Before acting to solve some recognized decision problem, it is important to think about which immediate decision you should face. Once you recognize a decision, you want to develop a clear and concise statement of this decision. You have an important choice—in fact, a decision itself–about the decision statement that you choose to describe the decision that you want to face. Your decision statement is the starting point for nudging your thinking about sets of appropriate values and alternatives to create the decision frame for your decision. Begin any decision statement with the word “decide,” typically followed by “which,” “what,” “when,” “whether,” “how,” or “if.” Decision statements are often narrow and end up addressing only part of the real decision. You want any mention of values in your decision statement to be broad. Before accepting any decision statement posed for you by someone else, you should carefully consider whether you want to address that decision.

To routinely use value-focused decision-making to nudge yourself to make better decisions, you need to develop skills to address its four critical concepts. These skills are the following: identifying values, creating alternatives, generating decision opportunities, and designing alternatives that satisfy others. For each of the four skills, several basic decisions similar to those you have previously faced are presented to practice using each concept. You can personalize these basic decisions to represent a decision that you do or will likely face. The exercises will help you understand the information that you create by applying the concepts. This should help you develop the initial skill to productively apply relevant value-focused decision-making concepts to any of your decisions. Mastering these skills requires using them on your decisions. This both helps you make better decisions and provides more practice at using the techniques to apply the concepts. With more practice, you will naturally become more proficient at the desired skills.

While theoretical, analytical, and methodological issues surrounding research on generations and generational differences at work have been thoroughly discussed, one topic that has received far less attention is the extent to which the inferences suggested by this research are appropriate. Therefore, the purpose of this effort is to review the recent-generations literature, identify the commonly represented inferences, and offer a critical review of the appropriateness of each. A qualitative review of the last ten years of published research found four main inferences: (1) organizations should adopt customized HR policies, (2) intergenerational conflict is inevitable, (3) generations should be led differently, and (4) the benefits of capitalizing on generational strengths. These inferences are critiqued using several different lenses including legal, methodological, practice, and theoretical. Our conclusion is that these inferences are not supported by the literature and that organizations should instead focus on broader work and workplace trends.

This chapter addresses generational changes and corresponding differences in personality, values, and attitudes. Both popular and academic interpretations of generations are described. We begin by defining generations, which are perhaps best thought of as fuzzy social constructs. Next, we detail key issues related to measurement of generations, notably teasing apart specific effects of age or development, culture or period, and birth cohort or generation. We describe two general models of how generations develop: a sociological model and cultural model. We also detail six models that predict the content of generations, from cyclical models to the no-change model. We argue for what we think are best practices for testing these ideas, while acknowledging the difficulties involved. We then describe some of the findings in the research regarding generational change as well as organizational specific findings. We conclude with a brief discussion of the future of research in this area.

The job structure has become more polarized in recent decades in the United States. Automation and related computerized technologies replaced many jobs which are characterized by well-defined, routine activities that do not require complex analytical skills. Using recent data for the labor force, we find that job polarization increased through about 2011. This overall trend was the outcome of two contrary patterns including occupational downgrading among men and occupational upgrading among women. However, the perception of job polarization may be greater than its actuality because the distribution of household income has become more unequal than the occupational structure due to rising assortative mating. Job polarization seems to have tapered off since 2011 whereas household income inequality has continued to increase. The trend towards job polarization ironically occurred while the educational distribution of workers was becoming less polarized.

While top managers’ compensation skyrockets, typical American workers’ real wages have been stagnating for over three decades, thereby contributing to organizational income inequality. In an attempt to understand changes in organizational income inequality, I summarize changes in reward distributions within organizations and elaborate on the consequences of such changes on powerful managers, powerless employees, and their interactions.

Teams are an integral part of organizations; however, changes in the nature of work – including increases in globalization, the scale and complexity of problems, and the capabilities of technology – have fundamentally altered the nature of teams. In this chapter, we delineate three important changes to the nature of teams: (1) complex organizational challenges are requiring complex and fluid patterns of teamwork; (2) teams are being assembled and led by members as well as managers; and (3) technology is increasingly interwoven with teamwork. In reference to these changes, we provide recommendations for future research and management of teams.

You have the power to enhance the quality of your life and maintain it at a high level. The way you do this—the only way you can do this—is through the decisions that you face and the alternatives that you decide to implement for those decisions. Your all-encompassing life objective is to maximize your quality of life. To pursue a high quality of life, you must define what the concept of “quality of life&”means for you. This is done by specifying your life objectives. Like a vehicle navigation system that guides your travels on roads, your life objectives are your life navigation system for guiding your decisions through life, so that you live the life that you want. Creating your life objectives is conceptually the same as defining and clarifying your objectives for an important decision. In practice, the process is both more difficult and more important. Thus, specific procedures to identify and organize your life objectives are presented. Once you know and understand your life objectives, they nudge your decision-making to be more creative, more consistent, and better, as well as reducing anxiety and the time required to make good decisions.

Like many other aspects of the world of work, PM has undergone substantial changes over the years, especially in the last decade. This chapter discusses the changing nature of PM practice and PM research, as well as the PM-related implications of other, more general, changes in the nature of work. It is clear that PM practices will continue to be impacted by the changing nature of work. As such, our PM research needs to continue to evolve, to meet the realities of the changing nature of PM practice. We offer several suggestions in this regard.

The distinction between decision problems and decision opportunities is very important, but it is not recognized by most decision-makers. Decision problems are decisions that you must face as a result of others’ decisions and/or circumstances beyond your control. Decision opportunities, as I define them, are decisions that you create for yourself. You must reactively solve decision problems, but you can proactively pursue decision opportunities. When a decision problem occurs, it degrades one aspect of your quality of life. Therefore, the purpose of solving a decision problem is to get your quality of life back to where it was before the decision problem occurred. A thought about something that would make your quality of life today better is what stimulates the recognition of the decision opportunity. Pursuing it directly enhances the quality of your life. In addition, it often lowers the chances of certain unwanted decision problems occurring in the future and reduces the extent of the downgrading of your quality of life if they do occur. Guidelines for creating desirable decision opportunities are provided and illustrated with examples.

As the nature of work and the workplace continue to change, leaders need to become adept at changing how they lead. In this chapter, we describe four broad leader behavior categories (task-oriented, relations-oriented, change-oriented, and external behaviors), their specific component behaviors, and evidence for the importance of these behaviors. We also describe several major changes facing leaders in the coming years, including demographic changes in the workforce, technological changes, changes in occupations and work tasks, and global and strategic changes. Then we provide suggestions for how leaders should flexibly use the different types of behaviors to reflect these changes and the leadership situation. Finally, we offer some suggestions for future research that would make theoretical and methodological contributions to the leadership literature.