Michael Aiken’s research while affiliated with University of Wisconsin–Madison and other places

... Our study focuses on the informal control of information, which is transmitted through interpersonal rather than nonpersonal channels. We adopt this perspective because important information is transmitted most frequently through interpersonal channels in the emergent networks involved in complex decisions (Bacharach and Aiken 1977;Baldridge and Burnham 1975). This occurs because interpersonal channels have greater flexibility and can be more attuned to the specific problems of the receivers (Tushman 1978). ...

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Information Control and Influence in Emergent Buying Centers

... At the organizational level, we included the industry type as a statistical control that can alter the results (Dess, Ireland, & Hitt, 1990). Vertical differentiation (i.e., the number of hierarchical levels) was likewise included, as process integration represents a response to organizational complexity (Aiken, Bacharach, & French, 1980). Finally, we controlled for the organizational design practice to check whether having internal OD expertise makes any difference in the multilevel mediation relationship. ...

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From Strategic Ambidexterity to Employees’ Task Performance? The Intermediary Role of Job Design

... Perhaps it is unsurprising, given its association with the division of labour, that when meritocracy was psychologised, it occurred first in the organisational psychology literature. In fact, the earliest empirical study retrieved by a search for "meritocracy" on the APA database PsychInfo, examined administrative bureaucracies in Belgium (Bacharach & Aiken, 1979). In this study, department heads and subordinates were asked about their levels of job satisfaction (1 = very dissatisfied; 4 = very satisfied) and "the organisational commitment to use merit criteria for promotions" (p. ...

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Psychologising meritocracy: A historical account of its many guises

... Firstly, horizontal specialization refers to the way in which tasks and responsibilities are allocated among different units at the same hierarchical level (Egeberg, 2003). Secondly, vertical differentiation describes how tasks and responsibilities are allocated across different hierarchical levels (Bacharach & Aiken, 1976). Thirdly, organizations can vary in the extent to which they allow for crossfunctional linkages that cut across different units or divisions (Whitford, 2006). ...

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What Does This Button Do? Departmental Restructurings, Information Processing, and Administrative Errors

... I used those definitions rather than the names of the variables in the original studies in coding the data. For example, "functional differentiation" (Kimberly & Evanisko, 1981), used in this study, has also been called "departmentation" (Young, Hougland, & Shepard, 1981) and "horizontal differentiation" (Aiken et al., 1980). I included only variables with a total of five or more correlations from at least two different studies in the analysis. ...

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ORGANIZATIONALINNOVATION-AMETA-ANALYSISOFEFFECTSOFDETERMINANTSANDMODERATORS.