In 1987, B. Schneider proposed a person-oriented model of organizational behavior based on the proposition that it is the collective characteristics of people who define an organization. He further proposed that, over time, organizations become defined by the persons in them as a natural outcome of an attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) cycle. We provide a brief overview of the ASA cycle and review literature relevant to two facets of the theory. The literature reviewed provides some indirect support for the proposal that founders and the members of top management have long-term effects on organizations through the ASA cycle. The literature reviewed provides both indirect and direct evidence supporting a central proposition of ASA theory-that organizations over time become relatively homogeneous with regard to the kinds of people in them. Suggestions for future research on ASA are presented.In the organizational sciences there is a fundamental difference in paradigms between studies of people who work and studies of the attributes of organizations in which people work. This difference has led to a scholarly bifurcation characterized by two parallel, yet largely nonoverlapping literatures. As a result, there has been a general failure to integrate the individual and organizational foci of theory and research inhibiting a full understanding of the reciprocal relationships that exist between individuals and their employing organizations. Some have begun to call for the integration of individual and organizational theories and research referring to this intermediate ground as "meso" (e.g., House, Rousseau, & Thomas-Hunt, 1995).

This article explores 1 mechanism by which leader personality affects organizational performance. The authors hypothesized and tested the effects of leader personality on the group dynamics of the top management team (TMT) and of TMT dynamics on organizational performance. To test their hypotheses, the authors used the group dynamics q-sort method, which is designed to permit rigorous, quantitative comparisons of data derived from qualitative sources. Results from independent observations of chief executive officer (CEO) personality and TMT dynamics for 17 CEOs supported the authors' hypothesized relationships both between CEO personality and TMT group dynamics and between TMT dynamics and organizational performance.

Employee attitude data from 35 companies over 8 years were analyzed at the organizational level of analysis against financial (return on assets; ROA) and market performance (earnings per share; EPS) data using lagged analyses permitting exploration of priority in likely causal ordering. Analyses revealed statistically significant and stable relationships across various time lags for 3 of 7 scales. Overall Job Satisfaction and Satisfaction With Security were predicted by ROA and EPS more strongly than the reverse (although some of the reverse relationships were also significant); Satisfaction With Pay suggested a more reciprocal relationship with ROA and EPS. The discussion of results provides a preliminary framework for understanding issues surrounding employee attitudes, high-performance work practices, and organizational financial and market performance.We report on a study of the relationship between employee attitudes and performance with both variables indexed at the organizational level of analysis. The majority of the research on employee attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job involvement) has explored the attitude-performance relationship at the individual level of analysis. This is somewhat odd because the study of employee attitudes had much of its impetus in the 1960s when scholars such as Argyris (1957), Likert (1961), andMcGregor (1960) proposed that the way employees experience their work world would be reflected in organizational effectiveness. Unfortunately, these hypotheses were typically studied by researchers taking an explicitly micro-orientation and they translated these hypotheses into studies of individual attitudes and individual performance without exploring the organizational consequences of those individual attitudes (Nord & Fox, 1996;Schneider, 1985). To demonstrate how ingrained this individually based research model is, consider the research reported by F. J. Smith (1977). Smith tested the hypothesis that attitudes are most reflected in behavior when a crisis or critical situation emerges. He tested this hypothesis on a day when there was a blizzard in Chicago but not in New York and examined the relationship between aggregated department level employee attitudes and absenteeism rates for those departments. The results indicated a statistically stronger relationship in Chicago between aggregated department employee attitudes and department absenteeism rates than in New York, but Smith apologized for failure to test the hypothesis at the individual level of analysis.Research conducted under the rubric of organizational climate represents an exception to this individual-level bias. In climate research, there has been some success in aggregating individual employee perceptions and exploring their relationship to meaningful organizational (or unit-level) criteria. For example, an early study by Zohar (1980) showed that aggregated employee perceptions of safety climate are reflected in safety records for Israeli firms, and Schneider, Parkington, and Buxton ...

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.

This paper examines the critical role that organizational leaders play in establishing a values based climate. We discuss seven mechanisms by which leaders convey the importance of ethical values to members, and establish the expectations regarding ethical conduct that become engrained in the organization's climate. We also suggest that leaders at different organizational levels rely on different mechanisms to transmit values and expectations. These mechanisms then influence members' practices and expectations, further increase the salience of ethical values and result in the shared perceptions that form the organization's climate. The paper is organized in three parts. Part one begins with a brief discussion of climates regarding ethics and the critical role of values. Part two provides discussion on the mechanisms by which leaders examines ethical leadership and the critical linkages between leadership and organizational ethics. He has presented on