Building organizational citizenship
Since every organization’s success is built on the participation and good work of its staff, this article advises leaders to view their organization as a country, and frames their primary management challenge as creating “organizational citizenship”, defined as a voluntary consistent commitment to the goals, methods, and ultimate success of the organization. Most leadership strategies are designed to create specific business results; their effectiveness will depend on the creation of a culture of patriotism throughout the organization.
Voluntarism as an organizing principle for 'responsible organizations'
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to promote the concept of organizational voluntarism, borrowed from political philosophy and to stimulate feedback and debate as to its efficacy in furthering the discourse on corporate responsibility.Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines a range of current theories that address the issue of balancing organizational plurality and coherence. It identifies both shortfalls in current research and provides criteria for developing new theory in this area. The concept of organizational voluntarism is developed and these criteria used to test the robustness of the model and to explore future areas of research.Findings – The criteria used to assess the voluntarism model are: the centrality of organizational plurality, the embeddedness of social relations and power in organization working, accounting for the motivations of managers to work this way; and the need for clear organizational benefits. Four potential cognitions are proposed that define a voluntaristic mindse...
Personality trait structure as a human universal.
Patterns of covariation among personality traits in English-speaking populations can be summarized by the five-factor model (FFM). To assess the cross-cultural generalizability of the FFM, data from studies using 6 translations of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (P.T. Costa & R. R. McCrae, 1992) were compared with the American factor structure. German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese samples (N = 7,134) showed similar structures after varimax rotation of 5 factors. When targeted rotations were used, the American factor structure was closely reproduced, even at the level of secondary loadings. Because the samples studied represented highly diverse cultures with languages from 5 distinct language families, these data strongly suggest that personality trait structure is universal.