Ethical Considerations and Change Recipients’ Reactions: ‘It’s Not All About Me’

An implicit assumption in most works on change recipient reactions is that employees are self-centred and driven by a utilitarian perspective. According to large parts of the organizational change literature, employees’ reactions to organizational change are mainly driven by observations around the question ‘what will happen to me?’ We analysed change recipients’ reactions to 26 large-scale planned change projects in a policing context on the basis of 23 in-depth interviews. Our data show that change recipients drew on observations with three foci (me, colleagues and organization) to assess change, making sense of change as multidimensional and mostly ambivalent in nature. In their assessment of organizational change, recipients care not only about their own personal outcomes, but go beyond self-interested concerns to show a genuine interest in the impact of change on their colleagues and organization. Meaningful engagement of employees in organizational change processes requires recognizing that reactions are not simply ‘all about me’. We add to the organizational change literature by introducing a behavioural ethics perspective on change recipients’ reactions highlighting an ethical orientation where moral motives that trigger change reactions get more attention than is common in the change management literature. Beyond the specifics of our study, we argue that the genuine concern of change recipients for the wellbeing of others, and the impact of the organizations’ activities on internal and external stakeholders, needs to be considered more systematically in research on organizational change.     

Fiscal decentralization in Indonesia: A comment on smoke and lewis

In World Development Smoke and Lewis (1996) describe a local government capability rating effort in Indonesia, and conclude that this approach to decentralization has great potential. Their analysis is bound to a limited set of central level actors, and thus reflects only part of the decentralization debate in Indonesia. Consequently the authors miss the roots of this purportedly “new” approach and overestimate its actual or possible effects. Smoke and Lewis have also not taken into account the importance of a vastly different approach to decentralization, the regional autonomy pilot program, which was inaugurated by the Indonesian Government in April 1995. Providing the broader context to the rating effort, we try to reveal its conceptual and practical limitations and point on the ambiguous role of the rating effort in the decentralization arena in Indonesia.     

A framework for analysing strategies of Internet Service Providers

The fast proliferation of services over the Internet and the development of new Internet standards and technologies are affecting the existing business models of the traditional telecommunications market. This holds, in particular, for the ISP market. This paper assesses the impacts of basic elements of business strategies on the relative competitive position of selected types of ISPs. One result is that the incumbent telcos have a relatively strong starting point in the ISP market, while small regional ISPs have a weak starting point.     

“Openness” of public governments in smart cities: removing the barriers for innovation and entrepreneurship

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Open innovation practices have been found to positively affect innovation and entrepreneurship due to the complementarities and uniqueness of...     

Enhancing green product and process innovation: Towards an integrative framework of knowledge acquisition and environmental investment

Despite the increasing interest in green innovation literature, little is known on how and under what conditions firms' knowledge transfer activities affect green innovation. There is lack of research that on how particular organizational capabilities are seen more useful and how it influences on green innovation performance. To address this research gap, we examine a mediation model in which we explore whether a firm's knowledge acquisition capability and investment in environmental management mediate the impact of buyer-driven knowledge transfer activities on green product innovation and green process innovation. On the basis of an analysis of a sample of 239 manufacturing firms, we find that buyer-driven knowledge activities have a greater positive impact on green product innovation than green process innovation. Investment in environmental management fully mediates the relationship between buyer-driven knowledge transfer activities and green process innovation, and knowledge acquisition capability partially mediates the relationship between buyer-driven knowledge transfer activities and green product innovation. The current study provides evidence that internal competencies and the role of buyers in knowledge transfer are critical for explaining the green product innovation and green process innovation. Our results suggest that buyer involvement pushes firms to develop resource acquisition capability to enhance green product innovation. Our results also highlight the importance of investment in environmental management for overcoming the environmental challenges in the manufacturing firms.