Meta-Analytic Organization

Lex Donaldson is a professor of management in organizational design at the Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His work includes a significant contribution to the development of contingency theory as well as founding stewardship theory—which has become a major influence in the area of corporate governance. He is the author of six books about organizations and management, among them: The Contingency Theory of Organizations, Performance-Driven Organizational Change, and For Positivist Organization Theory. In 2003 he received one of the highest possible accolades: a worldwide survey of ninety-five academics from the Academy of Management Learning and Education nominated his work on the Contingency Theory of Organizational Structures as one of the world’s top seventy-three management theories, ranked on criteria of importance, usefulness to management practice, and scientific validity.

• Part I: The Vision for a New Organizational Theory 1. Creating Organizational Theory From Methodological Principles 2. The Deep Structure of Data Part II: The Sources of Error 3. Managerial Errors From Small Numbers 4. Data Disaggregation and Managerial Errors 5. Measurement Error of Profit 6. Quantifying the Measurement Error of Profit 7. Measurement and Sampling Errors in the M-Form and Strategic Niches 8. Errors From Range Restriction and Extension 9. Confounding by the Performance Variable 10. Controlling for Confounding by Using Organizational Experiments 11. Controlling for Confounding by Data Aggregation Part III: Integration 12. Errors Not Self-Correcting 13. Equations of Statistico-Organizational Theory 14. How Managers Can Reduce Errors15. Conclusions