Browsing by Author "Mallak, Larry A."

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    Applying the management system model to a federal government organization
    Mallak, Larry A. (Virginia Tech, 1986)
    This research develops and applies a set of measurements to assess organizational system balance. The Management System ;Vlodcl (;\ISM), consisting of "who manages," "what is managed," and "what is used to manage," supplies the basis for defIning balance. Balance requires the system to regain stability at an equal or higher level when brought out-of-balance by change. This is exploratory research, examining management systems for correlations among related characteristics. Discovery of correlations helps in the understanding of management system behavior, and can lead to hypotheses on cause-and-effect relationships. Four C .S. Department of Energy subagencies were used as case studies for the management system analysis. The set of instruments used in this analysis provided a good first-cut at defining and describing balance for management systems. Two of the cases were found marginally balanced. The other two were marginally out-of-balance. Failure to achieve balance is analyzed by looking at results for conditions of balance between components of the management system. These conditions represent matches of important criteria, such as information portrayal formats, organization-compatible decision styles, and data capture. Balance should be measured, over time, to see if the management system analysis led to improvement. Various instruments were used to assess these balance conditions, including the MyersBriggs Type Indicator and the Driver Decision Style Exercise.
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    The development and application of a procedure to measure culture strength in organizations
    Mallak, Larry A. (Virginia Tech, 1993-04-08)
    The objectives of this exploratory research were to 1) operationally define culture strength, 2) develop a procedure for measuring culture strength in organizations, 3) and demonstrate the culture strength measurement procedure in one or more organizations. I used the culture strength measurement procedure in two organizations-a large research organization at a major university and the headquarters organization of a regional provider of life insurance products and services. I used analogies from materials engineering and psychology to help conceptualize and operationally define culture strength. I studied the effectiveness of five culture strength measures (intensity, core values, cultural behavior, effects from external forces, and the gap between the existing and desired culture) to predict three criterion variables (employee commitment, job satisfaction, and group cohesion). I constructed my measurement instrument using mostly existing scales modified for my application. I developed a scale to measure the force effect relationship. I found work groups with stronger cultures had smaller gaps between their existing values and their desired values, had many people whose behavior reflected the desired values, had people whose behavior reflected many of the 53 values used in the survey instrument, had a small set of work group values held tightly by their people, and that small set of work group values closely mirrored the set of values held tightly by all members of the organization. I used a canonical correlation analysis for the culture strength measures at the individual level and rank order correlations for culture strength measures at the work group level. I found culture gaps and its factors (as determined through a factor analysis) were consistently good predictors of the criterion variables. Cultural behavior, a measure of the percentage of people whose behavior reflects a set of mostly positive values, was also a good predictor of the criterion variables. The effects scale was not an effective measure of culture strength in this research.