Organizational Effectiveness Its Demise And Re-Emergence Through Positive Organizational Scholarship

Abstract

Abstract A fundamental shift has occurred over the last two decades in the organizational studies literature. Whereas the concept of organizational evocativeness was once the dominant dependent variable in organizational studies and lay at the centre of discussions about organizational success, it gradually lost favour and has largely been replaced by an emphasis on single indicators of outcomes such as share price, productivity, Wnancial ratios, error rates, or customer loyalty (Cameron and Wheaten, 1996). One well-known evocativeness scholar concluded, in fact, that organizational electiveness’ as a topic of study is dead (Wheaten, 2004). It was killed by the ‘‘validity police’’ (Hirsch and Levin, 1999), who tend to discard no useful and immeasurable concepts.