Using Organizational Architecture to Lead Change*

Effective leadership involves more than developing and communicating the right strategic vision for the company. To encourage employees to carry out the corporate vision, companies must ensure consistency among the following three main components of their “organizational architecture:”

• ? the allocation of decision‐making authority (that is, who in the organization gets to make what decisions);
• ? performance measurement systems (for evaluating the performance of individuals as well as business units); and
• ? reward systems (the rewards for success, both financial and otherwise, and the consequences of failure).

The authors illustrate the application of this framework with the case of Xerox's (eventually) successful attempt to create a customer‐oriented workforce in the 1980s. But a more effective demonstration of the importance of these principles, as the authors go on to suggest, might well be the same company's well‐known failure to realize the commercial promise of the many inventions by its research group in Palo Alto. This organizational framework is especially useful for evaluating the likely effects of major corporate initiatives such as “Six Sigma” or the “Balanced Scorecard.” For example, it could be used to help top management determine whether, and under what circumstances, decentralization is likely to improve decision‐making and performance, as well as the changes in the firm's performance management and incentive systems that would be required to make decentralization work. Finally, the authors apply the framework to another important leadership issue: corporate ethics. In response to the scandals of the past decade and the passage of Sarbanes‐Oxley, many U.S. companies have issued formal codes of conduct, appointed ethics officers, and instituted training programs in ethics. But a key question for top management is whether the incentives established by the firm's organizational architecture reinforce or undermine the code of conduct. In this sense, ensuring consistency in organizational design is an important leadership function—one that is critical to encouraging ethical behavior as well as the pursuit of shareholder value.     

DECREASING CAMPUS SMOKING WITH PUNISHMENTS AND SOCIAL PRESSURES

This paper reports the effectiveness of a Midwest state university's “100% tobacco‐free” policy. The policy used social pressures and punishments to incentivize tobacco users to no longer consume tobacco on campus. The policy had three distinct periods (Pre‐Promotion, Post‐Promotion, and Post‐Policy). Social pressures and punishments were introduced during the Post‐Promotion and Post‐Policy periods, respectively. Changes in cigarette consumption were inferred by counting the number of cigarette butts found at various locations on campus. A statistically significant decrease in the number of cigarette butts was observed during the Post‐Promotion period. After the initial drop, tobacco use remained constant for the remainder of the period. An additional decrease was observed once punishments were introduced in the third period. However, the number of cigarette butts observed on campus remained significantly above zero. Further research is needed to understand how smokers substitute across time, location, and tobacco products after the implementation of similar policies. (JEL I11, C99, I12)     

“Ending Welfare as We Know It”: The Symbolic Importance of Welfare Policy in America

In this paper, I offer a framework for analyzing non-market oriented household activities in a way that overcomes some issues about defining the boundaries among household activities. I utilize the concept of a social process and discuss how unpaid household activities are part of labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes. Next, I explain the importance of introducing economic class and social class processes into the framework, as well as the importance of making a distinction between the two. Economic class accounts for the basics of the capitalist economy, and social class opens contexts of variation. The framework allows for a multidimensionality of individuals and opens the question of unpaid activities varying in categorization based on economic class. Also, it helps the economic analysis of capitalism consider that maintaining a household lifestyle directly involves and pertains to unpaid household activities that are part of each of the delineated labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes.     

Exploring the dynamics of value and fit: Insights from project management

The strategic management literature has struggled with how to recognize, measure, and even understand the concept of “fit” between strategy, structure, and environment. Nevertheless, the concept of fit was fundamentally important from the beginning of the Value of Project Management project. In this article, we compare the “fit” construct defined by Miles and Snow (1984) with our concerns with value direction (Thomas & Mullaly, 2008). A comparative analysis of these two constructs provides insights into how both dimensions improve overall organizational understanding. We demonstrate that while each of these dimensions independently provides useful information, it is their intersection that provides a means of interpreting not just current realities but appropriate future actions.