Journal of Management

Subjects viewed a videotape of a manager behaving in either a positive, punitive, or goal-setting manner who was portrayed as having a reputation for effectiveness or ineffectiveness (or had no information given about his reputation). The impact of these variables upon perceptions of power was assessed. Managerial behavior signifi cantly influenced perceptions of reward, coercive, legitimate, expert, and referent power. Managerial reputation significantly influenced perceptions of legitimate, referent, and especially, expert power. The relationships between overt managerial behavior and subordinate power perception were replicated in a second more "natural" ex periment. The results suggested the existence of an "implicit power theory" evoked by these managerial behaviors and information cues.

Skill learnability, the degree to which a particular managerial skill can be acquired or modified by training and development, is de scribed and discussed. It is argued that those managerial skills com prised of large sociallinteractive components and affected by under lying noncognitive attributes are more difficult to learn than skills which can be articulated through a common body of knowledge or technology. Implications for organization resource allocation be tween selection and training strategies and future research directions are discussed.

A laboratory experiment involving 144 student subjects was con ducted to examine the effects of performance cues on descriptions of leader behavior. The concept of involvement, operationalized in a two-dimensional manner, was invoked in order to create varying vantage points (observation versus participation)from which subjects would view leader behavior. Split-plot analysis of variance demon strated an attribution effect in that the presence of performance cues directly affected subject descriptions of leader initiating structure and consideration. Subject involvement directly affected only subject ratings of consideration. Analysis of interaction effects showed per formance data to be a more salient cue for uninvolved observers than for involved participants.

The effects of participative versus assigned goal setting on intrinsic motivation were investigated for interesting and boring tasks. Par ticipative and assigned goal setting have no significantly different effects on performance if the goal is held consistently difficult. Participative and assigned goal setting have different effects on intrinsic motivation at different levels of task interest.

A model exploring the hypothesized impact of goal change on employee perceptions and behaviors was examined. Aspects of goal change were found to be significantly related to satisfaction, organ izational commitment, and absenteeism. Organizational com mitment was found to be related to turnover, but neither satisfaction nor organizational commitment was found to have a significant relationship with absenteeism. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Four different approaches for operationalizing organization slack through secondary financial data have been proposed (Bourgeois, 1981; Dimick & Murray, 1978; Marino & Lange, 1982; Wolf, 1971). In this paper these measures are organized into two types of oper ations: relative and absolute; and each is applied to a common group of firms. The relative measures agree to a significant degree on the classification of firms into high and low slack groups. The absolute measures do not, however, converge. Intertype comparisons (relative vs. absolute) indicate that the proposed operations do discriminate between these two aspects of the slack construct.