A review of literature indicates limited effort to understand and explain employees' acclimation to, and adoption of, new behaviors required by organization change initiatives. Psychological theories of individual behavior change have, in restricted instances, been applied into organizational environments. The transtheoretical model of change (TTM) offers a comprehensive explanation of behavior change uniting multiple theories of individual change. TTM describes change as a series of stages that individual progress through before arriving at the decision to implement a change in behavior. Movement through the stages is facilitated by processes which increase the probability of a behavior change effort's success. The present research investigated the potential applicability of TTM for explaining individual level change within a new context, specifically, an organizational environment. To examine if individual change in the context of an organization occurs in the fashion described by TTM, measures of core TTM constructs were delivered to employees in a water department of a city in the American southwest. The water department was immersed in an organization change initiative necessitating individual behavior change by its employees. Results of TTM core construct measures and their relationships with each other and the stages of change were examined. Initial findings are indicative of …

Application of multisource feedback (MSF) increased dramatically and became widespread globally in the past two decades, but there was little conceptual work regarding self-other agreement and few empirical studies investigated self-other agreement in other cultural settings. This study developed a new conceptual framework of self-other agreement and used three samples to illustrate how national culture affected self-other agreement. These three samples included 428 participants from China, 818 participants from the US, and 871 participants from globally dispersed teams (GDTs). An EQS procedure and a polynomial regression procedure were used to examine whether the covariance matrices were equal across samples and whether the relationships between self-other agreement and performance would be different across cultures, respectively. The results indicated MSF could be applied to China and GDTs, but the pattern of relationships between self-other agreement and performance was different across samples, suggesting that the results found in the U.S. sample were the exception rather than rule. Demographics also affected self-other agreement disparately across perspectives and cultures, indicating self-concept was susceptible to cultural influences. The proposed framework only received partial support but showed great promise to guide future studies. This study contributed to the literature by: (a) developing a new framework of self-other …

An abundance of theories exists on what constitutes appropriate team leadership; What seems to be lacking is how the "followers" react when exposed to their tenets. This particular study involves testing a contemporary model (Stewart & Manz, 1995) via interview statements that seem to indicate that a certain form of team leadership is taking place. Once determined, the effectiveness of the leadership "style" that is in effect is assessed using ten different performance dimensions to determine if that style is successful (or detrimental) in any of those areas. Leadership "tools" from other theories and models are examined as well.