Leadership and Responses to Organizational Crisis

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Crisis ◽  
State University ◽  
Organizational System ◽  
Identity Maintenance ◽  
Embedded Intergroup Relations ◽  
Romance Of Leadership ◽  
The Social ◽  
Penn State ◽  
Child Sex Abuse ◽  
Organizational Dysfunction

The tragic failure of Penn State University to effectively respond to years of child sex abuse perpetrated by Jerry Sandusky was both a breakdown of leaders and of leadership systems. Numerous individual leaders at Penn State had the knowledge, power, and interpersonal influence to effectively intervene in support of Jerry Sandusky's victims. However, fully understanding how this tragedy occurred also requires an examination of the organizational system of leadership that enabled each leader to rationalize the cover up of the sexual abuse of children. Alderfer's (2011) laws of embedded intergroup relations are useful for understanding the organizational dysfunction at Penn State; especially when those laws are integrated with other theories of organizational psychology, including the social identity maintenance theory of groupthink, the romance of leadership, and authentic leadership. The integration of these theories suggests specific strategies and tactics for preventing similar lapses of ethical behavior in the future through the development of leaders and leadership systems.

Athletics and Admissions: The Impact of the Penn State Football Scandal on Student Quality

2021 ◽  
pp. 152700252110394
Author(s):  
Candon Johnson ◽  
Bryan C. McCannon
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Control ◽  
State University ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Exogenous Shock ◽  
High School Gpa ◽  
Math Scores ◽  
Penn State ◽  
Child Sex Abuse ◽  
Average High School ◽  
The Impact

We ask whether a scandal in a university’s athletics department affects the quality of the incoming student body. To do so, we evaluate the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State University in 2011. The violations involved a former employee with the crimes occurring a decade prior. The plausibly-exogenous shock allows us to make a causal identification of the scandal's effect on the university. We use synthetic control methods establishing economically meaningful impacts. We find that the average high school GPA is 0.12 points less and the proportion of students with high SAT Math scores is down 4.8 percentage points.

scholarly journals Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment; Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton. Ed. Charles Walton. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. xvii, 244p. ISBN 978-0-271-05012-6. $49.95

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-207
Author(s):  
Greg Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
State University ◽  
Pennsylvania State University ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Penn State ◽  
History Of

Appearing as a title in the Penn State Series in the History of the Book, Into Print is a collection of twelve essays demonstrating a debt to Robert Darnton’s ground-breaking scholarship on the social history of ideas (Walton, vii; Pasta, 82). Divided into five thematic parts (“Making News,” “Print, Paper, Markets, and States,” “Police and Opinion,” “Enlightenment in Revolution,” and “Enlightenment Universalism and Cultural Difference”), it includes contributions from scholars, primarily historians, who studied under Darnton. Editor Charles Walton points out in his superb preface that, while topics covered are diverse, each essay exhibits Darnton’s influence by “analyzing the dynamic . . .

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