The Risks of Autonomy: Empirical Evidence for the Necessity of a Balance Management in Promoting Organizational Innovativeness

For the purpose of promoting innovativeness in organizations, the literature recommends more decentralization of power and more participative leadership as one dimension of empowerment and thus greater situation control for employees. In fact, however, increasing situation control involves specific risks (including co‐ordination problems). Without concurrent integration to cushion these risks through orientation, consensus and trust, increasing situation control therefore leads not to a further increase in innovativeness but to a decline. This first empirical demonstration of the covert curvilinear relationship between situation control and innovativeness in n = 101 organizations reveals these risks. At the same time, it calls into question the widespread recommendations in the literature for action on innovation‐friendly organization and leadership.     

Die Faser- und Spanplattenerzeugung mit Kleinanlagen in Entwicklungsländern

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Solid modeling and system design

This article is intended to give the reader a better understanding of solid modeling systems, with emphasis on their use in mechanical applications. It should be helpful for both users and buyers of such systems. While geometry creation and manipulation serve as the underlying foundations, we will also address functions such as weight (mass) calculation and mechanism simulation, as well as the interface to other programs (i.e. finite element analysis etc.).     

Managing diversity and enhancing team outcomes: The promise of transformational leadership.

In a sample of 62 research and development (R&D) teams, the authors examined transformational leadership as a moderator of the relationship of age, nationality, and educational background diversity with team outcomes. When levels of transformational leadership were high, nationality and educational diversity were positively related to team leaders' longitudinal ratings of team performance. These relationships were nonsignificant when transformational leadership was low. Age diversity was not related to team performance when transformational leadership was high, and it was negatively related to team performance when transformational leadership was low. Two mediated moderation effects help explain these findings. Transformational leadership moderated the relationship of the 3 examined diversity dimensions with the elaboration of task-relevant information, which in turn was positively associated with team performance. Moreover, transformational leadership moderated the relationship of the 3 diversity types with collective team identification, which in turn was positively related to the elaboration of task-relevant information. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results. Overall, this study suggests that transformational leadership can foster the utilization of the potential, but frequently untapped, benefits entailed by both demographic and informational/cognitive team diversity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)