Administrative science quarterly
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This study tested whether leadership instability--a systemic pattern of frequent succession in the top management position of an organization--was associated with sociopolitical structures that define the relationship between the board and chief executive officer (CEO), controlling for temporal patterns of the organizational life-cycle stage. In organizations that are not profit maximizing and subject to considerable uncertainty, such governance properties were hypothesized to affect leadership instability independent of organizational growth or decline. Results of regression analyses demonstrate strong main effects of board-CEO relations, net of the impact of organizational life cycle, on leadership instability.
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Surprise and sense making: what newcomers experience in entering unfamiliar organizational settings.
Growing disillusionment among new members of organizations has been traced to inadequacies in approaches to organizational entry. Current directions of research on organizational entry and their limitations are described, and a new perspective is proposed. The new perspective identifies key features of newcomers' entry experiences, including surprise, contrast, and change, and describes the sense-making processes by which individuals cope with their entry experiences. Implications for research and practice on organizational entry are drawn.
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This article outlines a social information processing approach to explain job attitudes. In comparison with need-satisfaction and expectancy models to job attitudes and motivation, the social information processing perspective emphasizes the effects of context and the consequences of past choices, rather than individual predispositions and rational decision-making processes. ⋯ Both attitudes and need statements, as well as characterizations of jobs, are affected by informational social influence. The implications of the social information processing perspective for organization development efforts and programs of job redesign are discussed.