ABSTRACT
More than a decade ago, a symposium at the annual Academy of Management meetings was organized in which several well known scholars discussed the current state of organizational effectiveness. The symposium highlighted the disarray and conceptual confusion that surrounded this construct. The discussion occurred at the height of the scholarly debate over the relative merits of competing models of organizational effectiveness (Goodman & Pennings, 1977; Price, 1982). Seven books and many articles were published on the topic in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most arguing for a particular effectiveness model. None of the competing models of effectiveness emerged as the dominant perspective, and some writers became so frustrated by the confusion that they recommended a "moratorium on all studies of organizational effectiveness, books on organizational effectiveness, and chapters on organizational effectiveness" (Goodman, 1979, p. 4).
