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We propose that research on problem‐solving behavior can provide critical insight into mechanisms through which organizations resist learning and change. In this paper, we describe typical front‐line responses to obstacles that hinder workers’ effectiveness and argue that this pattern of behavior creates an important and overlooked barrier to organizational change. Past research on quality improvement and problem solving has found that the type of approach used affects the results of problem‐solving efforts but has not considered constraints that may limit the ability of front‐line workers to use preferred approaches. To investigate actual problem‐solving behavior of front‐line workers, we conducted 197 hours of observation of hospital nurses, whose jobs present many problem‐solving opportunities. We identify implicit heuristics that govern the problem‐solving behaviors of these front‐line workers, and suggest cognitive, social, and organizational factors that may reinforce these heuristics and thereby prevent organizational change and improvement.

The purpose of this article is to discuss lean as a learning system in a hospital ward.

Discusses lean as a learning system in a hospital ward.

The Toyota veterans are fond of saying, lean is about “making people before making parts” or, in the wards' context, developing nurses before delivering care.

This example in using lean to carefully build a learning environment for staff and management has implications for nursing practice, certainly, but also more generally for lean implementation at large.

The case opens with the Ford Motor Company seemingly on the path toward bankruptcy. Ford had been bleeding red ink for more than ten years when it decided in 2006 that continuing the same turnaround attempts was not going to right the ship. The company was facing significant external challenges, such as intense competition and changing consumer preferences, as well as internal challenges, such as quality and design issues and a stifling level of corporate complexity. As the case begins, CEO Bill Ford has taken the unusual step of hiring an auto industry outsider as his replacement. Alan Mulally, a thirty-seven-year Boeing veteran and principal architect of the venerable airplane manufacturer's own massive and successful turnaround, wasted little time in getting about the business of remaking Ford. He developed a plan to: focus on the Ford brand and divest the numerous other brands the company had acquired over the years; simplify and streamline the company's manufacturing operations; and remake the corporate culture from one of fiefdoms and false optimism to collaboration and facing reality. With an ardent belief in the plan's viability, Mulally raised nearly $24 billion and began to put his plan into motion. The case explores the many causes of this once-great company's decline and the steps it took to beat the odds and get back on the path of profitability.

This case demonstrates that internal issues alone can derail a company and emphasizes the importance of leadership in fostering the right corporate culture to turn a company around. Students will identify the key internal and external factors that can contribute to a company's decline and learn the importance of diagnosing issues within each of three major aspects of a company-strategy, operations, and financials-in order to develop a successful turnaround plan.

The question of violence in hunter-gatherer society has animated philosophical debates since at least the seventeenth century. Steven Pinker has sought to affirm that civilization, is superior to the state of humanity during its long history of hunting and gathering. The purpose of this paper is to draw upon a series of recent studies that assert a baseline of primordial violence by hunters and gatherers. In challenging this position the author draws on four decades of ethnographic and historical research on hunting and gathering peoples.

At the empirical heart of this question is the evidence pro- and con- for high rates of violent death in pre-farming human populations. The author evaluates the ethnographic and historical evidence for warfare in recorded hunting and gathering societies, and the archaeological evidence for warfare in pre-history prior to the advent of agriculture.

The view of Steven Pinker and others of high rates of lethal violence in hunters and gatherers is not sustained. In contrast to early farmers, their foraging precursors lived more lightly on the land and had other ways of resolving conflict. With little or no fixed property they could easily disperse to diffuse conflict. The evidence points to markedly lower levels of violence for foragers compared to post-Neolithic societies.

This conclusion raises serious caveats about the grand evolutionary theory asserted by Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and others. Instead of being “killer apes” in the Pleistocene and Holocene, the evidence indicates that early humans lived as relatively peaceful hunter-gathers for some 7,000 generations, from the emergence of Homo sapiens up until the invention of agriculture. Therefore there is a major gap between the purported violence of the chimp-like ancestors and the documented violence of post-Neolithic humanity.

This is a critical analysis of published claims by authors who contend that ancient and recent hunter-gatherers typically committed high levels of violent acts. It reveals a number of serious flaws in their arguments and use of data.

The purpose of this paper is to study how individuals assess responsibility during an uncontrollable event requiring collective action, using crises affecting service workers as contexts. Specifically, the authors examine what parties consumers hold responsible for ensuring service worker welfare following an uncontrollable event and determine what factors make customers more open to accepting responsibility for ensuring worker welfare themselves.

The authors surveyed a nationally representative sample of US consumers regarding their attitudes toward protecting service workers during COVID-19 and used regression analysis to identify factors that predict attributions of responsibility to customers. The authors also conducted an experiment (using a new crisis context) to determine whether certain key factors impact customer perceptions of their own responsibility for helping employees during an uncontrollable event.

The survey results show US consumers hold firms most responsible for worker welfare, followed by customers and, finally, government. When examining factors that drive attributions of responsibility for customers, perceptions of how sincere firms are in their efforts to help employees predict higher responsibility attributions, and experimental results confirm that higher perceived firm sincerity increases consumers’ own sense of responsibility toward workers.

This research identifies factors that affect consumer support for efforts to help service employees and collective action problems more generally.

This research highlights an under-studied crisis context – uncontrollable events that require collective action – and shows how consumers make assessments about their own responsibility (in addition to the responsibility of the service firm) in these contexts.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between different streams of trust and leadership and their impact on motivation and performance. The model answers recent calls for a better understanding of underlying mechanisms in these interactions.

The authors drew from contemporary leadership and trust theories to develop ten propositions teasing out how specific person- and role-oriented leadership behaviors interact with calculus-, identification-, knowledge-based trust, motivation, and performance.

The model accentuates the complexity of the interactions between trust, leadership, and follower outcomes. It guides future empirical research to unravel these intricate relations and accentuates their complexity.

The ten propositions act as guidelines in mastering the complex art of leadership by understanding how behaviors affect followers. An important limitation originates in the detailed analysis of leadership and trust. Focusing on specific leadership behaviors and trust types leaves further scope for future research into additional behaviors and cofounding variables to arrive at a more holistic picture of the underlying mechanisms that make or break an effective leader.

Contemporary theories on leadership and trust frequently view the different streams as overall constructs in lieu of multi-faceted phenomena. The model is a first of its kind in that it fuses contemporary leadership and trust theory to develop a set of propositions based on specific interactions between leadership behaviors and different forms of trust.

The purpose of this paper is to present a process for managing project problem‐solving patterns. It focuses on shifting the emphasis of project teams toward a more collaborative and knowledge‐based style of dealing with challenges to project performance. The methods proposed in this paper encourage project managers to integrate processes for becoming more agile by tapping into lesson learned and knowledge gained to create higher quality solutions to problems.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for recognizing problem‐solving patterns and transforming problem solving from an individual passive event to a more open, agile active, systemic process. Several actual case examples are provided to illustrate applications.

The paper examines how taking a more open approach to problem solving in projects leads to better solutions. The proposed method and lessons from actual cases offer support to these proposals.

The proposed models in this paper originate from the conclusions and observations drawn by the authors over many years of experience. However, they are not the product of a systematic research effort. This paper is intended to provide a new lens for project managers to view projects. It does not purport to declare findings of any research or analyze any sort of research.

The conceptual framework provided in this paper is a practical one derived from the practices used in leading companies. The paper provides practical guidelines to aid project managers in recognizing and managing problem‐solving patterns to create better solutions to problems.

Modern society is plagued by the effects of ineffective problem‐solving initiatives in business, government, and not‐for‐profit organizations. Flawed proposed solutions exact a toll on organizations, their members, and the constituents they serve. This paper proposes a way of improving the quality of problem‐solving processes that may benefit a broad scale of people.

The concept of a problem‐solving pattern and a typology of problem‐solving patterns presented in this paper, provide project managers with a new way of conceiving of how problem solving can be used to improve project performance and adaptability.