Why do some organizations succeed and others fail in implementing the innovations they adopt? To begin to answer this question, the authors studied the implementation of manufacturing resource planning, an advanced computerized manufacturing technology, in 39 manufacturing plants (number of individual respondents = 1,219). The results of the plant-level analyses suggest that financial resource availability and management support for technology implementation engender high-quality implementation policies and practices and a strong climate for implementation, which in turn foster implementation effectiveness--that is, consistent and skilled technology use. Further research is needed to replicate and extend the findings.

Multilevel researchers often gather individual-level data to measure group-level constructs. Within-group agreement is a key consideration in the measurement of such constructs, yet antecedents of within-group agreement have been little studied. The authors found that group member social interaction and work interdependence were significantly positively related to within-group agreement regarding perceptions of the work environment. Demographic heterogeneity was not significantly related to within-group agreement. Survey wording showed a complex relationship to agreement. Both evaluative items and socially undesirable items generated high within-group agreement. The use of a group rather than individual referent increased within-group agreement in response to descriptive items but decreased within-group agreement in response to evaluative items. Items with a group referent showed greater between-group variability than items with an individual referent.

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Glick and Fiske have claimed that prior sexism measures are biased because they only capture hostile sexist attitudes and fail to tap benevolent sexist attitudes. The authors of the current article believe that other measures of sexism do, in fact, capture some aspects of benevolent sexism. To examine this hypothesis, they compared Swim, Aikin, Hall, and Hunter’s old-fashioned and modern sexism scales with Glick and Fiske’s Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) scales (i.e., benevolent and hostile sexism), asserting that modern sexism directly measures ambivalent sexism and therefore indirectly captures both hostile and benevolent attitudes. Results supported the authors’ hypothesis and refuted Glick and Fiske’s argument. Implications of findings are discussed in terms of the measurement of sexist attitudes in future research.

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