Peter J. Frost

Compassion in Organizational Life

In this article, the authors explore compassion in work organizations. They discuss the prevalence and costs of pain in organizational life, and identify compassion as an important process that can occur in response to suffering. At the individual level, compassion takes place through three subprocesses: noticing another’s pain, experiencing an emotional reaction to the pain, and acting in response to the pain. The authors build on this framework to argue that organizational compassion exists when members of a system collectively notice, feel, and respond to pain experienced by members of that system. These processes become collective as features of an organization’s context legitimate them within the organization, propagate them among organizational members, and coordinate them across individuals.

Teaching Effectiveness in the Organizational Sciences: Recognizing and Enhancing the Scholarship of Teaching

The 1997 Special Research Forum on Teaching Effectiveness in the Organizational Sciences represents an effort both to recognize the role of the scholarship of teaching and to enhance teaching effec...

Goal setting and the task process: I. An interactive influence on individual performance

Abstract Goal—performance relationships investigated in this laboratory study were based on a model of individual performance as influenced by the specificity and difficulty of goals assigned and by the frequency of performance intervals allocated for task completion. The form of these relationships was considered to be shaped by the prescriptiveness of the task process involved. Task process was found to differentiate the form of some goal-performance characteristics: Pacing the individual improved performance on a repetitive task (fixed process), but had no significant effect on a problem solving task (nonprescribed, variable process); focusing effort through a specific goal improved performance on a problem solving task, but had no significant influence on repetitive task performance. A post hoc separation of the 240 subjects in the experimental group into low and high task interest categories showed on analysis that high interest subjects outperformed low interest subjects on each task. The findings suggest a differential locus of interest, being externally induced in a repetitive task and intrinsic to a problem solving task.

The Shamanic Perspective on Organizational Change and Development

Proposes that there are parallels between the roles of shamans in their communities and the roles which organizational change and development consultants can play in guiding organizational transformations. Presents fundamental assumptions underlying the shamanic perspective on transformational change and utilizes them to understand the problems resulting from a large‐scale organizational change programme undertaken in one organization. Illustrates the importance of adopting an integrative holistic approach in order to enhance the long‐term viability and success of any organizational change and development intervention. Closes with a discussion of the ways in which organizational change and development consultants can and do act in shamanic ways.

Influence of Political Action on Innovation: Part I

Having a good idea, product or system is often not enough to ensure the adoption and diffusion of an innovation. Using an organisational power and politics perspective, several published accounts of product and administrative innovation are analysed. The interplay of political tactics or games are found to be present at both the observable surface level and the deep structural level of power relationships in all areas of activity – individual, group, organisational and societal. The viability of two overall political influence strategies, “asking for forgiveness” versus “seeking permission” are contrasted in terms of their implications for the eventual success or failure of a proposed product or administrative innovation. Several propositions and future research directions which focus on the political nature and processes of innovation are suggested.

Toward optimal use of video in management education: examining the evidence

Video has emerged as a widely used teaching tool among management educators in academic and corporate settings. This paper reviews research in comparative media and management education to identify how video can be used with traditional written material for optimal educational outcomes. Implications for research and practice are examined.

Threats to Innovation; Roadblocks to Implementation: The Politics of the Productive Process

Why is it that the initial man-machine interface in the modern world of computer technology relies on a keyboard designed over 100 years ago? An arrangement of symbols purposefully “anti-engineered” in order to slow down typists on a machine which relied solely on the forces of gravity to return the typewriter keys to their initial resting places. Even after the invention of spring-loaded keys and electric typewriters which negated the necessity of such an arrangement, we are still using the same basic keyboard designed to alleviate the constraints imposed by an machine invented in 1873. Has the innovative spirit for increased efficiency bypassed this most fundamental feature of office machinery? Is it because no better alternative has been designed?

Pfeffer's Model of Management: An Expansion and Modification

This article, based on an exploratory study of Pfeffers model of management, recommends several modifications to its conception of the relationships between managerial actions and substantive and symbolic outcomes. We suggest that the managers influence on beliefs is not necessarily greater than on tangible outcomes, but is contingent on managerial motivation, the type of symbolic action employed, and the type of organization involved. Our data indicate that factors affecting the strength of the link between substantive and symbolic outcomes differ with the type of symbolic actions employed and with the existence (or absence) of efforts to make the use of power unobtrusive.

Experiencing Mechanistic Versus Organic Systems: Adding Affect To Students' Conceptual Grasp of "Abstract" Organizational Concepts

Typically, students, especially undergraduates, have a difficult time &dquo;getting&dquo; the full meaning of concepts we teach in organizational theory. One reason for this difficulty is that students are given few if any ways to hook into the feeling of the concepts. At most, discussions of structure, technology, environment, centralization, and decentralization are grounded in examples, illustrations, and cases that emphasis the facts of the matter. What emotions are noted are processed cognitively by students. There is little or no attention given to the experiential dimension. The use of examples, illustrations, and cases is an appropriate and helpful teaching method, but the students reading and analyzing the material rarely, if ever, get a real sense of what the emotional connotations are for those in a centralized

Obtaining Organizational Reality through the Business Novel

Typically, undergraduate students have had very little exposure to organizational life. The entry level positions held for short periods during the summers usually do not provide much opportunity for o.rganizational insight. This lack of organizational experience, rather than leading to a sense of inadequacy and desire to learn, tends to produce the opposite response. Thus students often respond to materials dealing with organizational structure, leadership, group process or power on a superficial basis. They treat O.B. with indifference and even active rejection.