Knowledge Economy
Wired magazine (13.04, p. 040) — American companies earn more money from foreign firms outsourcing “service” jobs here than we loose from domestic companies sending service jobs overseas. In 2003 (the latest data available), U.S. businesses took in 61.4 billion by providing labor to foreign interests, while outsourcing 43.5 billion worth of jobs to other countries. Note that “service” jobs generally refer to work other than manufacturing, such as knowledge, health professions, insurance, etc.
In 1980, it appeared to be just about even with a couple billion being outsourced and in-sourced and then it took a fairly study rise to achieve our present 17.9B surplus.
By 2012, 80 percent of Americans will hold jobs in the service industry. It presently makes up about 60 percent of our workforce (BLS figures). Other countries with surpluses:
We develop and test a model linking ethical leadership with unit ethical culture, both across and within organizational levels, examining how both leadership and culture relate to ethical cognitions and behaviors of lower-level followers. The data were collected from 2,572 U.S. Army soldiers representing three organizational levels deployed in combat. Findings provide limited support for simple trickle-down mechanisms of ethical leadership but broader support for a multilevel model that takes into account how leaders embed shared understandings through their influence on the ethical culture of units at various levels, which in turn influence followers’ ethical cognitions and behavior. The influences of ethical leadership occur not only directly, among immediate followers within a unit, but also indirectly, across hierarchical levels, through the cascading of ethical culture and senior leaders’ influences on subordinate leader behavior. We discuss scholarly and practical implications for understanding how leaders transmit ethical influence both down and across large organizations.
Decision speed has long been recognized as a critical determinant of firm performance, particularly in dynamic environments. Extending prior studies, which have largely focused on firm-level decision speed in small- and medium-sized organizations, this study explores how control mechanisms set by corporate headquarters in multi-business firms influence decision speed at the strategic business unit (SBU) level. Using a multi-method approach, we first inductively derive six types of corporate control, before deductively examining their effects on SBU-level decision speed in five international multi-business organizations. Our results suggest that three corporate control types enhance decision speed (goal setting, extrinsic incentives, and decision process control), two have no effect (negative incentives and conflict resolution), and one has a negative effect (strategy imposition). By integrating results from our qualitative and quantitative analyses, we are also able to identify transparency/alignment, outcome orientation, participation, trust, and timely feedback as the key mechanisms accounting for these effects.