Richard D CottonUniversity of Victoria | UVIC · Peter B. Gustavson School of Business
Richard D Cotton
BS in Management Information Systems and Marketing, Syracuse University; MS and PhD in Organization Studies, Boston College
About
42
Publications
27,421
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647
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Associate Professor Rick Cotton began at the U of Victoria's Gustavson School of Business in 2015, bringing a passion for understanding how individuals achieve career success and how HR and talent management practices foster high performance in a variety of country, industry and occupational contexts particularly as it relates to human, social and positive psychological capital. He also studies how individuals in challenging contexts survive and thrive including hall of famers, women miners, serial entrepreneurs, employees in organizations recovering from scandal and HR professionals who've laid off hundreds.
Rick teaches undergrad, MBA and Exec Ed students in HR and MGT and has 25+ years experience as a change management consultant with Accenture, HR SVP and independent consultant.
Additional affiliations
September 2014 - present
August 2010 - December 2014
September 2005 - July 2010
Education
September 2005 - July 2010
September 1987 - May 1991
Publications
Publications (42)
Drawing on human capital theory, our study examines the relationship between international work experience and individuals' career success in terms of promotions and subjective financial success. We propose that these relationships are mediated by external employability and hypothesise a moderating role of national‐level economic freedom. Using dat...
Our chapter focuses on the concept of a “developmental network” which includes individuals from one’s personal spheres of life outside organizational boundaries (e.g., family, friends, and neighbors) and within one’s professional sphere (e.g., peers, juniors, and seniors enacting mentoring and/or coaching) who may be invested in their growth and de...
Employees can enhance their human capital through participation in organizationally‐sponsored development activities. However, there is little research on the extent to which the effects of such practices vary depending on national context. Adopting a human capital theory perspective, we hypothesized a positive relationship between human capital de...
We introduce career success schemas as critical for understanding how people in different contexts perceive and understand career success. Using a comparative configurational approach, we show, in a study of thirteen countries, that two structural characteristics of career success schemas—complexity and convergence—differ across country contexts an...
Careers exist in a societal context that offers both constraints and opportunities for career actors. Whereas most studies focus on proximal individual and/or organizational level variables, we provide insights into how career goals and behaviors are understood and embedded in the more distal societal context. More specifically, we operationalize s...
This paper assesses whether societal culture moderates the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational performance. Drawing on matched employer–employee data from 387 organizations and 7187 employees in 14 countries, our findings show a positive relationship between HRM practices combined in High-Performance Wo...
In this chapter geared towards graduating medical residents making the transition to being full-fledged doctors, readers learn how to transition from their existing support network to having an enhanced success network composed of a set of people who take an active interest in their journey and who assist them in their personal development as they...
Although career proactivity has positive consequences for an individual's career success , studies mostly examine objective measures of success within single countries. This raises important questions about whether proactivity is equally beneficial for different aspects of subjective career success, and the extent to which these benefits extend acr...
Whilst career proactivity has positive consequences for an individual’s career success, studies mostly examine objective measures of success within single countries. This raises important questions about whether proactivity is equally beneficial for different aspects of subjective career success, and the extent to which these benefits extend across...
The differential impact of social capital among employees in strategic and support roles has received far less attention than that of human capital in talent management literature. Building on network closure theory and differentiated workforce theory, we examine the effect of strategic and support teams’ experience ties on team performance while c...
The GLOBE project is hosting this panel to share research plans and explore ideas from the forum on contemporary issues in global leadership and culture. This panel aims to advance knowledge on how societal cultures, leadership, gender differences in leadership, and organizational practices (specifically HR practices) influence the human side of or...
Business Review article reprint which is a Mandarin translation of:
Shen, Y., Cotton, R. D., Kram, K. E. 2015. Assembling your personal board of advisors. MIT Sloan Management Review, 56(3): 81-90.
Accessible via ebusinessreview.cn
Due to the strikingly diverse forms talent management takes in the field, confusion has arisen about the meaning of the term ‘talent’ itself, especially in the context of cross-cultural organizing within multinational enterprises (MNEs). Taking an emic approach to this problem—examining the phenomenon of global talent management (GTM) from the pers...
Developmental networks enhance career success through the support received by the protégé via the network structure. This paper extends developmental network research by exploring the extent to which strain is associated with developmental network structure and support in the Australian mining industry, a highly volatile and unique context. Our res...
Corruption recovery is a critical but understudied organizational change. We gained
unique access to a company that experienced multiple corruption incidents in the
months prior to our survey roll-out that garnered 2,300+ respondents (71%) across
19 business units. We explored how employee perceptions of leaders’ enactment of
a core set of values a...
This paper develops and tests a model of an individual's intention to reenter entrepreneur-ship following business exit. Two long-standing theories, prospect theory and self-efficacy, seem to develop opposite predictions in this context. To reconcile these conflicting predictions , we theorize a moderating model and test the boundary conditions of...
https://hbr.org/2016/08/coping-with-the-effects-of-emotionally-difficult-work
In a recent study published in Journal of Management Inquiry, we explored how carrying out necessary evils affects those who must do the work, not just once or twice, but repeatedly — hundreds or even thousands of times. We conducted in-depth interviews with 21 HR profes...
“Necessary evils” require employees to psychologically or physically harm others to produce a perceived greater good. Employees can also help others during necessary evils tasks by providing assistance and support to those harmed. Through an inductive, qualitative study of human resources employees’ experiences carrying out downsizing, we explore h...
In today's complex business environment, one mentor is no longer sufficient. Executives and mangers need an array of advisors, mentors and role models to provide critical information and support at defining moments. As individuals change roles, occupations,l industries or organizations or relocate to different countries they need to build a "person...
Major changes in the career landscape—characterized by globalization, an increasingly diverse workforce, persistent change, and the extensive use of technology—present individuals at every career stage with unprecedented complexity and uncertainty. It has become very clear that one mentor cannot address all of an individual’s developmental needs. I...
In this paper, I utilize developmental networks, mentoring, and social networks theories to test a series of contradictory hypotheses as to the characteristics of the developers having the highest degree centrality (i.e. the superdevelopers) in a collective group of egocentric developmental networks. The hypotheses are tested on the connected egoce...
In this chapter we aim to advance understanding of the meanings attributed to ‘talent’ by HR directors across the world (N = 410), and how their ‘talent mindsets’ translate into the ways in which talent is identified and managed in their organizations. Respondents from different cultural clusters mentioned ability, skills, knowledge, and potential...
Of all possible developer roles that could be named in developmental network studies, it is the informal and formal mentors that stand out as having received by far the most scholarly attention over the last 30 years. One of the main effects of studying developmental networks has been a shift an expansion in level of analysis from the dyad to the n...
Sport Management provides an insightful overview of the sport management discipline. The collection includes influential articles and chapters from leading scholars in the field, covering a wide array of issues. In adopting a multilevel approach, this volume explores this topical field and addresses sport management issues at the societal, organisa...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify key developmental relationships for career‐spanning success and to examine relational models and support expectations associated with these relationships. The paper creates propositions associating developer‐protégé schema congruence and incongruence to relevant outcome variables.
Design/methodology...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the changing of institutional logics in an established field shapes the developmental networks of high‐achievers.
Design/methodology/approach
This research combines time series analysis of more than 80 years of historical data (1922‐2004) with qualitative analysis of induction speeches of 99...
This study investigates how the changing of institutional logics in an established field shapes the developmental networks of high-achievers. This research combines qualitative analysis of induction speeches of 99 hall of fame pitchers and hitters with time series analysis of more than 80 years of historical data (1922-2004) to show how a change in...
This was a summary piece based on our AMJ article, "On becoming extraordinary: The content and structure of the developmental networks of Major League Baseball hall of famers" that appeared on hbr.org on March 3, 2011.
We explore the structure and content of developmental networks depicted in 62
National Baseball Hall of Fame induction speeches to identify which developers and
what support mattered most to inductees’ career achievement. Our analysis illustrates
two new support subfunctions (“freedom and opportunity for skill development” and
“inspiration and moti...
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify key developmental relationships for career-spanning success and to examine relational models and support expectations associated with these relationships. The paper creates propositions associating developer-protégé schema congruence and incongruence to relevant outcome variables. Design/methodology...
The article discusses the deleterious impact of scandal on corporations, focusing on the potential of leadership actions to transform such situations. Possible consequences of scandals, such as public scorn and scrutiny, a tightening of internal controls, and reorganization are said to make the reversal of corporate decline more difficult. The impa...
Projects
Projects (4)
Focuses on the meaning of career success across the globe
Overview
With more than 200 researchers from 62 countries studying more than 17,000 mid-level managers in the initial phases, the 2004 study is the largest and most prestigious study of its kind in the social sciences. In the latest 2014 study, more than 70 researchers collected data from over 100 CEOs and 5,000 senior executives in corporations in a variety of industries in 24 countries. This study demonstrated the considerable influence of culture on societal leadership expectations and the importance of matching CEO behaviors to expectations for leadership effectiveness.
The GLOBE Board is proud to announce that GLOBE has been awarded a 6-year Insight Grant from the Social Science Human Research Council of Canada to conduct the next phase of GLOBE research. We are currently seeking Country Co-Investigators for this next phase. Contact us if you want to learn about the next phase and how you can become a GLOBE Country Co-Investigator.
GLOBE CEO Study 2014
The latest GLOBE project is the first large-scale study of CEOs and Top Management Team (TMT) members across cultures and countries. The influence of societal culture remains a consistent theme in this project as well as within all GLOBE research. Complete reports of this project can be found in Strategic Leadership across Cultures: The GLOBE Study of CEO Leadership Behaviors and Effectiveness in 24 Societies
GLOBE researchers were interested in how a society’s culture influences leadership behaviors expected in that culture and whether leadership success depends on a CEO matching his/her leadership style to these societal expectations. To answer this question as well as many others, more than 70 GLOBE researchers collected data from over 1,000 CEOs and over 5,000 senior executives in corporations in a variety of industries in 24 countries. Our findings reinforce the importance of CEOs to organizational outcomes, the considerable influence of culture on societal leadership expectations, and the importance of matching CEO behaviors to the leadership expectations within each society. This massive GLOBE study provides convincing evidence as to which leadership behaviors are likely to be most successful and which should be avoided.
Read more about this study
GLOBE Culture and Leadership Study 2004
The GLOBE 2004 study was the culmination of a ten year quantitative survey-based study of societal culture, organizational culture, and attributes of effective leadership in 62 societies around the world. Ground breaking in scale and scope, the project features results based on data from 17,300 middle managers in 951 organizations in the food processing, financial services, and telecommunications industries as well as archival measures of country economic prosperity and the physical and psychological well-being of the cultures studied.The study redefined scholarly understanding of how culture and leadership vary by national culture. The detailed results of the seminal study are available in Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies.
The second GLOBE study in 2007 was a follow-up to the 2004 study, with researchers in 25 countries reporting in depth on leadership and culture in their respective country contexts. The findings complement the first study with in-country leadership literary analyses, data from interviews and focus group discussions, and analyses of printed material in order to provide in-depth descriptions of leadership theory and behavior within the 25 cultures. Detailed in the book Culture and Leadership Across the World: The GLOBE Book of In-Depth Studies of 25 Societies, this volume presents a complex collection of global research addressing cultures of particular countries, leadership qualities within those countries, and recommendations on how managers should conduct business in countries other than their own. Data from the study will appeal to scholars in leadership, management, international business, cultural studies; and also to practicing managers.
