions under which assessment centers pay off best.

Performance appraisal for TQM: a team approach

This paper notes the emergence of teams over individuals as the basic building blocks of organizations. It reviews the apparently conflicting assumptions made by two different schools of management practice—human resources management (HRM) and total quality management (TQM)—as they apply to performance appraisal. A three-dimensional model of performance data reveals that the apparent conflict can be resolved by measuring process as opposed to result dimensions. The next section presents an extension of the behavior description (BD) method as a practical and efficient approach to building measures of team process effectiveness. Suggested applications for the BD team process measures complete the paper.