Friday, December 26, 2008

Building More Effective Organizations or Think Tanks Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise

Building More Effective Organizations: HR Management and Performance in Practice

Author: Ronald J Burk

Organizations today are facing heightened challenges in their efforts to perform effectively. These challenges are reflected in the failure of many long-standing organizations and the shortened tenure of senior level executives. There is increasing agreement that the unique competitive advantage organizations have today lies in their people, their human resource management practices and their cultures. All other elements of production can be readily obtained, bought or copied. We are now in the era of human capital; to be successful organizations need to unleash the talents of their people. Fortunately we now have considerable understanding of what high performing organizations look like. However, a large gap still exists between what we know and what managers actually do. With contributions from a team of leading academics and practitioners, Building More Effective Organizations provides an extensive survey of human resource management and the organizational practices associated with the high performance of individuals.



Table of Contents:
List of figures     viii
List of tables     ix
List of contributors     x
Foreword     xii
Preface     xv
Acknowledgements     xxvi
Building more effective organizations
Building more effective organizations: A primer   Ronald J. Burke     3
Enhancing individual health and performance
Enthusiastic employees   David Sirota   Louis A. Mischkind   Michael I. Meltzer     35
Organizational citizenship behavior, transaction cost economics, and the flat world hypothesis   Dennis W. Organ   Jeong-Yeon Lee     57
Best practices for work stress and well-being: Solutions for human dilemmas in organizations   Alvin L. Gibson   James Campbell Quick     84
Enhancing staff well-being for organisational effectiveness   Ivan T. Robertson   Gordon Tinline   Susannah Robertson     110
Enhancing organizational health and performance
Maximizing the value of leadership development: key questions (and some answers)   Steve Kerr   Steffen Landauer   Elise Lelon     127
Best practices in building more effective teams   Kevin C. Stagl   Eduardo Salas     160
Career development processes in organizations   Yehuda Baruch   Sherry E. Sullivan     183
Fostering organizational learning: Creating and maintaining a learning culture   Silvia Salas   Mary Ann Von Glinow     207
Work-life balance, best practices and healthy organisations: A European perspective   Christina Purcell   Suzan Lewis   Janet Smithson   Sue Caton     228
Diversity management practices in leading edge firms   Val Singh     252
Transforming organizations
Making it better - achieving outstanding performance in manufacturing organizations   John Bessant   Dave Francis     281
Culture change in a financial services organisation   Emma Preece     293
Building the sustainable organization through adaptive, creative coherence in the HR system   Barry Colbert   Elizabeth Kurucz   David Wheeler     310
Be in to Win - from absence to attendance in Royal Mail Group   Stuart Kennedy   Tony McCarthy     334
Transforming a company into a community   Philip Mirvis     353
Index     371

Interesting textbook: Finance for NonFinancial Managers or Work Consumerism and the New Poor

Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise

Author: Andrew Rich

Think tanks are nonprofit policy research organizations that provide analysis and expertise to influence policymakers. From the 1970s their number exploded in the U.S. and their proliferation represented a hope that lawmaking might become better informed and more effective as a result of these expert contributions. Instead, as this book documents, the known ideologies of many, especially the newer, think tanks currently contribute to an environment in which they differ little from advocacy organizations, promoting points of view and preordained policy prescriptions. As a result, they fail to achieve desired influence and undermine their credibility.



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