Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizational culture

In spite of the importance of organizational culture, scholarly advances in our understanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of culture research and argue that the ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how to study it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring culture. This ambiguity has constrained progress in both developing a coherent theory of organizational culture and accreting replicable and valid findings. To make progress we argue that future research should focus on conceptualizing and assessing organizational culture as the norms that characterize a group or organization that if widely shared and strongly held, act as a social control system to shape members’ attitudes and behaviors. We further argue that to accomplish this, researchers need to recognize that norms can be parsed into three distinct dimensions: (1) the content or what is deemed important (e.g., teamwork, accountability, innovation), (2) the consensus or how widely shared norms are held across people, and (3) the intensity of feelings about the importance of the norm (e.g., are people willing to sanction others). From this perspective we suggest how future research might be able to clarify some of the current conflicts and confusion that characterize the current state of the field.     

The shifting landscape of LGBT organizational research

Over the past generation, sexual minorities—particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons—have gained increased visibility in the public arena. Yet organizational research has lagged behind in recognizing and studying this category of organizational members. This article offers a critical review of this growing body of research. More specifically, we identify and discuss four dominant scholarly frames that have informed LGBT organizational research from the late nineteenth century to date. The frames include a “medical abnormality,” “deviant social role,” “collective identity,” and “social distinctiveness” view of sexual minorities. We argue that these frames have profoundly shaped the scope and range of organizational scholarship devoted to sexual minorities by showing that scholars using such contrasted frames have been drawn to very different research questions with respect to sexual minorities. We document and discuss the main and contrasted questions asked within each of these frames and show how they have both enabled and constrained LGBT organizational research. We conclude by calling for more attention to the frames organizational scholars adopt when studying sexual minorities, but also for more research on both minority and majority sexual orientations in organizations.     

On micro-foundations of dynamic capabilities: A multi-level perspective based on CEO personality and knowledge-based capital

In recent years, researchers have asked why some firms are better than others at developing dynamic capabilities. The existing literature assesses micro-foundations separately, either on the managerial or on the organizational level. This study aims to provide a more holistic picture on the antecedents of dynamic capabilities by integrating managerial and organizational micro-foundations. Specifically, we posit that the personality of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), manifested through their core self-evaluation (CSE), represents an individual-level micro-foundation which influences three types of a firm's knowledge-based capital—human, social, and organizational capital. We also argue that these three, in turn, are organization-level micro-foundations that ultimately enable the development of a firm's dynamic capabilities. We test our multi-level framework using data from 307 German CEOs, and confirm that CEO CSE is positively related with all three forms of knowledge-based capital. We further find that human capital and organizational capital mediate the relationship between a CEO's CSE and a firm's dynamic capabilities. Our research contributes by extending a central framework of the micro-foundations project (the bathtub model) that integrates the upper echelons perspective into a multi-level analysis. We empirically validate this model and advance the understanding of how firm leaders indirectly influence firm dynamic capabilities by shaping individual learning conditions.     

Take it to the top: Imagined interactions with leaders elevates organizational identification

Organizational identification is an important predictor of workplace behavior. The more strongly an individual identifies with their employing organization, the more motivated they will be to behave in ways that promote its success. In this paper we develop a new approach to fostering organizational identification based on principles of mental simulation. Across seven experiments we demonstrate that imagining positive contact with an organizational leader increases identification with the organization they represent. Experiments 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A and 3B replicated the basic effect against progressively varied control conditions, utilizing both scenario and field experiments. Experiment 4 demonstrated that as a consequence of heightened organizational identification following the imagined contact task, participants reported greater intentions to engage in organizational citizenship behaviors. We conclude by discussing the potential application of this technique as a simple and effective way for organizations to foster employees' motivation and performance.     

More (new) products,more problems? A systems perspective on increased capability deployment and organizational errors

The capabilities-based view postulates that organizational capabilities are a key driver of competitive advantage. However, while increasing the pace of deploying organizational capabilities, such as new product development (NPD), may enable alignment with changing environments, it may also have unintended consequences. In this study, we advance theory on these unintended consequences by investigating how the increased deployment of NPD capability leads to organizational errors. Borrowing from organizational research employing systems theory, we argue that an increase in NPD deployment may increase the likelihood of routine discoordination and, thus, the incidence of intra-firm and interfirm errors. However, we also proffer that firms can mitigate errors from increases in NPD capability deployment by engaging in distinct internal and external activities that enable the accumulation of knowledge on how to coordinate systemic change. We distinguish between internal and external errors, demonstrating that in the context of increased NPD deployments, internal voluntary investigations ameliorate internal manufacturing errors, while supplier alliances mitigate outsourced component errors. We find support for our predictions using data from new product introductions and recalls in the U.S. automotive industry. This study sheds light on the tension inherent to accelerating the deployment of patterned organizational activities and suggests that the outcomes of deploying an organizational capability are best viewed holistically within the milieu of organizational systems the capability spans.     

An organizational climate regarding ethics: the outcome of leader values and the practices that reflect them

In this article, we argue that the organizational climate regarding ethics — the shared perception of what is ethically correct behavior and how ethical issues should be handled within an organization — is an outgrowth of the personal values and motives of organizational founders and other early organizational leaders. We begin by arguing that one common label for the climate regarding ethics construct — “ethical climate” — is inappropriate. We also argue that climate regarding ethics has an impact on organizational outcomes, including organizational outcomes that do not have explicit ethical components. We propose that this impact largely occurs through the mediating mechanisms of organizational cohesion and morale. We conclude by discussing the variety of antecedents and outcomes related to climate regarding ethics.     

Natural experiments in leadership research: An introduction,review, and guidelines

Endogeneity is a serious challenge for leadership research. To overcome the problem, researchers increasingly rely upon experimental designs, such as laboratory and field experiments. In this paper, we argue that natural experiments — in the form of standard natural experiments, instrumental variable, and regression discontinuity designs — offer additional opportunities to infer causal relationships. We conduct a systematic, cross-disciplinary review of 87 studies that leverage natural experimental designs to inquire into a leadership topic. We introduce the standard natural experiment, instrumental variable, and regression discontinuity design and use topic modeling to analyze which leadership topics have been investigated using natural experimental designs. Based on the review, we provide guidelines that we hope will assist scholars in discovering natural exogenous variations, selecting the most suitable form of natural experiment and by mobilizing appropriate statistical techniques and robustness checks. The paper is addressed to leadership and management scholars who aim to use natural experiments to infer causal relationships.     

CEO political liberalism,stakeholders, and firms’ support for LGBT employees

We argue that CEO political liberalism, or the extent to which CEOs are more liberal rather than conservative, affects firms’ support for LGBT employees. Specifically, compared to conservative CEOs, liberal CEOs will be more likely to support LGBT employees by implementing LGBT-friendly policies. We furthermore posit that the presence of certain internal and external stakeholders—including boards, top management teams, and employees, as well as transient institutional investors and LGBT advocacy organizations—alter the proposed effect. Results based on a sample of Fortune 500 firms support our arguments. Our findings contribute to the literatures on leadership, stakeholders, and workplace diversity.     

Perceptions of ethical climate and organizational justice as antecedents to employee performance: The mediating role of employees' attributions of leader effectiveness

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating role of employee attributions of leader effectiveness on relationships between perceptions of (a) ethical climate and (b) organizational justice and both positive and negative types of performance. We argue that these relatively under-investigated perceptions are critical antecedents to effective productivity in the workplace. Accordingly, this study is the first to examine the associations of both ethical climate and organizational justice on both positive and negative performance within the context of mediation via employee attributions of leader effectiveness. Based on online survey data from 2486 Romanian employees, our SEM-based findings reveal that the attribution of leader effectiveness functions as a mediator between the associations of ethical climate and justice perceptions on two distinct types of performance: (1) Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) and (2) Counterproductive Work Behaviors (CWB).Additionally, the results revealed that trait negative affect moderates the mediating role of leader effectiveness with OCB but not with CWB. This study contributes to the recent and growing interest in the mediating role of attributions regarding work performance. Several theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed concerning leader-specific attributions, employee empowerment, and employee performance. Most prominently, we discuss why individuals with strong trait negative affect may engage in CWB without the influence of ethical climate or organizational justice.     

THE RED QUEEN: HISTORY-DEPENDENT COMPETITION AMONG ORGANIZATIONS

We argue that competition among organizations is history-dependent, so that each organization’s competitiveness at a given point in time hinges on the organization’s historical experience leading up to that point. Specifically, we summarize the theory of “Red Queen” competition, where competition de-selects weak organizations and stimulates organizational learning, which in turn further increases the intensity of competition and so further strengthens survivors in an ongoing dynamic of reciprocal causality. Empirical evidence of Red Queen competition is summarized from various analyses of two organizational populations. We conclude that theories and empirical models of competition may be seriously mis-specified, and that the analytic tools of the field of strategic management may lead to incorrect conclusions, if they do not explicitly allow for this form of history dependence in competition.     

核心能力:组织文化和组织学习作用

本文研究组织文化、组织学习、核心能力和组织绩效之间的相互影响关系,并以华南地区的139家企业为对象进行实证研究。本文的理论贡献在于证实了:(1)组织文化通过影响组织学习进而影响核心能力;(2)组织学习影响核心能力进而影响组织绩效;(3)核心能力对组织绩效有直接的正向影响;(4)组织文化对组织绩效没有显著的直接影响,但通过组织学习和核心能力的构建间接影响组织绩效;(5)组织学习对组织绩效没有显著的直接影响,但通过核心能力的构建间接影响组织绩效。本文的研究结果对于深刻理解核心能力的形成及正确认识组织文化和学习在组织管理中的作用有重要的借鉴价值。     

History and the present: Institutional legacies in communities of organizations

An important source of organizational variation in communities is institutional legacies: institutions that persist and affect the community over long periods of time. Institutional legacies have received attention in the past, but recently there has been increased interest in their origins and effects. We examine three carriers of institutional legacies—legal structures, voluntary organizations, and intra-community relations—and show some work on each of these carriers. We discuss how research on institutional legacies presents a particular challenge in causal identification, but we also offer potentially viable solutions to this challenge. Finally, we outline extensions of research on institutional legacies through work that documents how the interrelationships between community organizations and businesses are shaped by institutional legacies and in turn contribute to their evolution.     

Organizational change and rigidity during crisis: A review of the paradox

When and how do existential crises, threatening business continuity, stimulate organizational change or cause the opposite—rigid preservation of established business practices? This question remains unresolved, despite three decades of deliberations in the academic literature, which still yields contradicting theoretical arguments and empirical results. One view argues and finds support for the hypothesis that posits an amplified propensity to change within threatened organizations. The other view supports the threat-rigidity thesis, implying reinforcing habitual practices. In this paper, we provide a novel holistic typology of organizational crises and then review the literature on the topic, summarizing existing insights within a theoretical framework comprising three interrelated sequential processes: organizational cognition, decision-making, and implementation. We analyze the gaps in the field's knowledge within each process and propose a research agenda to address these voids.     

Executive turnover – Firms’ subsequent performances and the moderating role of organizational characteristics

I apply context-emergent turnover (CET) theory to investigate how different organizational characteristics moderate the effect of executive turnover on firm performance. I suggest and investigate different organizational characteristics as contextual factors. I find that executive turnover reduces future sales and employment growth, and show that three organizational characteristics (the firm's age, top management tenure, and employee tenure) moderate this effect. These results contribute to our understanding of the role of context in moderating executive turnover. Previous studies that examined the performance effects of executive turnover have often struggled to prove the causality between this event and a firms' post-turnover performance conclusively. The problem is that executive turnover is often correlated with a firm's current performance and expected future challenges. I address this endogeneity problem by exploiting the exogenous variation in firms' performances following 516 top managers' unexpected deaths. I use a matched sample to investigate which organizational characteristics that mitigate the negative effect on the firms' subsequent performances resulting from these executive turnovers. I obtained this sample randomly from a comprehensive dataset containing yearly observations of all Danish firms from 1995 to 2007.     

How does acquisition experience create value? Evidence from a regulatory change affecting the information environment

We argue that acquisition experience translates more readily into learning to select than into learning to restructure. The acquisition selection stage is less causally ambiguous than the subsequent restructuring stage—because its web of activities is less complex and its outcome less delayed—and causal ambiguity undermines learning from experience. Therefore, we hypothesize that more-experienced acquirers will perform particularly well when the information environment is less transparent and thus the ability to select targets (versus to restructure them) is more important. Relying on a unique database of 1388 acquisitions realized by private equity firms in the United States between 1975 and 2005, and exploiting a regulatory change affecting the information environment faced by acquirers when selecting their targets, we find results largely consistent with our theory.     

From ideas of power to the powering of ideas in organizations: Reflections from Follett and Foucault

Research on organizational creativity tends to emphasize fairly static notions of coercive power as positional authority and control over scarce resources. The field remains largely silent about power as a positive and generative phenomenon that can produce creativity. We seek to break that silence by amplifying and integrating the work of Mary Parker Follett and Michel Foucault in concert with recent practice-based approaches to creativity. Power in organizational creativity, we suggest, should first of all be explored as processes of connection, abundance and collective agency. We show that whereas established ideas of positional power over is related to assumptions of linearity and singularity of creativity, ideas of power with and power to are associated with a more dynamic, relational and process-based perspective. The latter set of views implies more attention be paid to processes of interactional framing through which people jointly attend to situations, reach new integrations and produce new social realities.     

Understanding the Antecedents of Effective Knowledge Management: The Importance of a Knowledge‐Centered Culture*

Within the context of knowledge management, little research has been conducted that identifies the antecedents of a knowledge‐centered culture—those organizational qualities that encourage knowledge creation and dissemination. In this study, the existing literature on organizational climate, job characteristics, and organizational learning (in the form of cooperative learning theory) are linked with the current thinking and research findings related to knowledge management to develop a theoretical model explaining the relationships among organizational climate, the level of cooperative learning that takes place between knowledge workers, and the resulting level of knowledge created and disseminated as measured by team performance and individual satisfaction levels. The study goes on to empirically test the proposed research model by investigating the climate of organizations, and seeks to understand the linkage between a set of organizational and individual characteristics and knowledge‐related activities found in cooperative learning groups and the resulting work outcomes. The hypothesized research model is tested using LISREL with data collected from 203 information systems (IS) professionals engaged in systems development activities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications the results have for future research and managerial practice.     

An attention-based view of short-termism: The effects of organizational structure

Debates about short-termism in business tend to center around the role of shareholder pressures and managers’ incentives, while the role of organizational structure remains understudied. In our paper, we adopt an attention-based lens to elucidate the role of organizational structure in directing the attention of management towards pressures for short-term results at the expense of the long term. Specifically, we argue that greater scale of operations, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and workforce flexibility reduce slack resources available to senior managers and increase the complexity of information presented to them in different ways. As a result, the senior managers shift their attention to short-term pressures, which are more easily understood, at the expense of attention for long-term considerations. Analysis based on a survey of senior managers in 3221 private firms in the Netherlands provides support for our arguments.