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.     

Informal networks: the company behind the chart

A glance at an organizational chart can show who's the boss and who reports to whom. But this formal chart won't reveal which people confer on technical matters or discuss office politics over lunch. Much of the real work in any company gets done through this informal organization with its complex networks of relationships that cross functions and divisions. According to consultants David Krackhardt and Jeffrey Hanson, managers can harness the true power in their companies by diagramming three types of networks: the advice network, which reveals the people to whom others turn to get work done; the trust network, which uncovers who shares delicate information; and the communication network, which shows who talks about work-related matters. Using employee questionnaires, managers can generate network maps that will get to the root of many organizational problems. When a task force in a computer company, for example, was not achieving its goals, the CEO turned to network maps to find out why. He discovered that the task force leader was central in the advice network but marginal in the trust network. Task force members did not believe he would look out for their interests, so the CEO used the trust map to find someone to share responsibility for the group. And when a bank manager saw in the network map that there was little communication between tellers and supervisors, he looked for ways to foster interaction among employees of all levels. As companies continue to flatten and rely on teams, managers must rely less on their authority and more on understanding these informal networks. Managers who can use maps to identify, leverage, and revamp informal networks will have the key to success.     

Independent Movement or Government Subcontractor? – Strategic Responses of Voluntary Organizations to Institutional Processes

The purpose of this paper is to identify factors that can explain differing responses of voluntary organizations to the pressure of homogenization that follows from interaction with public authorities. The paper is theoretically based on institutional organization theory and resource dependence theory, and empirically on research on voluntary organizations in the social sector. It is asserted that the following factors may explain voluntary organizations' ability to maintain autonomous in relation to public organizations: the characteristics of the organizational field, the focal organization's relations to the dominating organization in the field, organization characteristics and intra–organizational processes and strategies.     

商事信托法律构造研究

商事信托作为商事组织的一种形式,运用传统信托运作方式中所有权形式分割,责任与利益分离,受托人责任与风险承担来实现商事组织的灵活融资经营和受益人的信托收益。商事信托得益于信托的资产分割功能,使商事组织享有独立于信托所有人及其管理人的资产,得以自己名义经营管理、与第三人进行交易,产生独立的法律关系,承担独立法律责任,理应具有商事信托之独立法律主体地位,此乃我国商事信托发展和商事组织法之规范方向。     

How to invest in social capital.

Business runs better when people within a company have close ties and trust one another. But the relationships that make organizations work effectively are under assault for several reasons. Building such "social capital" is difficult in volatile times. Disruptive technologies spawn new markets daily, and organizations respond with constantly changing structures. The problem is worsened by the virtuality of many of today's workplaces, with employees working off-site or on their own. What's more, few managers know how to invest in such social capital. The authors describe how managers can help their organizations thrive by making effective investments in social capital. For instance, companies that value social capital demonstrate a commitment to retention as a way of limiting workplace volatility. The authors cite SAS's extensive efforts to signal to employees that it sees them as human beings, not just workers. Managers can build trust by showing trust themselves, as well as by rewarding trust and sending clear signals to employees. They can foster cooperation by giving employees a common sense of purpose through good strategic communication and inspirational leadership. Johnson & Johnson's well-known credo, which says the company's first responsibility is to the people who use its products, has helped the company in time of adversity, as in 1982 when cyanide in Tylenol capsules killed seven people. Other methods of fostering cooperation include rewarding the behavior with cash and establishing rules that get people into the habit of cooperating. Social capital, once a given in organizations, is now rare and endangered. By investing in it, companies will be better positioned to seize the opportunities in today's volatile, virtual business environment.     

Are Incentives the Bricks or the Building?

The efforts of economists to emphasize the importance of incentives as determinants of organizational performance, while successful to some degree, may have left the mistaken impression that "getting the incentives right" is the only task requiring the attention of senior executives when designing corporate organizations. The author identifies the incentive-intensive companies envisioned by economists as "mercenary organizations" (or MOs), or companies whose distinguishing feature is near-complete reliance on financial rewards and controls. Citing the difficulties of devising an effective incentive system that cannot be gamed (which he calls the organizational equivalent of "an anti-gravity machine"), the article questions whether such organizations are likely to yield superior performance.
As an alternative to paying more attention to incentive design, the author suggests devoting more corporate resources to seeking and attracting individuals with low "monitoring costs." After holding up examples of top executives who appear committed to that search, the author posits a "character-rich" organization (CRO) as an alternative to the MO of the economists.
Then, viewing all companies as occupying points on a continuum with the MO and CRO as its poles, the author argues that all companies combine elements of both kinds of organizations. And perhaps most important, the CEOs of many of the most successful large organizations, without minimizing the importance of incentives, pay even greater attention to the search for trustworthy individuals and the creation of a culture of teamwork and accountability.     

i-AGENTS: Modeling Organizational Problem Solving in Multi-Agent Teams

Organizations involving human and computer agents are constrained by a variety of factors including: task properties and arrangements; level of technology; knowledge held by, and distributed among, the agents; information and administrative structures; and organizational norms and policies. An important challenge to the scientific community is to develop, validate and apply theories and models to help managers re-engineer their organizations for higher levels of performance. Our research on organizational problem solving aims to develop a computational model of organizations to study interrelationships between agents' knowledge, task requirements, and organization structures and policies. This paper reports the first step of our research toward a computational organizational model—the i-AGENTS framework, a prototype computer system for modeling organizations of intelligent agents. i-AGENTS is composed of a number of high-level concepts: tasks, agents, organization and communication. A task is described in detail by task action, task object and task constraints; an agent is modeled to consist of cognitive attributes and expertise; role-based organizational structure is adopted for describing organizations. From an organization perspective, i-AGENTS extends traditional information processing models of organization (Galbraith 1977) by explicitly addressing the role of agents' knowledge of both the problem domain and the organization in problem solving. When viewed from an engineering perspective, our research is the first step toward an organizational problem-solving model that merges organization theory and distributed artificial intelligence and can be used to simulate and analyze organizational behavior of teams in engineering domains at a very specific level of detail.     

Virtuous capital: what foundations can learn from venture capitalists

U.S. foundations and nonprofits work diligently on behalf of society's most needy and yet report that progress is slow and social problems persist. How can they learn to be more effective with their limited resources? Foundations should consider expanding their mission from investing only in program innovation to investing in the organizational needs of nonprofit organizations as well. Their overemphasis on program design has meant deteriorating organizational capacity at many nonprofits. If foundations are to help nonprofits be assured of making payroll, paying the rent, or buying a much-needed computer, they must develop hands-on partnering skills. Venture capital firms offer a helpful benchmark. In addition to putting up capital, they closely monitor the companies in which they have invested, provide management support and stay involved long enough to see the company become strong. If foundation officers familiarize themselves with such practices, they can begin to build organizational capacity in the nonprofit sector. Foundations can hire organizational experts to assist grantees; they can lengthen grant terms to allow nonprofits to build up organization strengths; and they can create new classes of grants that allow for organizational effectiveness. Nonprofits in turn should articulate their organizational needs when applying for grants; they should apply to foundations known for longer-term grants; and they should create plans that justify long-term support from foundations.     

Be a better boss. Employee treatment,trust level and family business innovation: Evidence from China

This study examines the impact of employee treatment on family business innovation. Our empirical research shows that beneficial employee treatment can increase family business innovation input and output. Moreover, the empirical conclusions pass the robustness and endogeneity tests. An additional analysis shows that non-salary aspects of employee treatment can significantly increase the quantity and quality of innovation output; however, they have little to no impact on innovation input. Further, we find that the higher the levels of trust in society, trust in organizational decisions, and trust in co-workers are, the stronger is the role of employee treatment in family business innovation.     

The geography of trust

Leaders who rely forever on the same internal advisers, entrusting them with issues of ever greater sensitivity and consequence, run the risk of being sold short and possibly betrayed. Alternatively, lone-wolf leaders who trust no one may make enormous, yet preventable, mistakes when trying to sort through difficult decisions. A sophisticated understanding of trust can protect leaders from both fates. During the past decade, author and consultant Saj-nicole Joni studied leadership in more than 150 European and North American companies. Her research reveals three fundamental types of trustpersonal trust, expertise trust, and structural trust. Executives may persevere in relationships that are based on personal trust, no matter how exalted their leadership roles become. But such relationships are unlikely to remain static. They also probably won't provide the kinds of deep, often specialized knowledge leaders need. In circumstances where advisers' competence matters as much as their character, expertise trust--reliance on an adviser's ability in a specific subject--enters the picture. In organizations, leaders develop expertise trust by working closely with people who consistently demonstrate their mastery of particular subjects or processes. Structural trust refers to how roles and ambitions influence advisers' perspectives and candor. It shifts constantly as people rise through organizations. High-level structural trust can provide leaders with pure insight and information--but advisers in positions of the highest structural trust generally reside outside organizations. These advisers provide leaders with insights that their organizations cannot. High-performing leaders' most enduring--and most valuable--relationships are characterized by enormous levels of all three kinds of trust.     

Trust and Control in Network Relations: A Study of a Public Sector Setting

This study contributes to the literature by addressing the role of trust and control in public sector settings in which several organizations cooperate; its aim is to advance the understanding of trust and control in relations in which several parties are involved. The empirical study presented is a longitudinal case study of the relationships between organizational units within a municipality and a shared service center (SSC) that provides IT and administrative services. The main finding is that, compared to actors in previous studies of dyadic relationships in the private sector, actors in network relations seem to consider trust a risky option. It is less tempting to rely on a certain party when that party in turn is entangled with other parties. This situation causes a more intensive use of formal control. Another result is that increased trust between two parties might lead to more emphasis on formal control by a third party.     

Building collaborative enterprise

Can large companies be both innovative and efficient? Yes, argue Adler, of the University of Southern California; Heckscher, of Rutgers; and Prusak, an independent consultant. But they must develop new organizational capabilities that will create the atmosphere of trust that knowledge work requires--and the coordinating mechanisms to make it scalable. Specifically, such organizations must learn to: Define a shared purpose that guides what people at all levels of the organization are trying to achieve together; Cultivate an ethic of contribution in which the highest value is accorded to people who look beyond their specific roles and advance the common purpose; Develop scalable procedures for coordinating people's efforts so that process-management activities become truly interdependent; and Create an infrastructure in which individuals' spheres of influence overlap and collaboration is both valued and rewarded. These four goals may sound idealized, but the imperative to achieve them is practical, say the authors. Only the truly collaborative enterprises that can tap into everyone's ideas---in an organized way--will compete imaginatively, quickly, and cost-effectively enough to become the household names of this century.     

A comparative analysis of the evolution of a taxonomy for best practices: a case for ‘knowledge efficiency’

Taxonomies play an increasingly important role in knowledge management of business best practices, providing a basis by which to index, find and communicate knowledge. However, knowledge continues to evolve over time. As a result, taxonomies must also continue to evolve as organizations innovate and change. Reportedly, firms customize best‐practice taxonomies to meet their unique organization needs. Accordingly, we might expect organizations to generate dissimilar best‐practice taxonomies. However, taxonomies must also reflect the state of knowledge in the area being categorized, and thus are likely to be similar in many ways in different organizations. The purpose of this paper is to study how taxonomies change in different organizations and how they stay the same. In order to explain the parallels in organizational taxonomies, the notion of ‘knowledge artefact efficiency’ (or knowledge efficiency) is suggested to capture the concept that new knowledge is rapidly adopted by many organizations in their knowledge management systems. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Politicization and 'company-ization'—on institutional affiliation and confusion in the organizational world

The complexity of formal organizations in modern societies is explored by making reference to two institutionalized organizational types: The 'political organization' and the 'company'. These types differ to how organizational environments and inner workings are constructed. They regulate how actual organizations can be formed. But the regulation is far from perfect: many organizations contain elements from both types. Organizations are politicized and 'company-ized'. This 'institutional confusion' may arise by processes in which organizations imitate individual features of other organizations, in which they unsuccessfully try to realize one of the types or in which they adapt to changing external conditions.     

The power of collective ambition

In the past few years, some companies have not just weathered the economic storm: They've emerged stronger than ever. How did such players as Four Seasons, Sephora, and Standard Chartered Bank defy conventional logic? Instead of pursuing a single ambition, such as profits, employees defined a collective ambition. As a result, those organizations deepened their engagement with employees and other stakeholders and became sustainably profitable. Purpose, a company's reason for existence, is the central element of collective ambition. The other elements--vision, targets and milestones, strategic and operational priorities, brand promise, core values, and leader behaviors--must be aligned to serve the company's purpose. Articulating the elements of collective ambition can give everyone in the organization a better sense of the company's purpose and how they can contribute to it. Purpose does not have to be about saving the world; providing excellent entertainment or banking services is just as meaningful a purpose as improving health care in emerging economies--as long as it is an authentic representation of why the company exists. To shape and then achieve a collective ambition, companies must strengthen their organizational glue (the collaborative engagement that creates a unified culture) and grease (the disciplined execution that enterprisewide change initiatives require).     

Organizational adaptation to changing contingencies

Old, mechanistic firms need to change their technology and organizational forms to adapt to new market conditions. However, contingency theories of organization link the capacity for this kind of innovation with organic organizational forms, hence the firms seemingly have to change before they can start changing. The article develops a basis for an extension of these theories which looks in more detail at adaptation processes. A perspective on organizational functioning is introduced that sees continuity as fundamental to change, instead of treating innovation and stagnation as two unconnected phenomena. This perspective, called RTK for short, rests on an investigation of three aspects of organizations: their networks of routines for all activities, the local theories held and developed, and the contextual knowledge at the points of operation. It is then argued that change processes with which firms can successfully cope should be anchored in virtuous circles in existing routine networks.     

Creating the future: Goal-oriented Scenario Planning

Do current scenario planning techniques ignore an organizations ability to create its future? Social constructionists and organizational theorists have indicated that the future of an organization can be enacted by its constituents. Yet it is apparent that scenario planning techniques, used by organizations to plan for their future, tend to emphasize a future that the organization must react to instead of create. By emphasizing a future that the organizations must react to, it may ignore and completely miss the opportunity it has to create or enact the future it wants to have.Scenario planning, however, can evolve to support a creative foresight and approach to the future by recognizing the power behind enactment theory and applying a goal-oriented approach to the scenario planning process. Using goal-oriented scenario planning an organization can match the world it wants with the world it expects to see.     

Proactive or Reactive: An Analysis of the Effect of Agent Style on Organizational Decision-making Performance

This paper addresses the issue of agent style—proactive and reactive—from a theoretical perspective. The results show that agent style, though often considered key in decision making, only affects the organization's performance when the organization is under moderate time pressure. Further, the effect of agent style depends on the type of training given to organizational agents and the internal condition under which the organization operates. This research suggests that, when resources are scarce, organizations should spend these resources on organizational design and on increasing the accuracy of incoming information rather than on altering the agents' style.     

The five messages leaders must manage

If you want to know why so many organizations sink into chaos, look no further than their leaders' mouths. Over and over, leaders present grand, overarching-yet fuzzy-notions of where they think the company is going. They assume everyone shares their definitions of"vision;" "accountability," and "results". The result is often sloppy behavior and misalignment that can cost a company dearly. Effective communication is a leader's most critical tool for doing the essential job of leadership: inspiring the organization to take responsibility for creating a better future. Five topics wield extraordinary influence within a company: organizational structure and hierarchy, financial results, the leader's sense of his or her job, time management, and corporate culture. Properly defined, disseminated, and controlled, these topics give the leader opportunities for increased accountability and substantially better performance. For example, one CEO always keeps communications about hierarchy admirably brief and to the point. When he realized he needed to realign internal resources, he told the staff: "I'm changing the structure of resources so that we can execute more effectively." After unveiling a new organization chart, he said, "It's 10:45. You have until noon to be annoyed, should that be your reaction. At noon, pizza will be served. At one o'clock, we go to work in our new positions." The most effective leaders ask themselves, "What needs to happen today to get where we want to go? What vague belief or notion can I clarify or debunk?" A CEO who communicates precisely to ten direct reports, each of whom communicates with equal precision to 40 other employees, aligns the organization's commitment and energy with a well-understood vision of the firm's real goals and opportunities.     

The uncompromising leader

Managing the tension between performance and people is at the heart of the CEO's job. But CEOs under fierce pressure from capital markets often focus solely on the shareholder, which can lead to employee disenchantment. Others put so much stock in their firms' heritage that they don't notice as their organizations slide into complacency. Some leaders, though, manage to avoid those traps and create high-commitment, high-performance (HCHP) companies. The authors' in-depth research of HCHP CEOs reveals several shared traits: These CEOs earn the trust of their organizations through their openness to the unvarnished truth. They are deeply engaged with their people, and their exchanges are direct and personal. They mobilize employees around a focused agenda, concentrating on only one or two initiatives. And they work to build collective leadership capabilities. These leaders also forge an emotionally resonant shared purpose across their companies. That consists of a three-part promise: The company will help employees build a better world and deliver performance they can be proud of, and will provide an environment in which they can grow. HCHP CEOs approach finding a firm's moral and strategic center in a competitive market as a calling, not an engineering problem. They drive their firms to be strongly market focused while at the same time reinforcing their firms' core values. They are committed to short-term performance while also investing in long-term leadership and organizational capabilities. By refusing to compromise on any of these terms, they build great companies.