Lynn Miller | La Salle University (original) (raw)
Papers by Lynn Miller
Organization Management Journal, 2015
Decades of research have demonstrated that managers can effect substantial performance improvemen... more Decades of research have demonstrated that managers can effect substantial performance improvements by setting challenging and specific performance goals (Locke & Latham, 2002), providing goal-relevant feedback on a regular basis (Karakowsky & Mann, 2008), and, when appropriate, involving subordinates in goal setting (Stansfield & Longenecker, 2006). This article reviews core findings from the goal setting literature, and presents a collaborative exercise in which teams of students apply these findings to address management problems in five fictitious scenarios. Debriefing tips cite additional research evidence to allow for more nuanced classroom discussion of goal setting. A pretest indicated that prior to completing the goal-setting exercise, only a minority of students had a strong intuitive sense of how to set effective goals; a posttest following its completion demonstrated substantial improvement. Students rated the exercise as both challenging and effective in improving their knowledge of goal setting.
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Jul 1, 1992
Drawing hypotheses from theories of organizational life cycles, this survey compared the manageme... more Drawing hypotheses from theories of organizational life cycles, this survey compared the management practices of 37 founding and 133 nonfoundlng chief executives of human service organizations. The differences observed are Interpreted as suggesting that founders may be more likely than nonfounders to manage In ways that afford them greater ability to direct and oversee organizational matters.
Privatization and Entrepreneurship, 2018
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2016
Management Teaching Review, 2018
How one communicates concerns about another person’s actions or performance can significantly aff... more How one communicates concerns about another person’s actions or performance can significantly affect both the extent to which the feedback improves behavior as well as the quality of the ongoing relationship with the feedback recipient. This article reviews evidence-based principles for delivering corrective feedback and describes an engaging classroom exercise designed to help Organizational Behavior students learn about and apply these principles. Students are presented with a set of dilemmas written as letters to a fictitious advice columnist, “Dear Obby” (pronounced “OB”). The letters, describing situations that call for corrective feedback, can be student-generated or provided by the instructor. Teaching tips are included to help instructors use the scenarios to generate discussion about the goals and principles of effective feedback and to give students opportunities to practice feedback skills in role-plays.
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2015
At his untimely death in 1920, Max Weber--widely recognized as the father of organization theory-... more At his untimely death in 1920, Max Weber--widely recognized as the father of organization theory--left behind reams of manuscript pages that were assembled into Economy & Society. This paper argues...
Journal of Organizational Behavior Education, 2011
The Sociological Quarterly, 2010
Applying Weber's theorizing on action and stratification, this study examines whether the early 2... more Applying Weber's theorizing on action and stratification, this study examines whether the early 20th-century extinction of half of the medical schools in the United States resulted from actions intended to serve class, status, and party interests by achieving social closure. Analyses reveal closure intentions in the school ratings assigned by the American Medical Association, although not in the recommendations in the 1910 Carnegie-sponsored Flexner report. In contrast to claims that schools failed largely because of economic exigencies, analyses indicate that failures were influenced by the AMA's and Flexner's assessments, as well as by state regulatory regimes and school characteristics. Medicine, viewed by many sociologists as a paradigmatic profession (Wilensky 1964; Abbott 1988), paid no better than skilled manual labor in the United States during the latter years of the 19th century (Markowitz and Rosner 1973). Over the first decades of the 20th century, however, physicians' relative income rose to where it stands todaymore than four times that of the average worker (Friedman and Kuznets 1945; England 2007). This study analyzes previously unexploited data to identify the causes of what Brown (1979) characterized as the "most effective tool" in medicine's collective mobility process: a precipitous drop in the number of medical schools operating in the United States, from 161 in 1900 to just 74 in 1920. The resulting 40% reduction in graduates, over a period in which the U.S. population increased by approximately the same percentage, initiated a systemic constriction in the supply of medical practitioners, currently reflected in a dependence on graduates of medical schools outside of the United States to fill nearly one in four residencies (National Resident Matching Program 2009). Both structural functionalists and Marxians have employed the social mobility of medicine to illustrate their viewpoints' usefulness for explaining social change. Although for different reasons, adherents of these two classical theoretical perspectives have attributed medicine's gains to Abraham Flexner's (1910) Medical Education in the
Psychological Reports, 1991
Much work on orgaruzational structure has been based on a set of scales developed by Aiken and I-... more Much work on orgaruzational structure has been based on a set of scales developed by Aiken and I-lage to measure centralization, Formalization, and technology, yet the scales have been subjected to limited psychometric testing. This paper presents Factor analyses of the scales and makes recommendations for their revision and use.
Organization Management Journal, 2009
Interactive brainstorming groups consistently produce fewer ideas, and fewer high quality ideas, ... more Interactive brainstorming groups consistently produce fewer ideas, and fewer high quality ideas, than nominal groups, whose members work alone before pooling their ideas. Yet, brainstorming continues to be regarded as an effective method for enhancing creativity. This paper describes an engaging classroom ''experiment'' that reliably demonstrates the superiority of nominal over brainstorming groups for generating more ideas. Analyses of data from 105 student groups, collected from 12 classes, show that typical differences between the two group methods are sizable. Beyond lessons about group techniques, this exercise shows students the limits of intuition and the value of evidence-based management practices.
Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 1994
The study presented in this article examines the extent to which board characteristics and activi... more The study presented in this article examines the extent to which board characteristics and activities are associated with the executive director's level of certainty about future funding, using a sample of 127 human service agencies. The executive directors of agencies with low levels of funding adequacy expressed more certainty about future funding when their boards were more expert, influential, and involved in planning and fundraising activities. For agencies with more adequate funding, board expertise and activities were associated with lower levels of perceived funding certainty. This article argues that, rather than improving agency performance, boards serve a homeostatic function, acting in crisis situations to return their organizations to stable equilibria.
Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 1985
Volunteers from three soctal service agencies were surveyed to test the hypothesis that some peop... more Volunteers from three soctal service agencies were surveyed to test the hypothesis that some people volunteer in order to satisfy needs that are not satisfied through their other activities. The findings indicated that those volunteers whose regular employment failed to satisfy their needs for psychological growth tended to be in volved and satisfied with volunteering to the extent that they (a) felt personally in control of their lives, and (b) wanted and expected that volunteering would satisfy their growth needs. Volunteers whose regular employment did provide oppor tunities for psychological growth were more motivated by other potential rewards of volunteering.
Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 1988
Analyses of survey responses from the executive directors of 184 human service organizations exam... more Analyses of survey responses from the executive directors of 184 human service organizations examined the relationships of board characteristics to board activities, and of board activities to organizational outcomes. Results indicated that board characteristics most predictive of board activities were the numbers of board members who were representatives of the client population, who had expertise in marketing, who were trained in the types of service provided by the agency, and who regularly performed volunteer work for the agency. Although in general board activities had few statistical relationships with agency outcomes, the board's involvement in working to enhance the agency's image in the community was related to a number of outcome measures.
Law and Human Behavior, 1978
Courtroom lore suggests that jurors identifying with rape victims will show antidefendant biases,... more Courtroom lore suggests that jurors identifying with rape victims will show antidefendant biases, but empirical findings do not unequivocally support this supposition. On theoretical bases, it was predicted that identification with the victim's gender would bias judgment against the defendant when the circumstances of the crime are likely to be encountered in the daily life of the juror or a related potential victim. Parents of female-only (PFs) or of male-only children (PMs)judged defendants in an alleged rape, occurring either in a library, where the victim had engaged in normal routine, or in a street, under unusual and risky conditions. PFs were more conviction-prone and punitive than PMs only for the library case. Findings support theories of defensive attribution (Shaver, 1970) and of attribution of actors and observers (Jones & Nisbett, i972) but are inconsistent with a variant of defensive attribution (Walster, 1966) based on denial of chance occurrence of threatened harm. The systematic exclusion of jurors with certain characteristics from particular cases based on suppositional criteria is questioned, rigor of juror assessment notwithstanding. It is suggested that research concentrate on discovering the conditions under which biases are, or are not manifested, and on developing means of reducing bias effects in impaneled jurors.
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2008
The dramatic decline in the number of US medical schools in the early twentieth century has been ... more The dramatic decline in the number of US medical schools in the early twentieth century has been traced to a medical education reform movement that gained momentum after the Civil War. The major parties to reform-the universities themselves, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), state licensing boards, the American Medical Association (AMA), and Flexner-had different interests and strategies, however, and scholars have continued to debate the impact each had on the decline. To isolate the independent effects that the temporally intertwined forces for reform had on medical school failures, this study applies statistical survival analysis to an extensive and unique data set on medical schools operating in the United States between 1870 and 1930. Contrary to the views of some scholars, the results indicate that schools closed in response to critical evaluations published by the Illinois State Board of Health in the nineteenth century and the AMA and Flexner in the twentieth century. Additionally, the results indicate that schools were less likely to have failed if they adopted certain reforms implemented at leading schools or joined the AAMC, and were more likely to have failed if their state's licensing regulations mandated lengthier premedical and medical training.
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2011
Abraham Flexner&a... more Abraham Flexner's 1910 exposé on medical education recommended that only two of the seven extant medical schools for blacks be preserved and that they should train their students to "serve their people humbly" as "sanitarians." Addressing charges of racism, this article traces the roots of the recommendation that blacks serve a limited professional role to the schools themselves and presents evidence that, in endorsing the continuance of Howard's and Meharry's medical programs, Flexner exhibited greater leniency than he had toward comparable schools for white students. Whether his recommendations to eliminate the other five schools were key factors in their extinction is addressed here by examining 1901-30 enrollment patterns. Those patterns suggest that actions of the American Medical Association and state licensing boards, combined with the broader problem of limited premedical educational opportunities for blacks, were more consequential than was the Flexner report both for the extinction of the schools and for the curtailed production of black doctors.
The Journal of Social Psychology, 1993
... REFERENCES Brehm, JW (1966). A theor?: of psychological reactance. San Diego: Academic Press.... more ... REFERENCES Brehm, JW (1966). A theor?: of psychological reactance. San Diego: Academic Press. Kipnis. D.. Schmidt, S. M., & Wilkinson, I. (1980). Intraorganizationalinfluence tactics: Yukl, G., & Tracey, J. B . (1992). Consequences ...
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978
Page 1. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1978, Vol. 36, No. 12, 1443-1455 Reducing th... more Page 1. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1978, Vol. 36, No. 12, 1443-1455 Reducing the Effects of Juror Bias Martin F. Kaplan and Lynn E. Miller Northern Illinois University A theoretical framework is proposed for relating bias to a juror's ultimate judg-ment. ...
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1986
Previous research has identified certain dispositional variables that might moderate the relation... more Previous research has identified certain dispositional variables that might moderate the relationship between attitudes and behaviors. Building on this work, the present study predicted that individuals who are both aware of their own attitudes (high in private self-consciousness) and unconcerned with the opinions of others (low in self-monitoring) would display high attitude-behavior correspondence. In contrast, individuals with other combinations of these traits were expected to display high norm-behavior correspondence. To test these predictions, attitudes, norms and behaviors relevant to spending time on school work were measured for 226 college students. The results showed clear support for the predicted personality differences in attitude-behavior and norm-behavior correspondences. In addition, other findings showed that attitudes and norms are distinct rather than redundant constructs. Alternative interpretations and theoretical implications of the findings were discussed. Q 1986 Academic Press. I~C.
Organization Management Journal, 2015
Decades of research have demonstrated that managers can effect substantial performance improvemen... more Decades of research have demonstrated that managers can effect substantial performance improvements by setting challenging and specific performance goals (Locke & Latham, 2002), providing goal-relevant feedback on a regular basis (Karakowsky & Mann, 2008), and, when appropriate, involving subordinates in goal setting (Stansfield & Longenecker, 2006). This article reviews core findings from the goal setting literature, and presents a collaborative exercise in which teams of students apply these findings to address management problems in five fictitious scenarios. Debriefing tips cite additional research evidence to allow for more nuanced classroom discussion of goal setting. A pretest indicated that prior to completing the goal-setting exercise, only a minority of students had a strong intuitive sense of how to set effective goals; a posttest following its completion demonstrated substantial improvement. Students rated the exercise as both challenging and effective in improving their knowledge of goal setting.
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Jul 1, 1992
Drawing hypotheses from theories of organizational life cycles, this survey compared the manageme... more Drawing hypotheses from theories of organizational life cycles, this survey compared the management practices of 37 founding and 133 nonfoundlng chief executives of human service organizations. The differences observed are Interpreted as suggesting that founders may be more likely than nonfounders to manage In ways that afford them greater ability to direct and oversee organizational matters.
Privatization and Entrepreneurship, 2018
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2016
Management Teaching Review, 2018
How one communicates concerns about another person’s actions or performance can significantly aff... more How one communicates concerns about another person’s actions or performance can significantly affect both the extent to which the feedback improves behavior as well as the quality of the ongoing relationship with the feedback recipient. This article reviews evidence-based principles for delivering corrective feedback and describes an engaging classroom exercise designed to help Organizational Behavior students learn about and apply these principles. Students are presented with a set of dilemmas written as letters to a fictitious advice columnist, “Dear Obby” (pronounced “OB”). The letters, describing situations that call for corrective feedback, can be student-generated or provided by the instructor. Teaching tips are included to help instructors use the scenarios to generate discussion about the goals and principles of effective feedback and to give students opportunities to practice feedback skills in role-plays.
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2015
At his untimely death in 1920, Max Weber--widely recognized as the father of organization theory-... more At his untimely death in 1920, Max Weber--widely recognized as the father of organization theory--left behind reams of manuscript pages that were assembled into Economy & Society. This paper argues...
Journal of Organizational Behavior Education, 2011
The Sociological Quarterly, 2010
Applying Weber's theorizing on action and stratification, this study examines whether the early 2... more Applying Weber's theorizing on action and stratification, this study examines whether the early 20th-century extinction of half of the medical schools in the United States resulted from actions intended to serve class, status, and party interests by achieving social closure. Analyses reveal closure intentions in the school ratings assigned by the American Medical Association, although not in the recommendations in the 1910 Carnegie-sponsored Flexner report. In contrast to claims that schools failed largely because of economic exigencies, analyses indicate that failures were influenced by the AMA's and Flexner's assessments, as well as by state regulatory regimes and school characteristics. Medicine, viewed by many sociologists as a paradigmatic profession (Wilensky 1964; Abbott 1988), paid no better than skilled manual labor in the United States during the latter years of the 19th century (Markowitz and Rosner 1973). Over the first decades of the 20th century, however, physicians' relative income rose to where it stands todaymore than four times that of the average worker (Friedman and Kuznets 1945; England 2007). This study analyzes previously unexploited data to identify the causes of what Brown (1979) characterized as the "most effective tool" in medicine's collective mobility process: a precipitous drop in the number of medical schools operating in the United States, from 161 in 1900 to just 74 in 1920. The resulting 40% reduction in graduates, over a period in which the U.S. population increased by approximately the same percentage, initiated a systemic constriction in the supply of medical practitioners, currently reflected in a dependence on graduates of medical schools outside of the United States to fill nearly one in four residencies (National Resident Matching Program 2009). Both structural functionalists and Marxians have employed the social mobility of medicine to illustrate their viewpoints' usefulness for explaining social change. Although for different reasons, adherents of these two classical theoretical perspectives have attributed medicine's gains to Abraham Flexner's (1910) Medical Education in the
Psychological Reports, 1991
Much work on orgaruzational structure has been based on a set of scales developed by Aiken and I-... more Much work on orgaruzational structure has been based on a set of scales developed by Aiken and I-lage to measure centralization, Formalization, and technology, yet the scales have been subjected to limited psychometric testing. This paper presents Factor analyses of the scales and makes recommendations for their revision and use.
Organization Management Journal, 2009
Interactive brainstorming groups consistently produce fewer ideas, and fewer high quality ideas, ... more Interactive brainstorming groups consistently produce fewer ideas, and fewer high quality ideas, than nominal groups, whose members work alone before pooling their ideas. Yet, brainstorming continues to be regarded as an effective method for enhancing creativity. This paper describes an engaging classroom ''experiment'' that reliably demonstrates the superiority of nominal over brainstorming groups for generating more ideas. Analyses of data from 105 student groups, collected from 12 classes, show that typical differences between the two group methods are sizable. Beyond lessons about group techniques, this exercise shows students the limits of intuition and the value of evidence-based management practices.
Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 1994
The study presented in this article examines the extent to which board characteristics and activi... more The study presented in this article examines the extent to which board characteristics and activities are associated with the executive director's level of certainty about future funding, using a sample of 127 human service agencies. The executive directors of agencies with low levels of funding adequacy expressed more certainty about future funding when their boards were more expert, influential, and involved in planning and fundraising activities. For agencies with more adequate funding, board expertise and activities were associated with lower levels of perceived funding certainty. This article argues that, rather than improving agency performance, boards serve a homeostatic function, acting in crisis situations to return their organizations to stable equilibria.
Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 1985
Volunteers from three soctal service agencies were surveyed to test the hypothesis that some peop... more Volunteers from three soctal service agencies were surveyed to test the hypothesis that some people volunteer in order to satisfy needs that are not satisfied through their other activities. The findings indicated that those volunteers whose regular employment failed to satisfy their needs for psychological growth tended to be in volved and satisfied with volunteering to the extent that they (a) felt personally in control of their lives, and (b) wanted and expected that volunteering would satisfy their growth needs. Volunteers whose regular employment did provide oppor tunities for psychological growth were more motivated by other potential rewards of volunteering.
Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 1988
Analyses of survey responses from the executive directors of 184 human service organizations exam... more Analyses of survey responses from the executive directors of 184 human service organizations examined the relationships of board characteristics to board activities, and of board activities to organizational outcomes. Results indicated that board characteristics most predictive of board activities were the numbers of board members who were representatives of the client population, who had expertise in marketing, who were trained in the types of service provided by the agency, and who regularly performed volunteer work for the agency. Although in general board activities had few statistical relationships with agency outcomes, the board's involvement in working to enhance the agency's image in the community was related to a number of outcome measures.
Law and Human Behavior, 1978
Courtroom lore suggests that jurors identifying with rape victims will show antidefendant biases,... more Courtroom lore suggests that jurors identifying with rape victims will show antidefendant biases, but empirical findings do not unequivocally support this supposition. On theoretical bases, it was predicted that identification with the victim's gender would bias judgment against the defendant when the circumstances of the crime are likely to be encountered in the daily life of the juror or a related potential victim. Parents of female-only (PFs) or of male-only children (PMs)judged defendants in an alleged rape, occurring either in a library, where the victim had engaged in normal routine, or in a street, under unusual and risky conditions. PFs were more conviction-prone and punitive than PMs only for the library case. Findings support theories of defensive attribution (Shaver, 1970) and of attribution of actors and observers (Jones & Nisbett, i972) but are inconsistent with a variant of defensive attribution (Walster, 1966) based on denial of chance occurrence of threatened harm. The systematic exclusion of jurors with certain characteristics from particular cases based on suppositional criteria is questioned, rigor of juror assessment notwithstanding. It is suggested that research concentrate on discovering the conditions under which biases are, or are not manifested, and on developing means of reducing bias effects in impaneled jurors.
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2008
The dramatic decline in the number of US medical schools in the early twentieth century has been ... more The dramatic decline in the number of US medical schools in the early twentieth century has been traced to a medical education reform movement that gained momentum after the Civil War. The major parties to reform-the universities themselves, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), state licensing boards, the American Medical Association (AMA), and Flexner-had different interests and strategies, however, and scholars have continued to debate the impact each had on the decline. To isolate the independent effects that the temporally intertwined forces for reform had on medical school failures, this study applies statistical survival analysis to an extensive and unique data set on medical schools operating in the United States between 1870 and 1930. Contrary to the views of some scholars, the results indicate that schools closed in response to critical evaluations published by the Illinois State Board of Health in the nineteenth century and the AMA and Flexner in the twentieth century. Additionally, the results indicate that schools were less likely to have failed if they adopted certain reforms implemented at leading schools or joined the AAMC, and were more likely to have failed if their state's licensing regulations mandated lengthier premedical and medical training.
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2011
Abraham Flexner&a... more Abraham Flexner's 1910 exposé on medical education recommended that only two of the seven extant medical schools for blacks be preserved and that they should train their students to "serve their people humbly" as "sanitarians." Addressing charges of racism, this article traces the roots of the recommendation that blacks serve a limited professional role to the schools themselves and presents evidence that, in endorsing the continuance of Howard's and Meharry's medical programs, Flexner exhibited greater leniency than he had toward comparable schools for white students. Whether his recommendations to eliminate the other five schools were key factors in their extinction is addressed here by examining 1901-30 enrollment patterns. Those patterns suggest that actions of the American Medical Association and state licensing boards, combined with the broader problem of limited premedical educational opportunities for blacks, were more consequential than was the Flexner report both for the extinction of the schools and for the curtailed production of black doctors.
The Journal of Social Psychology, 1993
... REFERENCES Brehm, JW (1966). A theor?: of psychological reactance. San Diego: Academic Press.... more ... REFERENCES Brehm, JW (1966). A theor?: of psychological reactance. San Diego: Academic Press. Kipnis. D.. Schmidt, S. M., & Wilkinson, I. (1980). Intraorganizationalinfluence tactics: Yukl, G., & Tracey, J. B . (1992). Consequences ...
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978
Page 1. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1978, Vol. 36, No. 12, 1443-1455 Reducing th... more Page 1. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1978, Vol. 36, No. 12, 1443-1455 Reducing the Effects of Juror Bias Martin F. Kaplan and Lynn E. Miller Northern Illinois University A theoretical framework is proposed for relating bias to a juror's ultimate judg-ment. ...
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1986
Previous research has identified certain dispositional variables that might moderate the relation... more Previous research has identified certain dispositional variables that might moderate the relationship between attitudes and behaviors. Building on this work, the present study predicted that individuals who are both aware of their own attitudes (high in private self-consciousness) and unconcerned with the opinions of others (low in self-monitoring) would display high attitude-behavior correspondence. In contrast, individuals with other combinations of these traits were expected to display high norm-behavior correspondence. To test these predictions, attitudes, norms and behaviors relevant to spending time on school work were measured for 226 college students. The results showed clear support for the predicted personality differences in attitude-behavior and norm-behavior correspondences. In addition, other findings showed that attitudes and norms are distinct rather than redundant constructs. Alternative interpretations and theoretical implications of the findings were discussed. Q 1986 Academic Press. I~C.