Lyle Sussman

• University of Louisville

Health care is a business. Health care providers must become familiar with terms such as opportunity costs, the potential loss or gain when one choice is made in lieu of another. The purpose of this study was to calculate the opportunity cost of two orthopaedic surgery society board meetings and discuss these in the context of behavioral economics...

We compare and contrast Americans’ perceptions of four sources of extreme wealth: Executive, Financial Trader, Entrepreneur, and Heir, and find positive perceptions of the Entrepreneur’s wealth, and negative perceptions of the Heir and the Financial Trader. Respondents read biographies of each archetype, controlling for quantity of wealth and perso...

On a given workday, over 700 workers are attacked, 43,800 employees are harassed and 16,400 are threatened (Hynes, 2001). Yet the literature focuses upon environmental causes; none attempt to identify personal characteristics of the uncivil, deviant or maladaptive employee. This study helps fill this void by exploring the personality correlates of...

The objectives of this article are to introduce and develop team charters as tools to link corporate-level mission statements and strategies to activities at the team level. The theoretical frameworks of psychological contracts and realistic job previews provide the foundation. Based on relevant literature and anecdotal experience, the authors offe...

Both popular and social science literature are replete with recommendations for enhancing communication effectiveness, typically defined as improving the clarity and impact of the spoken and written word. However, managing internal organizational processes and external market competitiveness often requires a different communication strategy, specif...

In recent years, organizations representing all types of industries, including health care, have adopted the 360-feedback approach with the goal of strengthening leader performance. But while 360-feedback enjoys a high level of face validity, current research shows that it is not problem-free and often fails to achieve its goals without proper deve...

Recently, many practitioners and scholars of strategy have challenged the universal appeal of the traditional strategic concepts and agree that the discipline is at the point where new models of the strategy process should be explored. Here is such a model. The thinking process tools of the theory of constraints are described and applied to the cas...

This research examines the relationships among the types of self-serving political messages sent in organizations, the channels through which they are sent, and the targets to whom they are sent. Two theoretical streams converge in this study: Communication as Political Behavior and Media Usage Theory. A review and synthesis of these two bodies of...

This research examines the relationships among the types of self-serving political messages sent in organizations, the channels through which they are sent, and the targets to whom they are sent. Two theoretical streams converge in this study: Communication as Political Behavior and Media Usage Theory. A review and synthesis of these two bodies of...

The strategic planning process is arguably one of the most important topics taught in a management class. Moreover, the subtopic of strategy formulation is both the most pivotal and the most difficult to teach. As many theorists argue, strategy formulation is the “black box” of strategic planning. One approach for both clarifying and teaching strat...

Over the past four decades, information technology (IT) has had a profound effect on the US economy, resulting in a shift from a manufacturing to an information economy. This effect, however, has also produced what may be labeled the paradox of IT productivity. While the percentage of a firm's budget spent on IT continues to increase, there is incr...

I f the management mantra of the 1990s was "Do more with less," the mantra for the new millennium will be "Do ~~tz more with et~n less." Managers must accept the reality that the competition for external customers will be re-flected in increasing com-petition for internal re-sources. More and more, mdnagers will feel the antagonistic forces of requ...

Cultural-diversity training programs typically incorporate discussions of why some organizational acts and actors are seen as offensive while others are not. Invariably these discussions elicit perceptions and attributions of the actor's intent and interpersonal style. This paper presents a new model, incorporating intent and style into four archet...

Analyzes critical incidents provided by professional interpreters. Findings indicate three major roles interpreters play: editor, cultural coach, and monitor/checker. The article discusses the implications of these roles in order to make the international executive an informed consumer of interpretation services. (13 references) (Author/CK)

The following case is fictional, its “testimony” from “expert witnesses” extracted from published works. But the pain, turmoil, and soul-searching it represents are real for the litigants involved in all discrimination suits.

Numerous articles, business consultants, and scholars argue that high-performing management teams lead to higher productivity in organizations. Unfortunately, few managers are able to successfully develop such teams in their organizations. This article outlines the five strategies that define proactive management and produce high-performing teams.

In the context of rapid recent political, economic, and technological changes in the world, this paper examines the role of interpreters in international business. The study reported analyzes the development of a questionnaire designed to assess factors related to successful versus unsuccessful interpretations in cross-cultural business encounters....

As the demand and opportunity for international business ventures increase, the need for interpreters also will increase. When an executive communicates through an interpreter, however, he or she must realize that the interpreter is not a passive conduit of information and may in fact have strategic impact on the conduct and scope of the cross-cult...

This study tests several assumptions about the circumstances under which an individual will elect to use an electronic mail system (EMS) in an organization. Based on earlier work in EMS, three sets of hypotheses were formulated. Data were obtained by surveying a total of 200 EMS account holders at an urban midwestern university. The survey instrume...

This study tests several assumptions about the adoption and implementation of electronic communication media (ECM) in organizations. The assumptions are based on earlier work in ECM and studies of organizational communication. The actual study involves the administration of a survey instrument (long and short versions) to a total of 600 ECM account...

The impact of downsizing goes well beyong mere economic considerations. Trimming the labor force-more particularly-the specific method chosen to cut staff-will affect not only the firm's economic status, but also the overall competency of the human resource group, the success of current and future business strategies, and the organization's culture...

The authors discuss skills required by human resources development (HRD) professionals to act in the capacity of an in-house consultant. They provide a self-assessment tool to identify skills that must be acquired or sharpened. (Author/CH)

Describes a program developed to train corporate vice-presidents to be better performers. The design was based on the assumptions that (1) the needs of the group as well as of the individual must be met, (2) maximum output should be derived from minimum input, (3) one goal of training is to enable an executive to develop a personal action plan for...

Information systems and communication systems are two important but quite distinct systems within the organization. Decisionmakers must understand the qualities of these two systems to achieve effective organizational performance. A typology of decision styles based on a comparison of these two systems is presented. The comparison focuses on six ba...

This paper posits that communication consultants, in becoming grounded in the theory and practice of OD interventions, must recognize the subtle, potentially unforeseen problems inherent in most interventions. This argument is developed in three stages. First, OD as a problematic process is discussed by comparing it with Lindblom's analysis of “Mud...

The purpose of this study was to examine communication strategies for ascendance in same-sex and mixed-sex superior-subordinate dyads. The strategies, operationalized in terms of task and social facilitation, were derived from Bales' Interaction Process Analysis categories. Corollary data were collected relative to the subordinate's expected job sa...

This study analyzed the performance of individuals in real brainstorming groups in an attempt to determine the relationship between individual ideational output, perceptions of status within the group, and communication apprehension. Results of a multiple discriminant analysis suggest that persons who are high producers of ideas perceive fewer stat...

The purpose of this‐study was twofold: 1) To quantify the nature and extent of in‐house communication training, and 2) To collect such data from those individuals who actually conduct in‐house training. Data were obtained from questionnaires mailed to 118 members of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Society for Training and Development. This s...

A general framework for viewing the relationship between attribution processes and perceived source credibility is proposed. Based upon this framework, an experimental study was conducted examining perceived source credibility as a function of causal attributions in messages. Three independent variables were incorporated into a 2x2x2 factorial desi...

Because information flow is considered essential to an organization and because decision makers are dependent upon accurate information, the distortion of messages as they move upward in an organization has become a central concern of many organizational communication researchers. The purposes of this paper are to critically review the various appr...

Examines the potential positive and negative effects of conflict in superior-subordinate communication. (MH)

This article argues from an open systems perspective that, as the external environment changes, so too must the internal processes and structure of the organization. Toffler asserts that organizations of the future will move from the rigidity of bureaucracy to the flexibility of ad‐hocracy. Accordingly, this paper proposes a restructuring of the co...

It is inevitable that students will at some time during a course of instruction discuss the “fairness” of classroom grading. Although the “fairness” of grading is endemic to student evaluation, little empirical or theoretical literature has focused on this variable. The purpose of this paper is to fill that void. Specifically, this paper presents a...

This paper reports the results of a field study investigating the relationship between perceived message distortion and job satisfaction. A single hypothesis was tested: There is a positive correlation between a superior's job satisfaction and the extent to which he perceives messages from his sub ordinates as accurate. Both the hypothesis and inte...

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the ancients and the moderns on fear appeals. The paper is divided into two sections. The first presents comparative definitions of “fear”; and “fear appeal.”; The second section relates six conclusions derived in Higbee's review to contributions by the ancients.

Traducción de: Smart Moves