A study of organizational citizenship behaviors in a retail setting

This study investigates the potential antecedents of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) in a retail setting. Much remains unknown about the factors affecting OCBs in retail settings. Several characteristics of retail jobs, as compared with other organizational behavior contexts, suggest the need to examine antecedents of OCBs. Job attitudes (job satisfaction and organizational commitment) are proposed as direct predictors of OCBs. Leadership support, professional development, and empowerment are posited as indirect predictors of OCBs and direct predictors of job attitudes. The possible moderating impacts of employee demographics and job types on the modeled relationships are also examined. The research hypotheses are tested using data collected from 211 frontline employees who work in a retail setting. The employees have customer-contact roles in the upscale food and grocery retailer that participated in the study. The pattern of results is more complex than hypothesized. Job attitudes are related to OCBs but the mediating role of job attitudes is not supported. The relationships between leadership support, professional development, and empowerment, and OCBs and job attitudes differ systematically. Evidence of how employee demographics can alter the modeled relationships is also presented. The findings have significant implications for the theory and practice of managing frontline employees. Limitations of the study are discussed and a program of further research is sketched. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Leader development for transforming organizations: growing leaders for tomorrow

The article reviews the book "Leader development for transforming organizations: growing leaders for tomorrow",edited by David V. Day, Stephen J. Zaccaro and Stanley M. Halpin.

Does industry matter? Examining the role of industry structure and organizational learning in innovation and brand performance

A manager's perception of industry structure (dynamism) has the potential to impact various organizational strategies and behaviors. This may be particularly so with regard to perceptions driving organizational learning orientations and innovation based marketing strategy. The position taken here suggests that firms operating within a competitive industry tend to pursue innovative ways of performing value-creating activities, which requires the development of learning capabilities. The results of a study of SMEs suggest that market focused learning, relative to other learning capabilities plays a key role in the relationships between industry structure, innovation and brand performance. The findings also show that market focused learning and internally focused learning influence innovation and that innovation influences a brand's performance. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bad apples in bad barrels revisited: Cognitive moral development, just world beliefs, rewards, and ethical decision-making

In this study, we test the interactive effect on ethical decision-making of (1) personal characteristics, and (2) personal expectancies based on perceptions of organizational rewards and punishments. Personal characteristics studied were cognitive moral development and belief in a just world. Using an in-basket simulation, we found that exposure to reward system information influenced managers' outcome expectancies. Further, outcome expectancies and belief in a just world interacted with managers' cognitive moral development to influence managers' ethical decision-making. In particular, low-cognitive moral development managers who expected that their organization condoned unethical behavior made less ethical decisions while high cognitive moral development managers became more ethical in this environment. Low cognitive moral development managers also behaved less ethically when their belief in a just world was high.

Understanding the multidimensionality of group development

This article presents a three-dimensional definition space of the group development literature that differentiates group development models on three dimensions: content, population, and path dependency. The multidimensional conceptualization structures and integrates the vast group development literature, enabling direct comparison of competing theories. The utility of this definition space is demonstrated by using the relative positioning of two seemingly competing group development models-the punctuated equilibrium model and the integrative model-to demonstrate their complementarity. The authors also show how organizational researchers and practitioners can use the three-dimensional definition space to select an appropriate theoretical model for the group or group process with which they are working.

Development of a web-service-agents-based family wealth management system

The roiling financial markets, constantly changing tax law and increasing complexity of planning transaction increase the demand of aggregated family wealth management (FWM) services. However, current trend of developing such advisory systems is mainly focusing on financial or investment side. In addition, these existing systems lack of flexibility and are hard to be integrated with other organizational information systems, such as CRM systems. In this paper, a novel architecture of Web-service-agents-based FWM systems has been proposed. Multiple intelligent agents are wrapped as Web services and can communicate with each other via Web service protocols. On the one hand, these agents can collaborate with each other and provide comprehensive FWM advices. On the other hand, each service can work independently to achieve its own tasks. A prototype system for supporting financial advice is also presented to demonstrate the advances of the proposed Webservice- agents-based FWM system architecture.