Leonard A. Schlesinger

Choosing Strategies for Change

Change, though traumatic, can be good for some people, but many others, especially in their daily employment, feel threatened by any alteration in the status quo. Organizations by their very nature must change, and increasingly rapidly--and managers must implement changes and overcome resistance to them. Here are four basic reasons people resist change, various ways of dealing with that resistance, and a guide to the kinds of approaches to use with different types of opposition.

Quality of work life and the manager: Muddle in the middle

ore and more U.S. organizations are actively cles, participative management, total quality engaging in a wide variety of activities dedicontrol activities, and so forth) have been excated to improving employee productivity tensively written up in the management litand quality of work life (QWL). Such QWL erature and are often viewed as a move projects (which we define broadly as encomtoward empowerment of the worker. QWL passing employee involvement, quality ciractivities are designed to free workers to ful-

Strong Leadership and Teamwork Drive Culture and Performance Change: Ohio State University Medical Center 2000-2006

Several characteristics of academic health centers have the potential to create high levels of internal conflict and misalignment that can pose significant leadership challenges. In September 2000, the positions of Ohio State University (OSU) senior vice president for health sciences, dean of the medical school, and the newly created position of chief executive officer of the OSU Medical Center (OSUMC) were combined under a single leader to oversee the OSUMC. This mandate from the president and trustees was modeled after top institutions with similar structures. The leader who assumed the role was tasked with improving OSUMCs academic, clinical, and financial performance. To achieve this goal, the senior vice president and his team employed the service value chain model of improving performance, based on the premise that leadership behavior/culture drives employee engagement/satisfaction, leading to customer satisfaction and improved organizational performance. Implementing this approach was a seven-step process: (1) selecting the right leadership team, (2) assessing the challenges and opportunities, (3) setting expectations for performance and leadership behavior, (4) aligning structures and functions, (5) engaging constituents, (6) developing leadership skills, and (7) defining strategies and tracking goals. The OSUMC setting during this period provides an observational case study to examine how these stepwise changes, instituted by strong leadership and teamwork, were able to make and implement sound decisions that drove substantial and measurable improvements in the engagement and satisfaction of faculty and staff; the satisfaction of students and patients; and academic, clinical, and financial performance.

Thinking Like A Manager and Managing for the Long Run

Effective management is much more than the production of immediate results. Effective management includes creating the potential for achieving good results over the long run. The manager who as president of a company produces spectacular results for a three- to ten-year period can hardly be considered effective if, concurrently, he or she allows plant and equipment to deteriorate, creates an alienated or militant workforce, lets the company develop a bad name in the marketplace, and ignores new product development.

A Consumer Guide To Six Organizational Behavior Textbooks

This review essay is intended to serve as a consumer’s guide to six introductory OB textbooks. The phrase ’introductory OB course’ covers a considerable variety of teachers, students, institutions, and purposes. Our aim is to provide information which will help instructors sort through their choices by conveying the style, approach, and contents of each book. In selecting the books for our review, we were guided by a number of considerations. We intended to sample the quite diverse range of approaches to teaching organizational behavior from experiential to lecture/discussion. We wanted a mix of publishers and sought to avoid overlaps in authorship. These selection criteria produced a list of texts which represented a wide range of choices and possibilities for the instructor of the introductory OB course.