ENACTING NEW PERSPECTIVES THROUGH WORK ACTIVITIES DURING ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION

This article explores a behavioural counterpart to the changes in interpretive schemes that characterize organizational transformation. It investigates the experiences of organizational members (especially lower level members) who introduce new perspectives through the work they carry out during transformation. Results of a multi-year study in a religious order undergoing transformation indicated that members engaged in work that enacted a new perspective were less likely than other members to be appointed to organizational committees and more likely to leave the order. Members involved in work enacting a new perspective who remained in the order came to perceive themselves as less important to leaders but more influential in the order than other members did.     

Following in Partners’ Footsteps: An Uncertainty‐Reduction Perspective on Firms’ Choice of New Markets

In this paper, we develop a new perspective on what determines firms’ choice of new markets for entry. First, drawing on the open‐system theoretical tradition and literature on inter‐organizational networks, we advance and empirically test the proposition that firms tend to enter new markets to which they are connected by partnership ties. We then show that this network influence is filtered through the structure of firms’ network connections to new markets and firms’ experience. Specifically, we find that multiplicity of connections to new markets, as well as the extensiveness of firms’ experience and its relevance to new markets weaken the effect of network ties on firms’ choice of new markets. The results of this study indicate that firms’ choice of new markets for entry is a nuanced process that is affected by the interplay of firms’ collaborative ties, the structure of their network, and firms’ internal capabilities. We test our hypotheses in the empirical context of the U.S. venture capital (VC) industry using panel data over a 23‐year period and find broad support for them.     

CEO Experiences: Effects on the Choice of FDI Entry Mode*

abstract Drawing on the strategic management and international business literatures, this study examines the relationships between the experiences of newly selected CEOs and their choice of foreign direct investment (FDI) entry modes. Based on a sample
of 380 foreign market entry events involving acquisitions, greenfield investments, and joint ventures, our findings indicate that CEOs with less firm experience preferred acquisitions and greenfield investments to joint ventures and, older CEOs were more likely to opt for joint ventures over greenfield investments. In addition, CEOs with throughput functional experience favoured acquisitions over joint ventures and greenfield investments. Finally, CEO international experience was associated with a greater propensity to choose greenfield investments and acquisitions over joint ventures and also greenfield investments over acquisitions. The implications of the findings from the perspective of theory and managerial practice are discussed, along with possible directions for future research.     

组织支持对新生代农民工职业发展的影响研究——以浙江省为例

随着中国社会经济发展,新生代农民工已经成为农民工群体主体,但其身份、社会地位仍处于边缘地带。基于此,文章从组织和员工双赢的视角,以浙江省189名新生代农民工为研究对象,采用实证研究方法探讨组织支持对农民工职业发展影响机理。研究发现:在控制社会-人口和人力资本特征,组织支持对新生代农民工职业发展有显著正向影响;组织支持对新生代农民工职业发展各个维度有正向影响。     

Managers as Practical Authors: Reconstructing our Understanding of Management Practice

In Conversational Realities (1993), John Shotter draws on social constructionist suppositions to conceptualize management as a rhetorically-responsive activity in which managers act as 'practical authors' of their social realities (pp. 148–59). From this perspective, organizations are reworked from permanent, independent social structures to relational landscapes continually shifting from the imaginary to the imagined in interactive moments. Managing is seen as an embodied and situated dialogical activity in which managers act as authors of organizational realities through their conversations. In this article, I take as my central premise, the constitutive and metaphorical nature of language, and explore the practical, enacted aspects of Shotter's concept of authorship. Specifically, I suggest authorship may relate to how managers attempt to construct a sense of who they are, create a shared sense of features of their organizational landscape, and how they may move others to talk or act in different ways through their dialogical practices. I draw on research conversations with managers to explore how everyday poetic talk may be crucial to the process of constructing self, realities, and meaning. This 'reconstruction' of management practice offers both a different way of thinking about managing and potential dialogical resources which may allow managers to author or construct organizational experiences in more deliberate ways.     

Technological Expansion: the Interaction Between Diversification Strategy and Organizational Capability

This study analyses technological expansion by examining the interaction between firms' diversification strategy and internal capabilities. We argue that when new technologies emerge, firms that were actively pursuing diversification do not have equal intention to adopt the technologies. For firms that possess internal capabilities similar or relevant to the new technologies, their diversification strategy facilitates technological expansion, otherwise diversification strategy negatively affects technological adoption. This study improves our understanding on technological expansion. Existing studies try to identify organizational characteristics that facilitate or impede firm entry into new technological fields. This research reveals that the same organizational characteristic (e.g. diversification strategy) can exhibit different effects on technological adoption. It facilitates technological expansion if firms' existing capabilities can be applied to new technologies, otherwise it impedes new technological adoption.     

The impact of technological learning on NPD outcomes: The moderating effect of project complexity

The innovative status of an emerging market is largely attributed to the technological learning maturity of its finest multinational companies (MNCs). This study uses the information processing perspective to investigate the impact of inter-/intra-functional technological learning (knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation and organizational memory) of 105 project teams on new product development (NPD) outcomes (project success, development speed and product entry timeliness) across nine MNCs. Of the four technological learning dimensions, only organizational memory did not possess a direct relationship with any NPD outcome dimensions. This study further contrasts the above impact across varying levels of project complexity. Information interpretation and organizational memory contribute to project success for low complexity projects. Conversely, for high complexity projects, development speed is contingent on organizational memory.     

组织能力视野下的企业国际化模式研究——以四川长虹为例

组织能力是企业国际化经营的内在基础,也是持续竞争优势的源泉,它对企业国际化模式的选择会产生根本性的影响。文章借鉴传统的组织能力理论、国际化进入模式理论和国际化目标市场选择理论,尝试构建了组织能力视野下的企业国际化模式选择模型;并以四川长虹的国际化进程为研究主线,分别对其国际化的探索和拓展阶段所选择的国际化模式进行归纳与评价,以此来解构和检验模型,最后提出了我国家电企业国际化模式选择的几点建议。     

Introduction to designing information and organizations with a positive lens

The role and potential contribution of a positive lens to the design of systems and organizations is the focus of this introductory essay. The positive lens refers to a perspective in the social sciences that emphasizes the capacity of people and organizations to construct better work environments, customer experiences and socio-technical systems through a positive discourse. Joining a positive lens on organizing with the transformative power of design thinking opens new horizons and uncovers previously overlooked possibilities for creating organizational and social well-being. This volume aims to introduce design with a positive lens into the research on information systems and organizations and to explore its potential value.     

Ethnography,Reality, and Truth: The Vital Need for Studies of ‘How Things Work’ in Organizations and Management

There is considerable potential for ethnography to play a larger and more mainstream role in organization and management studies. Ethnography is not a research method. It is a way of writing about and analysing social life which has roots in both the sciences and the humanities. Whilst it prioritizes close and intensive observation in the gathering of information and insights, it may additionally and potentially use any of the full range of other research methods. A powerful rationale for ‘good’ ethnographic work is offered by Pragmatist Realist principles of truth, reality, and relevance‐to‐practice. Research based on these principles investigates the realities of ‘how things work’ in organizations. In doing this, it rigorously grounds and contextualizes the activities which the researcher observes and the accounts which they receive from organizational members. To do this well, researchers must avoid being diverted from the analysis of organizational patterns and managerial processes by researchers trying to ‘get into the heads’ of organizational members in order to capture their subjective experiences. Various moves can be identified which would encourage and enable more people to work ethnographically and to produce research which is inherently critical and is unfettered by attachment to any narrow specialist method, concept or ‘perspective’.     

Managing metadata: Networks of practice,technological frames,and metadata work in a digital library

The organizations that develop information systems are usually composed of members and groups with different technological backgrounds and experiences. While these different backgrounds are necessary to support the many dimensions of information system development, at the same time they can result in barriers to sharing organizational knowledge, and can thus impede this work. Understanding how the technological backgrounds of organizational groups are constituted and mediated thus provides useful insight into how information system development occurs in organizational contexts. This article contributes to this discussion with a qualitative and interpretive case study of a small team engaged in creating metadata for a digital library. A number of unexpected and recalcitrant problems were encountered that delayed this metadata work. Drawing on theories of networks of practice, technological frames, and perspective making and perspective taking, the article uses ethnographic- and action research-based interviews, to probe project members' understanding of metadata. The analysis identified different networks of practice and technological frames in the project, including the IT workers, who had a systems administration perspective, and the faculty members, who had a theoretical research perspective. The tensions caused by these differences are described, as are the ways in which the project resolved them. Two findings are that the intercommunal negotiation was established not just between individual networks of practice in the project, but with reference to an emerging community of practice that served as a boundary object, and that intercommunal negotiation also had to be carried out diachronically across time, with this latter form of negotiation being difficult to achieve.     

A multilevel perspective on organizational buying behavior in coopetition–an exploratory case study

This article offers a new and interesting perspective on organizational buying behavior by focusing on the simultaneous existence of both cooperation and competition, that is, coopetition. Coopetition may bring undesired knowledge leaks, opportunism, and weakened competitive advantage, and it is therefore important to understand how coopetition develops over time through interrelated activities on multiple levels. The article aims to improve our understanding of the development of organizational buying behavior through adopting a multilevel perspective on coopetition. The empirical study is based on exploratory case study research involving a single case from the manufacturing sector featuring a large multinational buyer and its supplier. The findings of the study show that organizational buying behavior in coopetition develops through interrelated activities on the individual, the organizational, and the relational level. Over time, dominating activities evolve from being ambivalent on an individual level to become authoritative on a company level and finally to being opportunistic on a relational level. Theoretically, this study contributes to organizational buying behavior literature by examining coopetition from a multilevel perspective. From a managerial perspective, the findings establish the importance of recognizing individual-, and organizational-level activities.     

Commitment before and after: An evaluation and reconceptualization of organizational commitment

A review of the organizational commitment literature has pointed out several advantages as well as some limitations of the approach advanced by Meyer and Allen (Meyer, P.J. and Allen, J.N. (1997). Commitment in the workplace: Theory, research, and application. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.). The advantages include good psychometric properties of the current scales, acceptable discriminant validity of the three dimensions, and research findings that showed the usefulness and acceptable content validity of the three-dimensional approach. Some of the limitations are limited predictive validity, conceptual ambiguity of continuance commitment, and concept redundancy between normative and affective commitment. This paper suggests a conceptualization that builds upon the strengths of the current approaches and minimizes their limitations. The proposed theory contends that organizational commitment is two-dimensional. One dimension is instrumental in nature and the second is affective. In addition, a sharp difference needs to be made between commitment propensity that develops before one's entry into the organization and commitment attitudes that develop after one's entry into the organization. The advantages of the suggested theory and its implications for the understanding of organizational commitment and future research on it are discussed.     

Markteintritts- und Marktbearbeitungsstrategien kleiner und mittlerer Personalberatungen im Ausland

This article presents the results of an empirical research concerning the strategies of foreign market entry of small- and medium-sized Executive Search Firms from a resource-based perspective. The results show that they tend to mainly use cooperative forms of market entry, although not exclusively. In addition to this, they also opt for export strategies or the establishment of wholly-owned offices. The choice of a specific strategy is highly dependent on the social and human capital of an Executive Search Firm as well as on the experiences and attitudes of the management. The study is embedded in and broadens the existing knowledge of the internationalization of Professional Business Services as well as the internationalization of both small and medium-sized enterprises.     

Managing Persistent Tensions on the Frontline: A Configurational Perspective on Ambidexterity

Ambidexterity research has noted that firms’ simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation causes organizational tensions that are difficult to resolve. To make these tensions manageable, scholars have generally suggested that senior managers take the central role in designing organizational solutions, such as the structural separation or contextual integration of the exploratory and exploitative tasks. Yet, in an inductive study of ten corporate innovation initiatives, we find that our informants assigned far less importance to the senior managers’ initial design choices than to the frontline managers’ subsequent configurational practices. Frontline managers used these practices to constantly adapt and align their initiatives’ organizational contexts, which allowed them to cope with persistent exploration‐exploitation tensions in their daily business activities. Based on these empirical insights and drawing on paradox theory, we develop a configurational perspective on ambidexterity, where frontline managers play a more central, proactive, and strategic role than purported by the established design perspective on ambidexterity.     

数字经济时代下企业组织惯性的重构路径研究

组织惯性研究中"选择决定论"与"组织适应论"的视角冲突,割裂了企业对组织惯性的认知,难以形成相匹配的应对模式。文章从资源基础理论视角切入设计案例研究,研究发现企业组织惯性的重构路径会经历三个主要阶段:(1)组织外围结构先行演化,不断试错,形成可被纳入核心结构的能力;(2)基于形成的能力进行资源动员,丰富可能的资源和能力组合方案;(3)通过解构与重组惯性的方式构建动态调节机制。研究结论有助于丰富组织惯性和资源基础的研究文献,弥合了组织惯性研究的视角冲突,在组织变革中引入了管理者的资源管理能力;同时可为企业无法准确识别环境变化时提供一个处理组织惯性的可行指导方案,促使企业组织的成长演化过程向进化转变。     

ORGANIZATIONAL SYMBOLISM AND IDEOLOGY*

The purpose of this article is to discuss organizational symbolism research from a critique of ideology perspective. Various aspects of ideology as a metatheoretical concept are discussed. Criteria governing when it might be appropriate to conduct a critical analysis of ideological elements in research texts are also suggested. These include restricted social autonomy of researchers, socio-political relevance and ideological usefulness of research products, social fashionability of research areas, pseudo-objective style, absence of indicated self-reflection and lack of manifested awareness of the social context of research in research publications. The organizational symbolism research field is discussed in relation to ideology and some influential texts are interpreted in the light of ideology-critique. the criteria for a sensitive reading of research texts in terms of problematical ideological elements are applied and their relevance illustrated. the article also discusses the field of organizational symbolism in terms of Habermas' concepts of cognitive interests, emancipation and undistorted communication.     

The effects of expatriate demographic characteristics on adjustment: A social identity approach

As demand increases for expatriates to manage far‐flung operations in a global economy, scholars and practitioners are focusing their attention on the factors that contribute to expatriate success. One such factor is the support that expatriates receive from host country nationals (HCNs) with whom they work. Researchers interested in understanding expatriate success have not closely examined the phenomenon from an HCN perspective, however. At the same time, although we have gained a significant understanding of the roles of psychological, organizational, and contextual variables in the international assignment, there is still much to be understood about how expatriates' demographic characteristics affect their experiences in international assignments. Current findings regarding the effects of demographic characteristics often are inconsistent, highlighting the need for more complex theorizing. This article reviews recent research on the effects of expatriate demographic characteristics and proposes a social identity approach to understanding how these characteristics affect HCN support for the expatriate. It also seeks to develop a theory that addresses discrepancies in extant empirical findings, provides propositions to guide future research in the study of expatriates, and discusses implications for both researchers and practitioners. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A purposeful approach for implementing preventive measures among European teaching professionals: bullying,deteriorated organizational factors and the mediating role of job dissatisfaction in poor health perception

Abstract

This research aims at examining how workplace bullying, a collection of predominant organizational factors and job dissatisfaction may both directly and indirectly influence the emergence of negative health perception among teaching professionals in occupational settings. The method utilized for testing the research hypotheses is based on Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), which enables the simultaneous assessment of construct measurement and the estimation of hypothesized relationships. A sample population of 2328 European educators has been employed to reach research objectives. Results suggest that negative health perception escalates when there is a direct conditioned correlation between this factor and either bullying or certain working conditions, while indirect effects are unveiled when dissatisfaction is added to the research framework as mediating construct. From a theoretical perspective, this work contributes to human resource management research on the subject of detection and prevention of those underlying organizational constituents that might potentially undermine occupational health. From a utilitarian perspective, the findings of this research encapsulate promising implications not only for teaching professionals but also for educational institutions that pursue the continual improvement of health and performance in their educators through human resource management.     

A comprehensive conceptual and bibliometric study of person-centered methodologies

Person-centered approaches, such as latent profile analysis (LPA) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), have gained in popularity in organizational scholarship because of their ability to provide insight into how interrelations between a group of conditions can lead to a particular outcome. Despite the growing acceptance of person-centered approaches in social science research, traditional variable-centered approaches continue to prevail, although their dominance is increasingly questioned. This paper offers in-depth analysis of the current state of QCA and LPA from both a conceptual and a bibliometric perspective. This study thus aims to contextualize the role of person-centered methodologies in organizational scholarship. This aim is important, given the significance of exploring novel approaches to advance knowledge in organizational research. This paper provides scholars with quantifiable and readily comparable information on the use of these emerging but promising methods in organizational studies. Ultimately, this scientific contribution sheds light on the current and prospective applications of person-centered methods in research. Moreover, it offers scholars who are considering applying these methods objective analysis of the scientific production in this area thus far.