Jeffrey Pfeffer

A social information processing approach to job attitudes and task design.

This article outlines a social information processing approach to explain job attitudes. In comparison with need-satisfaction and expectancy models to job attitudes and motivation, the social information processing perspective emphasizes the effects of context and the consequences of past choices, rather than individual predispositions and rational decision-making processes. When an individual develops statements about attitude or needs, he or she uses social information--information about past behavior and about what others think. The process of attributing attitudes or needs from behavior is itself affected by commitment processes, by the saliency and relevance of information, and by the need to develop socially acceptable and legitimate rationalizations for actions. Both attitudes and need statements, as well as characterizations of jobs, are affected by informational social influence. The implications of the social information processing perspective for organization development efforts and programs of job redesign are discussed.

Organizational Legitimacy: Social Values and Organizational Behavior

Organizations seek to establish congruence between the social values associated with or implied by their activities and the norms of acceptable behavior in the larger social system of which they are a part. Insofar as these two value systems are congruent we can speak of organizational legitimacy. When an actual or potential disparity exists between the two value systems, there will exist a threat to organizational legitimacy. These threats take the form of legal, economic, and other social sanctions. In this paper, it is argued that an empirical focus on organizational efforts to become legitimate can aid in explaining and analyzing many organizational behaviors taken with respect to the environment, and further, can generate hypotheses and a conceptual perspective that can direct additional attention to the issue of organizational legitimacy. This paper provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of organizational legitimacy and the process of legitimation through which organizations act to increase their perceived legitimacy. It presents a number of examples including a discussion of the American Institute for Foreign Study as a demonstration of these ideas in action. Both the particular circumstances which can lead to problems of organizational legitimacy and some of the actions that can be taken to legitimate an organization are illustrated.

Competitive advantage through people : unleashing the power of the work force

This text explores why, despite long-standing evidence indicating that a committed work-force is essential for success, firms continue to attach little importance to their workers. The answer, argues the author, resides in a complex web of factors based on perception, history, legislation and practice that continues to dominate management thought and action. He investigates each of these factors to get to the root of the problem. The work begins by examining why certain long-discredited perceptions of human behaviour persist in organizations. It then recounts the history of legislation and labour relations and their legacy of distrust and confrontation. Finally, it explores various aspects of the manager/employee relationship and highlights how it has been undermined. However, some organizations have been able to overcome these problems. Indeed, the five common stocks with the highest returns between 1972 and 1992 - Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, Circuit City and Plenum Publishing - were in industries that shared virtually none of the characteristics traditionally associated with strategic success. What each of these firms did share was the ability to produce sustainable competitive advantage through its use of managing people. The work documents how they, and others, resisted traditional management pitfalls, and offers frameworks for implementing these changes in any industry.

An Examination of Need-Satisfaction Models of Job Attitudes.

September 1977, volume 22 A need-satisfaction theoretical model has been ubiquitous in studies and writings on job attitudes and, by extension, motivation, job design, and other organizational performance improvement issues. An examination of such need models indicates that they are frequently formulated so as to be almost impossible to refute, and the research testing them has been beset with consistency and priming artifacts. Furthermore, available empirical data fails to support many of the crucial elements of need-satisfaction theories. An examination of the components of need-satisfaction models needs, job characteristics, and job attitudes indicates that all three have been incompletely considered. Need models may have persisted in part because of perceptual biases, their consistency with other theories of rational choice behavior, and because of what they seem to imply about human behavior. The models appear to deny, however, that people have the capacity to provide their own satisfactions by cognitively reconstructing situations.

The Ambiguity of Leadership

Problems with the concept of leadership are addressed: (a) the ambiguity of its definition and measurement, (b) the issue of whether leadership affects organizational performance, and (c) the process of selecting leaders, which frequently emphasizes organizationally-irrelevant criteria. Leadership is a process of attributing causation to individual social actors. Study of leaders as symbols and of the process of attributing leadership might be productive.

Seven Practices of Successful Organizations

In this excerpt from his recently published book, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, the author argues that many managers continue to overlook the extent to which the more effective management of people can improve firm economic performance. Firms that seek to produce enhanced economic performance through the management their human capital have adopted a number of common personnel practices. These include the provision of employment security, the selective hiring of new personnel, decentralized decision making, high compensation contingent on organizational performance, extensive training, minimal status distinctions and barriers, and the extensive sharing of financial and performance information throughout the firm.

Organizational Decision Making as a Political Process: The Case of a UniversityBudget.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Janice Barton, Karen Riley, and Ray Zammuto in the data collection and the support of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Illinois. The effect of subunit power on resource allocation decisions in one university is examined. Measures of departmental power in a university are found to be significantly related to the proportion of the budget received, even after statistically controlling for such universalistic bases of allocation as work load of the department, national rank, and number of faculty. Subunit power in the organization is also related to the correlation between a subunits resources-budget and instructional staff-and work load over time. The more powerful the department, the less the allocated resources are a function of departmental work load and student demand for course offerings. Subunit power is measured by both interviews of department heads and the analysis of archival records of departmental representation on major university committees. Intercorrelations between these measures of subunit power indicate that it is possible to obtain unobtrusive measures of organizational political systems without direct interviewing.

Producing sustainable competitive advantage through the effective management of people

Executive Overview Achieving competitive success through people involves fundamentally altering how we think about the workforce and the employment relationship. It means achieving success by working with people, not by replacing them or limiting the scope of their activities. It entails seeing the workforce as a source of strategic advantage, not just as a cost to be minimized or avoided. Firms that take this different perspective are often able to successfully outmaneuver and outperform their rivals. ........................................................................................................................................................................

The Bases and Use of Power in Organizational Decision Making: The Case of a University

The authors appreciate the support of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Illinois. They wish to thank Janice Barton and Ray Zammuto for their invaluable assistance in the collection of data for this study. The effects of subunit power on organizational decision making and the bases of subunit power are examined in a large midwestern state university.@ It is hypothesized that subunits acquire power to the extent that they provide resources critical to the organization and that power affects resource allocations within organizations in so far as the resource is critical to the subunits and scarce within the organization. Departmental power is found to be most highly correlated with the departments ability to obtain outside grants and contracts, with national prestige and the relative size of the graduate program following closely in importance. Power is used most in the allocation of graduate university fellowships, the most critical and scarce resource, and is unrelated to the allocation of summer faculty fellowships, the least critical and scarce resource.

The Business School`Business¿: Some Lessons from the US Experience

U.S. business schools dominate the business school landscape, particularly for the MBA degree. This fact has caused schools in other countries to imitate the U.S. schools as a model for business education. But U.S. business schools face a number of problems, many of them a result of offering a value proposition that primarily emphasizes the career-enhancing, salary-increasing aspects of business education as contrasted with the idea of organizational management as a profession to be pursued out of a sense of intrinsic interest or even service. We document some of the problems confronting U.S. business schools and show how many of these arise from a combination of a market-like orientation to education coupled with an absence of a professional ethos. In this tale, there are some lessons for educational organizations both in the U.S. and elsewhere that are interested in learning from the U.S. experience.