Joseph F. Porac

On the Importance of Self-Determination for Intrinsically-Motivated Behavior

Yoked pairs of subjects solved puzzles such that one member of each pair was given choice about what puzzles to work on and how much time to allot to each, while the yoked subject was assigned the same puzzles and time allotments as those chosen by the first subject. It was predicted and found that subjects who chose the activities and time allotments -in other words, who had additional self-determination--would be more intrinsically motivated than subjects doing the same activity without choice.

Worth, words, and the justification of executive pay

Summary This study examines how the compensation committees of a sample of U.S. corporations from the S & P 500 justify their compensation practices to shareholders. Drawing from research on organizational legitimacy as a theoretical base, we examine the eAects of ownership structure, CEO pay, and organizational performance on the frequencies of three types of compensation justifications: external validations, shareholder alignment statements, and discussions of company performance. We find that when companies have more concentrated and active outside owners, they are much more likely to justify their compensation practices by citing the role of compensation consultants as advisors in the compensation-setting process. They are also more likely to discuss the alignment of managerial and shareholder interests, and to downplay a company’s accounting returns. Companies that pay their CEOs large base salaries are also more likely to cite the role of consultants, and, for those with dispersed ownership, to discuss shareholder alignment. High accounting returns lead companies to emphasize accounting performance in their compensation justifications, and to downplay market returns. High stock price volatility leads companies to de-emphasize market returns. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and theory on the symbolic aspects of company‐shareholder relationships. #1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cognitive categorization and subjective rivalry among retailers in a small city

The authors report the results of 2 studies conducted to measure the cognitive structures underlying perceived competitive relationships among retailing firms in a small city. Drawing from recent research on cognitive categorization, they first discuss the theoretical importance of studying subjective rivalry and then explain how categorization processes influence perceived competitive boundaries among firms. The results of Study 1 suggest that cognitive categories of firms are perceived to be largely independent sets of organizations. The results of Study 2 suggest that middle-level categories represent a psychological inflection point differentiating rivals from nonrivals. The authors discuss the implications of these data for studying how managers make sense of competitive structures

The Impact of CEO Status Diffusion on the Economic Outcomes of Other Senior Managers

In this paper we develop and test predictions regarding the impact of CEO status on the economic outcomes of top management team members. Using a unique data set incorporating Financial Worlds widely publicized CEO of the Year contest, we found that non-CEO top management team members received higher pay when they worked for a high-status CEO. However, star CEOs themselves retained most of the compensation benefits. We also show that there is a “burden of celebrity” in that the above relationships were contingent on how well a firm performs. Last, we found that, when compared with the subordinates of less-celebrated CEOs, members of top management teams who worked for star CEOs were more likely to become CEOs themselves through internal or external promotions.

Effects of Goal Difficulty, Goal-Setting Method, and Expected External Evaluation on Intrinsic Motivation

The article examines the goal-setting method of corporations and its corresponding effects on the job performance of employees. A discussion is presented about employee motivation. The authors pres...

Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers Revisited

In this paper we reflect on the contribution of our 1989 article ‘Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers’. We begin by recalling our backgrounds and motivations as collaborators on the project, and then discuss recent developments in the Scottish Borders knitwear industry. Noting that the industry has suffered continual decline in the twenty years since we published our paper, we suggest that the case still raises issues that remain open questions in the field despite the significant efforts by management researchers in recent years to understand the sources of industrial decline and revitalization. We outline what we feel are gaps in the existing literature and then end with the suggestion that these gaps are likely to be addressed only through multidisciplinary research that integrates resource, power, and cognitive theories of industrial dynamics.

Falls from Grace and the Hazards of High Status The 2009 British MP Expense Scandal and Its Impact on Parliamentary Elites

Although the benefits of high status are well documented, in this research we explore the potential hazards associated with high status that have increasingly been implicated in recent studies. Organizational research suggests two such hazards: (1) opportunistic behaviors by elites that eventually lead to sanctions and (2) the targeting of elites by various audiences such that they are held more accountable than their lower-status counterparts for similar offenses. Our objective was to disentangle these two explanations in the context of an organizational scandal involving the Members of the British Parliament (MPs) whose annual expense claims were unexpectedly exposed in a well-known 2009 scandal. We find that high-status MPs were not more likely to abuse the expense system than were lower-status MPs, but they were more likely to be targeted by the press and voters for their inappropriate expense claims. As a consequence, high-status MPs were significantly more likely than non-elite MPs to exit Parliament when they had high levels of inappropriate expense claims. Elite MPs who were not implicated in the scandal, however, were far more likely to remain in Parliament than their lower-status counterparts. Our results also suggest that media coverage of the expense incident by British newspapers played a significant role in shaping social reactions to the scandal.

Modeling Distributed Knowledge Processes in Next Generation Multidisciplinary Alliances

Current research on distributed knowledge processes suggests a critical conflict between knowledge processes in groups and the technologies built to support them. The conflict centers on observations that authentic and efficient knowledge creation and sharing is deeply embedded in an interpersonal face to face context, but that technologies to support distributed knowledge processes rely on the assumption that knowledge can be made mobile outside these specific contexts. This conflict is of growing national importance as work patterns change from same site to separate site collaboration, and millions of government and industrial dollars are invested in establishing academic-industry alliances and building infrastructures to support distributed collaboration and knowledge. In this paper we describe our multi-method approach for studying the tension between embedded and mobile knowledge in a project funded by the National Science Foundations program on Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence. This project examines knowledge processes and technology in distributed, multidisciplinary scientific teams in the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a prototypical next generation enterprise. First we review evidence for the tension between embedded and mobile knowledge in several research literatures. Then we present our three-factor conceptualization that considers how the interrelationships among characteristics of the knowledge shared, group context, and communications technology contribute to the tension between embedded and mobile knowledge. Based on this conceptualization we suggest that this dichotomy does not fully explain distributed multidisciplinary knowledge processes. Therefore we propose some alternate models of how knowledge is shared. We briefly introduce the setting in which we are studying distributed knowledge processes and finally, we describe the data collection methods and the current status of the project.

Undermining overjustification: Inducing intrinsic and extrinsic task representations

Abstract A study was conducted to test the proposition that the overjustification effect is a result of the interaction of two distinct task interpretations. It was argued that intrinsic and extrinsic motives might best be viewed as cognitive representations of task situations involving multiple task associates. It was predicted that by altering the salience of intrinsic and extrinsic task information, it would be possible to change the effects of an extrinsic reward on intrinsic motivation. The results indicated taht when task rewards were interpreted from within an intrinsic task representation, they did not undermine an individuals free-choice task activity. The results are discussed in terms of recent work in cognitive psychology.

Causal attributions, affect, and expectations for a day's work performance.

Two studies were conducted to explore the relationships between perceived job performance, causal attributions, employee affect, and expectations for a days work. In both studies, causal categories derived from previous attribution research were found to correspond with employee job explanations. However, results somewhat inconsistent with previous laboratory studies were obtained.