Search results

How do successful management educators prepare for, organise, conduct and evaluate their teaching? A dialogue between four management faculty members is presented.

There is a growing need for management education and management development. Business organisations need a supply of well‐educated and behaviourally competent managers. Business schools and business organisations are not fulfilling this need at present. Both must increase the effectiveness of current business school faculty, curricula and operations. Businesses need to become more involved in helping business schools become more effective and efficient. This requires an exchange which is mutually beneficial and based on mutual respect. Business organisations must demand high quality services from education. Current areas of strength and weakness in management education are identified from a business perspective. Appropriate roles and action steps for these schools and organisations are proposed to strengthen their effectiveness.

Proposes a broader framework for management development which includes education, training and planned job assignments. Within this framework, the major challenges confronting management development in the 1990s are seen as: linking development efforts to the organization′s strategic plan: utilizing job assignments more effectively to build management skills; improving the transferability of training and educational experiences to the job, and developing more collaborative business‐university relationships (e.g. consortia) to meet the development needs of specific industries and organizations better.

Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic traits are often viewed as negative or undesirable personality traits. However, recent research demonstrates that individuals with these traits possess qualities that may be personally beneficial within the business contexts. In this chapter, we conceptualize a balanced perspective of these traits throughout the entrepreneurial process (opportunity recognition, opportunity evaluation, and opportunity exploitation) and discuss human resources management strategies that can be employed to enhance the benefits, or minimize the challenges, associated with Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic traits. Specifically, we propose that Machiavellian qualities are most beneficial in the evaluation stage of entrepreneurship, and Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic qualities are beneficial in the exploitation stage of entrepreneurship.

This study examined relationships involving Machiavellianism, the career plateau, job satisfaction and salary in a sample of commercial bank officers in the United States. Results showed that American bankers had relatively low Machiavellianism scores compared to scores reported for other groups. While a negative relationship between job satisfaction and Machiavellianism was found, there was no association between salary and Machiavellianism. Those who scored high on Machiavellianism were more likely to believe that they had reached a career plateau than were those who scored low. Some results are explained in the context of the U.S. banking industry environment.

This study examined the relationships between emotional intelligence, locus of control, and mental boundaries. Three hundred and eighty-two county employees were sampled using a cross-sectional survey design. The results indicated internal locus of control and thin mental boundaries are positively related to emotional intelligence. A hierarchical regression revealed that internal locus of control and thin mental boundaries together explained 18% of the variance in emotional intelligence for this population. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Measures perceived locus of control (LoC) and levels of occupational stress in a sample of 189 members of the Devon Ambulance Service, using Levenson′s multidimensional LoC questionnaire and a specially designed stress questionnaire. Finds significant positive relationships between levels of stress and both “chance” and “powerful others” LoC but, contrary to expectations, the relationship between internal LoC and stress was non‐significant. The fact that different results were obtained for the internal and two external LoC measures supports Levenson′s decision to develop separate scales for these variables. However, the practical implications of the results are limited. As chance and powerful others do genuinely have a major impact on the working lives of ambulance service personnel, any attempt to increase internality or reduce externality would run the risk of denying or distorting reality, thus causing serious psychological problems in the longer term.

Attempts to identify some important variables that contribute to occupational and academic stress and to estimate their direct and indirect effects on various outcome measures (such as mental health, physical health, job satisfaction and scholastic grade point average). Based on previous research, proposes and tests a model of academic and occupational stress, using data collected from 247 individuals employed in diverse organizations in the Orange County and Los Angeles areas, who were enrolled in either undergraduate or graduate courses at a major university in the southern California region. Claims that the results of the analysis support the proposed model of stress. Outlines the implications of the findings for research and practice in education and management.

Decision styles and Machiavellianism were studied among four groups of managers in pharmaceutical companies. Using a Decision Styles Inventory, directive, analytic, conceptual and behavioural decision styles were studied, each representing a different combination of cognitive complexity and brain hemisphere preference in decision making. Machiavellianism was assessed using the Mach IV scale of Christie and Geiss (1970) and its components, namely, tactics, views and morality. The sample studied comprised 39 marketing, 23 financial, 35 medical and 21 operations managers. No significant interdependence was found between decision style, Machiavellianism and managerial group. Further research is recommended to investigate differences in decision style between managers and non‐managers, and to establish the effects of Machiavellianism in the workplace.

Managers and human resource specialists often prefer a particular approach to the delivery of training and development above all others. Frequently, this approach is advocated as a blanket solution to a firm′s managerial problems with little consideration of other approaches. The strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches to management development are evaluated and their application for developing different levels of management in small and large companies is discussed.