Gordon E. Dehler

Product Development Tensions: Exploring Contrasting Styles of Project Management

Successful product development requires managing tensions—coping with fluctuating contingencies to foster innovation and efficiency. To investigate this challenge, we explored the nature, dynamics,...

Spirituality and Organizational Transformation

Although restructuring may represent an appropriate managerial response to global competitive pressures of the 1990s, initial research indicates that reorganizing efforts such as downsizing and re‐engineering are not improving organizational performance. The thesis is that structural approaches to change represent only part of the solution to a complex dilemma. Management also needs to address the role of emotion, and spirituality in particular, in the change process. Develops the concept of spirituality as a kind of positive emotion that serves as a thread connecting the non‐rational dimensions of human behaviour that are so integral to implementing change. The Porras and Silvers (1991) model, which distinguishes organizational transformation from organizational development as intervention strategies, is extended by incorporating the emotional aspects of critical variables into the organizational transformation approach. Variables include vision, transformational leadership, intrinsic motivation depictin...

Critical Pedagogy in the `New Paradigm'

This article argues for the adoption of critical pedagogy by management educators. This change not only recognizes the Profound shifts in competitiveness that have already occurred in the business environment, but would also equip students as independent learners. Students become capable of a complicated understanding of the historical, social, political, and philosophical traditions underlying contemporary conceptions of organizations and management. Truly critical pedagogy necessitates changes in educational roles, curricular content, and classroom practices to create a learning space that supports and encourages students to engage in critical commentary. This space emerges when power in the classroom is de-centered, disciplinary borders become permeable, and issues are problematized. Two examples of implementing critical pedagogy in content (text selection) and process (paradoxical thinking) are presented to illustrate the potential for the transformation of organizational arrangements. Critical pedagogy in management education possesses the capacity for developing students with a greater sensitivity to the emancipatory and transformational possibilities in the future.

Advocacy, Performance, and Threshold Influences on Decisions to Terminate New Product Development

Termination of new product development projects was examined as an advocacy process influenced by performance judgments and unobserved performance thresholds, and contextual factors related to the ...

Learning through Paradox: A Pedagogical Strategy for Exploring Contradictions and Complexity.

Over the past decade, the notion of paradox has become increasingly of interest in organization studies. This article seeks to extend the topic to the arena of management education. Specifically, we present paradox as one means of raising the complexity of students’ understandings of what it means to manage in an increasingly turbulent world. Invoking a “pedagogy of paradox” intentionally introduces contradictions that exist simultaneously to discussion, thereby initially prompting a degree of confusion and feelings of anxiety to stimulate creative thinking that moves beyond either—or toward both—and understandings. We begin by discussing the key components of paradox, then introduce three pedagogical strategies—conceptual polarities, personal contradictions, and paradoxical predicaments—and elaborate accompanying classroom exercises for each.

Prospects and Possibilities of Critical Management Education: Critical Beings and a Pedagogy of Critical Action

The critical management studies project has generated considerable controversy in the scholarly community in terms of its place in the management and organization domain. Its educational counterpart, critical management education (CME), similarly has aroused debate among those in the management education and learning arena. Typically operationalized as critical pedagogy, CME raises a number of issues concerning the delivery of management curricula in institutional and organizational settings around the world. This article addresses these issues in terms of Barnetts (Higher Education: A Critical Business, 1997) conception of students as critical beings, that is, students capable of thinking critically, reflecting critically, and engaging in critical action. An American undergraduate course, focusing especially on critical action as a mechanism for social change, offers the opportunity to explore the prospects and possibilities of CME in a university curriculum. Students adopted a questioning stance, undertook individual and collaborative critical action projects, and reflected critically on the process. The insights derived from this critical pedagogy endeavor to advance the dialogue on CME beyond previous accounts centered largely on critical reflection into the realm of social change.

Whither the MBA? Or the Withering of MBAs?

This article employs a critical realist perspective to contextualize management education, including the MBA, and facilitate debate on the prospects for its reinvention. Two decades of substantive management education critique has not resulted in any fundamental change in models of content and process used to educate managers. We argue this is a matter of ontology and discuss the advantages of critical realist ontology for addressing this issue. A critical realist analysis identifies the generative mechanisms at work that both necessitate and constrain reinvention. We argue that one generative mechanism in particular, a legitimation crisis, could ultimately lead to the transformation of management education. This is explored systemically at the institutional, programmatic and pedagogical levels.

Political Legacy of Administrative Succession

The article examines the influence of political activity during executive succession on post-succession outcomes. A discussion is presented about the influence of an organizations resource environ...

The Guest Editors’ Corner

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of interest in spirituality in general and in spirituality in the workplace in particular. When Journal of Management Education (JME) editor Diana Bilimoria approached us at the Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference (OBTC) ’97 to coedit this Special Issue, “Spirituality in Contemporary Work: Its Place, Space, and Role in Management Education,” we were honored. It is fitting for JME to assume leadership in connecting spirituality to management education. Since the mid-1990s, the OBTC program has had sessions linking teaching with spirituality, including a “spirituality stream” in 1999, cofacilitated by Dorothy Marcic and Judi Neal. And over the years, there have been special issues of academic journals on management and spirituality, including the American Behavioral Scientist (“The Development,” 2000), Chinmaya Management Review (“Spirituality at Work,” 1999), the Journal of Organization and Change Management (“Spirituality in Organizations,” 1999), and the Journal of Managerial Psychology (“Spirituality and Management,” 1994). But this Special Issue of JME is unique because it explicitly connects spirituality and management education, as well as applications of spirituality to the classroom. Spirituality is not only about who we are as human beings but also about who we are in relation to our work. In these remarkable times, “the tumultuous environment in which we do our jobs may be the best reason to look for meaning—even transcendent meaning—in what we do” (Thompson, 2000, p. 5). Now, an increasing number of faculty are feeling more

Transferring technology into R & D: a comparison of acquired and in-house product development projects

Abstract New technologies acquired from outside the firm have become a key ingredient in technology transfer within industrial R&D laboratories and an important source of new product development efforts. This study compares the management and performance of acquired technology projects (n = 24) with product development projects that employed technology originating within the firms R&D function (n = 57), i.e., in-house projects. Acquired projects differed in a number of ways from in-house projects that were attempting to develop new technologies, but did not differ from in-house projects that were extending existing technologies within the firm. Relationships between project management and project performance also were found to differ across the project types. Similarly, the relationships between management practices and project termination differed across the project types. Overall, acquired technology projects in this study appeared more similar to the extension of technology in-house than to the development of new technology in-house. Factors related to the competitive value and success of acquired technology are discussed.