My Research
For a long time I have been curious about how decisions get made in organizations. I have often wondered why some executives are involved in strategic decision making and others are not. Some of my research has explored whether the participation of certain kinds of decision makers influences organizational outcomes.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to be part of an ongoing conversation with some people at The Seton Cove in Austin, Texas, under the leadership of Sister Mary Rose McFee, about what organizations could do to foster a sense of joy at work. It must be possible, we all thought, for work to fill people rather than drain them, for "living" and "livelihood" to be more connected. Out of those converstions Dennis Duchon and I created an instrument to measure spirituality at work, called "Meaning & Purpose at Work." The instrument is owned by Seton Cove but they allow us to share it with other scholars interested in pursuing the topic of workplace spirituality. That work led to two publications on spirituality, one of which is the fifth most cited article in Journal of Management Inquiry.
My recent interest in radical change came from studying an urban church in San Antonio, TX that was in decline and had started a controversial day center for homeless people. That project heightened my curiosity about how complex organizations change and grow, how they interpret and make sense of what is happening in the midst of change, how they self-organize, and how leaders enable emergent self-organization.
Click here to download some of my publications. Publications
Homelessness
It's not often that our work as organizational scientists brings us face to face with one of the major social problems of our time. However, in the fall of 2004 I was looking for a research project for a small seminar I was teaching on Organizational Decision Making. In hopes of learning something about how a real organization makes difficult decisions, my friends and co-pastors of Travis Park United Methodist Church in San Antonio, Texas - Rev. John Flowers and Rev. Karen Vannoy - invited me and my class in for a look, and for some help, actually, on how the church could improve the way it made decisions. At the time of our study the church had recently opened a Day Center for the Homeless in downtown San Antonio and was the subject of considerable controversy in the downtown area.
As we began our research project on decision making we encountered a more interesting story about radical organizational change that had emerged, unintentionally. We learned that a handful of young people, partly out of boredom, had the idea of offering Sunday morning breakfasts to homeless people. The idea caught on, an entire outreach ministry to "the marginalized" eventually unfolded, and the church, which had been in decline, began to experience renewal and a radical change in its identity and purpose. You can read the story of what happend at Travis Park United Church in our article, "Radical Change, Accidentally: The Emergence and Amplification of Small Change," published in Academy of Management Journal in June of 2007.
One of the unintended consequences of this study was what my co-authors and I learned about homelessness, how awful the problem is, and how small actions taken by individuals can make a huge difference in the lives of people who find themselves living at the margins of our society. We spent time in the Day Center talking with some of the "consumers" (the church didn't like using the term, homeless) and learned that many of them didn't look any different from us, many were women and children, many were just down on their luck. We quickly saw how dangerous and discouraging life on the streets is. We talked to street people who had lost any form of identity (drivers' license, social security card, etc.), making it nearly impossible to get a job. If they applied for a job, how could the potential employer reach them - no phone, email, address. We also witnessed first hand how people and organizations can do something about homelessness. The lack of public
bathrooms leads to many problems for homeless people. On this page are some pictures from Travis Park United Methodist Church. The Sunday morning breakfasts were named Cafe Corazon and the entire ministry became known as Corazon Minsitries.
STARTING FACTS WE LEARNED ABOUT HOMELESSNESS: (during the year 2004)
- There were 25,000 homeless people in San Antonio, Texas
- Of the 25,000 homeless people, 6,000 were mentally ill
- Of the 25,000 homeless people 5,000 had substance abuse problems
- Of the 25,000 homeless people 3,700 were employed
- 50% of the homeless population consist of families
- There were 792 "transitional" beds for homeless people in San Antonio. That means that local homeless shelters provided shelter at night for 792 of the 25,000 homeless people in San Antonio.
- A 2004 Report indicated there were 16 cities in the United States with harsher treatment of the homeless than San Antonio