Frank Balthis

Publication Date

1968

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Green, Gerald G.||Novak, Ralph S.

Degree Name

M.S. (Master of Science)

Legacy Department

Department of Management

LCSH

Management committees

Abstract

The problem was a study to attempt to determine what criteria major industrial corporations used in making evaluations of their committees. Four sub-problems were developed relating to such possible approaches to committee evaluation as comparing committee costs to contributions, determining need, assessing internal operating efficiency, and contrasting individual with group performance of a function. The procedure utilized was a survey by questionnaire of one hundred firms randomly selected from Fortune magazine's "Directory of the 500 Largest U.S. Industrial Corporations." The responses were then tabulated and analyzed by contrasting and/or comparing industrial criteria to authoritative recommendations of criteria revealed by library research. The study revealed committee evaluation was not standard practice in industry. Ten of the twenty-eight respondees evaluated committees, although five of them did not reveal what criteria they used. The evaluations that were made were, in many cases, hardly as sophisticated as they might have been in light of current knowledge. None of the firms used prepared forms to assure uniform evaluations, although some had assigned the responsibility for all evaluations to a given department. Committee costs were considered by three firms and only two of them specified the costs they considered. None compared costs to contributions. Seven firms considered the need for a committee in their evaluations. As there was, and still is, a lack of agreement among authorities as to what purposes committees should serve, the firms used, or did not use committees, in varying degrees and for varying purposes. Evaluations of the internal operating efficiency of committees did not use much of the available information about possible criteria. Only one of the firms attempted to compare individual with group performance of a given function. They did not do this as a controlled experiment.

Comments

Includes bibliographical references.

Extent

ii, 59 pages

Language

eng

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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