James A. F. Stoner

Plateaued and Non-Plateaued Managers: Factors in Job Performance

The opportunity to have vertical mobility, to grow in a career sense, and to be promoted to higher levels of responsibility, is endemic to the American culture. Yet, most managers reach a career plateau before they reach the top. What happens when this occurs? What is the effect on job performance? Using both self and organizational responses, 384 middle level managers were partitioned into various likelihood of promotion and degree of mutuality groups. A comparison off the pattern of factors associated with groups of high and low likelihood of promotion suggests these groups are independent. A similar comparison of groups with varying degrees bf mutuality indicates these groups are independent also. A comparison employing the source of assessment (individual or organization) did not produce significant differences. Thus, both likelihood of promotion and mutuality appear useful in further clarifying the nature of managerial work motivation. Implications of these results are discussed from both individual and organizational perspectives.

Management, Spirituality, and Religion (MSR) ways and means: a paper to encourage quality research

Abstract Despite 15 years of functioning as an interest group, our domain of inquiry is relatively young and there are limited theoretical boundaries to support, shape, and assist our efforts. This metaphorical “blank canvas” is both empowering, in that so many inquiries are open for exploration, and yet also limiting. In this document we highlight three critical elements to emphasize their importance in MSR research: (a) delineating and operationalizing the key terms of religion, spirituality, and workplace spirituality; (b) acknowledging the work to date in the MSR corpus around definitions of these terms, and (c) being explicit about how ontological and epistemological assumptions inform our methods. The intention is to encourage growth in the quality and rigor of our individual and collective scholarship.

What We Want this Journal to Be: Our First Editorial Essay in which We Hope to Start a Continuing and Evolving Conversation about Why We are Now Creating this New Journal and What We Want It to Become

The primary purpose of this journal is to help all of us move more rapidly toward a sustainable and socially just world. We will seek to do so by providing a forum in which scholarship oriented toward sustainability and social justice, that is, toward building a better world for all, can be published and, we hope, influence all of us as scholars, managers, leaders, and citizens of the world to effect positive change. We, the editorial board, believe that this purpose is stable and we hope that our editors, contributors, and readers will be willing and eager to take risks, try out new ideas and types of analysis, insights, and approaches, learn from our experiences, and welcome changes in and evolution of the journal. It is clear that even the best informed and wisest among us has little certainty about how to manage for global sustainability. Humility thus is appropriate in all we write and do—but we seek to combine humility with intellectual rigour and professional boldness.

Cura Personalis, Homines Pro Aliis, Magis, and ...?

Cura personalis, homines pro aliis, and magis have long been key themes of Jesuit education. Care for the whole person, men and women for others, or maybe men and women together for others, and excellence—the never ending search for improvement—have been foundation stones upon which many, perhaps all, Jesuit educational institutions have built their approaches to teaching, research, and service. Many non-Jesuit, non-Catholic, and non-Christian universities would also very likely agree that these three themes are deeply consistent with how they see their own missions, even if they might not use those particular Latin words to capture their own commitments. In many ways, those words are also guides to the good life—to lives well and richly lived. Recent events, however, are suggesting ever more strongly that we— as educators and as citizens, and simply as members of the human species—are called to make explicit a fourth foundation stone for our commitments to serve our communities and ourselves. That fourth foundation stone is “care for God’s creation”—or whatever phrase each individual may be most comfortable with. In the deepest spiritual sense, care for God’s creation refers to the call to meet our obligation to honor the loan of this planet that we have been given responsibility for, at this time in the planet’s very, very, very long existence and in our almost in! nitesimally short length of time on it. In a purely practical and perhaps even sel! sh sense, this call refers to the need to protect the planet’s capacity to support our immediate personal existence and the existence of our own species. Of course, we also have

Creating a Spiritually Friendly Company

This series of teaching cases is intended for use in graduate and undergraduate courses to explore the broad issues of spirituality in organizations and individual approaches to management and spirituality. It consists of eight cases—A, B(1), C, D, E, F, G, and H.

Framing the Inquiry into Risk Management and Climate Change

The authors of the chapters in this book all address the question of what climate change does mean for business and what business practices and strategy can mean for climate change. The jury is now clearly in on climate change. It no longer can be seen as something that might happen to our grandchildren; it is something that is impacting all of us now.

How Business, Resources, and People Fit Together in a Sustainability Model

This book of chapters on global sustainability is based on one of the simplest of all premises: the premise that “what cannot continue forever will not continue forever.” The way business operations are currently conducted, and the way other productive enterprises conduct their operations, cannot continue in their present forms because of the past and current rapid exhausting of the planet’s natural capital—natural capital on which those operating (“business”) models are built. It is hard to imagine that any, even slightly informed person could believe things will not change very dramatically in the very near future if for no other reason than the fact that we are using the planet’s store of natural capital far more rapidly than it can be replenished by the cyclic processes that have maintained and restored it for millennia.

Introduction: Exploring New Frameworks, Practices, and Initiatives for a Sustainable World

In Experiments Never Fail (2008), his update of The Max Strategy (1996), Dale Dauten reminds us how important it is to keep trying new things—day after day and time after time. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras learned from 3M and reported in Built to Last (1997, p. 6), “What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of ‘Let’s try a lot of stuff and keep what works.’” Dauten (2008) would have us go beyond problems to the antiproblem and beyond failures to the antifailure.