Organizational Linkages

By one analysis, a 12 percent annual increase in data processing budgets for U.S. corporations has yielded annual productivity gains of less than 2 percent. Why? This timely book provides some insights by exploring the linkages among individual, group, and organizational productivity.

The authors examine how to translate workers' productivity increases into gains for the entire organization, and discuss why huge investments in automation and other innovations have failed to boost productivity.

Leading experts explore how processes such as problem solving prompt changes in productivity and how inertia and other characteristics of organizations stall productivity. The book examines problems in productivity measurement and presents solutions.

Also examined in this useful book are linkage issues in the fields of software engineering and computer-aided design and why organizational downsizing has not resulted in commensurate productivity gains.

Important theoretical and practical implications contribute to this volume's usefulness to business and technology managers, human resources specialists, policymakers, and researchers.

Table of Contents

• FRONT MATTER
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE PRODUCTIVITY PARADOX
• 3 INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY: LINKAGES AND PROCESSES
• 4 WHAT IS ENOUGH? A SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE ON INDIVIDUAL-ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE LINKAGES
• 5 MEASURING AND MANAGING INDIVIDUAL PRODUCTIVITY
• 6 THE INFLUENCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL LINKAGES AND MEASUREMENT PRACTICES ON PRODUCTIVITY AND MANAGEMENT
• 7 DECOMPOSING THE PRODUCTIVITY LINKAGES PARADOX
• 8 MODELS OF MEASUREMENT AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH ON THE LINKAGES BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY
• 9 COORDINATION AS LINKAGE: THE CASE OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TEAMS
• 10 PRODUCTIVITY LINKAGES IN COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN
• 11 ORGANIZATIONAL-LEVEL PRODUCTIVITY INITIATIVES: THE CASE OF DOWNSIZING
• 12 CONCLUSIONS
• INDEX
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