This volume is based around 14 chapters and two critical analyses which provide new perspectives on important organizational constructs. The first half of the book provides chapters by advanced graduate students who are making their first contributions to understanding organizational behavior. The second half of the book provides chapters illustrating new views of organizational constructs but from the perspectives of more established researchers in the field. All chapters share a common theme of attempting to provide new ways of viewing organizations and organizational behavior. Each chapter is based on the premise that, when presented with problems that seem impossible to solve, often the best results are achieved by finding new perspectives on the basic constructs being studied. These new perspectives provide insights which illuminate the problems for the theory of organizations as well as improving the ability of organizational members to solve practical organizational problems.

Understanding Employee Engagement is a comprehensive source for the science and practice of employee engagement. This book provides a rigorous and objective review of scholarship and empirical research on engagement from around the world. Grounded in theory and empirical research, this book debates the definitions of engagement, provides a thorough evaluation of empirical findings in the engagement field including a focus on international findings, and offers practice implications for organizations. The book is broad, with references and research across disciplines and countries, as well as new sections addressing current challenges, such as virtual engagement, engaging the aging workforce, and perspectives on diversity and inclusion. Employers can learn how to foster an engaged organization; practitioners can learn how to measure, identify, and implement evidence-based solutions to disengagement; and researchers can master the existing engagement literature and begin to study the many propositions and new models the author proposes throughout the book. This book is an essential read for scholars, researchers, practitioners, and business leaders alike for understanding how to measure, identify, and implement evidence-based solutions to foster employee engagement.

This Research in Organizational Sciences volume to explore and question the received wisdom of organizational sciences. The chapters in this volume (and the companion volume) seek to establish boundary conditions for important organizational constructs and processes. They illustrate the importance of context for interpreting the received wisdom of organizational science by showing when constructs must be adapted to changing circumstances. The volume begins with four chapters looking at the construct of leadership. Each of these addresses an important aspect of our understanding of leadership and its practice. The four chapters on leadership are followed by five chapters dealing with other organizational processes including motivation, organizational change, the role of diversity in organizations and organizational citizenship. The last three chapters deal with the issue of knowledge in large systems. Two chapters address how information may be transmitted across organizations and generations of workers. The final chapter deals with the use of information by organizational decision-makers. The 12 papers in this volume all, in some way question received wisdom and present alternatives which expand our understanding of organizational behavior. These chapters each strive to present new ways of understanding organizational constructs, and in so doing reveal how received wisdom does not always lead to best practice in research or application. It is our hope that these chapters illustrate how challenging received wisdom in organizational studies can provide new ways of thinking about organizational processes. These new ways of thinking in turn can provide better understanding of the processes necessary to increase organizational effectiveness.

This volume of the Research in Organizational Sciences is entitled “Received Wisdom, Kernels of Truth, and Boundary Conditions in Organizational Studies”. Received wisdom is knowledge imparted to people by others and is based on authority and tenacity as sources of human knowledge. Authority refers to the acceptance of knowledge as truth because of the position and credibility of the knowledge source. Tenacity refers to the continued presentation of a particular bit of information by a source until this bit of information is accepted as true by receivers. The problem for organizational studies, however, is that this received wisdom often becomes unquestioned assumptions which guide interpretation of the world and decisions made about the world. Received wisdom, therefore, may lead to organizational practices which provide little or no benefit to the organization and, potentially, negative organizational effects, because this received wisdom is no longer valid. The 14 papers in this volume all, in some way, strive to question received wisdom and present alternatives which expand our understanding of organizational behavior in some way. The chapters in this volume each strive to present new ways of understanding organizational constructs, and in so doing reveal how received wisdom has often led to confirmation bias in organizational science. The knowledge that some perceived truths are actually the products of received wisdom and do not stand up to close scrutiny shakes up things within research areas previously thought settled allowing new perspectives on organizational science to emerge.

Organizational science profits from taking new perspectives using a simple model to understand why behaviors of particular types occur within them. This volume provides readers with a rich source of casestudies and empirical studies of the role played by the interaction between individual actors, organizational contexts, and the actual behaviors being performed the actors. These chapters each seek to describe how these three interact in to create organizational practices with negative effects on either internal members of the organization or external stakeholders (e.g,. clients). The chapters provide insight into how organizations may control these negative behaviors with basic Human Resource Management practices. It is this volume’s hope that these chapters may provide insight into the important role these three factors plays in understanding negative organizational behavior within organizations across the world.

Emerging Themes in International Management of Human Resources is the third volume in the Research in Organizational Analysis series. This volume investigates important human resource management (HRM) issues within an international context. The papers in this volume provide insight into several HRM areas. First, the international context’s effects on management knowledge transfer; privatization of traditionally governmental services; and the relation between social capital and organizational diversity is considered. The second part of this volume is concerned with the issue of staffing in international organizations with special emphasis on HRM selection and termination practices for the cross-national company. Third, women’s issues in the international firm are explored. Gender issues such as flexible work arrangements and the role of culturally defined gender egalitarian values on role differences among women and men managers are investigated. Finally, the volume explores the issues of expatriation and repatriation among firms. The role of psychological contracts in supporting successful expatriate experiences; how repatriate support practices influence repatriate organizational commitment; turnover intentions; and career success; and an investigation of repatriation as sense making process are discussed. This volume provides a good basis for understanding how HRM practices are affected by cross-cultural differences and provides insight into best HRM practices for the international organization.

Links constructive software development to traditional problem-solving methods Not dependent on any particular specification language, but is based instead on their common core

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an illustration of how chaotic changes to large systems are caused by small, seemingly insignificant environmental events such as the initial case(s) of COVID-19 in China. From this small starting point for the pandemic, there have been (and continue to be) millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars spent trying to alleviate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. World government and corporate leaders are striving to deal with this pandemic, but uncertainty is felt across the globe. Unprecedented strategies (e.g., the United States government’s multi-trillion-dollar stimulus package (s)) have been used to halt the spread of COVID-19. These small events cascade throughout larger and larger systems leading to unforeseeable consequences. Organizations must experiment and make decisions on how to react. Decisions must be made and implemented to see what the effects of these decisions are. The chapters in this volume provide important insights for all organizations during this time of crisis. The chapters express bottom-up and top-down approaches to a crisis-initiating environmental change by organizations. The chapters provide insight into the way organizations perceive the effect of COVID-19 as 1) a permanent or transitory change in the organization’s environment; and 2) as a crisis or opportunity. Taken together, the chapters provide both scientists and practitioners with a starting point for understanding the impact of COVID-19 on organizational theory and on management practice for readers.

Refinement is one of the cornerstones of a formal approach to software engineering. Refinement is all about turning an abstract description (of a soft or hardware system) into something closer to implementation. It provides that essential bridge between higher level requirements and an implementation of those requirements. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to refinement for the researcher or graduate student. It introduces refinement in different semantic models, and shows how refinement is defined and used within some of the major formal methods and languages in use today. It (1) introduces the reader to different ways of looking at refinement, relating refinement to observations(2) shows how these are realised in different semantic models (3) shows how different formal methods use different models of refinement, and (4) how these models of refinement are related.

This book uniquely combines gender theory, case studies, and the legal challenges surrounding the mechanisms of gender discrimination at work. It provides the student with real-life examples from managers (based on interviews with people who experienced discrimination) that help students understand how gender discrimination operates, even when there are legal protections against it. At the end of each case study, students are asked to put themselves in the shoes of the individual experiencing the discrimination and ask themselves reflect on how they would handle the situation. Students must examine their own beliefs about gender and work place practices and consider consequences of actions they might take. In addition to the sections of theory, cases, and legal challenges, websites of interest are included student assignments and classroom activities. Key features include: Engaging case studies embedded in each chapter Legal cases that highlight each chapter and lend credibility to each case study Discussions of international/global situations Suggestions for student assignments/projects