Shepherds and Sheep: Parish Reconfiguration,Authority, and Activism in a Catholic Diocese

This mixed method study describes contention over parish reconfiguration in a northeast Catholic diocese, and a case study of one merged parish. Guided by social movement theories about collective action frames and political opportunities in mobilization, we outline the diocesan frame of reconfiguration and the counter frame developed by activists who organized to oppose the process. While the diocesan frame focused on a shortage of priests that officials believed demanded reconfiguration of financially burdened parishes, the lay counter frame shifted the debate to questions about the role of the laity in the contemporary Catholic Church and what they perceived as failed leadership from their bishop. Our case study of Resurrection Parish shows how the merger process and the activists’ opposition to their diocesan leaders resulted in a parish that works to ensure the involvement of the laity, and continues to publicly dissent from Catholic leaders.     

An Analysis of Organizational Structure and Transition Outcomes in the Youth-to-Senior Professional Soccer Transition

The study critiqued whether the demands, resources, and barriers associated with the youth-to-senior sport transition in Stambulova's (2003) model help explain transition outcomes. Following initial screening, two professional football clubs were purposively selected for detailed case study analysis. Data collected included meeting minutes, websites, interviews (N = 17) with players, coaches, support staff, and parents, and e-mail communications. The club with the proactive program aligned with Stambulova's model had better transition outcomes (e.g., player financial value, retention rates) and spent less on player assistance compared to the club with no transition program. Future research and practical implications are discussed.     

Organizational Revivalism: Explaining Metamorphosis of China's Catholic Church

The classical works of Troelsch and Niebuhr suggested that sect movements had been the origin of reform and revitalization of the church. More recently, Finke and Wittberg supplemented that thesis by suggesting that the Catholic Church was able to reform itself not through the sect development, but through the establishment of religious orders within the Catholic Church itself. This article suggests, from historical and contemporary archival sources, that the revitalization of the Catholic Church in China was through indigenization of the Church. The vitalization has been achieved despite tensions between the underground church committed to Rome and the national church, which advocated self-government without political and financial ties to the Catholic hierarchies outside China. Both the Chinese government's accommodation of the ecclesiastical authority of the papacy, and the Vatican's silence in response to the underground church's pleas to disregard the national church, had helped the indigenization process and the growth of the church without a possible schism.     

Satisfaction and Morale Among Parish Clergy: What American Catholic and Orthodox Priests Can Learn from Each Other

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches share a similar theology and a hierarchical church administration. Local parish communities are organized in similar ways. However, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches occupy different places in the context of American culture, and they have developed distinct notions of priesthood. Findings explore similarities and differences in the attitudes and experience of Catholic and Orthodox clergy. Most striking, the younger clergy (less than 45 years of age) report more conservative attitudes about the priesthood, "democracy" in church government, and empowering lay persons in the ministry.     

Testing the Effects of Organizational Culture on a Catholic Religious Order

It can be stated that very committed religious people do not develop a monolithic culture, even when they belong to the same spiritual tradition, although there is little research on the pluralism present in a religious segment which is often deemed too uniform and closed to study. The present article aims to explore the internal culture of a homogeneous group of Catholic friars and the presence therein of sub-cultures. Further, the study will test the influence of cultural variables on the factors of vitality and performance. A broad survey, based on an individual questionnaire and involving other monks from different generations and geographic areas, will provide the basic data. The results confirm the complexity of ‘organizational culture’ as a factor that contributes to the vitality of a religious institution.     

组织政治认知对员工行为的影响

组织政治是组织生活的现实反映,是一种普遍现象,员工对组织政治现象的认知对其行为、态度有诸多的不利影响。本研究运用自行研制的组织政治认知调查问卷,通过对29家企业共1647名员工的调查,探讨了在中国文化背景下员工的组织政治认知的结果变量,可望为各类组织的人力资源管理实践提供理论依据。     

Organizational ethics in Catholic health care: honoring stewardship and the work environment.

Organizational ethics refers to the integration of values into decision making, policies, and behavior throughout the multi-disciplinary environment of a health care organization. Based upon Catholic social ethics, stewardship is at the heart of organizational ethics in health care in this sense: stewardship provides the hermeneutic filter that enables basic ethical principles to be realized practically, within the context of the Catholic theology of work, to concerns in health care. This general argument can shed light on the specific topic of non-executive compensation programs as an illustration of organizational ethics in health care.     

Honesty-Humility and Perceptions of Organizational Politics in Predicting Workplace Outcomes

Purpose

The present study sought to examine whether a personality dimension named Honesty-Humility influences the relationship between employees’ perceptions of organizational politics (POP) and workplace outcomes, both attitudinal and behavioral.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data were collected online and cross-nationally from 268 full-time employees from various organizations and occupational backgrounds.

Findings

Results indicate that the adverse effect of POP in the workplace is exacerbated for employees who are lower (rather than higher) in Honesty-Humility. Specifically, when perceiving their workplace as political, low Honesty-Humility individuals were more likely to engage in counterproductive work behavior and impression management behavior and to experience greater job stress and decreased job satisfaction.

Implications

Examining the role of individual differences in POP helps to advance our understanding of the mechanisms that employees use to interpret and react within a perceived politically charged workplace. This study provides further evidence of the deleterious effects of POP in the workplace, especially among low Honesty-Humility individuals. Practical implications of this research focus on reducing the likelihood of hiring low Honesty-Humility individuals as well as on reducing the opportunity for undesirable behaviors among currently employed individuals.

Originality/Value

There is a paucity of research exploring the possibility that individuals may react differently from one another to POP within their workplace and, in turn, experience varying outcomes. The present study helps to fill this gap in the literature by providing novel insights as to the role of personality in predicting perceptions of, and reactions to, organizational politics.     

Organizational Revival From Within: Explaining Revivalismand Reform in the Roman Catholic Church

The most enduring theoretical model for explaining the rise and fall of religious movements has been some form of the church-sect theory. Yet this model offers little explanation for the continued vitality of the Roman Catholic Church. We argue that a key to this institutional success is the Church 's ability to retain sect-like revival movements within its boundaries. We demonstrate that religious orders, like Protestant sects, stimulate organizational growth, develop innovations for adapting the church to a new culture or era, and provide institutional support for a high tension faith. Unlike Protestant sects, however, they do so within the institutional church. This source of internal reform and revival helps to explain the long term vitality of the Roman Catholic Church and its ability to operaate effectively as a religiou monopoly.     

Perceptions of Organizational Politics: A Meta-analysis of Outcomes

Organizational researchers during the past few decades have increasingly focused on the role of subjective work issues and their impact on important worker-related outcomes. One of the most prominently studied factors, perceptions of organizational politics, has received much recent conceptual and empirical attention. In an effort to better understand the relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and key outcomes, we apply meta-analysis on 79 independent samples from 59 published and unpublished studies involving 25,059 individual participants. Results indicate strong negative relationships between POP and job satisfaction and between POP and organizational commitment, moderately positive relationships between POP and the outcomes of job stress and turnover intentions, and a non-significant relationship between POP and in-role job performance. Moderator tests show that age, work setting (i.e., public sector or private sector), and cultural differences (i.e., domestic sample or international sample), have contingent effects on certain POP relationships.     

Positive Organizational Outcomes Associated with a Penchant for Openness

The tension between scientific openness versus secrecy has existed for centuries (Hull 1985). However, both academics and practitioners have recently argued that openness by private firms has many positive attributes. The purpose of this research effort is to review the extant literature on openness and to develop hypotheses regarding its impact on organizational outcomes. We then use a unique database to test the idea with 87 companies. Our findings are that openness is beneficial to the firm from a science, technological, and financial perspective and, perhaps, to the employees from an ethical viewpoint. The managerial and societal implications are also discussed.     

The Difference Catholic Makes: Catholic Faculty and Catholic Identity

This study examines, for the case of Catholics, the thesis that a "critical mass" of devoted faculty members—50 percent or more, according to the papal document Ex Corde Ecclesia—serves to promote or preserve the religious character of religiously affiliated institutions of higher education. Factor analysis and structural equations are employed to analyze a random sample of faculty members ( n = 1,290) and institutional profiles ( n = 100) of American Catholic colleges and universities. Catholic faculty show higher support for Catholic identity in latent structures of aspiration for improved Catholic distinctiveness, a desire for more theology or philosophy courses, and longer institutional tenure. Institutions having a majority of Catholic faculty exhibit four properties consistent with stronger Catholic identity: a policy of preferential hiring for Catholics ("hiring for mission"), a higher proportion of Catholic students, higher faculty aspiration for Catholic identity, and longer faculty tenure in the institution. These latter two characteristics are not due simply to aggregation, but are stronger, on average, for Catholic faculty when they are in the majority. Preferential hiring marks Catholic identity, but is ineffective to increase the proportion of Catholic faculty. I conclude that the prediction of the critical mass thesis is correct.     

Antecedents and Outcomes of Organizational Commitment: A Study of Salespeople

The role organizational commitment plays in salesperson behavior is unresearched. To increase understanding of both causes and outcomes of organizational commitment for salespeople, this study proposed and tested a path model. The model was drawn from the framework for studying organizational commitment proposed by Chornco (1986).

The study results imply that salespeoples' performance is not determined by commitment or by effort, but that it is positively affected by the sales manager, income and education. Commitment was positively affected by anticipatory socialization, work satisfaction and manager satisfaction. Means for building commitment are discussed, as are situations where management should stress salesforce commitment.     

Organizational Conspiracy Beliefs: Implications for Leadership Styles and Employee Outcomes

Purpose

Belief in conspiracy theories about societal events is widespread among citizens. The extent to which conspiracy beliefs about managers and supervisors matter in the micro-level setting of organizations has not yet been examined, however. We investigated if leadership styles predict conspiracy beliefs among employees in the context of organizations. Furthermore, we examined if such organizational conspiracy beliefs have implications for organizational commitment and turnover intentions.

Design/Methodology/Approach

We conducted a survey among a random sample of the US working population (N = 193).

Findings

Despotic, laissez-faire, and participative leadership styles predicted organizational conspiracy beliefs, and the relations of despotic and laissez-faire leadership with conspiracy beliefs were mediated by feelings of job insecurity. Furthermore, organizational conspiracy beliefs predicted, via decreased organizational commitment, increased turnover intentions.

Implications

Organizational conspiracy beliefs matter for how employees perceive their leaders, how they feel about their organization, and whether or not they plan to quit their jobs. A practical implication, therefore, is that it would be a mistake for managers to dismiss organizational conspiracy beliefs as innocent rumors that are harmless to the organization.

Originality/Value

Three novel conclusions emerge from this study. First, organizational conspiracy beliefs occur frequently among employees. Second, participative leadership predicts decreased organizational conspiracy beliefs; despotic and laissez-faire leadership predict increased organizational conspiracy beliefs due to the contribution of these destructive leadership styles to an insecure work environment. Third, organizational conspiracy beliefs harm organizations by influencing employee commitment and, indirectly, turnover intentions.

     

Catholic hospitals and Catholic identity.

Catholic hospitals seek to offer health care in accord with the example of Christ. They have several models to assist in this effort. The first model is the values portrayed in the Gospels. The Catholic Church has sought to embody these Gospel values in specific teachings. These teachings have been further specified for hospitals in the United States by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the Ethical and Religious Directives. Finally, the Gospels values are also expressed for individual Catholic health care systems in mission statements and statements of Catholic identity. This article examines the worth of mission and identity statements, and explains that the statements must be put into practice through a process of internalization before they will be able to be of worth to the Catholic health care apostolate.