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Planning is a perennially popular management tool with an ambiguous relationship to learning and performance. The purpose of this study attempts to resolve this ambiguity. The authors suggest that the critical question is not whether firms need learning for planning to influence performance, but when different firms experience different performance outcomes. The authors propose firms will benefit from strategic planning only when they learn from planning and have the resources to act on their learning.

The authors collected data from a survey of 293 individuals from 191 publicly listed US firms.

Organizational learning mediates the relations between strategic planning and organizational performance. This mediated relationship is positively moderated by high levels of human resource slack and moderate to high levels of financial slack.

The study provides evidence for previous theoretical arguments on the planning–learning relationship while extending this research by finding a complicated moderating effect of slack. The study also adds to the existing debate on optimal slack levels by suggesting that having bundles of slack resources may matter more than having uniformly high or low levels of slack. A cross-sectional study means the authors cannot infer causation.

While strategic planning is a common practice, companies may vary in their planning methodologies, influencing the outcomes of planning. Firms seeking to benefit from planning need to have both the mechanisms to learn from planning and slack to deploy these mechanisms.

These findings clarify the planning–learning–performance relationship while challenging the assumption of an average effect of planning on performance across firms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of ethical climate types on two components of organizational trust, i.e. trust in supervisor and trust in organization.

A sample of 178 managerial employees from seven hospitals in Poland was used to investigate the specific relationships between ethical climates (i.e. egoistic, benevolent, and principled) and trust in supervisor and trust in organization. Structural equation modeling was used to explore the relationship between ethical climates and the two trust components.

It was found that egoistic climates were negatively associated with trust in organization and trust in supervisor, whereas benevolent climates were positively associated with trust in supervisor and trust in organization. No support was obtained for any sort of association between principled climates and either of the two trust components.

Future research should examine the role of trust as a mediating variable in the relationship between ethical climates and variables such as commitment or productivity or satisfaction. Future research should also examine different national and work contexts to test out these relationships.

Managers and organizations should try and establish benevolent ethical climates as opposed to egoistic ones, in order to bolster levels of trust among their employees.

The findings of this paper are unique and original because this is the first study to suggest a relationship between ethical climate types and the two trust components. The value of this study is that it provides managers and organizations with a way by which they could potentially increase levels of trust among their employees.

Frederick Taylor, the “Father of Scientific Management” is recognized as a pioneer in the field of management. However, many unfair criticisms have been leveled at him starting with the infamous Congressional hearings of 1911. Many scholars of management history believe that such criticisms have resulted in negative portrayals of Frederick Taylor in both practitioner and academic circles, and even in some basic management textbooks. This is unfortunate because many of those criticisms result from either a failure to read and understand Taylor's original works or from misinterpretations of them. The purpose of this paper is to contend that students of management will develop a more accurate impression of Frederick Taylor if they read his words and not interpretations of them.

First, an introduction of Frederick Taylor and scientific management is presented. Then, a categorization of common criticisms of Taylor is offered. The results of a study conducted to measure undergraduate business students' impressions of Taylor from their exposure to him in an introductory management course are then presented. The students then give their impressions of statements taken from Taylor's original work and are tested on the differences between them.

The results of the analyses suggest that students have a negative impression of Taylor from their textbooks, but their reaction to statements taken from the original works of Taylor are rated quite favorably.

Future research could be conducted to determine whether the works of other seminal management theorists should be presented in their complete contexts and direct sources to provide students with a more accurate and complete portrayal of their ideas.

This paper is unique in that it empirically tests whether negative attitudes towards Frederick Taylor and scientific management persist after students are exposed to original source works.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between two components of job burnout (emotional exhaustion and depersonalization) and organizational cynicism. Another aim of this research was to examine the role of moderating variables such as role conflict, work-family conflict, perceived fairness, and trust in coworkers on the relationship between burnout and organizational cynicism.

The methodology was a survey-based quantitative method. Totally, 172 nurses in a Taiwanese hospital were surveyed, and 169 completed responses were obtained. The nurses filled out self-report surveys that measured their levels of burnout, organizational cynicism, and various other variables including demographic variables.

The results indicate that several variables acted as moderators in the relationship between emotional exhaustion and organizational cynicism, and in the relationship between depersonalization and organizational cynicism. Trust in coworker, perceived fairness, and role conflict all were found to negatively influence the relationship between a burnout component and cynicism, whereas work-family conflict had a positive influence on the relationship between depersonalization and cynicism.

The limitations of this research are that the study is cross-sectional in nature, and is based on a Taiwanese sample. Future research should aim to study these variables in a longitudinal fashion and in different contexts.

The practical implications from this study include managers being able to harness various variables (such as perceived fairness and trust in coworkers) in order to reduce cynicism.

The value of this study is that it connects burnout and organizational cynicism together. It also uncovers several moderating variables that influence the relationship between burnout and organizational cynicism. This is also one of the first studies that have obtained a positive effect of role conflict.