Creating a corporate vision

Work on strategy has only recently been paying attention to the role of vision in the strategic management process and the possible relationship between vision and concepts as creativity, leadership and entrepreneurship. Analysis, however, has not been uniform in defining the core issues itself or in positioning vision within the overall strategic management construct. Even worse, the inter-relationship between vision and other concepts like leadership and entrepreneurship was only casually treated. This article is an attempt at putting strategic vision within one consistent conceptual frame. A frame that would encompass a definition, a set of attributes, an input and output flow and an operationalization dimension. The article relies heavily on contemporary work on strategy, entrepreneurship, creativity, leadership and organization. Illustrative cases are drawn from recent business (and non-business) histories of business organizations.     

参与度、信任与合作效果的关系——基于中国非营利组织与企业合作的实证分析

非营利组织与企业合作共同解决社会问题,是非营利组织和企业共同关注的发展战略,也是和谐社会建设的重要方面。本文基于中国非营利组织与企业合作的现实,通过建立合作双方参与度、信任关系与合作效果的假设模型,根据230个合作项目样本数据,利用回归分析进行了检验。分析结论表明,高的参与程度会带来良好的合作效果;信任在参与度与合作效果关系中的中介作用不完全一致:在参与度影响合作的直接效果中起中介作用;在参与度影响知识创造效果中没有起中介作用;在参与度影响社会效果中起到一定的中介作用。这对改进非营利组织与企业合作管理实践,以及有目的和针对性地实现相应合作效果具有指导意义。     

Shades of Grey: Guidelines for Working with the Grey Literature in Systematic Reviews for Management and Organizational Studies

This paper suggests how the ‘grey literature’, the diverse and heterogeneous body of material that is made public outside, and not subject to, traditional academic peer‐review processes, can be used to increase the relevance and impact of management and organization studies (MOS). The authors clarify the possibilities by reviewing 140 systematic reviews published in academic and practitioner outlets to answer the following three questions: (i) Why is grey literature excluded from/included in systematic reviews in MOS? (ii) What types of grey material have been included in systematic reviews since guidelines for practice were first established in this discipline? (iii) How is the grey literature treated currently to advance management and organization scholarship and knowledge? This investigation updates previous guidelines for more inclusive systematic reviews that respond to criticisms of current review practices and the needs of evidence‐based management.     

Performance Appraisal,Performance Management,and Firm-Level Performance: A Review,a Proposed Model,and New Directions for Future Research

Abstract

There has been a long history in management and industrial/organizational psychology of studying methods to improve performance at work. These efforts have traditionally been concerned with individual-level performance (with some attention paid to team performance as well); even when research began to more broadly consider the topic of performance management instead of just performance appraisal. However, the often unstated assumption was that, if an organization could effectively improve the performance of individual employees, this would accrue to improvements in firm-level performance as well. A review of the literature suggested that this link had never really been established in a direct way. Instead, we found considerable support for relating “bundles” of human resource (HR) practices to firm-level performance, and several models for how these practices could create the transformation from individual-level to firm-level performance. We drew upon several of these models, from somewhat diverse literatures, to propose a model whereby bundles of HR practices, when aligned with the strategic goals of the organization, can be used to create a climate for performance that could transform generic knowledges, skills, and abilities (KSAs) into specific KSAs needed to improve firm-level performance.     

Examining the Antecedents and Consequences of CIO Strategic Decision‐Making Authority: An Empirical Study*

Despite the strategic importance of information technology (IT) to contemporary firms, chief information officers (CIO) often still have varying degrees of strategic decision‐making authority. In this study, we apply the theory of managerial discretion to define CIO strategic decision‐making authority and argue that the CIO's level of strategic decision‐making authority directly influences IT's contribution to organization performance. We also draw on the power and politics perspective in the strategic decision‐making literature to identify the direct antecedents to the CIO's strategic decision‐making authority. A theoretical model is presented and empirically tested using survey data collected from a cross‐industry sample of 174 matched pairs of CIOs and top business executives through structural equation modeling. The results suggest that organizational climate, organizational support for IT, the CIO's structural power, the CIO's level of strategic effectiveness, and a strong partnership between the CIO and top management team directly influence the CIO's level of strategic decision‐making authority within the organization. The results also suggest that the CIO's strategic decision‐making authority in the organization directly influences the contribution of IT to firm performance and that effective CIOs have a greater influence on IT's contribution when provided with strategic decision‐making authority.     

Strategies for Knowledge Creation in Firms *

We extend the knowledge‐based view by providing an explanation of how firms develop the capability to create knowledge. We take the view that firms are distributed knowledge systems composed of individuals who embody knowledge, and theoretically identify and empirically test the existence and effectiveness of two strategies – organization and project team – that promote their interactions to develop this capability. On the one hand, building on what we call the organization‐level innovation literature, we identify the organization strategy, which suggests investment in organization‐level integrative management practices to facilitate interactions to create knowledge among individuals situated in different parts of the system, independently of when a knowledge‐creation task is established and individuals are organized to create knowledge. On the other hand, building on what we call the team‐level innovation literature, we identify the project team strategy, which suggests investment in project team‐level integrative management practices to facilitate interactions to create knowledge among individuals once a knowledge‐creation task is defined and individuals are placed into teams to create knowledge. The two strategies are substitute approaches for the development of the capability, although the organization strategy appears to better predict outcomes of the capability. However, this approach might be more costly, so not all managers will choose to follow it.     

The role of cognitive load in effective strategic issue management

Firms have different ways of addressing issues emerging from outside their regular calendar-driven strategy processes. These practices tend to be unstructured, organization specific, and highly dependent on the characteristics of the strategic issues themselves. Building on three dimensions of cognitive load—intrinsic, germane, and extraneous cognitive load—we extend existing research on strategic issue management by showing how different team-level choices in strategic issue processing and organizational congestion interact in their effects on a firm's strategic issue management performance. Based on an in-depth analysis of all 92 strategic issue decisions in a large multinational firm during a three-year period, we find that organizational disturbances influence strategic issue initiation by top management, which in turn influences the quality of strategic issue management practices and subsequent performance outcomes. We conclude by providing recommendations for managers on how they can decrease the sensitivity of their companies' strategic issue systems to external disturbances.     

The relationship between HRM practices and organizational commitment of knowledge workers. Facts obtained from Swiss SMEs

This paper explores the effects of human resource management (HRM) practices in Swiss small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). More specifically, the main objective of this study is to assess the impacts of HRM practices developed in Swiss SMEs upon the commitment of knowledge workers. Using data from a survey of over 198 knowledge workers, this study shows the importance of looking closer at HRM practices and, furthermore, to really investigate the impacts of the different HRM practices on employees' commitment. Results show, for example, that organizational support, procedural justice and the reputation of the organization may clearly influence knowledge workers' commitment, whereas other HRM practices such as involvement in decision-making, skills management or even the degree of satisfaction with pay do not have any impact on knowledge workers' commitment.     

Disentangling the Governance Configurations of Strategic Spatial Plan-Making in European Urban Regions

This paper is aimed at assessing and disentangling how territorial governance configurations influence contemporary practices in strategic plan-making in 14 European urban regions. The findings allow us to distinguish three dominant practices: i) plan-making shaped by consensus building and multilevel government cooperation; ii) plan-making shaped by the involvement of profit-oriented actors and negotiations, and iii) plan-making shaped by consolidated planning practice. To truly grasp plan-making practice, it is necessary to scrutinize who rules and who is ruled while negotiations are unfolding, as well as the extent to which private actors’ interests influence how spatial development goals and strategies are defined.     

Organizational commitment: a critique of the construct and measures

Organizational commitment has been at the centre of studies into individual and organizational performance for several decades. During this time, much has happened to the ways in which organizations behave, including the evolution of new forms of employee relations and new psychological contracts. Against a transformational background for organizations, developments in the ways that commitment is measured have been incremental and arguably detached from the broader context of 'new deals' for employees. This paper examines classical approaches to defining and measuring organizational commitment and, in the context of strategic human resource management, argues for its continued importance. Classic approaches, however, are criticized on the basis of diminished utility in light of revised employee–organization linkages. Suggestions for improving the relevance of commitment research to contemporary management research and practice are given.     

Institutional maintenance in an international bureaucracy: Everyday practices of international elites inside UNESCO

Scholars have recently called for an organizational sociology of international experts and expertise, the production and functioning of elite worlds. Meanwhile, efforts have been made to refocus organization studies of institutions towards the lived experience and everyday working practices through which organizational actors perceive, reproduce and revise the institutional structures within which they operate. The purpose of this paper is to bridge the study of international elites in the context of international policy making and emergent research on how actors actively accomplish institutional maintenance, the intent being to advance a more differentiated understanding of agency of international elites in micro-institutional maintenance. This research is based on an organizational ethnography among international program experts at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. The study contributes to knowledge about how maintenance of institutional frameworks of policy making is accomplished by program specialists as they continually apply the legitimate language of the institution, endow it with institutional authority in everyday practices and navigate in hierarchies and social networks. The paper discusses contributions to extant research on international elite worlds, power and agency in institutional reproduction.     

战略人力资源管理的理论模式

本文将战略人力资源管理中关于人力资源管理与企业绩效关系的研究总结为三种不同的理论模式:根据最佳实践模式,一些HRM活动是普遍有效的,组织采用这些最佳的HRM活动就会获得相当好的绩效;在权变模式里,HRM活动的效率是随着企业战略等因素而变化的,组织采用适合于其战略的HRM活动将更有效率;在形态模式里,HRM活动通过内部匹配形成特定的HRM系统形态,HRM系统与组织战略等因素的外部匹配会对组织绩效产生重要影响。     

An integrated approach to evaluation and planning of best practices

This paper develops a new integrated evaluation and planning approach for implementing a given set of best practices in a prioritized and phased manner. The best practices are implemented for achieving lower-level business unit objectives and higher-level strategic goals of an organization. With a multiattribute decision making algorithm under the balanced scorecard (BSC) framework, a new evaluation model is developed to effectively measure the relationship between lower-level objectives and higher-level goals, and to give each best practice a relative priority value. A new adjustment method is also developed to address potential biases in the self-assessment process at the business unit level. The evaluation model enables the prioritization and implementation planning of best practices in terms of their importance and achievability from the viewpoints of the organization, four BSC strategic perspectives, individual business units, and the overall implementation planning zone. An empirical study is conducted to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the integrated evaluation and planning approach.     

The quest for quality at Philips

All over the western world during the last few years companies have been introducing total quality programmes. Their objective is to regain or maintain market leadership. Top management understands the importance of company-wide quality for strategic positioning and actively leads the companies in these excellence movements. All aim at improving performance through top management leadership, total involvement of all members of the organization, rebuilding organizational and management practices and systematic, deep, long-term change strategies. At Philips such a movement started company-wide 3 years ago. This article describes the background to the programme, gives some of the results achieved so far and looks ahead to possible future developments.     

Organizational persistence in the use of war gaming and scenario planning

Even though war gaming and scenario planning are widely used in business contexts, there is little evidence that either practice is associated with superior performance. Why, then, spend the costs? In this paper we address this puzzle and suggest why the extant empirical findings have so far proven limited. We consider the development of these practices and find that they have a substantially entangled and overlapping history, particularly at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Despite shared historical roots, the treatment of war gaming and scenario planning in the scholarly literature branched out into different streams. This separation is unfortunate because it obscures a better understanding of the premises under which these practices are effective. We propose an analysis of the overlaps and contrasts of war gaming and scenario planning that sets out clear boundary conditions for their use and efficacy. We find that each practice is tailored to provide strategic guidance in a context where the organization is facing different forms of uncertainty. This suggests they may be effective, and thus improve organizational performance, where the relevant uncertainties are operative. Such benefits would be apparent over longer time scales, and only if the relevant boundary conditions are met. However, to the best of our knowledge, no longitudinal empirical test of either war gaming or scenario planning is available. We therefore conclude that more research is needed to ascertain the true relationship between these popular practices and their performance outcomes.     

The Role of Knowledge in Resource Allocation to Exploration versus Exploitation in Technologically Oriented Organizations*

Decisions regarding research and development (R&D) activities of an organization greatly affect the fiscal and market outcomes of technologically oriented firms. Yet, the resource allocation choices between these two activities are tied strongly to an organization's technology knowledge. Technological knowledge is itself a resource that the firm can manage to achieve strategic and competitive advantage. In this paper, the authors present a system dynamics view of the decomposition of R&D efforts into explorative and exploitive activities and the resultant knowledge‐specific and performance outcomes from the decision to focus on one type of activity or another. Four factors are shown to affect the relative value of innovative knowledge to the organization: resource availability, exogenous competition, aging of knowledge bases, and adaptive capacity, a firm's ability to adapt to its environment. A variety of long‐ and short‐term strategic issues are discussed in relation to these forces.     

The social construction of strategic coherence: Practices of enabling leadership

The construction of “strategic coherence,” defined as the development of a system of mutually compatible meanings among organization members about desirable organizational directions, is clearly a crucial issue for organizations. Yet, how to achieve it is in part an open question. While previous studies have considered how strategic coherence may emerge across top levels of management through strategic planning activities and negotiations among senior leaders, we know much less about the contribution of other actors and processes behind the scenes (in non-strategy roles). Drawing on an ethnographic study of a public hospital's planning and project management practices, this paper therefore focuses on the bundles of practices, people and tools through which strategic coherence can emerge across different levels and sectors in mundane activities. We build on the concept of “enabling leadership”, grounded in practice theories of leadership, as our analytical lens. The study reveals how strategic coherence is socially constructed by practices of ‘fueling’, ‘shaping’ and ‘entwining’ mutually compatible meanings, in interactions among diverse people and tools. We propose a grounded model of the construction of strategic coherence as the progressive socialization of meanings about organizational direction that is not just administered from the top, nor naturally emergent from the grass-roots, but that is a collective and inherently socio-material accomplishment of enabling leadership.     

Some initial specifications for a strategic information system

Much of the discussion and published literature on information systems to date has been about systems concerned with the internal administration and operations of an organization. Considerably less attention has been given to the information requirements of the more strategic managerial activities of planning and policy making, in which the future directions and objectives of the organization are decided. Internal information systems in many organizations have now grown to maturity. At the same time, managers have become aware of the need for an additional component of the overall information system to support their more strategic activities. This paper considers the broad characteristics of a strategic component of an organizational information system and derives some initial specifications from which a more comprehensive design can be developed.     

Remote control: measuring performance for value creation and governance of globally distributed knowledge work

This article examines the governance of globally distributed knowledge work. To measure performance in knowledge work, it is important to focus on what the knowledge workers do and hence view knowledge as something one does, namely the practices, instead of something one has. By following the practices of knowledge work, it was possible to evaluate the effect of measures related to organizational processes, and identify what was not well covered by the measurement tool. Strategic and long term needs such as learning and employee competence are better managed through projects. This article shows how work performance in international organizations needs two different measures: one tool for measuring short-term value creation linked to the organizational processes; and, one tool for measuring long-term value creation linked to the practices of service work made in projects. Global governance of distributed employees is therefore successfully managed through key performance measures and through understanding projects through their multiple contributions, at both an individual and an organizational level. Global long term governance needs are strategic for the entire firm. The paper rests on an in-depth empirical case study of an international professional service firm.     

Strategic planning as an organizational change process—Some guidelines from practice

Learning to cope with the problems and uncertainties created by today's changing business environment is a task which faces ever company. Coping with the challenge of change is not just a question of adapting or reacting to the changes, it may also involve taking new initiatives in relation to the environment itself in order to exploit the opportunities which exist.A company may need to make fundamental adjustments to its philosophy, strategies, organization and practices in order to meet the newer demands of the environment. A prime difficulty is that companies are rarely in a position to start from scratch, they have existing organizational arrangements, power distributions, well established strategies and vested interests all of which tend to resist any kind of change which is likely to upset the ‘status quo’. They also have to overcome outdated beliefs and norms if they are to progress.This article considers the use of a modified approach to strategic planning as a mechanism for helping a company to acquire the norms, organization and strategies needed to cope with today's business environment. It is based on experience gained in helping to re-organize business enterprises engaged in textiles, steel tube manufacture, light engineering, distribution (world wide) and vehicle sales and servicing and also the Government of Jersey, Channel Islands.