Each year, Walden honors the efforts of several recent alumni for the quality and social-change implications of their dissertations. This year’s recipients contributed knowledge that could transform the way we look at business ethics, organizational change, juvenile sex offenders, and workplace aggression.

 

Harold L. Hodgkinson Award

 

A Narrative Inquiry Into the Experiences of Individuals in the Midst of Organizational Change: A Shift From Systems to Stories

Stan Amaladas, Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences (Leadership and Organizational Change), 2004

 

Dr. Stan Amaladas, a senior learning and change management advisor within the Canadian federal public service, explored how employees make meaning of their experiences while in the midst of radical proposed and already implemented organizational changes. To accomplish this, he collected and analyzed the narratives of various managers within Canada’s public sector.

 

“The greater part of organizational experiences happen through the circulation of stories that are told and retold,” says Amaladas.

 

One conclusion of Amaladas’s study was that, contrary to conventional management theory, employees are not categorically resistant to workplace change. According to Amaladas, this assumption is in part due to management’s black-and-white interpretation of employees’ complex construction of their realities. The construction of their realities, he suggests, is recursively connected to factors including lack of trust, practices of silent collusion, lack of closure to issues related to past organizational change efforts, internal beliefs, and already-made decisions. Amaladas recommends that employers and employees candidly confront their constructions and create opportunities to honestly converse about them.

 

Frank Dilley Award

 

Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Firm Value in the Oil and Gas Industry

Javier Fadul, Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences (Finance), 2004

 

Dr. Javier Fadul’s research showed that corporate social responsibility has a significant positive impact on firm value in companies in the oil and gas industry. “But it was at different degrees and different levels,” says Fadul, a marketing and business analyst in Halliburton’s oil-well-logging division. For example, a positive relationship existed between degree of diversity and firm value; however, no significant relationship was found between companies’ environmental performance and firm value.

 

“Overall, the results corroborated the economic importance of managers leading a socially responsible business operation,” Fadul says. “The knowledge provided … can establish a road map to guide managers to behave ethically and avoid common social responsibility pitfalls, such as bribery, kickbacks, corruption, or harassment and discrimination in the workplace.”

 

Honorable Mention

 

Juvenile Sex Offender Recidivism: Typological Differences in Risk

Gregory Parks, Ph.D. in Psychology (Clinical Psychology), 2004

 

“Risk assessment for adolescents who have sexually offended represented one of the greatest gaps in the research literature and has been a major concern for those treating this population,” says Dr. Gregory Parks, who is on the faculty at the Center on Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

 

Parks says his results support previous research that shows most adolescents who sexually offend do not continue offending into adulthood. “Such results can lead to improved treatment by targeting specific risk factors for intervention and better use of risk-management resources in the community, while preserving the most restrictive treatment options for the highest risk offenders,” Parks explains.

 

Honorable Mention

 

Covert Workplace Aggression

Paula M. Fremont, Ph.D. in Psychology (Organizational Psychology), 2004

 

“Covert workplace aggression is insidious, less researched, and more financially damaging than its overt counterpart, workplace violence,” says the organizational consultant/professional counselor who specializes in workplace issues. Dr. Paula Fremont developed her study’s operational definition of covert workplace aggression (which she terms CWA) after an extensive review of the literature. CWA includes behaviors whose motives and forms are subtler than workplace violence, such as habitual lateness and withholding information.

 

Fremont’s study investigated the relationship between 11 independent variables (for example, gender, age, hierarchical level, workplace type, workplace location, and salary/pay satisfaction) and three dependent variables that were representative of her study’s operational definition of CWA.

 

One notable finding was that public sector workers reported engaging in more CWA toward their employing organizations than workers in the private sector. “This might be an important area for further research, especially in the health and mental health care delivery system,” Fremont says.

 

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