Tuning-In 1 to Organizational Song as Aesthetic Discourse

In this article, the author explores organizational songs, referring to songs that are created by members of an organization as an expression of organizational culture. More specifically, the author is concerned with organizational songs as an expression of organizational culture, versus the better-known occupational songs that act as an expression of occupational culture. First, the study differentiates the genre of work songs (defined by the occupation of 'laborer') to discern organizational songs (defined by the occupation of "manager"). Second, this exploration reveals a musical expression of organizations; a musical expression that also serves as a form of organizational communication or organizational discourse--specifically an aesthetic communication or aesthetic discourse. A significance for organizational studies is asserted, as the study identifies organizational songs as expressive strategies: song as a form of organizational action and an attempt at organizational intervention; song as an organization's attempt to construct its own history and autobiography; and song as a means of celebrating the identity of organizational leaders and organizational values. The approach is to provide a comprehensive literature review followed by case vignettes of organizational songs.     

Employee perceptions of reputation: An ethnographic study

The ability of organizational members to identify and analyse stakeholder opinion is critical to the management of corporate reputation. In spite of the significance of these abilities to corporate reputation management, there has been little effort to document and describe internal organizational influences on such capacities. This ethnographic study conducted in Red Cross Queensland explores how cultural knowledge structures derived from shared values and assumptions among organizational members influence their conceptualisations of organizational reputation. Specifically, this study explores how a central attribute of organizational culture – the property of cultural selection – influences perceptions of organizational reputation held by organizational members. We argue that these perceptions are the result of collective processes that synthesise (with varying degrees of consensus) member conceptualisations, interpretations, and representations of environmental realities in which their organization operates. Findings and implications for organizational action suggest that while external indicators of organizational reputation are acknowledged by members as significant, the internal influence of organizational culture is a far stronger influence on organizational action.     

Lerne die Regeln um sie zu verändern! Die Rolle der Organisationslogik in Veränderungsprozessen

In this article we introduce the concept of the firm’s organizational logic and how it influences organizational change processes. Characteristics and the essence of the organizational logic are explained and then illustrated by mean of a real-world case. Depending on the level of organizational change – whether it leads to single-loop, double-loop or deutero learning – we provide different implications for change agents to make use of the organizational logic to steer organizational change successfully.     

Ingesting the organization: The embodiment of organizational food rituals

This exploratory paper asks: ‘how do organizational food and drink rituals shape, reflect or create organizational culture?’ Adopting an embodied approach based on Merleau-Ponty's [1945. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith, 2003. London: Penguin. New York: Routledge] phenomenological work, this paper explores the significance of food-based rituals. Data were collected from different organizations using mixed methods and an embodied, reflexive approach – which is relatively novel in organizational research. Embodied experiences are potent, and this paper proposes that workplace food and drink rituals can powerfully influence perceptions of organizational culture. The unique contribution is in showing how embodied organizational rituals create and sustain organizational culture by using the pre-reflective moment of food ingestion to shape cognitive reconstructions of organizational culture. However, food rituals can be controlled and shaped by the organization to specifically influence employee perceptions of organizational culture. Control of food rituals can be perceived as a deliberate effort to create a constructive culture and encourage reciprocity through employee loyalty and effort.     

Towards a theory of organizational storytelling for public relations: An engagement perspective

In this paper, organizational storytelling is defined as planned communication by. organizations that deliberately uses specific forms of content and delivery behavior to. engage audiences (both internal to the organization and outside it) cognitively and. affectively primarily for the achievement of organizational goals and objectives. But. there is little in the literature to show how organizational storytelling fits into the. theoretical lexicon of public relations; or to guide practitioners in how to adapt. storytelling to suit organizational purposes. There is even less discussion from either. perspective on how public relations can contribute to organizational storytelling. Stories are often described as being engaging, but little has been written to explain. why this is. Extant research tends to focus on the significance of engaging of. audiences with stories, rather than understanding how stories engage. This paper. adopts an engagement perspective on storytelling in general to identify the cognitive,. affective, and behavioral aspects of its elements (characters, plots etc.). The same lens. is then applied to organizational stories and shows how they use the elements of. engagement to convey organizational key messages. The paper also highlights. differences between storytelling and organizational storytelling. These findings are. incorporated into a checklist for practitioners to help them identify, create, critique, and. improve organizational storytelling in their work. In addition, the paper suggests ways. in which public relations can bring its uniquely relational perspective to contribute to. organizational storytelling by empowering stakeholder storytelling to organizations and. listening by organizations.     

Organizational resilience and employee work-role performance after a crisis situation: exploring the effects of organizational resilience on internal crisis communication

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to explore the positive outcomes of organizational resilience to see how resilient employees can support an organization by adapting to and initiating changes during the recovery process following a crisis. This study focuses on organizational resilience generated by employees, as a resilient system, through their psychological ability and positive communication behaviors. Resilient employees can help their organization bounce back to normal functioning following a crisis. A nationwide survey (N = 830) was conducted among full-time employees in the U.S. to examine the positive effect of organizational resilience on employee work-role performance. The results indicate that organizational resilience was positively and significantly associated with: employees’ intentions for proficiency, adaptivity and proactivity of organizational members, thus contributing to organizational effectiveness after a crisis situation.     

Divided and Drifting: Interactionism and the Neglect of Social Organizational Analyses in Organization Studies

The analysis of organizational phenomena within interactionism has become bifurcated between social organizational analyses and organizational ethnographies. This division has had the effect of allowing organizational ethnographies to more readily contribute to organization studies while marginalizing studies of social organization. The historical conditioning of this development and current evidence for this case is demonstrated through an analysis of the existing literature from the past thirteen years of interactionist organizational research. To end the continued neglect of social organizational analyses in the interdisciplinary field of organization studies the article concludes by suggesting a number of possible inspirations for promoting future research.     

Organizational change tactics in a homeless services agency

There is a vast literature on organizational change, but research on a key aspect of organizational change, the tactics used by change leaders, is limited. To address this gap, a questionnaire assessing the use of organizational change tactics has been used to allow an organization's staff to describe an organizational change initiative they had experienced. This study also included an interview with the agency's director of programs, an interview with two other staff, document analysis, and pre–post client outcome data. Findings showed the extent to which these tactics were observed and were seen as useful in achieving the change goal, offering guidance for change leaders considering organizational change tactics, and for researchers by advancing methods for studying organizational change. Results were also contrasted with those of an earlier study to identify common themes.     

INTERORGANIZATIONAL RELATIONS AND COMMUNITY INFLUENCE STRUCTURE

This study examines the continuity of organizational and leader networks and community elite structure by replicating a study carried out 12 years earlier. Continuity of structure in the organizational bases of in fluence, in the leaders identified as influentials, and in the organizational and leader networks in the community is looked for. It is concluded that there is continuity in the bases and structure of influence and that the ability to exercise influence is related to access to organizational resources. A contrast of organization and leader networks suggests a shift from narrow organizational interests to business class interests.     

Extending the Bounds of Interpretive Inquiry: Toward a Performance Approach to Organizational Studies

In recent years, interpretive organizational communication scholars have utilized a variety of methodologies in their attempts to study the process of communication occurring within organizations. Underlying each of these assorted methods, however, is the desire to interrogate the meaning and symbols of organizational life. Regardless of their methodological preference, interpretive organizational scholars of all casts seek to understand the symbolic structures that constitute and reflect meanings of the human activity within their individual objects of study. A survey of interpretive organizational literature reveals that, although many contemporary organizational theorists have advocated the study of organizations as sites of cultural enactments, few organizational communication scholars to date have advanced the use of performance through enactment as a methodology for examining organizational activity. This essay seeks to do just that. It asserts that performance, when used in combination with other interpretive methods, is a useful research methodology, which enables researchers and organizational members alike both to know and to show the symbolic structures constituted by and reflected in their actions and practices.     

The expanding territory of organizational communication in China

The field of organizational communication has been dominated by the Euro-American intellectual tradition. In order to create a multicultural field, this study proposes a Chinese-centered perspective to examine organizational communication in Mainland China. Based on a search of the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database using the key words “organizational communication,” the authors collected 129 articles that were published from 1996 to 2014. Using a Chinese-centered perspective, the authors then developed a codebook based on the thematic analysis of the collected articles. A content analysis was employed to analyze year-to-year distributions, definitions of organizational communication, topical areas, theoretical orientations, and methods that were reported in the articles. The results were used to map the current trajectory of organizational communication studies in China. Based on our findings, we recommend that organizational communication scholars acknowledge local philosophies and build local frameworks in order to promote the global inclusivity of the field of organizational communication.     

Organizational access to research settings: Entering secondary schools

Fieldworkers have long acknowledged the problems of gaining access to research settings but often failed to analyze them systematically. In this article we provide preliminary evidence that, when seeking to enter formal bureaucracies, access problems can be better understood and more easily resolved by referring to the organizational logic of the setting. Adopting an organizational perspective to analyze access issues, we compare public schools and private religious schools and show how access problems and the strategies to overcome them vary according to the variation in the schools’ organizational features. We develop our argument in four steps. First, we examine the organizational literature on formal institutionalized organizations to highlight the structural problems of gaining entry to public schools for research purposes. Second, we adopt an organizational perspective to identify strategies for overcoming problems of access to public schools. Third, we compare the access to private religious schools and to public schools to demonstrate that problems and solution strategies vary according to the schools’ variation in organizational features. Fourth, we demonstrate the usefulness of organizational access by showing that researchers’ ability to gain entry is enhanced by a preliminary understanding of the organizational characteristics of a formal research setting. Throughout our discussion, we provide illustrative examples from the senior author’s research in public schools and private religious schools in a large Midwestern city.     

MARKET VENTURES, MORAL LOGICS, AND AMBIGUITY: Crafting a New Organizational Form in Post-Socialist China

How do institutional entrepreneurs craft new organizational forms under unstable conditions, especially when all of the relevant organizational models have serious liabilities in terms of legitimacy? Previous literature argues that emergent organizational models must adopt existing organizational elements in order to solve three problems: (1) gaining access to resources, (2) exploiting previous competencies, and (3) demonstrating legitimacy to salient audiences. Yet, these three distinct needs often require very different organizational elements associated with diverse, contradictory moral logics. This article, which examines the case of for‐profit ventures started by Chinese state organizations in the 1990s, reveals one strategy that entrepreneurs can use to solve this problem—to deliberately increase ambiguity about the organization's central characteristics and its underlying moral logic. This strategy makes it possible for new organizations to solve the problems of resources, competency, and legitimacy by simultaneously adopting (and adapting) contradictory organizational elements.     

How might servant leadership work?

This study examines the mechanics of servant leadership, particularly how it enhances organizational citizenship and how that drives organizational effectiveness. A case study of three successful Catholic parishes identified three direct leadership mechanisms—invitation, inspiration, and affection—that evoke and nurture the service of others. The case analysis also identified two organizational leadership mechanisms—culture building and structural initiatives—through which servant leaders fostered organizational citizenship. This study contributes to an understanding of organizational effectiveness by suggesting how leaders might foster the growth and development of others, build servant‐oriented organizations, and improve overall organizational performance.     

Getting called out: Effects of feedback to social media corporate social responsibility statements

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts via social media are increasingly common and are often key to achieving organizational CSR objectives. Concerns exist about potential damage caused by negative user comments and effects of user feedback to CSR efforts are mostly unknown. Exploring the effects of positive and negative comments to social media CSR statements and subsequent organizational response, this work reports the results of an online experiment (N = 257) that manipulated both user-generated feedback to organizational CSR statements and subsequent organizational responses. Results demonstrate that negative user comments are less of a concern than commonly thought, and call into question the value of organizational response to user feedback.     

Examining the influence of organizational characteristics on nonprofit commercialization

A growing body of literature discusses the (dis)advantages of nonprofit organizations becoming commercial by engaging in the sale of organizational services and products. However, when explaining this phenomenon, scholars tend to focus on resource uncertainty, thereby disregarding the organizational ability to commercialize. Complementing resource dependency theory with insights from contingency theory, this study presents arguments drawn from a comparative case study of six sociocultural nonprofits in Belgium. We find that, when resource uncertainty is similar, organizational differences in terms of commercial income can be explained by differences in (a) organizational origins, (b) professional capacity, and (c) types of tasks. We conclude that organizational characteristics can either enable or disable the ability of nonprofits to commercialize and consequently their ability to self‐sustain in an increasing challenging resource environment.     

Network stability in organizational flux: The case of in-house management consulting

This article explores the effects of organizational flux on the statics of interpersonal knowledge exchange structures. In our empirical case, organizational flux refers to high rates of personnel turnover, temporary project work, constant recombination of team memberships, and short-term collaboration. Network statics refers to the balance between forces composing and decomposing a network. Set in continuously changing organizational compositions of an in-house management-consulting unit, our study offers insights into the relationship between organizational characteristics and informal networks between experts. Against conventional intuition, we find a dense and stable structure of knowledge exchange. Furthermore, we elaborate on the two concepts of organizational flux and network statics, by comparing the observed structures with theoretical (random graphs) and empirical references (other empirical cases), and by using ERG models to account for different factors of organization, social balance, and individual attributes.     

Organizational culture influence on service delivery: A mixed methods design in a child welfare setting

Despite the growing acknowledgement that mixed methods can be useful to better understand complex organizational cultures, there are few examples of studies, which demonstrate how organizational culture studies combine quantitative and qualitative methods in a single study within the child welfare setting. The purpose of the article is to illustrate how a concurrent triangulation was accomplished in a single organizational culture study in a child welfare agency. A sample of 92 employees was selected from a Midwestern private, non-profit, faith-based child welfare agency. Four distinct methods were used to measure organizational culture and its influence on service delivery which allowed for greater validity by collecting different data bearing on the same organizational culture phenomena. Strengths and implications are discussed.     

Women's Accounts of Organizational Politics as a Gendering Process

Organizational politics is implicated in all levels of organizational functioning, from power structures and informal interaction to individual identity. This study argues that organizational politics provides an approach to examining professional women's experiences of organizations as gendered. Women graduates in male‐dominated organizations claimed not to be limited by explicit discrimination, but they construct organizational politics as being masculine in character and as a barrier to their careers. These women represent organizational politics as irrational, aggressive, competitive and instrumental, leading to individual, not organizational, success. Their accounts undermine the stereotypical dichotomy of masculine rationality and feminine emotion by claiming that women behave reasonably and by focusing on emotion in men's political game playing. However, claiming to be rational and rejecting politics, while acknowledging its role in career success, is uncomfortable for ambitious women. They risk sabotaging their own position by appearing too sensitive to engage in the less savoury aspects of organizational life. Organizational political processes are seen as fundamental to gender in organizations, first, because political activity is seen as gendered and masculine and contrary to female identity; secondly, because politics is part of the informal system which constructs organization from which outsiders are excluded; and finally, because political activity is linked to the performance, achievement and maintenance of power.     

Organizational innovations,human resources and firm performance: The Emilia-Romagna food sector

This paper studies the relationship between organizational innovation, industrial relations and economic performance at the firm level. It adopts an applied perspective by means of a comprehensive survey on a specific industrial sector, the food industry, with the aim of investigating: (i) the degree of organizational innovation and the diffusion of HRM practices; (ii) the relevance of the interaction between unions and top management in the process of decision-making at an operative, organizational and strategic level; (iii) the relations between the intensity of organizational innovation and the quality of industrial relations; (iv) the effects of organizational changes on firm performance.The focus is on firms with bargaining activity at establishment level where worker committees exist. The dataset is derived from a structured questionnaire submitted to union members concerning structural data on firms and local productive units, production flexibility, organizational models, compensation systems, industrial relations and firm performance.The quantitative analysis highlights the following critical elements.First, the firm governance seems characterized by a strong relevance of industrial relations, in terms of “good quality atmosphere” and “involvement of worker representatives and employees”: their action proves to be a stimulus to organizational changes. The set of industrial relations variables does emerge as a significant factor explaining firm innovation intensity.Second, although we cannot ascertain the causal link given the cross-sectional nature of data, firm performance and organizational innovations arise as two elements which are strictly and positively related to each other.Third, the evidence points out that good industrial relations are important as far as the firm performance is concerned; nevertheless their role is mediated by their effects on organizational changes rather than having a direct impact on performance.