Leonard Greenhalgh

The Effects Of Negotiator Preferences, Situational Power, And Negotiator Personality On Outcomes Of Business Negotiations

A laboratory experiment was used to investigate the joint effects of preferences, personality, and situational power on the outcomes of business negotiations. Results show that preferences vary acr...

Evolution of Research on Job Insecurity

This paper provides an overview of how theory and research on job insecurity have evolved in the past 25 years. We trace the Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt (1984) model to its origins in a large-scale action research project, summarize the subsequent theoretical and empirical developments of the model, and suggest directions for future research to understand the perpetually important phenomenon of job insecurity.

Maintaining Organizational Effectiveness During Organizational Retrenchment

Organizational changes usually imply work force changes. The method used to make personnel changes can reduce organizational effectiveness, particularly in terms of productivity and turnover. This paper describes and assesses an action research program to alter an organizations procedures for achieving work force changes in response to a declining environmental niche. Evaluation research was conducted to assess the consequences of existing procedures, and the resulting data were reported in dollar terms to demonstrate more effectively their negative impact on the organization. A demonstration program, subsequently evaluated as successful, provided the model for change. The paper examines the difficulty of establishing the revised procedures, the unintended side effects, the generalizability of the experience, and the social values underlying the approach.

Survivor Sense Making and Reactions to Organizational Decline Effects of Individual Differences

Major organizational upheavals, such as mergers or restructuring of declining organizations, present employees with considerable ambiguity about their future employment, which presents a serious challenge for management communication. Not all employees are perplexed by this uncertainty, however. Those who are averse to ambiguity and insecurity tend to deny the ambiguity regarding their future. Such individual differences also affect reactions to whatever ambiguity they do perceive. This study uses data from a merger of two declining organizations to investigate the relationship between work environment and worker reactions.

Clinical Assessment Methods in Negotiation Research: The Study of Narcissism and Negotiator Effectiveness

Field studies suggest that individual differences are strong determinants negotiator effectiveness, but their impact has yet to be adequately documented (Thompson 1990). We argue that the lack of empirical confirmation is attributable to methodological limitations of the dominant paradigm. This paper shows the usefulness of psychodynamically-oriented constructs and clinical assessment methods. The study contrasts the negotiation experience of individuals high and low in narcissistic functioning, a core psychodynamic variable, and the deep-seated character trait that underlies the interpersonal orientation construct. Implications of this approach for the design of personality assessment and negotiation research are explored.

Simulating an On-Going Organization:

role-taking episode that students or trainees engage in for two thirds of a class period, leaving the remaining time for analysis of the experience. Although such exercises can be very useful devices for achieving certain learning objectives, they have shortcomings in addition to those pointed out by Vaill. 1. The exercise is abstract in that it is separated from its context. Thus the learning experience is limited by the learner’s necessarily narrow definition of a situation. One can appreciate the importance of context by considering a role-play involving a manager disciplining a worker. The manager would be likely to construct a different definition of the situation if he or she were also experiencing a union organizing campaign rather than a more placid organizational climate. Context also includes the organization’s task environment (Thompson, 1967) which imposes constraints on the actors. Their actions increasingly take place &dquo;in a fishbowl,&dquo; are subject to government regulation, are on the record, and are monitored by various groups. Experiencing these factors in the classroom may be the best way to learn how to deal with them; simulations that omit them may encourage a dangerous neglect of environmental issues in real life. 2. The situation experienced lacks a rich history which would also have a considerble effect on action in real life. Apart from the likely existence of various precedents, the &dquo;current situation&dquo; facing the role players would in reality be the product of the interaction of a series of events over time, which would lead to competitive &dquo;interpretations of history&dquo; (Cohen & March, 1974) by the actors. 3. There are no &dquo;personalities&dquo; involved, except what is ad libbed in the role-play. In a recent bargaining exercise I conducted, a board chairman commented, after negotiating with one of my students over a major policy issue, that in real life, he would previously have studied a dossier on his opponent which included information on the opponent’s background, interests, values, priorities, and negotiating style. 4. The events in the exercise tend to be episodic rather than continuous (Caplow, 1968). Even when specific instructions are given to the effect that the actors will have to continue to interact interdependently and live with the consequences of their behavior after the event highlighted in the experiential exercise, there seems to be an inexorable tendency toward endgame behavior, which might provide the students with a maladaptive learning experience. 5. Role-taking is not instantaneous for students. It takes time for them to get into their own new roles, and to adjust to the novel roles of others. As a result, in short exercises, students sometimes report that they do not begin really experiencing the role until the exercise is almost over. 6. Many short-term exercises need to abstract from real life situations a single issue which can be dealt with in isolation. The more crucial learning, however, seems to come from students’ recognizing and wrestling with a web of complex dilemmas arising within organizational life. Removing these can produce a simplification in students’ thinking, rather than complicating it (Weick, 1975). Most of these shortcomings can be overcome through the use of an extended simulation. The purpose of this paper is to describe such an exercise which was the backbone of a second-year MBA course in human resource management at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College. Briefly, students in the course went through the 1An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Academy of Management, Newport, Rhode Island, May 1979. The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of William J. Wasmuth and Mary Lutynski Jacobs to the development of the simulation training program described, and of John Hennessey to previous drafts of this paper. 24 experience of totally running a small organization in the role of its chief executive officer for a (simulated) five-month period. During that time they dealt with environmental pressures and opportunities, faced staffing and fiscal crises, negotiated (in role-plays) with various people ranging from members of their board of directors to rank and file employees, and lived with the outcomes of their own earlier decisions. The essence of the exercise is the experiencing of a series of complex and interrelated managerial dilemmas. Objectives The teaching objectives which guided the design of the extended simulation are: ~ to encourage students to conceptualize the organization as an open system and to gain an understanding of the nature and extent of the ripple effects which spread throughout the system when the equilibrium is disturbed; ~ to enable students to deal with &dquo;individual&dquo; events in their ongoing envirnmental and historical context, rather than &dquo;in a vacuum&dquo;; ~ to induce students to apply the knowledge they gain from written reference sources to tangible organizational situations, thus to blend cognitive with experiential learning; ~ to allow students to experience the short-term and some of the long-term consequences of their managerial actions, thereby reinforcing what they have learned; and ~ to give students the opportunity to experiment with their own interpersonal behavior in a situation with minor consequences.