Jeffrey Gandz

The Experience of Workplace Politics

This study investigates the perceived politicization of organizational processes and their attitudes and beliefs about workplace politics. Perceived politicization is related to characteristics of ...

The ethics of empowerment

Driven by competitive pressure, organizations are empowering employees to use their judgment, creativity, and ideas in pursuit of enhanced organizational performance and both employee and shareholder satisfaction. This empowerment offers both benefits and potential harm. This article explores the benefits and harm associated with role, reward, process and governance empowerment and makes recommendations for minimizing the harm while maximizing the benefits.

Toward a Framework of Leader Character in Organizations

While the construct of character is well grounded in philosophy, ethics, and more recently psychology, it lags in acceptance and legitimacy within management research and mainstream practice. Our research seeks to remedy this through four contributions. First, we offer a framework of leader character that provides rigor through a three‐phase, multi‐method approach involving 1817 leaders, and relevance by using an engaged scholarship epistemology to validate the framework with practicing leaders. This framework highlights the theoretical underpinnings of the leader character model and articulates the character dimensions and elements that operate in concert to promote effective leadership. Second, we bring leader character into mainstream management research, extending the traditional competency and interpersonal focus on leadership to embrace the foundational component of leader character. In doing this, we articulate how leader character complements and strengthens several existing theories of leadership. Third, we extend the virtues‐based approach to ethical decision making to the broader domain of judgement and decision making in support of pursuing individual and organization effectiveness. Finally, we offer promising directions for future research on leader character that will also serve the larger domain of leadership research.

Developing leadership character

1. Good Leadership: Competencies, Character, and Commitment 2. Character and Business Leadership 3. Dimension 1: Transcendence 4. Dimension 2: Drive 5. Dimension 3: Collaboration 6. Dimension 4: Humanity 7. Dimension 5: Humility 8. Dimension 6: Integrity 9. Dimension 7: Temperance 10. Dimension 8: Justice 11. Dimension 9: Judgment 12. Dimension 10: Accountability 13. Dimension 11: Courage 14. Call to Action 15. Conclusion

Confronting Sex Role Stereotypes: the Janis/Jack Jerome Cases

With an increase in the number of women in the workforce, there has been a proportionate rise in the number of dual career couples. It is likely that many of our business students will be involved in a dual career lifestyle. The challenge of balancing career, marriage and possibly parenting is therefore an important issue to address. Katz (1984-1985), for example, has developed role conflict exercises that focus on how to manage and maintain the dual career lifestyle successfully. A related trend is that career opportunities may entice the husband or the wife to different geographic locations. Thus, the dilemmas facing dual career families are compounded by geographic separation and the disruption of family life (Polegato & Barras, 1984). To address the dual career family dilemma we wrote a case, based on a real situation, which featured Janis Jerome, a 40 year old mother of three children. She was trying to decide whether she should take a high paying, challenging job with a consulting firm which also involved moving to another city and trying to maintain a &dquo;long distance&dquo; marriage or stay in a less challenging, lower paying job with limited prospects for advancement.

Teaching business ethics

Business ethics should be taught in business schools as an integrated part of core curricula in MBA programs with a dual focus on both analytical frameworks and their applications to the business disciplines. To overcome the reluctance of many faculty to handle ethical issues, a critical mass of faculty must develop suitable materials, educate their peers in its use, and take the lead by introducing it in their own courses and on senior management programs.