ORGANIZATIONAL PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT

The phenomena of organizational perception management is hardly new. The efforts of organizational spokespersons to protect and manage positive images, identities, or reputations of their organizations can be found in historical accounts of the Roman Catholic Church, and the universities of ancient Greece. The same perception management problems that plagued these early organizations (e.g. threats of illegitimacy due to changes in social norms; face-saving following scandals or accidents), continue to confront organizations today. During the past thirty years, these types of issues have been studied by organizational scholars in attempts to understand how perception management tactics affect the views and support critical audiences’ (i.e. those audiences on which the organization depends for support). This paper provides an overview of this research and a framework defining the primary components of organizational perception management. This framework distinguishes organizational perception management from individual perception management in terms of its practical implementation and strategic nature.     

Social Activism in and Around Organizations

Organizations are frequent targets for social activists aiming to influence society by first altering organizational policies and practices. Reflecting a steady rise in research on this topic, we review recent literature and advance an insider-outsider framework to help explicate the diverse mechanisms and pathways involved. Our framework distinguishes between different types of activists based on their relationship with targeted organizations. For example, “insider” activists who are employees of the target organization have certain advantages and disadvantages when compared with “outsider” activists who are members of independent social movement organizations. We also distinguish between the direct and indirect (or spillover) effects of social activism. Much research has focused on the direct effects of activism on targeted organizations, but often the effects on non-targeted organizations matter more for activists goals of achieving widespread change. Drawing on this framework, we identify and discuss eight specific areas that are in need of further scholarly attention.     

Generations in organizations

Despite a rich tradition of scholarship across many disciplines, organizational research on the topic of generations has been relatively scarce. In this article we develop a framework for studying generations in organizations that draws on multiple conceptualizations across multiple disciplines. Our framework distills two distinct critical elements that give ‘generations’ agency in organizational settings – chronology (the idea that a unique location in time creates a ‘generation’) and genealogy (the idea that generations are linked through the transmission/descent of ideas/values/skills/knowledge). After an historic overview of the evolution of the topic of generations, we review generational research across the fields of political sociology, family sociology, psychology, social anthropology, cultural sociology, demography, and gerontology. Our framework elucidates how linkages between generations, based on chronology and genealogy, can be characterized in organizations and how the nature of intergenerational contact and transfer predicts a wide range of organizational outcomes such as change/innovation, conflict, turnover, and socialization. We outline the implications of this framework for future research on generations in organizations.     

Leadership for organizational adaptability: A theoretical synthesis and integrative framework

One of the biggest challenges facing leaders today is the need to position and enable organizations and people for adaptability in the face of increasingly dynamic and demanding environments. Despite this we know surprisingly little about this topic. In this paper we provide a theoretical synthesis and integrative review of research from strategy, organization theory, innovation, networks, and complexity to provide a framework of leadership for organizational adaptability. Our review shows that leadership for organizational adaptability is different from traditional leadership or leading change. It involves enabling the adaptive process by creating space for ideas advanced by entrepreneurial leaders to engage in tension with the operational system and generate innovations that scale into the system to meet the adaptive needs of the organization and its environment. Leadership for organizational adaptability calls for scholars and practitioners to recognize organizational adaptability as an important organizational outcome, and enabling leadership (i.e., enabling the adaptive process through adaptive space) as a critical form of leadership for adaptive organizations.     

The effectiveness and specificity of change management in a public organization: Transformational leadership and a bureaucratic organizational structure

There is an extensive private sector literature on organizational change management. However, recent studies have suggested that the specific context of public organizations may have consequences for the management organizational change. This study examines to what extent different change approaches and transformational leadership of direct supervisors contribute to the effective implementation of organizational change in public organizations, and to what extent the bureaucratic structure of public organizations makes the implementation of organizational change s3pecific. The implementation of an organizational change in a Dutch public organization is studied using quantitative methods and techniques. The results indicate that bureaucratic organizations may effectively implement organizational change with both planned and emergent change approaches. The contribution of transformational leadership depends on the type of change approach and organizational structure. Transformational leadership behavior of direct supervisors contributes little to planned processes of change, but is crucial in emergent processes of change in a non-bureaucratic context. Although the literature on change management mostly emphasizes the leadership of senior managers, the leadership role of direct supervisors should not be overlooked during organizational change in public organizations.     

Darwinism,organizational evolution and survival: key challenges for future research

How do social organizations evolve? How do they adapt to environmental pressures? What resources and capabilities determine their survival within dynamic competition? Charles Darwin’s seminal work The Origin of Species (1859) has provided a significant impact on the development of the management and organization theory literatures on organizational evolution. This article introduces the JMG Special Issue focused on Darwinism, organizational evolution and survival. We discuss key themes in the organizational evolution research that have emerged in recent years. These include the increasing adoption of the co-evolutionary approach, with a particular focus on the definition of appropriate units of analysis, such as routines, and related challenges associated with exploring the relationship between co-evolution, re-use of knowledge, adaptation, and exaptation processes. We then introduce the three articles that we have finally accepted in this Special Issue after an extensive, multi-round, triple blind-review process. We briefly outline how each of these articles contributes to understanding among scholars, practitioners and policy makers of the continuous evolutionary processes within and among social organizations and systems.     

Refuting the cliché of the distrustful manager

Although trust is fundamental to social and organizational functioning, the media often portray managers as distrusting, suggesting that distrust of others is a typical personality variable of successful leaders. This study puts the cliché of the distrustful manager to the test. Both self-report data (N = 32,926) and behavioral data (N = 924) from the German Socio-Economic Panel refute this cliché. Analyses reveal that individuals in managerial positions neither show a lower level of trust before, nor a systematic reduction in trust after attaining such positions. Moreover, analyses demonstrate that managers are generally more trusting than non-managers. This selection effect implies that individuals who trust others are more successful in achieving managerial positions than their less trusting counterparts.     

Inter-organizational network structures in Russia: organizational changes from institutional and social embeddedness perspectives

Theory posits that organizations are embedded socially within their environment. The level of embeddedness depends highly on the environmental uncertainty a company and its network partners face. The latest research on transition economies indicates that the institutional framework in these countries is highly relevant for inter-organizational structures (i.e. formalization, standardization, frequency, intensity and reciprocity). As Russia constitutes a good example of high environmental uncertainty, a closer look at organizational changes in general and inter-organizational network structures in particular is taken. This paper extends the theoretical and empirical scope of social and economic theories on inter-organizational structures by formulating a conceptual framework that unites economic rationalism with socially embedded arguments. Contributing to emerging international HRD literature, the objective is to understand better the institutional influences on network structures and thus on organizational change. Moreover, it will be demonstrated how far organizational changes and human resource development is associated with institutional influences on network structures.     

Building interpersonal trust within organizations: a relational signalling perspective

This article develops the foundations for a theory of interpersonal trust-building based on relational signalling theory (RST). RST is based on the assumptions that rationality is bounded through framing, that preferences are partially determined by altruism (through a distinction between foreground and background goals), and that an individual’s action is influenced by the normative context in which he or she operates. The focus is on interpersonal trust in work relations within organizations. Interpersonal trust-building is construed as an interactive process in which both individuals learn about each other’s trustworthiness in different situations. Four conditions for the building of interpersonal trust within organizations are (1) the suspension of all opportunistic behaviour, or the removal of distrust; (2) exchange of positive relational signals; (3) avoiding negative relational signals, i.e., dealing with trouble; and (4) the stimulation of frame resonance, or the introduction of trust-enhancing organizational policies. The proposed theory can explain important characteristics of trust in organizational contexts, such as the interactive nature of trust, the learning required to build trust, the role of psychological mechanisms (such as attributions and perceptions) in decisions to trust, the limits to trust, asymmetries between trust and distrust and the context-dependency of trust.

Organizational sensemaking: A systematic review and a co-evolutionary model

Over the last 30 years, a massive body of literature has been generated for explaining how individuals and groups make/give sense to their experiences in organizations. Reviews on sensemaking have been produced, but they did not update the original Weickian sensemaking model – strongly based on the Darwinian principles – according to the occurred developments. To fill this gap, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of 402 contributions on organizational sensemaking has been conducted; sample articles have been interpreted according to a renewed evolutionary lens: co-evolution. This study offers an updated and holistic revisitation of the original sensemaking model and proposes a co-evolutionary framework of organizational sensemaking. In particular, it identifies four new and two evolved properties that compose the sensemaking phenomena, emotional schemata as the new unit of analysis for sensemaking studies, and specifies the individual and collective sensemaking processes.     

基于免疫的组织健康捍卫机制建构:一个案例

本文借鉴医学免疫和健康的新视角,试图建构基于组织免疫行为的组织健康捍卫机制分析框架,探讨组织健康状态的理论维度和组织免疫行为如何捍卫组织健康状态并发挥作用的机制,同时,选取广东粤电集团沙角C电厂进行了案例研究。本文的研究揭示出,组织监视、组织防御和组织记忆是组织免疫过程的主要行为维度,而组织健康的理论维度,包括组织结构均衡性、功能活跃性、社会和谐性和环境适应性,组织免疫行为对组织健康有捍卫作用,任何一个要素和环节的缺失或失灵都会破坏组织健康状态,组织免疫系统的建立对于避免复杂系统的运行失败是非常关键的。     

That Unwanted Feeling: A Psychodynamic Study of Disappointment in Organizations

This paper explores the emotion of disappointment in organizations and develops a new line of theorizing inspired by psychoanalytic object‐relations theory. Existing literature frames disappointment as a threat to organizational effectiveness, as both a response and an anticipation of failure and as an emotion that needs to be managed in order to prevent it from damaging organizational morale and performance. This only captures part of the complexity of disappointment and leaves unexplored its potential contribution to organizational and individual learning and even creativity. The paper develops a theoretical framework which depicts disappointment in three configurations or positions, and it establishes the potential of disappointment acting as an integrative emotion within organizations. The framework accounts for an apparent contradiction in organizational members' experience of disappointment – that it is, at the same time, seen as ‘of little concern’ to individuals, and yet viewed as capable of undermining stability and destroying positive feelings. The paper shows how disappointment is connected to the dynamics of blame in organizations but, when fully appreciated, can offer a way of moving beyond these dynamics by recognizing partial failure within an organization and turning it into the basis for organizational learning.     

Darwinist connections between the systemness of social organizations and their evolution

Is the systemness of social organizations related to their evolution? This research question has not yet received appropriate attention by the literature on management and organization theory. The author believes that addressing it can constitute a substantive opportunity to understand key intertwined associated processes, such as organizational survival, competitive success/advantage, or failure. In this article, the author attempts to contribute to fill the aforesaid gap adopting a critical Darwinist approach.     

From start to finish: Flexi-time as a social exchange and its impact on organizational outcomes

We employ arguments from social exchange theory to develop a framework explicating the relationship between flexi-time and employee absenteeism, employee turnover, and organizational profitability. Then, employing data from 1,064 private sector organizations located in France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, we test our hypothesized model via path analysis. We found flexi-time to have a significant negative relationship with employee turnover and a significant positive relationship with organizational profitability, controlling for organizational, industry, and country factors, as well as other flexible work arrangements. The relationship between flexi-time and absenteeism did not reach significance in our estimations. We highlight the implications of our work and outline directions for future research.     

From bias to exclusion: A multilevel emergent theory of gender segregation in organizations

This article presents a multilevel emergent theory of organizational segregation linking gender bias in performance assessment (a micro-level phenomenon) to gender segregation in organizations (a macro-level phenomenon). Based on an integration of multilevel research, emergence and signaling theory, we propose the following: (a) gender segregation in organizations is an emergent phenomenon that arises from the collective behavior of individuals who express only a small bias in favor of males, in concert with the signals governing promotion decisions and organizational mobility; (b) the emergence of a gender-segregated organization is often unintentional and the bottom–up and top–down processes that produce segregation are difficult to see; and (c) agent-based modeling is especially well-suited for illuminating the dynamics of bias that produce gender-segregated organizations. This multilevel emergent-based theory contributes to the research literature on organizational stratification by: (a) revealing the manner in which micro-level and macro-level forces conspire, oftentimes unwittingly, to produce gender-segregated organizations; (b) providing new and very different directions for future research on gender segregation that rely on agent-based modeling; and, most importantly, (c) moving a 30-year debate over the “real-world” impact of gender bias that continues to occupy the field of human resource management and, most recently, Supreme Court justices on to more fertile ground.     

Organizational Improvisation: A Consolidating Review and Framework

Organizational improvisation is increasingly recognized as a relevant area of management research. However, the cumulativeness of research on improvisation in organizations remains low. This paper organizes existing contributions on organizational improvisation within a new consolidating framework combining degrees (minor, bounded and structural) and levels (individual, interpersonal and organizational) of improvisation. The proposed degree/level framework allows for reviewing the existing literature on organizational improvisation in the management disciplines of strategy, organizational behaviour, organizational theory, innovation and marketing in a systematic manner. It also exposes potential areas for future research across management disciplines, research areas, organizational settings and industries, and beyond existing metaphors, most notably of jazz and improvisational theatre.     

Organizational/environmental interchange: a model of boundary spanning activity.

A theoretical framework is developed for analyzing determinants and functions of activity at the boundaries of organizations. The process of boundary spanning, based on internal and external organizational factors, is conceptualized. A model of the organizational/environmental information interchange process suggests relationships between organizational, environmental, and individual aspects of boundary activity.     

How Subgroup Interests and Reputations Moderate the Effect of Organizational Identification on Cooperation

Two experiments tested the effects of organizational identification on individual decisions to cooperate. These decisions occurred in the context of a nested social dilemma in which individuals, subgroups, and the larger collective each held distinct and incompatible interests. In Study 1, when the two subgroups in the dilemma were from different real organizations, higher organizational identification caused lower cooperation with the collective (and higher cooperation with the subgroup) when the opposing organization had a purportedly individualistic culture and reputation. The results of Study 2 supported this interpretation by showing that organizational identification had a negative effect on collective cooperation, and a corresponding positive effect on subgroup cooperation, when decision makers perceived the opposing department to have an individualistic reputation. I discuss the implications of these results for organizations that try to elicit cooperation by fostering members’ organizational identification.     

A Person-Environment Fit Model for Virtual Organizations

While the increasing sophistication of information technology has led to the spread of virtual organizations, there has been very little research on what factors contribute to individuals’ effectiveness in such organizations. This paper argues that organizations possess different degrees of virtuality based on four dimensions of temporal, spatial, cultural, and organizational dispersion. Using a person-environment fit framework, a theoretical model that identifies individual qualities required to fit into virtual organizations, virtual teams, and virtual jobs is developed, taking into account dimensions and degrees of virtuality. Mechanisms for enhancing fit in virtual organizations as well as theoretical and practical implications of the model are addressed.     

Social ties, task-related communication and first job performance of young engineers

This study investigated the relationships among social ties, task-related communication, and first industrial job performance of a group of young engineers by utilizing a cooperative (coop) engineering program as a natural study. The coop arrangement allowed the researcher to examine the work behavior of these young engineers with similar academic training who were working on comparable work assignments in the same set of organizations.The study found that the job performance of the coop engineers was related to the pattern of work- related communication but not the total number of contacts. Specifically, high performance new engineers were integrated more broadly into the interpersonal communication networks than low performance new engineers. Moreover, high performance new engineers exhibited communication patterns similar to those of high performance veteran engineers working on similar types of technical work. Social ties with the company staff was found to be related positively with job performance, but social ties with other coop engineers was found to be related negatively with job performance, a result which challenges an implicit assumption often made by researchers and managers about the organizational socialization of newcomers. Overall, this study provides an integrative framework for relating social ties and communication as key factors for understanding the job performance of young engineers and presents a methodology for assessing their organizational assimilation.