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Tomorrow's corporation will have to be like a butterfly, says Beverly Goldberg, vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund and Siberg Associates, both in New York. “The organization of the future is going to be a constantly evolving entity,” she notes drawing the comparison to the diurnal insects in the order of Lepidoptera.

We are living in a time of unparalleled change, turbulence, and uncertainty that is transforming our lives. In the course of two years, the superpower that inspired us to build a great military machine turned into a cluster of poor nations needing economic aid to survive. Business takeovers have disappeared from the front pages of our papers, replaced by stories on “the permanent disappearance of middle management” and 20% layoffs due to “downsizing.” New technologies have become part of our everyday lives: VCRs, microwave ovens, and voice mail are eliminating fixed viewing times, hours spent in the kitchen, and the need for answering machines.

Classic theory says that there are three major steps in a change management program: unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. The early gurus of change management who developed the theory had as their goal changing the way specific processes were done.

While the adoption of CD‐ROM as a medium for distribution of reference databases is lagging behind projections, the laser disc format seems to be picking up momentum as a replacement for and a expansion upon COM (Computer‐Output Microform) catalogs. No fewer than five vendors demonstrated products at the January 1987, meeting of the American Library Association in Chicago, up from one at ALA's July 1986 exhibits.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the Big Five personality factors and five styles of handling interpersonal conflict. The Big Five factors are extroversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism, and the five conflict styles are integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding, and compromising. A total of 351 students completed questionnaires. As a check on generalizing the results beyond students, 110 managers also completed the same surveys. The main results indicate that extroversion, conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness have a positive relationship with integrating style. Extroversion has a positive relationship with dominating, while agreeableness and neuroticism have negative relationships with dominating. Extroversion, openness, and conscientiousness have a negative relationship with avoiding, while agreeableness and neuroticism have a positive relationship with avoiding. Implications of the study and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The study investigated the relationship of career instrumental and expressive intra‐organizational network resources with extrinsic and intrinsic career success and with the Big‐Five of personality in a sample of 264 white‐collar workers. Total network resources were associated with extrinsic and intrinsic career success above the contribution of human capital, demographics and mentoring received. And instrumental network resources contributed more strongly than expressive network resources to extrinsic career success. Furthermore, instrumental network resources emerged as important for intrinsic evaluations of hierarchical and interpersonal career success while expressive network resources emerged as important for intrinsic evaluations of job and interpersonal career success. There was limited support for the influence of personality on the accumulation of network resources. As hypothesized, conscientiousness was negatively associated with instrumental network resources; however, extra‐version, openness and agreeableness failed to make significant contributions to network resources over and above the contribution of human capital and demographics. The implications of the findings for individual career tactics and for organizational practices are discussed and the limitations of the study are considered along with directions for future research.

As the hospitality industry is shifting its focus from service to experience, customers are becoming co-creators of the perceived value of a hospitality service because experiences customers obtained when consuming a hospitality service involve the participation of the customers. Thus, more research is needed to examine the relationships among consumer’s personal factors and their evaluations of hospitality services. This study developed and tested hypotheses that examined the effects of customers’ intrinsic characteristics on their evaluations of a restaurant service. Data were collected from college students in the United States (n = 220) and China (n = 254) using a scenario approach. Findings reveal that customers’ gender, personality, and cultural background had significant effects on their evaluations of a restaurant service. Specifically, female customers rated the same service higher than male customers on the reliability dimension of service quality and overall service quality; customers with personalities of extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness rated the service higher than customers with neuroticism personality on the responsiveness dimension; and customers in individualistic cultures rated the service higher than those in collectivistic cultures on most of the service evaluation measures. Implications of the study’s findings are discussed.

Managing conflicts between employees and supervisors is a critical issue in maintaining productive labor‐management relations. This study uses the theory of cooperation and competition to specify the nature of the relationship and the flexible strategies that facilitate mutually beneficial solutions to employee complaints. Results based on interviews of supervisors and union employees in a remote site in British Columbia support the hypotheses that cooperative, compared to competitive and independent, goals promote open‐minded discussions of complaints that result in efficient resolutions which benefit both supervisors and employees. Results suggested that developing cooperative goals and open‐minded negotiation skills can help supervisors and employees to create integrative solutions to shopfloor conflicts.