This study explores some of the consequences of everyday moments of interpersonal interaction within an organization. The primary research questions concern the grammar of episodes of "frustration" and episodes of "success," or those moments that employees identify as working well. What is "frustration" here? How does it affect the person who experiences it? How does its performance affect others in the office? How is it made and re-made, and with what consequences, in everyday moments of interaction? The study explores these questions from a communication perspective using the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory of communication. The main contribution of this study lies in the application of the method. The CMM theory of communication encourages the analyst to understand the ways in which utterances may participate in multiple important stories simultaneously (stories of identity, relationship, and organization, for example). In this case study, the experience and consequences of "stress" may be best understood only in the context of stories of "teamwork" and "professionalism." This study is not about emotion itself. Rather, it presents an approach to engaging in research about emotional displays at work and the consequences of their enactment on the employees, their relationships, and the organization itself. Communication, or the telling and living of stories in patterned ways, is at the heart of this approach.

Virtual teams have become more commonplace in the corporate landscape of the twenty-first century. These non-traditional teams are typically involved in complex and dynamic projects. They are comprised of members who are located in more than one geographic location and who rely on computer-mediated communication to accomplish their goals. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between various dimensions of virtual teams and team effectiveness. Variables of interest included trust, shared understanding, internal collaboration, external communication, functional diversity, team leadership, and amount of face-to-face communication. Thirty-three virtual teams from high-technology firms participated in the study. Since this study incorporated both individual team member data and project team data into the majority of analyses, Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to eliminate the problems associated with using regression for cross-level data sets. Three models were developed based on the results of the analyses reflecting the significant relationships between various predictors and the outcomes of overall performance, innovativeness and member satisfaction. The findings indicated that trust, shared understanding, and internal collaboration abilities among the team members had strong positive relationships with effective outcomes of virtual teams. In some cases, the extent to which the team members were geographically dispersed negatively interacted with the predictor variables and lessened their impact on the outcome variables. In addition, teams that were self-managed had higher performance, were more innovative and had more satisfied team members than those led externally. Further, the results indicated that the effect of face-to-face communication varied with the desired outcome. Specifically, teams that brought members together in person tended to have higher innovativeness ratings and increased levels of member satisfaction. Face-to-face communication also positively interacted with internal collaboration, increasing the joint effect of these variables on member satisfaction. The extent that team members communicated with individuals outside the team was also shown to have a direct effect on innovativeness. Finally, functional diversity interacted with trust, which served to increase the joint effect on a team's innovativeness. These models now serve as a foundation for future research on virtual teams. The implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

This dissertation seeks to examine the claim that contemporary industrial societies are witnessing a fundamental transformation in the nature of work leading to the advent of a new organizational paradigm. This research contends that while the new paradigm does exhibit significant breaks from the ways of organizing in the past, the change is by no means all embracing. A critical examination of the new paradigm must therefore attempt to focus attention on not just the transformation but also the continuities that persist from the past. This dissertation project has three inter-related components. First, it constructs a historiography in an attempt to offer an explanation of the shift from the old to the new organizational paradigm. Drawing upon literatures from multiple disciplines, it scrutinizes the claim of the transformation of work and identifies the changes and the continuities across the paradigmatic divide. Second, it uses the empirical sites of two software consulting firms--one at Silicon Valley and one at New York City--in order to examine the transformation of work at a leading edge of change. Through participant observation at the research sites and interviews with managers, programmers and end-clients, it examines the ruptures from earlier forms of work in the context of the software industry paying particular attention to the nature of the changing technologies, the local and the international division of labor, and the changing contours of space and time that accompany the transformation of work. Third, it constructs and tests two sets of hypotheses. One attempts to explore the nature of various forms of work commitment demonstrated by the growing assembly of the contingent workers of the new paradigm while the other focuses on the division of labor and the fragmentation of work in the organizations of the present. Through these three stages, this dissertation attempts to contribute to a more complex understanding of the issues around the transformation of work and to subject the discourse of the new organizational paradigm to critical scrutiny.

Employees adapting to change display a wide array of responses. Coping with change can be difficult for some individuals, whereas some employees may not be bothered by change; instead they look at it as a chance to grow and learn. Carver (1998) and O'Leary and Ickovics (1995) purport four potential modes of adapting to change: to succumb to the change, to survive the change, to be resilient to the change by regaining the level of functioning prior to the change, or to thrive and function better than before the change. This study analyzed the causes, consequences and outcomes of individual adaptation to a changing work environment. This study served to broaden and refine our understanding of the process of adaptation to organization change by filling some of the conceptual and empirical gaps in the research on individual adaptation at work (Chan, 2000). Prior studies have concentrated mostly on individual differences contributing to one's ability to adapt to change (Judge, Thorensen, Pucik, and Welbourne, 1999), or have focused on how organization changes affect stress and anxiety levels among individuals (Wanberg & Banas, 2000, Shaw, Fields, Thacker & Fisher, 1993 e.g.). This study advanced empirical research on individual change by developing and testing a model of both individual differences and organizational, or context specific factors affecting individual responses to change. It was hypothesized that individuals reporting higher levels of the above variables would also report higher levels of adaptability. This study also introduces the notion of thriving (functioning at a higher level after a change) to the empirical research on organizational changes and tested the hypothesis that better adaptors would perceive better work outcomes in the form of higher job satisfaction and perceived performance and lower absenteeism and intentions to quit the organization. The above model was tested in a field study of 169 participants across four different organizations experiencing varying changes. Results indicated participation, role clarity and optimism were positively related to adaptability. Further, it was found that better adaptors were more satisfied with their jobs, were less likely to quit the organization, and perceived higher performance after the change.

Although research shows that nurses are dissatisfied with conditions in work environments, they generally do not initiate behaviors that could produce change. Reasons for this lack of initiating or leadership behaviors among nurses are unclear. The purpose of this study was to explore the phenomenon of sex-typing among nurses and to investigate the relationship between sex-typing and some elements of leadership behavior. Specifically, the following research question and two hypotheses directed the study. Research Question I. What is the nature of the distribution among female nurses who practice in five general hospitals in Massachusetts of the four sex-type groups as determined by the Bem Sex-Role Inventory? Null Hypothesis I. There are no significant differences among the four sex-type groups of female nurses practicing in five hospitals in Massachusetts and their identification of problems in the work setting that hinder their effectiveness in providing optimal services to clients. Null Hypothesis II. There are no significant differences among the four sex-type groups of female nurses practicing in five hospitals in eastern Massachusetts and their perception that staff nurses should initiate action necessary to solve the problems identified that hinder their effectiveness in providing optimal services to clients. Data collection included a mailed survey and personal interviews using the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, (BSRI) and the Practice Environment Inventory (PEI). The BSRI identified sex-type and the PEI identified perceptions about problems in work environments and problem solving initiators. Chi square tests were computed to compare the distribution of sex-type of the sample to others and Analysis of Variance Procedures were used to test the relationship between sex-type and (1) numbers of problems identified in work settings, (2) number of times staff nurse was named as the appropriate person to initiate action. The results showed no significant differences between the sample's distribution of sex-type and two others to which it was compared. Further, no significant relationships were found between sex-type and numbers of problems or choice of problem solving initiator. Data also showed that nurses recognize the need for change and think that nurses should respond.

After a general review of the dynamics of personal crisis and change, a theory of how complex organizations decline into a crisis state was developed. The premise is that misalignment of dominant elements work to establish a degenerative state. Such a state causes the organization to become maladaptive. As the maladaptive condition increases, change inhibitors begin to form. The level of organizational decline determines what inhibitor or combination of inhibitors evolve. The primary organizational change inhibitors identified are: inappropriate defense patterns and defense mechanisms; traumatized leadership; organizational blockages; and organizational syndromes. As misalignment increases, assisted by the negative coping mechanisms or inhibitors, a point is reached where a state of disharmonic resonance is established (the negative of synergy) and a crisis state is created or organization utility equals zero. This descriptive theory was then translated into a prescriptive model of degenerative intervention called "organizational triage" (OTR). Triage refers to an efficient process of identification of the most significant dominant elements that will have the greatest impact on reversing the decline and the selection of the most appropriate intevention protocol--salvage, treatment, or surgery--to realign these dominant elements. The degenerative intervention model identified seven major stages: equilibrium misalignment occurrence, pre-crisis, crisis, stabilization, regeneration, and new equilibrium. The pre-crisis and crisis stages were further broken into four phases. Intervention and alignment strategies and observations about the model were developed. Special emphasis was placed on the stabilization of an organization in crisis as a triage component needed to prepare an organization to accept the realignment intervention. Last, a review of applications, and further areas of research and conclusions were presented.

The challenges of the turbulent environment facing most top executives today, the need for creative skills at every level in organizations and at the top in particular, and the lack of clear understanding as to what creativity is all about point out the need for an investigation into the factors influencing creativity at the top of organizations. The issues are rich and complex. The causes of the differences in creativity levels are many and not easily isolatable. The complexities of understanding the dynamics are heightened when they are put into a real-life context of a particular person, in a certain place, at a particular point in time. Much research has been conducted in the various relevant disciplines on diverse pieces of the complex puzzle, but most research has not been specifically related to the factors influencing creativity levels in top executives. The purpose of this dissertation is to better understand, through interviews with sixteen top executives of sixteen different organizations, how these executives, in their own words, perceive their personal creativity and the factors influencing its levels during their climb to and tenure at the top. As a result of the research, four themes emerge: (1) Personal issues play a much larger role than do external factors in explaining the differences in top executives' creativity levels; (2) Creativity in business is not well understood, and there are consequences from an incomplete understanding of creativity for both the top executive as well as the business; (3) The picture of the creative top executive resulting from these interviews and the literature is that of an artist. Awareness of the need for a new set of creative skills is a starting point for the development of a top executive's own program of education and growth; and (4) Several strategies for personal development are identified in this study. Implications for practitioners and aspirants, Boards of Directors, human resource specialists, and the teaching and research communities are explored. Suggestions for further research are also outlined.

Complex conditions in the popular work place mechanism of Self-Directed Work Teams require many skills of team members. Adult Cognitive Development studies skills that deal with complex ideas and finds their development in some adults, always in predictable patterns. This naturalistic, exploratory research investigates the existence, characterization, development and importance of nine cognitive and intrapersonal skills found in both work place literature and adult cognitive development literature but not uniformly emphasized in training offered to team members. The skills include Systems Thinking, Integration and Synthesis, Taking the Perspective of Others, Analysis and Diagnosis, Recognizing, Identifying and Dealing with Feelings, Willingness to Disagree with Authority or Majority, Ability to be Flexible, Ability to Deal with Ambivalence, and Ability to Assess and Take Risks. This research investigates use of the nine skills through observations of team meetings in two distinctive work places. Observed uses of the skills were confirmed through interviews with team members which also explored skill development. Interviews with team leaders established their sense of importance of the skills. Major findings include: (1) Use of six of the skills is widespread. (2) Characteristics of 248 skill instances offered a basis for determination of sequence of skill development. (3) "Learning From Models" and "Reflection On Experiences" were credited by team members for development of their skills. School experience and training programs were not significant sources of development. (4) Most of the skills were considered important by the people responsible for the teams. Unexpected findings include: (1) Some team members without higher education evidenced skills at a level expected by Adult Cognitive Development theories only of those with higher education. (2) The team itself was cited by members as having positive developmental effects. (3) The interviews in which team members reflected upon their skills development proved developmental, strengthening the findings that reflective thought constitutes a significant pathway for development of the nine skills under consideration.

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