To envisage

Great leaders across centuries and across institutions - political, social and economic - have astutely used the "power of imagery" in stirring a group of people. The power of envisaging an inspiring future and energizing the constituents towards realizing it seems indisputable. In an organizational context too, the implications of a "shared vision" has received considerable attention both on theoretical and practical fronts.

Social entrepreneurship: A distinctive domain?

Though 'social entrepreneurship' as a phenomenon that integrates economic and social value creation has had a long presence, it does not seem to have attracted wide scholarly attention. A review of the social science literature found despite spanning a period of nearly 20 years, just 152 journal articles on social entrepreneurship and 10 key areas of future research (Short, Moss and Lumpkin, 2009).

Leadership effectiveness

A cursory glance at the academic literature shows that the phenomenon of leadership has intrigued scholars across domains, particularly those from social psychological and organization behavioral disciplines. In fact, a Google Scholar search for the word "leadership" in the title of the article yields more than 150,000 results.

Institutions and Entrepreneurship

Douglass C North's essay on "Institutions", published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Vol 5, Winter 1991), was a compulsory reading during my MBA days. But as many B-school students, I too graduated barely managing to flip through the many seminal essays such as this.

Maximizing organization performance

I have always been fascinated by the subject of how organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, manage their human resources to achieve greater organizational performance. Having worked in organizations of varied nature and settings, albeit for a shorter time, and having gotten time to reflect on these experiences, I believe that this area of maximizing organization performance offers tremendous scope for meaningful investigations.

Trust: Intra- and Inter- organizational

A few days back an interesting academic lecture titled "Sparks, Workers and Slugs: On the Relationship between Work Orientation and Trust among Firefighters" was delivered by Professor Michael G. Pratt. Based on a decade of research, his talk was essentially about exploring the relationship between work orientation and trust among firefighters. It was particularly intriguing to know how perceptions of work orientations get formed based on small social cues outside the work domain, and how this perception determines the degree of trust between workers.

CWB and OCB

Reference paper:

Dalal, R. S. (2005). A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Counterproductive Work Behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(6), 1241–1255. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.90.6.1241

Personality traits and OCB

Reference paper:

Chiaburu, D. S., Oh, I.-S., Berry, C. M., Li, N., & Gardner, R. G. (2011). The Five-Factor Model of Personality Traits and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(6), 1140–1166. doi:10.1037/a0024004

Role stressors and OCB

Reference paper:

Eatough, E. M., Chu-Hsiang Chang, Miloslavic, S. A., & Johnson, R. E. (2011). Relationships of Role Stressors With Organizational Citizenship Behavior: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(3), 619–632. doi:10.1037/a0021887

Predicting citizenship behaviors

In the pursuit of understanding what makes certain organizations exceptionally functioning, a few weeks back I stumbled upon a very interesting construct called OCB. That discretionary behaviors and gestures of employees is key to improve organizational performance has been recognized by management theorists. Such voluntary behaviors, defined as Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs), can neither be enforced on the basis of formal role obligations nor elicited by contractual guarantee of recompense (Organ, 1990).

Universal elements of employee engagement

A recent extensive research by Gallup Inc, a research based performance management company, indicates that majority of Amercian employees, about 71 percent, are either "not engaged" or "actively disengaged" in their work. While I have my own understanding of what employee engagement means, I was particularly curious to know how this research firm defined this concept, particularly the concept of "active disengagement".