Gerald R. Salancik

Gerald R. (Jerry) Salancik (29 January 1943 - 24 July 1996) was an American organizational theorist, and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is best known for his work with Jeffrey Pfeffer on "organizational decision making" and "the external control of organizations."

Life and work Salancik obtained his BS in Journalism in 1965 from the Northwestern University, and obtained his PhD in experimental social psychology in 1971 at Yale University.

After his graduation, Salancik was researcher at the Institute for the Future for a year. In 1972, he was appointed Associate Professor of Organization Behavior at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Legacy

The Gerald R. Salancik Doctoral Dissertation Award is given each year to a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior & Theory at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University.

Selected publications Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Gerald R. Salancik. The external control of organizations: A resource dependence perspective. Stanford University Press, 1978; 2003. Salancik, Gerald R., and Barry M. Staw (eds.) New directions in organizational behavior. Krieger, 1982.

Articles, a selection: Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Gerald R. Salancik. "Organizational decision making as a political process: The case of a university budget." Administrative Science Quarterly (1974): 135-151. Salancik, Gerald R., and Jeffrey Pfeffer. "An examination of need-satisfaction models of job attitudes." Administrative science quarterly (1977): 427-456. Salancik, Gerald R., and Jeffrey Pfeffer. "A social information processing approach to job attitudes and task design." Administrative science quarterly (1978): 224-253. Leblebici, H., Salancik, G. R., Copay, A., & King, T. (1991). "Institutional change and the transformation of interorganizational fields: An organizational history of the US radio broadcasting industry." Administrative science quarterly, 333-363.