Increasing Corporate Social Responsibility Through an Employee-centered Approach

As the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) literature has developed, it appears that a dominant paradigm has emerged. Both scholars who study CSR and those who write about its organizational application have largely converged on CSR as an organizational strategy issue. Viewing CSR as a matter of top-level strategy unwittingly links it to a particular conceptualization of organizational change—a top-down perspective. We suggest that the dominance of this traditional view of organizational change is limiting the study of CSR. Thus, we seek to increase awareness of an alternative model, one that complements the strategic view. Specifically, we describe a model of CSR organizational change that suggests two things. First we assert that significant change can be initiated at lower organizational levels as well as from the top. And second, we suggest that the change can be accomplished in small steps and involve only a portion of the organization, as opposed to an overarching organizational strategy. We present our employee-centered approach to CSR change as an addition to the traditional top-down view.     

What Is Organizational Strategy? A Language‐Based View

Under what conditions does a collective strategy exist among organizational members? Where should a scholar look for one? To offer one way to start solving these puzzles I propose a view of organizational strategy as a language game that governs the use of strategy labels at the level of the organization. Organizational strategy exhibits a division of linguistic labour, where responsibility for key concepts is assigned to particular individuals or organizational functions. Such linguistic experts oversee the proper use and maintenance of strategy language. The language‐based view helps to understand linkages between institutional, network, organizational, and micro level views on strategy. It also problematizes widely held intuitions regarding the relationship between strategy and organizational outcomes.     

The impact of organizational climate and strategic fit on firm performance

A firm's organizational climate—its degree of trust, morale, conflict, rewards equity, leader credibility, resistance to change, and scapegoating—helps determine its success. Likewise, organizational strategy—the firm's commitment to capital investment, innovation, quality, and the like—has also been found to be an important determinant of firm performance. However, prior work has most often explored the impact of climate and strategy separately, and not in tandem. In our study, we develop a measure of organizational climate comprised of tension, resistance to change, and conflict, and go on to show that at least for some pairings of a firm's climate and its strategy, there is a negative effect on return on assets (ROA). © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The Relationships Between Adhocracy and Clan Cultures and Tacit Oriented KM Strategy

Abstract

In this study knowledge is considered as explicit and tacit; and in line with this, knowledge management strategy that focuses on tacit knowledge is identified as tacit oriented knowledge management strategy. Organizational culture, which is one of the crucial antecedents of knowledge management process, is categorized into four types by using two dimensions—external versus internal orientation and formal versus informal organizational process—as adhocracy, clan, market and hierarchy. And the relationships between adhocracy, and clan culture and tacit oriented knowledge management strategy are investigated. Also the industrial environment hostility is used as a moderator between adhocracy and clan cultures, and tacit oriented knowledge management strategy.

According to the regression analyses, adhocracy and clan cultures have positive effects on tacit oriented knowledge management strategy; and the impact (magnitude) of adhocracy culture is approximately the same as the clan culture on tacit oriented knowledge management strategy. Also it was found that greater industry environment hostility, the greater relationship between adhocracy and clan cultures, and tacit oriented knowledge management Strategy.     

No business is an island: The network concept of business strategy

The purpose of this article is to explore the contributions that could be made to the conceptual frame of reference for business strategy management by one of the research programmes which focuses on the organization–environment interface, and to which a network approach has been applied. We start by examining some of the assumptions underlying the current “strategy management doctrine”. The network model of the organization–environment interface is then reviewed and three central issues of the strategy management doctrine are discussed from the viewpoint of the network model: (1) organizational boundaries, (2) determinants of organizational effectiveness, and (3) the process of managing business strategy.The conclusion reached is that in all three areas changes are required in the assumptions of the business strategy model. Our arguments stem from a basic proposition about the situations described by the network model: continuous interaction with other parties constituting the context with which the organization interacts endows the organization with meaning and a role. When this proposition applies, any attempt to manage the behaviour of the organization will require a shift in focus away from the way the organization allocates and structures its internal resources and towards the way it relates its own activities and resources to those of the other parties constituting its context. Such a shift in focus entails a somewhat different view of the meaning of organizational effectiveness: what does it depend on and how can it be managed?     

How Do Controls Impact Employee Trust in the Employer?

Do organizational controls facilitate or hinder employees’ trust in their organization? We addressed this question through a mixed‐methods design using three studies. Based on a literature review and an open‐response survey study (Study 1), we developed a theoretical model proposing that organizational control is positively related to employees’ trust in their organization, and that this relationship is mediated by procedural fairness and organizational prestige. This mediated model was tested and supported in a quantitative survey of 582 European managers and professional employees from a range of organizations (Study 2). A complementary, qualitative interview‐based study (Study 3) confirmed that well‐implemented controls facilitate trust in the organization; however, poorly implemented control systems that are inconsistent, overly rigid, or incentivize untrustworthy behavior can undermine trust in the organization. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Making Innovation Happen in a Megaproject: London's Crossrail Suburban Railway System

Isolated pockets of innovation can be found in projects—such as the novel solution used to redesign the Velodrome roof during the London 2012 Olympics—but there have been few, if any, systematic efforts to manage innovation in a megaproject. This paper presents the initial findings of an ongoing three‐year (2012–2014) action research project between Crossrail and researchers at Imperial College London and University College London. Action research is well suited to a setting where an intervention is required to diagnose and solve an organizational problem and produce scientific findings (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Van de Ven, 2007). Undertaken in collaboration with practitioners, the aim of action research is to transform the research setting through a process of critical inquiry and action. Our engagement with Crossrail aimed to formulate and implement an innovation strategy to improve the performance and outcomes of the project. We identified four stages—or windows of opportunity—to intervene to generate, discover, and implement innovation in a megaproject: (1) the bridging window during the front‐end when ideas, learning, and practices from other projects and industries can be used to create an innovative project process, organization, and governance structure; (2) the engaging window, when tendering and contractual processes can be used by the client to encourage contractors and suppliers to develop novel ideas and innovative solutions; (3) the leveraging window, when all the parties involved—clients, delivery partners, and suppliers—are mobilized to develop novel ideas, new technologies, and organizational practices to improve performance; and (4) the exchanging window at the back‐end, when ideas and resources for innovation can be (re)combined with those of other projects in the wider innovation ecosystem to improve performance. The first two stages had largely occurred when we became involved in the Crossrail project in 2012. Our intervention addressed the final two stages, when we assisted in the development and implementation of an innovation strategy. Core to this strategy was a coordinated mobilization of the innovative capabilities across the project supply chain. Though, to be successful, this approach had to be open enough to span organizational boundaries beyond the supply chain, reaching into the broader ecosystem. The four windows provide a valuable new heuristic for organizing innovation in megaprojects, pointing to areas where project managers can craft targeted innovation interventions and compare their efforts with those of others.     

Network design in games with spillovers

How should an organization be designed in order to provide its members with minimal incentives to defect? And how does the optimal design depend on the type of strategic interaction between defectors and remaining organizational members? This paper addresses such issues in a game theoretic model of cooperation, in which an organization is formally represented by a connected network, and where gains from cooperation are given by a partition function. We show that critical structural features of the organization depend in a clear-cut way on the sign of spillovers. In particular, positive spillovers favor the adoption of dispersed and centralized forms, while negative spillovers favor cohesive and horizontal ones. Moreover, if the organizational form determines all the communication possibilities of members, a highly centralized organization—the star—emerges under positive spillovers, whereas two horizontal architectures—the circle and the complete—emerge under negative spillovers.     

Enactment,Sensemaking and Decision Making: Redesign Processes in the 1976 Reorganization of US Intelligence

Weick’s theories of organizing and sensemaking help enrich the assumptions in the organization design school. This study builds on Weick’s theories of sensemaking to illustrate how three fundamental organization design assumptions — dominant variables, causal laws and executive dictates — were found to be restrictive in the explanation of redesign processes in the 1976 reorganization of the US intelligence community. The assumption of dominant variables was challenged by the appearance of a multitude of events, or enactments, which were selected by organization members for further attention. The assumption of causal laws was challenged by the appearance of individual‐level cause maps which were filtered, through sensemaking processes, into organization‐level workable realities. The assumption of executive dictates was challenged by the appearance of attempts to punctuate redesign processes as organizational decisions. The study suggests value in moving from simple organization design assumptions to more reliable findings drawn from detailed observations of redesign processes.     

Organizational design in public procurement: A stakeholder approach

Organizing the purchasing function for public bodies and other non-profit and/or non-market bodies starts with the selection of an appropriate organizational strategy. In order to be able to select between generic strategies like low cost and differentiator or strategies described as operational excellence, customer intimacy and product leadership, a stakeholder based model was used. The selected strategy forms the basis to design the nature of three organizational elements: policies (P), organization (O) and processes (P). The aspect system of the purchasing function and the sub-system of the purchasing department reflect the nature of these three POP elements. It helps to translate the selected organizational strategy into a appropriate supplier strategy and clarifies the idealized mix of suppliers in terms of portfolio archetypes. Ten policy aspects of purchasing and four organizational aspects are described to redesign purchasing.     

Leading for Long‐Term Performance: Matching the Behavior to the Situation

Is there one right way to lead, or does it all “depend?” The right answer will inform the right leadership development strategy. A recent study by McKinsey & Co. using survey data collected from 165 organizations and over 365,000 respondents globally suggests that the answer is both. Two types of behavior sets emerged from organizations that enjoyed higher member perceptions of leadership effectiveness and attained higher levels of organizational health (the latter predicts long‐term financial and operational performance). We combined these into a model that prescribes a set of “baseline” behaviors that should always be evident, complemented by another set of behaviors (“situational behaviors”) that should be differentially emphasized depending on the level of organizational health. Both the content of the behavior and its relative emphasis are critical to either set. The current paper combines these into a model of organization‐wide leadership and concludes with action implications for organizations’ leadership development strategy.     

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.     

Administrative reforms as routines

Administrative reforms are sometimes perceived as dramatic organizational changes solving administrative problems once and for all. In this article, it is argued that reforms reflect organizational stability more than organizational change. Reforms are driven by problems, solutions and forgetfulness, which are all common phenomena in modem organizations. Reforms are also driven by reforms—reforms are highly self-referential. Organizations may have reasons for avoiding reforms, for instance because reforms may increase a preference for values that the organization has particular difficulty in achieving rather than improving performance. Paradoxically, one effective way of stopping reforms is to try to implement them and to propose new reforms, which is a further reason of why reforms are common in organizations.     

Identification and Trust in Public Organizations: A communicative approach

Abstract

Little empirical research has examined the link between organizational identification and organizational trust. Identification presupposes a level of consistency in its object, and this study proposes that trust can reduce uncertainty between organization and employee, enabling a bond between the two to form. Secondly, this research looks at how interaction with various organizational groups may affect organizational trust, thereby indirectly encouraging identification. It is thus proposed that organizational trust should be understood as an important mechanism mediating the relationship between interaction with employees at different levels of the organizational hierarchy and identification with the organization as a whole.     

Learning and relationship orientation: an empirical examination in European museums

• The purpose of this paper is to assess the interrelations between learning orientation, innovation strategy, relationship orientation and economic and social performance in the management of cultural organizations such as museums. We first provide a review of the literature addressing the main constructs involved in the research: learning orientation, innovation, relationship orientation and performance, and we detail the model's hypotheses reflecting the interrelations amongst the proposed variables. Building on extensive literature, a model is developed and empirically tested using survey data collected from 491 European museums in Spain, France, Italy and the UK. Data are analysed through structural equation modelling. In the present study, evidence is found to support the positive and significant link between learning orientation and internal (organizational innovation) as well as external (relationship orientation) changes in museums. Further, we find that organizational innovation and relationship orientation aid the introduction of greater technological developments in these organizations. We also find evidence to support the idea that learning orientation, innovation strategy and relationship orientation impact the economic and social performance of museums. Findings clearly show that achieving organizational objectives through learning processes necessarily entails the introduction of internal changes—innovation—and external relationships—relationship orientation.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Top Teams and Strategy in a UK University

This paper reports on the results of an in-depth study of how a top management team (TMT) puts strategy into practice in a UK university. A study of the top team in Warwick University was conducted to analyse how strategy was formulated and implemented. The results suggest that a combination of two broad theoretical lenses provides useful analytical insight. These are strategy as practice and strategy as process. The main elements of this university's strategy result from an interplay of localized routines and patterns of action within an organizational context, which both produces and is a product of such actions. The TMT itself was found to be clearly identifiable and stable in composition. The team exhibited identifiable patterns of strategic thinking and acting. However, the role of organizational structure was also found to be a key influence on the actions and processes of the TMT with strong central control tendencies in the team being counterbalanced by devolved operational control to individual departments. The data also reveal inter-relationships between organizational structures and the TMT in four key areas: direction-setting, monitoring and control, the alloca- tion of resources, and processes of interaction. The overall conclusion is that to understand how strategy is practised, analysis needs to focus on how patterns of action are associated with the characteristics of both the team and the wider organization. The nature and characteristics of these patterns can be related to how strategy is put into practice.     

Does alignment matter? The performance implications of HR roles connected to organizational strategy

For the HR function to have a positive impact on performance and thus strategically add value to the organization, it has been suggested to redefine its traditional operational role. However, to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between these HR roles and performance, their alignment with the organizational strategy should not be ignored. In this paper, we therefore focus not only on whether the operational and strategic HR roles are linked to performance, but also on the extent to which their alignment with the applied organizational strategy actually matters for performance. We carried out a survey study among 336 respondents either holding an HR function or being responsible for HR-related tasks in various organizations. We found a positive effect of the strategic role on performance, and also how it might substitute a lack of innovation strategy. Further, we found an alignment effect between a cost strategy and the operational HR role in relation to organizational performance. We discuss these findings based on the literature and provide some practical recommendations for further developing the role of HR.     

混合型组织的可持续成长：多重紧张的战略响应

本文从混合型组织的“多重紧张识别-多重紧张影响效应-多重紧张的战略响应”这一逻辑链条出发，建构混合型组织紧张表现形式的钻石模型，识别出以使命紧张和制度紧张为表现形式的本源性紧张和以战略紧张、治理紧张、运营紧张和身份紧张为表现形式的引致性紧张。在此基础上，提出紧张度对混合型组织可持续成长影响效应的倒U型关系，认为恶性紧张容易引发单向性使命漂移、内外部合法性冲突、组织治理失灵、扩展性受限等组织脆弱性问题，良性紧张则可以激发组织创新性、促进制度逻辑重构并促进组织身份制度化，有利于组织的可持续成长。针对混合型组织出现的多重紧张，本文结合紧张度和混合元素性质认知两个维度，拓展性地提出针对“紧张”的适度竞争、适当激发、分离战略、整合战略和弹性战略五种响应战略，并基于紧张形式与组织类别建立针对恶性紧张的响应战略适配矩阵。     

Metaphor and the Dynamics of Knowledge in Organization Theory: A Case Study of the Organizational Identity Metaphor*

abstract Despite the increased salience of metaphor in organization theory, there is still very little conceptual machinery for capturing and explaining how metaphor creates and/or reorders knowledge within organization theory. Moreover, prior work on metaphor has insufficiently accounted for the context of interpreting a metaphor. Many metaphors in organization theory, including the ‘organizational identity’ metaphor, have often been treated in singular and monolithic terms; seen to offer a similar or largely synonymous interpretation to theorists and researchers working along the entire spectrum of disciplines (e.g. organizational behaviour, organizational psychology) in organization theory. We argue in this paper that contextual variation however exists in the interpretation of metaphors in organization theory. This argument is developed by proposing and elaborating on a so‐called image‐schematic model of metaphor, which suggests that the image‐schemata (abstract imaginative structures) that are triggered by the metaphorical comparison of concepts may vary among individuals. Accordingly, once different schemata are triggered the completion and interpretation of a metaphor may equally vary among different individuals or, indeed, research communities. These points associated with the image‐schematic model of metaphor are illustrated with a case study of the ‘organizational identity’ metaphor. The case study shows that this particular metaphor has spiralled out into different research communities and has been comprehended in very different ways as different communities work from very different conceptions, or image‐schemata, of ‘organization’ and ‘identity’, and use different theoretical frameworks and constructs as a result. The implications of the image‐schematic view of metaphor for knowledge development and theoretical progress in organization theory are discussed.     

The role of organizational culture in the relationship between leadership and organizational commitment: an empirical study in a Greek organization

The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of relationships between organizational culture and leadership behaviours in affecting employees' commitment to their work organization. Building on organizational commitment literature, this study used a survey methodology. Empirical evidence was obtained from 300 employees working in a large Greek service company. The analyses indicated that the culture orientations examined served as mediators in the relationship between leader behaviour and followers' affective and normative commitment to the organization. The findings also indicated that continuance commitment is a two-dimensional construct; the ‘personal sacrifices’ dimension was found to be related to organizational culture and transactional contingent reward. This research paper has key messages for practitioners contributing to the fields of commitment, organizational culture, leadership and human resource management.