Lívia Markóczy

The Role of Middle Management in the Strategy Process: Group Affiliation, Structural Holes, and Tertius Iungens

This study explores the relationship between eight distinct brokerage roles of middle managers and their involvement in achieving different strategic goals. The authors argue that each role contributes to different aspects of middle managers’ strategic goals and that some roles are more likely to realize brokerage advantages than others. They further suggest that bridging structural holes may not be an optimal strategy in all situations. Important implications of their model are discussed and several future research directions are proposed.

Complex Rhetoric and Simple Games

Complexity has become interesting to management scholars who value its challenge to reductionism, prediction and equilibria, as well at its ability to derive interesting emergent properties from simple relations. We step through these and other properties attributed to chaos and complexity to examine which of the properties are actually desirable and whether the approaches actually have that property. For example, we find reductionism generally desirable, but find that complexity may be overly reductionistic for the study of humans. As a matter of comparison, we show that most of the desirable properties attributed to complexity and chaos can be found, sometimes uniquely, in the theory of games.

Forbearance in organizational citizenship behaviour

We argue for the need to distinguish active positive contributions from forbearance within the concept of organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB). We demonstrate the usefulness of this distinction by showing that forbearance plays a major role in national understandings of OCB. Drawing from institutional theory, we argue that country institutional environments affect what behaviours are considered to be discretionary, and thereby impact the perception of forbearance OCBs. In our study of 524 US and Chinese managers, we found that Chinese respondents were more likely to perceive forbearance from abuse of personal power and forbearance from use of company resources as OCBs and as discretionary actions than US respondents. In contrast, forbearance from complaining about trivial issues and forbearance from inconsiderateness were more likely to be perceived as OCBs and as discretionary behaviours by US than Chinese respondents. In addition, we found that the relationship between country and forbearance OCBs was mediated by the discretionary nature of these behaviours. These results have implications for research on OCB as well as for human resource managers, particularly in an international context.

States and belief states

Differences and similarities of managerial beliefs were measured in a Hungarian-American joint venture using causal maps. The relative influence of nationality, functional area and other characteristics of managers was investigated and it was found that functional area seems to have more importance in explaining similarities and differences in the business beliefs of managers than nationality does.

Multiple motives behind single acts of co-operation

To understand co-operation in social dilemmas, we need to allow for individual variation along several motives and beliefs instead of declaring that co-operativeness is merely self-interested or is merely a consequence of ones culture or the situation. This paper describes three beliefs and eight motives for co-operation or non-co-operation based on research on social dilemmas from a number of disciplines. It also proposes a framework that describes how beliefs and various motives interact with a given situation leading to a specific behaviour.

Group learning and performance: the role of communication and faultlines

Drawing upon group learning theory, we suggest that communication content and frequency as well as experimentation can be considered aspects of group learning behavior and explore their effect on group performance. We posit that communication content and frequency, as well as experimentation, positively influence group performance. Further, drawing upon the diversity construct of group faultlines, we hypothesize that faultlines moderate these relationships. Results provide mixed support for our hypotheses.

Toward greater understanding of the pernicious effects of workplace envy

Despite the fact that envy is widely viewed as one of the most pernicious and dysfunctional workplace emotions, research has ignored its longer term consequences. This oversight can largely be attributed to over reliance on the relatively static affective events framework that does not account for how envy-eliciting events can threaten an individuals perceptions of social standing or trigger emotional schema from previous events. Hence, we propose an extension of this framework in order to address these shortcomings and in order to account more fully for the cumulative effects of prior envy-eliciting events. In particular, by integrating insights from social comparison and emotional schema theories into the current framework, we offer a deeper, more fine-grained explanation of the cumulative effects of emotionally congruent envious episodes. We believe that these additional insights will offer a perspective, for researchers and practitioners alike, into how envy-eliciting events can result in more malicious and chronic behavior. Future research and managerial implications are discussed.

Yabba-Dabba-Doo! A Response to Unfair Accusations

There may be reasons to critique evolutionary psychology (EP) and particularly its application to the study of organizations. Those reasons might arguably include: (i) it hasn’t lived up to the enthusiasm of its proponents in producing concrete results; (ii) it smells of fadishness; (iii) it is so poorly defined that anything can be called EP; (iv) everything ‘true’ about it is trivial, everything non-trivial is probably not true. Although we would dispute such criticisms, a review of EP to date could carefully analyze the progress in EP and make such (arguable) claims. Furthermore, such a critique may even be useful at this point, if to do nothing less than to get us proponents of EP to clarify what has and hasn’t been gained by adopting the EP approach. But Graham Sewell’s article is not such a critique. Instead it is the same pack of misunderstandings and misrepresentations about EP and sociobiology that have been repeated (and refuted) for years. His article is no more a critique of EP than it would be a critique of J.S. Bach to complain that he over used the saxophone in his operas. Indeed, Sewell’s comments are (indirectly) a testimony to the strength of EP, since they may demonstrate that the only way to oppose EP is to misrepresent it. If Sewell is correct in his characterization of research in EP, then we are intellectual imperialists and absolutists with a nefarious political agenda who condone rape and infanticide. It is hard not to respond with fury and outrage at such allegations. But we will attempt to contain our anger and hope to provide a more measured response. We use the space alloted to us trying to persuade you that Sewell has grossly and massively mischaracterized EP, and that he (and other critics of EP) employ an extreme double standard with respect to method. We also discuss what we think underlies the antipathy some feel toward EP. But before we get to that, we would like

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nodes, but you can't pick your friends' nodes: misattributions of others'

One hundred and eleven managers from international organizations in Hungary selected success factors listed on cards by importance. The expressed preferences of non-Hungarians in this node selection task differed from the preferences attributed to them by the locals; the locals felt that the non-Hungarians did not care enough about the local environment, while the non-Hungarians - by their card selection - appeared to care more than the locals did about those issues. Several candidate explanations for the discrepancy are discussed, but all are eliminated with the exception of misattribution on the part of the locals. Implications of wide-spread misattribution, both for practice and for how management scholars go about their business, are discussed.

The virtue of human universals and cooperation: a review essay of Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue

In reviewing Matt Ridleys The Origins of Virtue we do five things. (1) We discuss and challenge the basic assumptions of the Standard Social Sciences Model which permeates management scholarship. (2) We present some alternatives to this model, particularly evolutionary psychology. (3) We look at how these alternatives provide a framework for understanding cooperation. (4) We enumerate some of the difficulties (both real and imaginary) with evolutionary psychology. (5) Finally, we suggest that management scholars work more closely with scholars from the many other disciplines that are developing solid theories of cooperation.