This study was conducted to determine the relationship between managers' ethical positions and their intended behavior.

Participative management practices between United States parent companies in the maquiladora industry and their Mexico assembly plants were investigated for this study. It was hypothesized that managers of parent maquiladora companies in the United States encouraged greater levels of worker participation than did expatriate managers in Mexican subsidiaries. However, the findings of this study indicate that expatriate managers in a number of the Mexico subsidiaries are currently implementing employee involvement approaches. In some instances, highly participative team-based approaches are being used.

Firms' use of external labor arrangements (ELAs), such as temporary, contract and seasonal workers, has become increasingly prevalent over the last two decades. Despite the increasing importance of this phenomenon, little is known about firms' reasons for using ELAs. Most research to date has been exploratory, using qualitative methods or archival data not well suited to the constructs. The result of this research has been a long and often contradictory list of proposed antecedents of ELA use. In this study, I tested the ability of the transaction costs theory to predict when firms will fill a given job using an ELA rather that a permanent employment relationship. According to this theory, three characteristics of the job will determine whether the job will be filled using an ELA: transaction-specific investment, likelihood of repetition, and uncertainty of performance. Firms will be less likely to staff a given job using an ELA when the job requires investment in idiosyncratic skills, when the firm is likely to require a person with that set of skills regularly, and when performance in that job is difficult to measure.

The purpose of this research project was to develop and test a theoretical model of technical professionals in self-managing work teams using a number of constructs that have not been tested with this population. The overall aim was to begin to humbly fill a significant gap in the research literature focused on self-managing work teams. The rationale for the need to address technical professional perspectives in team settings is discussed in the following section.

Transaction cost economics (TCE) theorists traditionally have classified transactions between firms as governed by either market or hierarchy. By assessing characteristics of the transaction - asset specificity, uncertainty, and frequency - firms choose the governance form which minimizes transaction costs, the costs of administering the business deal. During the 1980s, however, TCE has found itself unable to explain the proliferation of strategic alliances. These hybrid relationships seek the benefits of both markets and hierarchies, including quasi-integration, the control of assets without actual ownership. Further, hybrids tend to prefer trust-based relational contracting. TCE's acknowledgment of hybrids, however, raises other questions surrounding the behavioral assumptions which supposedly influence the transaction characteristic governance linkage. Various dissenting researchers have theorized that (1) trust is more dominant in business than opportunism (2) the behavioral assumptions actually function as variables in different contexts, and (3) trust offers an integration mechanism for behavioral variables.

Technologists predict that electronic information dissemination will create a paperless work environment. In spite of such predictions, paper-based internal communication will remain the primary medium for disseminating information in organizations for decades to come. However, electronic technology will have an impact on paper information production that may be more profound than changes following word processing's introduction. Previously unavailable for everyday production to enhance word meaning, certain graphic techniques now can be used to access readers' preconditioned symbol meanings to increase comprehension of routine correspondence and information internalization. This quasi-experimental field study examines interactions among laser-printer graphic treatment and communication variables as contributors to explaining variance in comprehension. Set Multiple Regression/Correlation analysis identifies significant variance explained by conditional relationships between near-typeset quality text and readers' self-interest and between near-typeset quality text and text's readability. The conditional relationship of near-typeset quality and self-interest shows increase in reader comprehension at a greater rate than the comprehension increase rate attributed to the reader's self-interest increase alone. This suggests that conditional relationships may be accessing an internal judgment process interpreting greater self-interest in near-typeset printed text. The conditional relationship between near-typeset quality and readability reveals that at more difficult reading levels comprehension is greater for …