New development: A new principle—the higher the position,the broader the view

ABSTRACT

The Peter Principle, introduced over 50 years ago, refers to an organizational phenomenon where employees in a hierarchy are promoted to positions for which they are not well qualified (Peter & Hull, 1969). It has been a topic of debate and empirical research in organizational theory and management literature ever since. This article does not seek to prove or disprove the Peter Principle. Rather, it provides an alternative explanation of promotion within an organization based on employee experience. The research presented here demonstrates that the role inhabited by an employee greatly influences their perspective, which may change based on their location within an organizational hierarchy. In other words, people’s horizons depend on their place within that hierarchy.     

Impediments to Communication in Financial Institutions: Implications for the Risk Management Organization

This article investigates the question of how risk management should be embedded in a financial firm’s hierarchy. We answer this question by combining capital market theory with game-theoretic thinking. We develop a theory for the integration of risk management into an organization, based on private information and differences in preferences. Our model compares the payoffs from uninformed decision-making, solo decision-making, joint voting decision-making, and coordinated decision-making when information about a project’s expected return and risk is dispersed in the organization. Our findings have a number of implications for the organization of risk management.     

商业银行操作风险管理组织架构存在问题探讨

作为风险管理系统的商业银行操作风险管理,操作风险的风险管理理念、策略和政策都需要通过具体的风险管理部门来实施,独立的操作风险管理组织架构是操作风险管理战略得以落实、政策得以实施、过程得以体现的保障。本文通过对我国商业银行操作风险管理组织架构现状的分析,以及与国际活跃银行在操作风险管理组织架构实践的比较,探讨了我国商业银行操作风险管理组织架构存在的主要问题,为恰当的操作风险管理组织架构设计提供前提准备。     

Let first-level supervisors do their job

Performing well as a first-level supervisor is like walking the circus high wire. In both positions, the ability to maintain one's balance when shifting forces pull in opposite directions is a measure of one's success. First-level supervisors must be able to harmonize the demands of management, the demands of the collective work force (often represented by unions), and the demands of workers with the requirements for doing the tasks at hand. These needs are more often than not conflicting and even at times mutually exclusive. First-level supervisors usually have mixed emotions about their situation and often lose their sense of identity as they try to perform this precarious balancing act. Today these supervisors are part of management, but chances are they were once among the employees they are now trying to supervise. Although first-level supervisors have the responsibility for implementing the goals of upper management, their organizational authority to carry out the necessary actions is frequently unclear and often insufficient. By allowing these lowest-level managers to use the levers of influence inherent in their position, higher-level managers will be improving the performance of the whole organization.     

The Industry Life Cycle,Acquisitions and Investment: Does Firm Organization Matter?

We examine the effect of industry life‐cycle stages on within‐industry acquisitions and capital expenditures by conglomerates and single‐segment firms controlling for endogeneity of organizational form. We find greater differences in acquisitions than in capital expenditures, which are similar across organizational types. In particular, 36% of the growth recorded by conglomerate segments in growth industries comes from acquisitions, versus 9% for single‐segment firms. In growth industries, the effect of financial dependence on acquisitions and plant openings is mitigated for conglomerate firms. Plants acquired by conglomerate firms increase in productivity. The results suggest that organizational forms' comparative advantages differ across industry conditions.     

How process enterprises really work

Many companies have succeeded in reengineering their core processes, combining related activities from different departments and cutting out ones that don't add value. Few, though, have aligned their organizations with their processes. The result is a form of cognitive dissonance as the new, integrated processes pull people in one direction and the old, fragmented management structures pull them in another. That's not the way it has to be. In recent years, forward-thinking companies like IBM, Texas Instruments, and Duke Power have begun to make the leap from process redesign to process management. They've appointed some of their best managers to be process owners, giving them real authority over work and budgets. They've shifted the focus of their measurement and compensation systems from unit goals to process goals. They've changed the way they assign and train employees, emphasizing whole processes rather than narrow tasks. They've thought carefully about the strategic trade-offs between adopting uniform processes and allowing different units to do things their own way. And they've made subtle but fundamental cultural changes, stressing teamwork and customers over turf and hierarchy. These companies are emerging from all those changes as true process enterprises--businesses whose management structures are in harmony, rather than at war, with their core processes. And their organizations are becoming much more flexible, adaptive, and responsive as a result.     

国有商业银行二级分行实施扁平化管理研究

近年来,国有商业银行二级分行在扁平化管理的实践中进行了一些积极尝试,但总体效果尚不尽如人意.其主要原因就在于对扁平化管理含义上的片面理解和实际操作过程中的简单推行.作为一项涉及二级分行全辖业务处理流程、会计核算流程和管理流程的复杂的系统工程,实践中必须在对扁平化管理内部含义深刻理解的前提下,在对二级分行为主体的业务处理流程,纵、横向的组织管理架构和会计核算流程重新再造的基础上,结合实施资金管理体制改革和全面成本管理,通过经营管理流程架构和机制方面的综合再造,推进扁平化管理取得实质性进展.     

Management of frontline financial sales personnel

The employee turnover rate within the financial services industry is one of the highest among all industries. Studies demonstrate that a salesperson’s organizational commitment and propensity to leave are impacted by job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. This study examines the relationships among emotional exhaustion, organizational commitment, propensity to leave and the facets of job satisfaction. Findings support that: (i) financial services salespeople’s propensity to leave is influenced by emotional exhaustion, (ii) emotional exhaustion is mediated by multi-faceted job satisfaction in predicting organizational commitment and (iii) the facets of job satisfaction are, in part, mediated by organizational commitment in predicting propensity to leave.     

Calm in the storm: Simulating the management of organizational co-evolution

Whilst past research has explored the notion of co-evolution and ambidexterity in organizations, few have drawn from theoretical insights made in other domains of study such as biology and cultural evolution. This paper seeks to make a contribution towards this project, by developing an agent-based simulation model of multi-level co-evolution within an organization, with a view towards shedding new light on organizational adaptation. Unlike previous simulation studies of this nature, this study focuses on the co-evolution of behaviour at multiple-levels between interacting individuals, based on the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection and retention. In this way it is seen that incremental, punctuated and chaotic patterns of aggregate organizational behaviour arise from the same core building blocks of variation–selection–retention. The findings from this study point to the need for management control in ambidextrous organizations both during times of stability AND transformational change. In the latter case, this control was not that of an overpowering management suppressing variations and innovation from within the organization. Rather it might be interpreted as the voice of calm in the chaos of the storm, providing direction to the many actors within the organization and walking them along the thin line between inaction and chaos.     

加快金融企业社会责任转型的对策建议

十七届五中全会和中央经济工作会议明确了低碳经济发展战略.我国金融业正围绕社会责任和赤道原则为主线,从组织架构、客户结构和经营模式等方面转型布局.本文从责任管理体系建设、赤道原则的指导原则出发,结合我国金融业公司治理机制现状,论述了我国金融机构在治理机制和业务发展上,必须贯彻低碳发展思路,企业市场责任必须与环境、社会责任...     

Out of control little-used clinical assets are draining healthcare budgets

To improve utilization and reduce the cost of maintaining mobile clinical equipment, healthcare organization leaders should do the following: Select an initial asset group to target. Conduct a physical inventory. Evaluate the organization's asset "ecosystem." Optimize workflow processes. Phase in new processes, and phase out inventory. Devote time to change management. Develop a replacement strategy.     

咨询优化决策

对重大工程进行前期评估,这是中国的项目投资管理制度中的一项必要程序。然而,很少有人知道,在多项重大工程背后,都有一家咨询机构的身影。这是一家以美国兰德公司为发展目标的咨询机构。兰德公司是当今美国乃至世界最负盛名的决策咨询机构,朝鲜战争时期,它因     

The influence of power strategies in AIS implementation processes

This study is based on a longitudinal in-depth case study, conducted in a Portuguese public-sector organization, where the accountants adopted a strategic business partner role and promoted the implementation of two new accounting information systems (AIS), under the context of increasing business competition. Given their role, we examined how the implementation processes of such AIS were influenced by the accountants’ power strategies, adopting an organizational power narrative inquiry grounded on the four power dimensions proposed in Hardy’s (1996) framework: power over resources, power over decision-making processes, power over meanings and power of the system. As a result, this study contributes to the literature available on AIS by discussing the strategic business partner role of (management) accountants in a specific case; and by offering new insights into AIS research under the topic of accounting change through the exercise of power. Our research also contributes to the literature on organizational power by providing theoretical developments to Hardy’s (1996) power framework.     

Budgetary incrementalism in a Christian bureaucracy

This paper presents the second stage of a field based case study focussed upon the planning and control concepts and processes employed by the central offices of the Victorian Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia. Its analysis is informed by grounded theory methodology and develops a micro-theoretical framework of that organization’s planning and control process. A reactive style of planning produces an incremental budgetary mélange that ultimately results in a form of control by compromise. The emergent findings are compared with a selection of relevant prior strategy and not-for-profit organization research. The study presents contextualized insights into the potential limits of ‘rational’ management system operation in such organizations, and the role of budgetary systems in organizational approaches to coping with a complex and dynamic environment.     

Getting offshoring right

The prospect of offshoring and outsourcing business processes has captured the imagination of CEOs everywhere. In the past five years, a rising number of companies in North America and Europe have experimented with this strategy, hoping to reduce costs and gain strategic advantage. But many businesses have had mixed results. According to several studies, half the organizations that have shifted processes offshore have failed to generate the expected financial benefits. What's more, many of them have faced employee resistance and consumer dissatisfaction. Clearly, companies have to rethink how they formulate their offshoring strategies. A three-part methodology can help. First, companies need to prioritize their processes, ranking each based on two criteria: the value it creates for customers and the degree to which the company can capture some of that value. Companies will want to keep their core (highest-priority) processes in-house and consider outsourcing their commodity (low-priority) processes; critical (moderate-priority) processes are up for debate and must be considered carefully. Second, businesses should analyze all the risks that accompany offshoring and look systematically at their critical and commodity processes in terms of operational risk (the risk that processes won't operate smoothly after being offshored) and structural risk (the risk that relationships with service providers may not work as expected). Finally, companies should determine possible locations for their offshore efforts, as well as the organizational forms--such as captive centers and joint ventures--that those efforts might take. They can do so by examining each process's operational and structural risks side by side. This article outlines the tools that will help companies choose the right processes to offshore. It also describes a new organizational structure called the extended organization, in which companies specify the quality of services they want and work alongside providers to get that quality.     

Structure,formality and the importance of financial and non-financial information in strategy development and implementation

The strategic management literature indicates that there is high variety in the form and nature of strategic processes within organizations. By contrast, writers on strategic accounting tend focus on the structure and formality of strategic activities and call for a balance of financial and non-financial information to support strategic processes. This study explores the conceptual basis for this perspective and also investigates empirically whether such characterisations hold in practice. The empirical part of the study draws on questionnaire responses by senior corporate accountants and interviews held with a subset of respondents from this group. The results indicate that strategy development and implementation activities tend to be structured and formal, and while greater emphasis is placed on financial information in strategy implementation, in strategy development both financial and non-financial information are used. Differences however prevail across firms as to what is considered to be strategic and the role played by financial and non-financial information varies across companies. A high degree of organization specificity also exists in the uses of strategic accounting information. The study found support for normative ideals within the firms investigated but high organizational particularity also pervades the deployment of strategic accounting information.     

La delimitación contingente del espacio organizacional basada en procesos de saber

The aim of this article is to call into question the concept of organization delimited as a social object of discrete character, in order to propose that the organizational space is a product of multiple operations of knowledge that conform and delimit its spatiality in a contingently and current way, according to the knowledge process that are functioning at that time. Going along with this line of thought, we differentiate the roles of the management system, the standardization system and judicial-legal system in the delimitation of the spatiality of the organizational phenomenon and we propose that this delimitation produces a rethinking of the management system as to internal system of the discrete organization. Consequently, this results in rethinking the political dimension that is present in the organizational phenomenon. This also impacts on the processes of including subjects in this complex spatiality. We conclude that the concept of organization as a social object of discrete character is not only insufficient to conceptualize the organizational phenomenon, but is also insufficient as a tool for organized action.     

Terrorism and Critical Infrastructures: Implications for Public–Private Crisis Management

The spate of terrorist attacks in New York, London and Madrid has raised some significant issues for the public management of critical infrastructures. In many countries, privatizations in the 1980s and 1990s have transferred key elements of the critical infrastructure to private companies. Because these infrastructures are of major significance to our societies and economies, they must be protected against prolonged periods of breakdown. The ‘new’ terrorism has the potential to do just that. The management of this new threat is a complex task, which invariably will be undertaken by both public and private actors. They must deal with the core challenges of the prevention of attacks, effective communication of information across organizational boundaries and the ‘ownership’ of crisis decision-making. This article considers these issues within the context of the broader research areas of public management and crisis management.     

Toward an integrative framework of organizational control

This paper develops an integrative organizational control model which synthesizes selected contributions of the administrative management school, organizational sociologists and organizational psychologists. The model consists of a core control system embedded in the context of organizational structure, organizational culture and the external environment. Control is defined as attempts by the organization to increase the probability that individuals will behave in ways that will lead to the attainment of organizational objectives. Control of work behavior is accomplished by the four core control mechanisms of planning, measurement, feedback and evaluation-reward. The paper presents propositions for each core control mechanism, relating its impact to work behaviors and outcomes. It also examines the manner in which the contextual factors (culture, etc.) function as control mechanisms on work behavior. Finally, the paper suggests directions for future research on the proposed model. Taken together, the model and the propositions comprise the basis for an integrative framework of organizational control.