Mobile Managers Research Articles

Pathways and crossroads to institutional leadership.

When upwardly mobile persons are promoted from lower, individual contributor roles to higher, managerial roles, they are confronted by the challenge of negotiating a series ofl35-degree or shifts in their careers. Those who make the complete journey must traverse five pathways and four crossroads. These critical career crossroads consist of discontinuous and unprecedented changes in the role responsibilities and accountabilities to which managers in transition must respond. At each crossroads, people are confronted by a triple challenge: letting go of anachronistic responsibilities and competencies, preserving those that continue to be useful, and adding new, discontinuous responsibilities and consequences. Managers in transition can cope with these demands by making adaptive changes in their preferred activities, behavior patterns, and style. A detailed examination of the unprecedented discontinuities that ambitious, upwardly mobile managers must bridge is presented. The adaptation process that is required at each career crossroads is described, followed by a detailed set of recommended shifts in behavior patterns for the future executive at each crossroads.

Enabling mobile network managers

Network and system maintenance personnel are increasingly mobile. This creates a potential market for a network, system and service management terminal that is highly mobile, which would supplement existing network and system management solutions. This paper presents a generic architectural solution for this problem based on a highly scalable and network-centric approach to development of network management applications. Although the specific focus is on network management solutions, the results are generally applicable to many other types of applications as well. Some details and experiences from an actual implementation are described, using the Nokia 9000 Communicator 3 3 http://www.nokia.com/com9000/n9000.html and IBM Webbin' CMII 4 4 http://misa.zurich.ibm.com/Webbin/ as the enabling technologies. Areas for future research are also explored.

The Changing Overseas Assignment: Managing for Competitive Advantage

Today, more than ever, the overseas assignment is a staple of the managerial career. Yet, overseas postings do not necessarily have standard or normative objectives, durations, and structures despite the fact that these assignments tend to be more demanding on the employee and increasingly costly and mission-critical to the organization. The authors believe that overseas assignments need to be planned and managed holistically according to a three-point system. They recommend that decisionmakers pay balanced attention to three factors-the environment, the organization, and the employee-when planning for their mobile managers. That will enable transnational companies (TNCS) to better manage work vulner abilities in overseas assignments. The authors offer a toolkit that builds on their proposed holistic systems model. This toolkit requires decisionmakers to adopt a boundary-spanning paradigm by acknowledging all stakeholders in transnational assignments, managing local procurement of services to overseas employees, investing in developing local suppliers when necessary, and managing employee demand for services (for example, by bringing prevention and wellness programs to overseas locations).

Emerging calendaring and scheduling standards

Calendaring and scheduling products are well established, but they have one significant drawback: they are usually limited to exchanging information among users of the same system, usually within the boundaries of a single organization. Thus you cannot use them to schedule a meeting with some one who uses a different application. Currently proprietary standards exist to structure some types of calendaring and scheduling information, but no single, open specification comprehensively addresses the needs of collecting and communicating information across many channels, such as phones, e-mail, and face to face meetings. However, important progress has been and is being made in standardizing both the format and exchange of this inherently complex information. The group working on bringing standardization to calendaring and scheduling applications-a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)-is nearing the final stages in developing standards to enable different products to interoperate and to work across organizational boundaries. These standards-which include iCalendar, iTIP, IMIP, and iRIP-will be published by the end of the year (1997). The benefit of standardizing such interoperability is clear: users will be able to communicate calendaring and scheduling information among different applications by using a variety of communication protocols. The applications that will benefit from these new standards include familiar mainframe products, LAN based group scheduling products, and desktop and mobile personal information managers (PIMs).

The Effect of Lengthening Job Tenure on Managers' Organizational Commitment and Turnover

Using the psychological contract literature as a framework, we examined upwardly mobile managers' reactions to lengthening job tenure brought about by slower organizational growth and greater competition among peers. We hypothesized that managers tend to view lengthening job tenure as a violation of the relational employment contract held with their corporate employers and, therefore, experience decreased organizational commitment, and an increased probability of turnover. We also examined three variables expected to exacerbate or to offset these relationships: manager's past career success, their current level of job responsibility, and the candidness of the career feedback they received from the organization. The sample consisted of 109 general managers working in Fortune 500 companies. Results showed that lengthening job tenure decreased managers' affective commitment and increased the likelihood of turnover during a three year follow-up period for managers who had previously experienced greater success in the organization and for those whose jobs included higher levels of responsibility. Contrary to hypotheses, candid career feedback did not offset the negative effects of lengthening job tenure on the dependent variables. Conceptual and practical implications are discussed.

A decade of change: Managers' attachment to their organizations and their jobs

AbstractIn this study geographically mobile managers in 1978 were compared to mobile managers in 1989 and significant changes were found in career patterns and attachment to the organization and the job. The managers in 1989 were changing jobs and relocating more frequently than were the 1978 managers. They were also less satisfied with their companies. Job involvement and job satisfaction, however, were higher among the 1989 managers than among the 1978 managers. Retrospectively, the 1989 managers thought they were less loyal to their companies than they had been five years previously. Managers' attachment to their organizations may be tied to challenging jobs that provide career development opportunities; those organizations unwilling or unable to provide such jobs may experience higher managerial turnover.

To the Beat of a Different Drummer: Timing and Contextual Differences of Mobile and Immobile Managerial Careers

This study used detailed career histories to explore the differences in career patterns between mobile and immobile managers. The timing of mobility events was examined along with movement direction and type. In addition, the study explored to what degree contextual factors associated with the career path, influenced such career patterns. Analysis showed unique differences in mobile and immobile career patterns and demonstrated that contextual factors play a significant role in shaping these patterns.

The Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service: A Personnel System under Siege

c>*G mo HE past several years have been an exciting time for fed1-Z eral personnel management. Much of the excitement has surrounded the birthing and nurturing of the Senior Executive Service (SES), the acknowledged centerpiece of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. But while the implementation of SES garnered a lot of attention, it was not the only personnel action in Washington. While one set of officials spent a great deal of effort breathing life into the SES, a much smaller set has been arguing over whether to extinguish the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service, a personnel system that has been in existence for almost a century. Ironically, the Corps, located in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), contains many of the very characteristics that the SES was intended to have, namely the characteristics of a career service. In constructing his "ideal type" definition of a career service, Frederick Mosher, in Democracy and the Public Service, contrasts the rank-in-the-position feature of the general civil service with the rank-in-the-person feature of a career service (1). Associated with and promoted by the rank-in-theperson feature are such attitudes as esprit de corps, organizational loyalty, and commitment to mission. In addition, the career service provides agencies the capacity for short-run adaptability: careerists can be expeditiously deployed to meet agency needs, unencumbered by position-classification restraints. There is a widely shared understanding that Title IV of the Civil Service Reform Act establishing the SES was intended to create a career service of an elite cadre of mobile managers. Whether this has happened or can indeed ever happen is the subject of much recent debate (2). The Commissioned Corps already has many of the necessary features of a

A Theory of Incongruent Experience

that more and more social scientists are finding it useful to conceive of the modern corporation as a political system.28 Certainly relationships such as those we discovered are consistent with this approach. We conclude with a brief summary of our major findings. In the firm studied, it was found that the more upwardly mobile and higher level managers were more likely than the less mobile and lower level managers: