Speaker Series 2004-2005

Why the Rich Get Richer: The Role of Organizations in the Wealth of Nations

JONE L. PEARCE
University of California, Irvine

Monday, April 4, 2005
Room 2505, 10:00am - 12:00pm

Abstract:  This is an application of organizational research into an area usually left to economists and sociologists: why governance quality creates national wealth. Drawing on archival sources for 49 countries, and managerial surveys in four countries, hypotheses are developed to explain the wealth-creating effects of governance quality via facilitative context that allows managers to create successful large independent organizations. Governance quality, in the form of governmental facilitation of organizations, predicted organization-enhancing managerial weaker dependence on their personal relationships, less cultivation of relationships with government officials, less strategic use of their relationships for competitive business advantages, and less managerial distrust, secrecy and the withholding of information. Further, the wealthier the country the more important government facilitation was to its wealth. These results support the argument that large, independent Weberian organizations do matter for national wealth creation.

Jone L. Pearce is Professor of Organization and Strategy in the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine. Jone’s Ph.D. is in Administrative Sciences from Yale University (1978). Her field is organizational behavior and she conducts research on workplace interpersonal processes, such as trust, and how these processes may be affected by political structures, economic conditions and organizational policies and practices. Her work has appeared in over seventy scholarly articles, including the Academy journals AMJ, AMR, and AME; she has edited several volumes and written two scholarly books, Volunteers: The Organizational Behavior of Unpaid Workers (Routledge, 1993) and Organization and Management in the Embrace of Government (Erlbaum, 2001). Jone serves on the editorial boards of Human Relations and the Journal of Applied Psychology. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and her honors include research grants from the National Science Foundation; a Fulbright Fellowship to the International Management Center, Hungary; Scholarly Contribution Awards (1998 from the Academy of Management and 1986 from the American Society for Personnel Administration); several teaching excellence awards; and an invitation to testify on legislation pending before the United States House of Representatives. Professor Pearce has been active in the Western Academy of Management, elected as President in 1995-96, and in the Academy of Management elected as a Representative-at-Large on its Board of Governors 1995-98 and as Program Chair for the 2001 Annual Meeting and President in 2003. She has served as Associate and Interim Deans (2002-04) for her school and has served on several non-profit governing boards. 

Curriculum Vita