the Journal
of Behavioral and Applied Management
Spring 2002
Vol. 3, No. 3
Table of Contents
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Editor's Note on Vol. 3, No. 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .See Below Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Page 190
Spirituality in the Workplace – A
Measure of Success?
A Business Strategy
Typology for the New Economy:
Hiring consultants
during organizational change:
Cooperating Teams and
Competing Reward Strategies:
Do Community Banks
Gain Competitive Advantage with Online Banking?*
The Rise of Religion
and Spirituality in the Workplace: |
the Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management
This Spring 2002 edition of JBAM marks a changing of the guard of the editor of the journal and as the incoming editor I would first and foremost like to thank Dr. Daniel James Rowley, the past editor and the current associate editor. For the past three years Dan has worked very hard to create IBAM’s first journal (and an electronic one at that), first working with the inaugural co-editors of the journal as IBAM’s webmaster and then working as editor of the journal with his co-editor Barbara Rowley. I would also like to note that Dan has started a rather interesting tradition of past IBAM presidents becoming editors of the journal and I would like to thank Dan for providing me with the opportunity to continue that tradition.
This edition of the journal builds upon several themes discussed in prior editions of the journal and at IBAM conferences as well. There has been a growing movement, both amongst academics and practitioners alike, to discuss the role of spirituality in the workplace and, in essence, elaborate upon Abraham Maslow’s (1943) concept of self-actualization in the workplace. The first paper in this edition of JBAM by Hanna Ashar and Maureen Lane-Maher of National-Louis University examines spirituality in the workplace as a definition of success. They compare two prior studies of executives and how they perceive spirituality, religion, and values. This analysis leads to the development a conceptual model that contains four components of both success and spirituality.
Keiko Krahnke and Lynn Hoffman of University of Northern Colorado continue the discussion of the impact of spirituality in the workplace in the sixth article in the journal. They note the mounting significance of this topic and examine how firms are trying to accommodate employees’ religious and spiritual beliefs and the legal ramifications associated with the firms’ adaptation to these employees’ needs. Suggested for employers are included at the end of the article.
The second article by John A. Parnell, of Texas A & M University-Commerce, revisits the issue of differing typologies of business strategy discussed early on by Sherman (1991) and touched upon in this journal by Barbuto, Jr. (2001) and by O'Neill, Beauvais, and Scholl (2001). Parnell introduces a new wrinkle to generic modeling of competitive strategy, that of the knowledge-based economy and posits that the generic strategy typologies like IO/resource-based theory and strategic groupings need to be modified in order to be applied to the new e-economy.
Deborah Salus and Mary Weeks of Radford University in the fifth article (an invited paper) examine the impact of e-business, specifically on-line banking, on the banking industry. Factors that they address include, but are not limited to customer acceptance and satisfaction, profitability, competition form non-banking institutions and the perceived value added for the bank and the consumer. They particularly focused on the competitive advantage that e-banking would have on smaller community banks, given their relative limited resources and number of branches.
One of the strategies that firms may follow in order to create a competitive advantage is through mergers and acquisitions. Ruth Burnice McKay of Niagara University in the third article denotes that these organizations often face the arduous task of redesigning their hierarchical structures and often solicit support from expert consultants. McKay, by referring to a specific case, denotes that there are inherent risks associated with hiring outside consultants as change agents during these organizational transitions and offers suggestions for consultants in terms of managing the political conflict that arises from the old corporate allegiances.
Team building and inter-team building serve as excellent intervention strategies when merging two organizations (French and Bell, 1995) and several articles in past issues have discussed virtual teams (Bowerman et. al., 2002; Neimero, 2001), and student teams (Cox and Bobrowski, 2000). Larry W. Howard of Middle Tennessee State University, Daniel B. Turban of University of Missouri, and Sandra K. Hurley of Frequency Engineering Laboratories discuss in the fourth article the relationship between organizational reward systems, task interdependence, team performance and productivity. Their empirical study demonstrates that higher productivity levels resulted from firms utilizing reward systems based upon employee and team outputs with team performance utmost in teams with complex interdependent tasks.
References
Barbuto, John E. Jr. (2001) “How
is Strategy Formed in Organizations? A Multi-Disciplinary
Taxonomy of Strategy-Making Approaches” Journal of Behavioral
and Applied Management, 3 (Summer/Fall), 1, 64-73.
Bowerman,
Karen
Dill,
Terence P. Curran,
James J. Freiburger, Linda S. Hartenian,
and Ray Maghroori
(2002)
“A Successful Virtual Team Adventure: IBAM Sparks Collegial Research”
Journal
of Behavioral and Applied Management,
3 (Winter), 2, 99-107.
Cox, Pamela L. and Paula E. Bobrowski (2000) “The Team Charter Assignment: Improving The Effectiveness of Classroom Teams” Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 1 (Winter/Spring), 2, 83-91.
French, Wendell L. and Cecil H. Bell (1995) Organization Development: Behavioral Science Interventions for Organization Improvement. 5th Edition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Maslow, Abraham H. (1943) “A Theory of Human Motivation” Psychological Review, 50 (July), 370-396.
Nemiro, Jill E. (2001) “Connection in Creative Virtual Teams” Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 2 (Winter/Spring), 2, 92-112.
O'Neill, John W. Laura L. Beauvais, and Richard W. Scholl (2001) “The Use of Organizational Culture and Structure to Guide Strategic Behavior: An Information Processing Perspective” Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 2 (Winter/Spring), 2, 131-150.
Sherman, Herbert (1991) “A Typology of Strategic Management: Rational, Natural and Ecological Approaches” Journal of Management Science and Policy Analysis, 8 (Spring/Summer), 3 & 4, 331-345.
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