In the 1987 film Wall Street, written and directed by Oliver Stone, the main character Gordon Gekko says “Greed, for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right; greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” This rationalization of wrongdoing – exemplified by Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, and so on, and some very recent examples as well (e.g., Libor rigging of inter-bank interest rates by banks, VW car emissions scandal) – makes this book a timely reminder of misconduct in the workplace and its consequences for individuals, businesses, and society. The volume editors, Donald Palmer, Kristin Smith-Crowe, and Royston Greenwood, have put together the latest research by some of the most prominent academics and scholars in the field, to highlight “a wide range of unethical, socially irresponsible, and illegal behaviors” engaged in by senior executives and others in a variety of organizations for personal gain, or to enhance their promotion, or to cover up their incompetence or lack of goal achievement, and so on.

The book explores some of the following issues: the limitations and imbalances of theory and research on organizational wrongdoing, workplace morality, market enablers to wrongdoing (an historical review), trust and mistrust, a boundaries perspective of professional misconduct, social networks and organizational wrongdoing, compensation and employee misconduct, the consequences of misconduct, the media portrayal of wrongdoing, and other very important topics.

Although business wrongdoing has been around since trade began, through the Industrial Revolution to the conglomerates of today, the “big data age” and media scrutiny have more quickly highlighted corporate corruption. Now that the light is able to shine on these events, we are more able to explore organizational wrongdoing and business ethics than in the past. This volume provides the science and informed debate on where we go from here in creating more ethical workplaces. As Plato said, “there are not many very good or very bad people, but the great majority are something between the two.” We need to create more ethical organizational cultures for the majority.

Scholarly and practical interest in mindfulness has exploded in recent years, bringing with it questions about what mindfulness is, how it differs from related concepts in organization and management, and on the effectiveness of organizational mindfulness interventions. Professors Jochen Reb and Paul W. B. Atkins have gathered together the leading scholars and practitioners into a collection that seeks to address these questions and to demonstrate the theoretical and practical richness of mindfulness. This collection is deeply based in scholarship, taking care to discuss the history of mindfulness research, methodological challenges and critical debates; yet, it also includes several chapters by mindfulness teachers and practitioners. Thus, scholars interested in mindfulness can read rich descriptions of mindfulness interventions, and practitioners can better understand the empirical and theoretical basis of mindfulness research.

While mindfulness has traditionally centered on stress reduction, here the concept is applied to new areas of management scholarship, helping to further our understanding of negotiation, decision making, work-life balance, creativity and leadership, among others. It is a resource for those already conducting research on mindfulness as well as those considering moving into this exciting new area of organizational scholarship. This collection will also be useful to practitioners and educators who would like to know what others have done that has been effective and what has not worked so well. Overall we anticipate that this collection will help establish mindfulness in organizations as an important topic within management research and practice.

Foreword

In any gathering of human resources professionals today their conversation is dominated by questions of strategic talent management. These professionals and their executives want to know how they can more effectively acquire and manage the talent their organizations need to meet their current client and customer needs, as well as be staffed for the demands they expect to be facing. This is without question the most pressing practical challenge in human resources management today throughout the world. However, this cacophony of practical questions and ad hoc advice makes it difficult to know what to trust. People use the word “talent” to mean very different things. For example, does talent management refer only to elite employees, or is every employee in the organization talent? Further, is talent management just old human resources management under a new name? Such questions, and the circumstances that make any one approach useful or not, are not well understood. Scholars have only recently begun to provide the clarity and coherence necessary to the effective application of strategic talent management in organizations, as is reflected in the numerous recent journal special issues on the topic. However, such collections of divergent perspectives do nothing to bring coherence to the subject.

Here Paul Sparrow, Hugh Scullion, and Ibraiz Tarique address this challenge by collecting the growing body of systematic research and integrating it into a coherent framework. Making a compelling case that talent management places strategy at the center of employee hiring and management retention, and that there is a range of useful innovations and programs, developing one strategy is the driving objective. This volume makes it clear there is indeed something new and important happening under the umbrella called strategic human resources management. Yet this book does not shy from addressing the competing ideas and interpretations of talent, but lets the disputants make their cases in their own words. The editors then go on to explain where each perspective has the most value, using the differences to explain and illustrate rather than taking any one perspective and seeking to impose it on others. This volume contains contributions from (and has value to) those in fields as diverse as strategy, organizational learning, organizational behavior, marketing, supply-chain management, as well as human resources management. Further, it has a global focus, recognizing that the most challenging talent management is in far-flung global firms and non-governmental organizations.

Downsizing has become a fact of life throughout the world. The term downsizing has come to mean terminating employees when the organization is still viable and has work for employees to do. Historically, downsizing white-collar workers was a rare event, and these employees could reasonably expect that if they performed well they would keep their jobs as long as the organization existed. A couple of decades ago that all changed. Now downsizing is common, driven by mergers, acquisitions, recessions, incentive-driven decisions to show a short-term boost in quarterly profits, and ideologically driven market signaling. Downsizing is now done for so many different reasons that shareholders, analysts, employees, and local communities struggle to interpret and understand an organization’s downsizing. Even in the public sector, once considered safe from downsizing, employees increasingly find themselves at risk for downsizing, and public-sector managers must make decisions they never expected to make. What is more, downsizing can be a traumatic, life-altering experience for everyone involved. For these reasons, it is probably one of the most important decisions that executives make. In the past few years, scholars have tried to understand this increasingly important phenomenon. Because downsizing has such powerful effects, it cries out for the systematic and dispassionate knowledge that scholarship can bring.

Cary Cooper, Alankrita Pandey, and James Campbell Quick have done an outstanding job of gathering together the leading scholars from a wide variety of disciplines focusing on the behavioral causes and consequences of downsizing. All of the chapters draw on or report carefully designed empirical research that seeks to dig deeper into the consequences of downsizing, and the reasons why executives decide to let employees go. Here readers will learn what drives the decisions to downsize, and the effects of differing ways to do it. A number of chapters address the effects of downsizing on the remaining employees, and its effects on those who have lost their jobs. Here readers will find the best of our current knowledge about downsizing. This book organizes and clarifies what we know about downsizing and is a pioneering contribution to the study of this vital subject. There is something here both for scholars interested in research on downsizing as well as for interested general readers who want to separate fact from ideology on the human and social causes and consequences of downsizing.