Edward Emmet Lawler, III: Scholar, change agent, sports fanatic, and a hell of a nice guy

Abstract

Edward Emmett Lawler, III, has been a central figure in the development of the fields of organizational behavior, management, and organization development. His early work generated and tested theoretical frameworks about motivation and performance, and he was a leader in investigating how organizational practices impact employee and organizational outcomes, including work design, compensation, performance management, and participation and involvement. The Quality of Worklife studies at the University of Michigan that he co-led with Stan Seashore provided a model and developed a methodology for studying and understanding organizations as dynamic systems and for creating knowledge about organizations by intentionally changing them. From this work, he developed his highly influential high-involvement management framework. During a career that has spanned 50 years, he has influenced both the theory and practice of organizing for effectiveness during a period when organizations have had to change fundamentally to adapt to the emerging dynamic, digitalized, global economy. Lawler has been a scholar of how organizations are changing to be effective in their changing contexts more than he has been a scholar of change processes. His emphasis on doing useful research led to partnerships with companies to address and learn from the challenges they face and to ensuring that the knowledge created is accessible to both academia and practice. His work has helped shape the development and increasing strategic orientation of the human resource function. He founded and for almost 40 years has led the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO), a research center at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, which he designed to carry out useful research. He and his colleagues at CEO have contributed to the development of methodologies for doing useful research and to the debates in the Academy about the legitimacy of such approaches. This chapter describes Lawler's evolution as a scholar, the many contributions that he has made to the understanding of how organizations can change to be more effective, and the immense impact he has had on practice and academia.