Society for Advancement of Management
Volume 84 Edition 3 | Summer 2020
Strategic Management and Social Media: Its Role in Strategic Planning and Management
Marc Sollosy and R. Nicholas Gerlich
The impact of social media continues to increase in today’s hypercompetitive business environment. Social media’s impact is no longer limited to the realm of personal interactions; rather it is increasingly pervasive in the business and governmental spheres of influence. This study examines 265 diverse companies to ascertain the influence of social media upon the company’s strategic management processes. The researchers found that despite the increasing influence of social media in most all facets of modern society, its role has yet to be actively adopted into the executive suite of most businesses. The role of social media remains an activity still viewed as the domains of marketing, CRM and public relations. The authors posit the need for companies to actively incorporate a mindset incorporating the impact and influence of social media into their strategic management processes.
Reference Check: Review of a Central Selection Method
Andrew F. Johnson and Ryan P. Terry
References are among the most common type of information collection for reducing ambiguity during the selection process. Due to the inherent information asymmetry between employers and job candidates, signaling theory provides a sound theoretical basis for examining elements of the selection process. This manuscript draws on signaling theory as a framework for understanding the use of employment references by employers and employees. Following an overview of research on employment references, best practices for organizations and candidates are offered.
Strategies for Aligning Performance Expectations for Virtual Teams
Sean A. Newman, Robert C. Ford, and Greg W. Marshall
Organizational alignment is very important. Successful alignment of employees with the organizations’ mission, strategy, and goals increases the organizations chance of successful outcomes. Not having aligned employees can reduce the organizations’ performance and minimize the chance for the organization to successfully meet strategic goals and performance targets. This should make achieving organizational alignment a critical objective for business leaders. However little research has been done on how to gain organizational alignment holistically, across the organization. Gaining organizational alignment is even more challenging when leaders must account for the communications challenges posed from virtual employees. Virtual employees oftentimes have a lower level of organizational cohesion and feel isolated, making it more difficult for them to understand or be engaged in how their work fits into the organizations’ mission, strategy, and goals. This paper addresses this challenge by providing hands-on strategies that business leaders can leverage to gain higher levels of organizational alignment with their workforce.
Leading a Pivot: How Agile Leaders Redirect Team Efforts to Overcome Barriers in Strategy Execution
Robert C. Ford, Misty L. Loughry, and Loren R. Ford
Effective leaders focus their team’s energies on executing a chosen strategy, but what happens when the implementation plan suddenly needs to change? This article offers leaders strategies for successfully leading their teams in pivoting from a failed plan of strategy execution to a new plan. Asking teams to stop working on projects they have been working hard on and change to a new plan can demoralize team members and reduce their motivation. Agile leaders must find ways to ensure that their teams are as committed to and enthusiastic about executing the new plan as the one that must be abandoned. Here, we offer a five-step process for leaders to follow to make a successful pivot: 1) assess team readiness to pivot, 2) effectively communicate the reason the old plan failed, 3) interactively define pivot options with projected outcomes, 4) build the team’s energy, enthusiasm and commitment to the new plan, and, 5) clean up the inevitable problems pivoting creates. Examples illustrate how these steps work in real organizations. Leaders who can shepherd their teams through unplanned changes and foster a culture that embraces changes are the agile leaders today’s organizations need to cope with and adapt to a dynamic world.
Medical Marijuana in the Workplace
Junyi Dai
Marijuana legalization sparks a controversy globally as the enormous potential market value and medicinal value prompt the regulatory body of countries to reform the regulation of marijuana. As projected by the researcher, the sales of medical marijuana could reach $55 billion on the global market by 2025. Most previous studies take the perspective of pharmacy to investigate the effect of medical marijuana on human body, which means there are few articles focusing on the impact of medical marijuana in the workplace. This article is purposed to figure out the implications of legalizing marijuana for medical use by applying the pluralist industrial relations model.
