Shared values make a difference: An empirical test of corporate culture

Is the recent popular management literature on corporate culture and cultural values just a passing fad or is it highlighting some fundamental organizational realities? The results from a recent nationwide survey of American managers shows, we are convinced, that clearly articulated organizational values do make a significant difference in the lives of employees, as well as in their organization's performance. This article is an effort to integrate this broad-based data on individual managers' values with the reported experience of successful organizations that pay careful attention to their culture. It also offers ideas on how human resource managers can facilitate the alignment of personal and organizational values.     

Organizational change techniques: their present, their future

To help carry out their responsibility of managing rapid and often unexpected change, managers have an available set of techniques: organizational behavior modification, management by objectives, management development, organization development, management auditing, and a control cycle of planning, implementation, and control. Each of these has a format that species the procedures to be followed to bring about organizational change. Michael emphasizes that such formats are preferable to a haphazard, trial-and-error approach that may produce unanticipated results. In part because some techniques are newer than others, data from a research project of planning and control that Michael conducted show different rates of usage by a sample of Fortune 500 companies. The control cycle is the most widely used; organizational behavior modification the least widely used. The use of these techniques of organizational change is likely to vary in some ways and experience may bring about changes in the techniques. Michael concludes that the newer breed of managers who are versed in the social sciences, mathematics, and the computer are likely to spread new techniques in the organizational world.     

Micro‐Practices of Strategic Sensemaking and Sensegiving: How Middle Managers Interpret and Sell Change Every Day*

abstract This paper looks at the workings of ongoing primary sensemaking and sensegiving micro‐practices by which middle managers interpret and sell strategic change at the organizational interface. Through middle managers’ routines and conversations related to the implementation of a strategic change in a top‐of‐the‐line clothing company, the article shows how they contribute to renewing links with stakeholders, in particular clientele, by drawing on their tacit knowledge. Interpretative analysis of these routines and conversations highlights four micro‐practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: translating the orientation, overcoding the strategy, disciplining the client, and justifying the change. The paper outlines a practice perspective of sensemaking and sensegiving. It ends by suggesting the necessity of looking at middle managers’ role as interpreters and sellers of strategic change at the micro level for a better understanding of their contribution in sustaining competitive advantage through their everyday activities.     

Relationship between perceptions of corporate social responsibility and organizational cynicism: the role of employee volunteering

This study explores the role of positive corporate social responsibility (CSR) perceptions of employees in reducing cynicism toward the organization. As employee involvement in CSR activities through volunteering could influence the perceptions of CSR among employees, the moderating impact of employee volunteering on the relationship between CSR perceptions and cynicism is also tested. Considering that managers and non-managers can have different perceptions of CSR and organizational realities, the relationship between CSR and organizational cynicism is compared among managerial and non-managerial staff working in large organizations. The analysis of 348 questionnaires collected from 191 managers and 157 non-managers showed that positive perceptions of CSR were negatively correlated with organizational cynicism for both managers and non-managers, with significantly stronger negative correlations among managers. Employee volunteering did not significantly moderate the relationship between CSR and organizational cynicism in both groups. The implications of these results on human resource management theory and practice are discussed.     

Bridging the gap between corporate social responsibility and new green product success: The role of green organizational identity

In this study we explore the relationship between corporate social responsibility and new green product success based on organizational identity theory. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 150 companies in China. The results indicate that corporate social responsibility positively affects both green organizational identity and green adaptive ability. We also find that green organizational identity and green adaptive ability are positively influences on new green product success. In addition, we find that green organizational identity partially mediates the relationship between corporate social responsibility and green adaptive ability. Moreover, green organizational identity fully mediates the link between corporate social responsibility and new green product success. This means that corporate social responsibility indirectly and positively affects new green product success through green organizational identity. These results suggest that managers should seek to enhance their organizational sense of green identity and improve their organizational green adaptive ability, which will facilitate their firm's sustainable development. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings for environmental policy are also discussed.     

东方管理学视角的企业知识型员工管理

知识经济时代,企业的核心资源是知识型员工。本文认为企业应结合知识型员工的特点,将东方管理学的核心思想———"人为为人"思想有机地运用到管理中,注重从"利他"角度着眼,追求让知识型员工达到关系和谐与身心健康的目标,让企业达到持续提高工作绩效和竞争能力的目标。文中探索的主要实现途径包括:树立知识型员工是第一客户的理念;建立服从知识与服从权威同样重要的舆论氛围;管理者要以身作则,率先垂范;充分授权,注重沟通,提高知识型员工的参与感;识别需求,有效激励,探索按知分配;开展以提升创新能力为核心的培训开发;关爱知识型员工的身心健康;从有利于知识型员工发挥价值的角度,优化改造组织结构。     

Line Managers’ Rationales for Professionals’ Reduced‐Load Work in Embracing and Ambivalent Organizations

This study examines line managers’ rationales regarding reduced‐load work (RLW), an emerging talent management practice allowing professionals to reduce their workload and take a pay cut, while actively remaining on a career path. Unlike flextime and telework, RLW addresses professionals’ core problems of rising work hours and workloads. Interviews with 42 managers in 20 North American employers suggested that managers were more likely to support RLW for employees whom they saw as (1) high‐performers, (2) flexible in their use of RLW, and (3) doing conducive jobs. Interviews with 20 HR experts and 24 senior executives revealed four dimensions of organizational support, two cultural (senior management support and discourse on career penalties) and two structural (adaptation of HR systems and organizational diffusion). In embracing organizations there was a higher frequency of more supportive managers than there was in ambivalent organizations. Managers’ rationales were connected to their organizational contexts, albeit loosely, suggesting managerial implementation agency. The same rationales were more likely to be used in supportive ways in embracing contexts and in less supportive ways in ambivalent contexts. This study suggests that managerial and organizational support for flexible talent management practices dovetail in nuanced and important ways. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The Unbounded Gatherer: Possibilities for posthuman writing-reading

This article develops a posthuman approach to authorship to challenge implied distinctions and superiorities between the social and material worlds, which can detach academics and their writing from societies and ecosystems. By reimagining academic texts that are open for richer interpretation and accessible to diverse audiences, this article offers two main contributions. Firstly, I develop a conceptualisation of the posthuman author as an 'unbounded gatherer', adding to others' attempts to destabilise predominant humanistic ways of writing about managing and organizing that view authors as autonomous agents. Secondly, by developing the idea of 'mediators' as a means to explore how the sociomaterial is implicated in writing, debates about materiality in writing are extended. Through an illustration of posthuman writing, five emergent categories of mediators are analysed, and three textual practices are performed and examined.     

Telling Tales: Management Gurus' Narratives and the Construction of Managerial Identity

This paper examines the reasons for the apparently powerful impact of management gurus' ideas (i.e. guru theory) on senior managers. An examination of the limited literature on management gurus and other related literatures suggests three explanations for the appeal of guru theory for senior managers. The first set of explanations relates to various features of management work which may heighten managers' receptivity to guru ideas. The second set focuses on the gurus themselves and emphasizes the form in which they are presented (i.e. public performances). The final set of explanations highlights the importance of the socioeconomic and cultural context within which guru theories emerge and become widely adopted. A number of criticisms of these explanations are offered: that they define the manager as passive, that the flow of ideas is one way (guru to manager), that they rely on an academic conception of knowledge. An alternative explanation of their success is outlined which suggests that their work – their analyses, presentations and theories – offer attractive conceptions of the role of managers which constitute the identity of the modern senior manager as an heroic, transformative leader. Gurus therefore not only constitute the organizational realities but also managers themselves     

Organizational scandal on social media: Workers whistleblowing on YouTube and Facebook

The paper explores the emergence of organizational scandals on social media, and how the communicative dynamics of such scandals evolve as a social drama. I propose that when whistleblowers utilize information technologies to expose evidence of organizational misconduct, they, and their audiences, engage in meta- organizational discourse: The reflexive – immediate and durational – interactions through which organizational stakeholders instigate organizational scandals on social media, negotiate the normative boundaries of whistleblowing, and (de)legitimize the act of disclosing managerial transgressions online. I examine an organizational scandal embedded in the recent wave of workers’ unionization struggles in Israel in which whistleblowers performed the role of investigative journalists by posting a video on YouTube exposing a senior manager trying to dissuade workers from joining the union. Following that, on workers’ unionization Facebook pages, union supporters and opponents vigorously deliberated the intentions and consequences of publicly shaming their manager and damaging the reputation of their company. Analyzing workers’ discourse suggests that participants from both sides experienced the scandal as something that affected all company employees. They acknowledged the high visibility of their social drama and recognized the potential impact of whistleblowing online across organizational spatial and temporal boundaries.     

Management Development In Europe: A Study In Cultural Contrast

Peter Lawrence is Professor of Comparative Management at Loughborough University and a member of the Human Resource and Change Management Research Unit. He argues that management development is less formalised and explicit in the countries of Continental Europe than it is in the Anglo-Saxon world. Using France and Germany as the main examples, he shows how their very different ways of making managers are shaped by cultural factors. Lawrence goes further by suggesting that these countries have a different conception of what management ‘is all about’. He implies that much of the recent talk of ‘internationalism’ is, in consequence, premature.     

When do threats mobilize managers for organizational change toward sustainability? An environmental belief model

In pursuit of counteracting today's environmental problems, corporate management will have to implement organizational changes factoring in sustainability, which is why it is important to understand exactly what leads managers to initiate these changes. It has been established that managers' personal values are critical for their behavior and that threats to these values can mobilize managers to change their actions. However, when confronted with environment-related threats, managers may face value conflicts and various tensions between their aim to implement sustainable changes and their desire to fulfill business requirements of their job positions. Only recently have researchers begun to investigate the underlying beliefs that may lead managers to initiate organizational change toward sustainability. Borrowing theoretical assumptions from the domain of health psychology (from the well-established health belief model), the present conceptual article develops an environmental belief model that specifies when exactly threats lead managers to initiate organizational change. The environmental belief model proposes that environment-related threats trigger change (i) when managers believe that their firms are susceptible to these threats, (ii) the threats are considered as serious for the company, (iii) the perceived benefits of the change outperform (iv) the perceived barriers, and when there is (v) an external cue (e.g., an information campaign). All these propositions are supported with empirical findings from business contexts. Besides theoretical advancement on the role of environmental threats as precipitators of organizational change, the model provides guidance on how to frame environment-related threats that will mobilize managers for organizational change toward sustainability.     

Can business‐oriented managers be effective leaders for corporate sustainability? A study of integrative and instrumental logics

This qualitative study investigates whether the views of managers need to be congruent with the corporate sustainability (CS) logics—either integrative or instrumental—of their employing organization. We assessed the CS performance of 25 organizations within the Australian forestry and wood products industry and analyzed the CS orientations of 32 senior managers within these companies to explore whether their individual CS views were consistent with organizational CS logics. The findings indicate that, in general, better performing organizations are led by managers that hold the integrative view, whereas poorer performing organizations are more likely to have managers with an instrumental view of CS. Nonetheless, there were noteworthy exceptions to this conclusion. The findings indicate that, under certain industry conditions, managers who hold an instrumental view may be able to generate ecological and social organizational outcomes that are at least equal to those produced by integrative managers.     

Accounting for Management and Managing Accounting: Reflections on Recent Changes in the UK

This paper uses data derived from interviews carried out in a number of UK companies to explore the extent to which management concerns are driven by accounting practices, and also how accounting practices are mediated by the views that managers have of the role of accounting. The paper also analyses accounts given by UK managers of the ways in which changes in accounting are being managed. Two specific issues relating to accounting change are examined: (1) the impact of new information technology on accounting change, and (2) the competition between accounting and alternative bodies of expertise as mechanisms for change. In studying accounting in the context of wider organizational change, the paper focuses on a number of distinct, yet related, themes: (1) management accounting’s power to reinvent itself; (2) the interface between management accounting practices and employee empowerment (as one example of ‘new’ management practices); and, (3) contradictions in using management accounting calculi to facilitate the ‘new’ organization.     

The role of line managers in employee career management: an attachment theory perspective

Line managers increasingly play a key role in organizational career development systems, yet few studies have examined the nature of this role or its implications for employee career attitudes and behaviors. In two studies, we used attachment theory to explore this issue. In Study 1, in-depth interviews (N = 20) showed that employees viewed career management as a relational process in which line managers are expected to act as ‘caregiver’ to support individualized career development. Study 2 was a large-scale international survey (N = 891). Participants scoring higher on attachment avoidance in their line manager relationships reported more negative perceptions of career growth opportunities, lower participation in organizational career development activities and higher turnover intentions. Trust in the organization partially mediated the relationship. Theoretical and practical implications for HRM are discussed.     

Factory Innovations And Management Machinations: The Productive And Repressive Relations of Power

This article explores how power is exercised by managers in both 'repressive' ways so as to chase out or deny alternative interests/subjectivities and in ways which are 'productive' of the subjectivity of those they employ and indeed their own subjectivity. Rather than necessarily an intention of managers, exercising power in productive and repressive ways, is a condition and consequence of the strategies they deploy. Nonetheless, the concern here is to question the totalizing effects of power whether in relation to management strategy, total quality management, business process reengineering or culture change. Through exploring innovation in an established automobile manufacturing company, it is argued that a necessary though not sufficient condition of such a prospect, is that managers reconstitute themselves. It is demonstrated that such a reconstitution is problematic when one considers managers as thinking, social beings, situated in a historical context of power and inequality rather than structural automatons or agents that are free of power.     

An Exploration of Two Competing Perspectives on Informational Contexts in Top Management Strategic Issue Interpretation

Two disparate theoretical views of how informational contexts affect managerial sensemaking and decision making appear in organizational research. An organizational information processing perspective posits that increasing the flow of information within and between organizations will enhance environmental awareness. In contrast, behavioural decision making and social cognition research suggest that information may increase the occurrence or magnitude of overconfidence and illusions of control. These competing predictions were examined by means of an investigation of the relationship between informational contexts and top managers' strategic issue interpretation. Findings indicate that managers whose organizations have environmental information readily available to them perceive higher control over issues than managers in organizations with lower informational availability. Moreover, managers in top management teams with higher information processing capacity seem to perceive higher degrees of control and manageability, and search for less data in issue interpretation, than managers in teams with lower information processing capacity. These results offer some support for the behavioural decision making and social cognition perspective, and question the organizational information processing prediction that organizations engaging in active information processing are more aware of the environment and more likely to assess environmental developments, trends or events in a more vigilant manner.     

Charity shops in sectoral contexts: the view from the boardroom

Charity shops seem inherently contradictory in many ways. This paper unravels some of the contradictions by analysing charity shops in their ‘sectoral contexts’. First it puts forward different meanings of ‘sector’ and introduces notions of ‘sector values’. Then it presents results from empirical research into UK charity shop organisations, to show how senior managers of charity shop chains deal with ‘sectoral contradictions’. Finally, it asks how the sectoral contexts influence the management philosophies and marketing strategies (in the broadest sense) of these senior managers. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications