Susan Mohrman

University of Southern California | USC · Center for Effective Organizations

New book How to Do Relevant Research: From the Ivory Tower to the Real World describes “sweet spot” where organization research joins theory and practice, and rigor and relevance, to reach both academics and practitioners with your research. Here are some guidelines!

A guide to doing organizational research that is relevant for practice.

Edward Emmett Lawler, III, has been a central figure in the development of the fields of organizational behavior, management, and organization development. His early work generated and tested theoretical frameworks about motivation and performance, and he was a leader in investigating how organizational practices impact employee and organizational...

Edward Emmett Lawler, III, has been a central figure in the development of the fields of organizational behavior, management, and organization development. His early work generated and tested theoretical frameworks about motivation and performance, and he was a leader in investigating how organizational practices impact employee and organizational...

Edward Emmett Lawler, III, has been a central figure in the development of the fields of organizational behavior, management, and organization development. His early work generated and tested theoretical frameworks about motivation and performance, and he was a leader in investigating how organizational practices impact employee and organizational...

PurposeApplying concepts from the theory of complex adaptive systems, we investigated the emergence over time of a local foods system that embodies values of traditional agriculture and the preservation of the earth and its biodiversity, community, and equitable access to food. The purpose was to learn, from this place-based transformation, the pro...

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic - Peter Drucker. In our rapidly changing world what was thought of as breakthrough yesterday may become mediocre or obsolete tomorrow. Is the field of Organization Development and Change keeping pace with or stepping up to the role it can play in t...

The journey to sustainable effectiveness is complex and challenging. On the one hand, it implies an integrated set of complex design features that allows the organization to pursue and achieve three interdependent outcomes: economic, social, and environmental. There is a dearth of frameworks and examples demonstrating 1) how these goals should be e...

PurposeThe dynamics of the physician knowledge system in the Southern California Region of Kaiser Permanente are explored. The framing and analysis use concepts from the knowledge management literature and network theory. The criticality of this issue to the establishment of sustainable healthcare relates to the lynchpin nature of embedding evidenc...

PurposeThe chapter redefines the focus of the changes required to create sustainable healthcare away from fixing healthcare organizations and toward reconfiguring the constituent elements of the healthcare ecosystem and redefining how they interrelate to yield value more sustainably. Methodology/approachBased on a review of recent literature on hea...

PurposeThis chapter provides a reflective synopsis of six cases focused on making healthcare sustainable. The nature and value of an ecosystem perspective is explored. The intent is to apply and generate organizational knowledge to understand and guide purposeful design and learning. Design/methodologyFrom five countries where healthcare is organiz...

The change management challenge in organizations is overwhelming. The pace, complexity, and scope of change in the environment demands an organization change approach that is pervasive, complex, agile, and integrated. Unfortunately, the change management models, tools, and processes used today were developed during a simpler time and are not genera...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine design features that enable an organization to address today's complex and increasingly pressing global issues in ways that are sustainably effective. It identifies key social and environmental issues and reviews research examining how organizations can respond to them. Design/methodology/approach...

At a recent Academy Meeting, a panel was convened to discuss the meaning and sources of scholarly impact, taking a primarily individual perspective to explore ways in which each of us can increase the impact of our academic research. The discussion centered on how to publish and get cited in top academic journals – certainly a cornerstone objective...

PurposeThis chapter argues that organizations are not sustainable if they operate in unsustainable societal and ecological contexts, and that operating in a way that contributes to the health of the larger system requires organizations to develop new capabilities. It demonstrates the role that rich internal and external networks play in developing...

Purpose – This chapter argues that health care is best conceptualized as a complex adaptive system. Sustainable health care depends on harnessing the complexity of the system by building aligned purpose, flexible pathways to connect people, knowledge and resources, and the capacity for self-organization. Design/methodology/approach – The case study...

Purpose – This chapter provides a reflective synopsis of the chapters in the volume and highlights the learning from the cases about the development of new orientations, design configurations, and learning mechanisms. It charts directions for further research and possible managerial actions. Design – The chapters in this second volume of the book s...

Purpose – This chapter frames the topic of organizing for sustainable health care in terms of the environmental trends that have rendered current health care approaches unsustainable, the embeddedness of health care in society's triple bottom line, and the need to build adaptive capability within the complex health care ecosystem. Design/methodolog...

Large group interventions are an important method of organization change. The large group intervention literature is largely descriptive and normative and contains a number of case studies that describe the process and some immediate outcomes. There is a large void with respect to empirical investigation. This research tested fundamental hypotheses...

The large number of publications about sustainability and sustainable development that have been published during the past decade has dealt largely with the science of sustainability, the content of sustainability initiatives, and increasingly with the need to more closely link the economic, environmental, and social purposes and operating logic of...

The chapters in this first volume of the book series “Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness” captured a rich set of cases in which sustainable effectiveness was the central focus. Each chapter illuminated the development of a distinct sustainable system, and had a special focus on reporting theoretically informed and rigorously explored knowledg...

Organizations are operating in a constantly changing environment and need research that can help them adapt to these changes. This has created an opportunity for scholars to do research that will be valued and used if it is relevant. We argue that to achieve relevance, researchers need to work with and learn from practitioners, and they need to spe...

This commentary supports Gail Whiteman’s suggestion that the field of organizational research and its community of practice would be strengthened if researcher emotions were acknowledged in organizational research. I go further and argue that emotions and values underpin all the professional choices made even by purportedly objective organizational...

This handbook provides the latest thinking, methodologies and cases in the rapidly growing area of collaborative management research. What makes collaborative management research different is its emphasis on creating a close partnership between scholars and practitioners in the search for knowledge concerning organizations and complex systems. In t...

Collaborative management research aimed at changing the dynamics and performance of a system must pay careful attention to the voices of the participants. The voices of the varied collaborators are rarely heard in reported research. This chapter builds on the four earlier chapters in this section. Reflecting across the varied cases in which the voi...

This introductory article argues building intentional design capabilities is a primary approach to bridging theory and practice. To address the complexity and challenges of today’s organizational environments, the organizational development (OD) profession’s focus on humanistic development should be complemented by equally strong attention to bring...

This paper describes the development of a behaviorally based performance appraisal system. Blanz and Ghiselli's Mixed Standard Scale was used as the basis for developing the performance appraisal system for assessing the performance of highway patrol personnel. However, the particular developmental procedures described here differ in some respects...

The use of employee participation groups is an increasingly widespread response to unrelenting environmental demands for higher levels of organizational performance. Guidelines for the design of participation groups are suggested, based on a study of participation group programs in nine organizational units of a major corporation. In order to be mo...

Innovation is central to the dynamics and success of organizations and society in the modern world, the process famously referred to by Schumpeter as 'gales of creative destruction'. This ambitious and wide ranging book makes the case for a new approach to the study of innovation. It is the editors' conviction that this approach must accomplish sev...

Developing new capabilities is a strategic necessity for many organizations. It entails extensive learning dispersed across complex activity fields that extend beyond the firm. We generate a model and present propositions about new capability development that integrate perspectives from the strategy, learning, and social capital and network literat...

this paper we have renamed these two concepts as interactive collaboration and alignment mechanisms. the capabilities of today's software tools and computer systems, eventual integration of these two systems appears inevitable and is part of the long-range strategy of the business. Currently each of the product line organizations designs and produc...

A structural equation model of the knowledge system for new product development (NPD) is derived from a sample of 1200 engineers in 10 technology firms, and validated on a hold-out sample. Core to the model are knowledge work behaviors that: (1) expand knowledge relevant to NPD by focusing on the performance of the organization as a system; (2) inc...

This volume presents the findings of a 6-year longitudinal study on the function of HR organizations in large corporations. The results of the study, conducted by the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, are distilled into a vision of how HR can become a contributor to organizational success in today’s...

This study examined the relationship between individual demographic dissimilarity from co-workers and three indicators of inclusion by an organization: decision-making influence, access to sensitive information, and job security. Data from 345 individuals in eight work units showed that individual dissimilarity in race and gender were negatively as...

Building commitment and preventing costly turnover of technical employees are key challenges facing organizations today. We examine whether the elements of the employment relationship that predict commitment and willingness to change companies vary significantly with age. Using a sample of over 3000 technical professionals from six large companies,...

Drawing from literature on knowledge transfer and cognition, we develop a theoretical model for conducting research that is useful to practitioners. We explore the potential of this model by examining the usefulness of a research project involving ten companies. Perceived usefulness is related to the extent that members' organization self-design ac...

Team-based organizations follow a different logic from traditional hierarchical organizations that rely primarily on individuals as the primary performing unit. Organization design processes are involved when organizations convert to a team-based organization, or they strengthen the capabilities of an organization that already performs its work in...

Team-based organizations follow a different logic from traditional hierarchical organizations that rely primarily on individuals as the primary performing unit. Organization design processes are involved when organizations convert to a team-based organization, or they strengthen the capabilities of an organization that already performs its work in...

Compensation professionals are flocking to seminars on innovative reward practices, buying books, and reading journals. But what are the leading companies actually doing? This article summarizes data on reward innovations from a unique new study.

This publication summarizes research that investigated how school-based management (SBM) can be implemented for long-term school improvement. It is argued that a successful SBM plan must be part of a quest for improvement and utilize a "high involvement" model. In addition to having more power, schools need knowledge of the organization, informatio...

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Incl. bibliographical references

Employee attachment and withdrawal was examined for a sample of high technology electronics workers located in the Silicon Valley. The effects of current and future expectations were compared as predictors of job responses for high tech workers at different job tenure stages (newcomers, insiders, and long-term veterans). A survey based multivariate...

Firms in global high technology industries face key challenges. This paper presents an integrative framework that delineates aspects of their context, organization and human resources. It also identifies tensions within the firm that can only be resolved by increasing the capacity of the firm to deal with multiple and conflicting pressures. High te...

Shows how the strategies that once virtually guaranteed success have been overturned by the advent of tough foreign competition, new technologies, and shrinking resources. Carefully lays out the new ground rules to effectively anticipate and address the challenges of the new global economy.

Describes the structure, strengths, and problems associated with quality circles (i.e., a parallel-structure approach to getting employees involved in problem solving). The phases that quality circles typically go through—from very positive to significant disillusionment—where quality circles fit in with employee involvement, and the establishment...

There is no more essential task, no more basic information that one could collect, that is critical to survival than the knowledge of one's underlying assumptions. Here are some assumptions about the steel and auto industries that give insight into the many underlying assumptions responsible for the directions other industries take.

Today there is virtually no problem, from technological to economic, whose various aspects can be considered in isolation one from another. The world in which we live is a complex highly-interconnected system, yet most people are still trying to solve problems with the mentality and tools appropriate only for a simpler, mechanistic, view of the wor...

This study of 17 schools and 250 individuals finds Political Access to be a better predictor than Participation in Decision Making of Trust and of Organizational Effectiveness. Political Access is defined as the ability to raise issues and secure system attention. Internal and external measures of effectiveness are used.