Category: Workplace Culture

Please Note: Resources are listed in date order with most recent listed first.

• Office Ergonomics

  A brief guide to creating an ergonomically healthy workstation, including information on chair selection, computer work and laptop use.

  Type: article, assessment, guide, recommendations, tool

• Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail

  A classic article by Kotter on change management that outlines and explains his eight steps to effective change.

  Type: article, guide, model, recommendations

• The relative merits of lean, enriched, and empowered offices: an experimental examination of the impact of workspace management strategies on well-being and productivity

  Researchers look at the effect on employee well-being and productivity that lean, enriched, empowered and disempowered office spaces have, as well as the relationship between organizational citizenship behaviour and workspace design. Lean office spaces have the largest negative impact on both productivity and well-being. Enriched office spaces are better but empowered office spaces performed the best. However, if employees are empowered to design their office space and then their decisions are overridden (disempowerment condition) this negatively affects both productivity and well-being. This study offers support for both enriched and empowered workspace environments.

  Type: study

• Transformational Leadership and Performance

  A meta-analysis of 113 primary studies comparing how transformational (inspirational) and transactional (reward-based) leadership styles affect task performance (job tasks, for example) and contextual performance (organizational citizenship behaviour, for example). Researchers find that transformational leadership robustly predicted desirable performance outcomes across a variety of situations and levels (individual-level, team-level, organization-level). These findings lead them to suggest not only training high-potentials in transformational leadership but also selecting for traits that are associated with transformational leadership such as extraversion and emotional stability, especially when recruiting for upper-level management. This study offers strong research support for the positive impact of transformational leadership and its ability to augment a more traditional, transactional leadership style. A key finding in the meta-analysis was that transformational leadership predicted higher levels of contextual performance (extrarole contributions, OCB), which could be highly useful in the modern organization with its increasing focus on social responsibility and employee engagement.

  Type: study

• Management Integrity Assessments

  A set of two studies, the first looks at the traditional competency survey and the second tests a new methodology (dubious reputation method) using subordinate ratings to identify managers lacking integrity. The sample is 672 directors and vice presidents of a Fortune 500 technology firm. Traditional competency methods neither identify managers with low integrity nor link low integrity to low performance, a relationship found in other research. The subordinate rating methodology, on the other hand, identified managers perceived to be low in integrity, which correlated with the managers perceived effectiveness. Organizations that rely on traditional methods for testing integrity need to re-examine the effectiveness of these methods. Have the pre-existing integrity tests predicted unethical behaviour in previous managers? What can be done to make integrity testing more effective? The dubious reputation method is promising, however, it needs more research support before it can be implemented into a workplace setting.

  Type: study