EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Is Organization Theory Obvious to Practitioners? A Test of One Established Theory

Richard L. Priem () and Joseph Rosenstein
Additional contact information
Richard L. Priem: Department of Management, College of Business Administration, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas 76019
Joseph Rosenstein: Department of Management (retired), College of Business Administration, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas 76019

Organization Science, 2000, vol. 11, issue 5, 509-524

Abstract: Critics have argued that organization theories which “work” are obvious to practitioners; that is, the theories simply confirm relationships that are already well understood by experienced managers. In our study, four types of respondents—Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) with business school education, CEOs without such education, graduating MBA students, and liberal arts graduate students—were presented with theory-based performance-rating tasks. These tasks identified respondents' beliefs regarding high-performance alignments of businesslevel strategy, structure, and environment for manufacturing firms. The respondents' cause maps were then compared to one another and to the alignment-performance relationships prescribed by business-level contingency theory.The graduating MBAs' cause maps reflected contingency theory most closely. The MBAs' cause maps were much closer to prescriptions of the theory, however, than were those of either the liberal arts graduate students or the experienced CEOs. This suggests that business-level contingency theory is not obvious to educated laypersons, or to highly experienced practitioners; both groups would find that the theory dis confirms aspects of their causal expectations. Further, each of the four respondent types in our study emphasized different contingency factors during the decision-making exercise. We discuss these results and their implications.

Keywords: Organization Theory; Relevance; Obviousness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.11.5.509.15199 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:11:y:2000:i:5:p:509-524

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:11:y:2000:i:5:p:509-524