Motivation in Work Organizations (Jossey Bass Business and Management Series) [Paperback]

Edward E. Lawler III (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1555426611 | ISBN-13: 978-1555426613 | Publication Date: April 15, 1994 | Edition: 1

For more than twenty years, Edward E. Lawler III has had worldwide influence in the areas of management and organization design. This landmark book, one of the most-cited volumes on the topic of motivation in the workplace, defines Lawler's basic philosophy: in order to have effective organizations, we must understand how to motivate and encourage effective individual performance. Time-tested theories have been the basis for nearly all of Lawler's subsequent work in the areas of pay and reward systems, employee involvement, organization design, and organizational change.

In his new introduction to this classic edition, he shows how his original emphasis on work design and reward systems is especially relevant to the current emphasis on creating high performance work organizations through new organization design and management approaches. Lawler's theories continue to help us understand the world around us today, forming the basis for many successful managerial practices found in today's workplace, and continue to prove that no matter what organization design or approach is used, it cannot succeed if it fails to motivate employees to perform well.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A classic in providing fundamental knowledge about what is valid and useful in such areas as motivation, job design, pay systems, and interpersonal relations. —Chris Argyris, James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior, and author of Knowledge for Action

"With this book, Lawler defined, spearheaded, and made respectable a new and unusually important area of research and practice in the area of industrial and organizational psychology, namely, issues related to human motivation in work settings." —Marvin D. Dunnette, chairman and CEO, Personnel Decisions Research Institute

``I still carry a battered copy of the first edition of Lawler's well-deserved classic in my briefcase. It was a virtual classic on its publication twenty years ago and now it's a real time/space classic.'' —Dr. Warren Bennis, university professor and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at USC and author of Beyond Bureaucracy

From the Inside Flap

For more than twenty years, Edward E. Lawler III has had worldwide influence in the areas of management and organization design. This landmark book, one of the most-cited volumes on the topic of motivation in the workplace, defines Lawler's basic philosophy: in order to have effective organizations, we must understand how to motivate and encourage effective individual performance. Time-tested theories have been the basis for nearly all of Lawler's subsequent work in the areas of pay and reward systems, employee involvement, organization design, and organizational change.In his new introduction to this classic edition, he shows how his original emphasis on work design and reward systems is especially relevant to the current emphasis on creating high performance work organizations through new organization design and management approaches. Lawler's theories continue to help us understand the world around us today, forming the basis for many successful managerial practices found in today's workplace, and continue to prove that no matter what organization design or approach is used, it cannot succeed if it fails to motivate employees to perform well.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (April 15, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555426611
• ISBN-13: 978-1555426613
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,982,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edward E. Lawler III joined the faculty of Yale University after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. Three years later he was promoted to Associate Professor.

He moved to the University of Michigan in 1972 as Professor of Psychology and also became Program Director in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. In 1978, he became a Professor in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. That same year, he founded and became Director of the University's Center for Effective Organizations. He was named Professor of Research at the University of Southern California in 1982 and Distinguished Professor of Business in 1999.

Lawler has been honored as a major contributor to theory, research, and practice in the fields of human resources management, compensation, organizational development, corporate governance, and organizational effectiveness. He is the author and co-author of over thirty-eight books and more than three hundred articles, which have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, MIT-Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, USA Today, Strategy and Business, the Financial Times, and more than thirty other magazines, journals, and newspapers.

His most recent books include Rewarding Excellence (Jossey-Bass, 2000), Corporate Boards: New Strategies for Adding Value at the Top (Jossey-Bass, 2001), Organizing for High Performance (Jossey-Bass, 2001), Treat People Right (Jossey-Bass, 2003), Human Resources Business Process Outsourcing (Jossey-Bass, 2004), Achieving Strategic Excellence: An Assessment of Human Resource Organizations (Stanford Press, 2006), Built to Change (Jossey-Bass, 2006), The New American Workplace (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), and America at Work (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage (Jossey-Bass, 2008), and Achieving Excellence in HR Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Organizations (Stanford Press, 2009) and Management Reset (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Business Week has proclaimed Lawler one of the top six gurus in the field of management, and Human Resource Executive called him one of HR's most influential people. Workforce magazine identified him as one of the twenty-five visionaries who have shaped today's workplace over the past century. He has been a consultant to many corporations, including the majority of the Fortune 100, as well as governments at all levels.