The Duality of an Atypical Leader in Diversity Management: The Legitimization and Delegitimization of Diversity Beliefs in Organizations

An atypical leader is often celebrated as an individual who is likely to support workforce diversity in organizations. Yet the verity of the assumption that an atypical leader will invariably promote workforce diversity remains underexplored. In this paper, we question this assumption and demonstrate the dualities of an atypical leader in legitimizing and delegitimizing workforce diversity. We define and examine the concept of atypicality among leaders, in terms of how they emerge, who they are (dispositions), what they say (discourses) and what they do (performative acts). We introduce a conceptual framework that maps out the emergence and constitution of an atypical leader, as well as their impact on diversity management within an organization. Our analysis incorporates the concept of habitus (class‐specific and reflexive), in order to reveal the dualities of an atypical leader which determine the management of diversity within an organization and cause continuity and change in diversity beliefs.     

Managing Risk as a Duality of Harm and Benefit: A Study of Organizational Risk Objects in the Global Insurance Industry

This study examines how organizations construct and manage risk objects as a duality of harm–benefit within their normal operations. It moves beyond the existing focus on accidents, disasters and crisis. We study the risk‐transfer processes of 35 insurers where they navigate the tension of retaining risk in their insurance portfolio to increase the benefit of making profit and transferring risk to reinsurance to reduce the harm of paying claims. We show that organizations’ constructions of risk are underpinned by everyday risk management practices of centralizing, calculating and diversifying. Through variation in these practices, not all organizations seek balance and we in turn uncover the sensemaking processes of abstracting and localizing that enable organizations to prioritize harm or benefit. This contributes to the risk literature by illuminating the co‐constitutive relationship between risk sensemaking processes and everyday risk management practices. Following the complex linkages involved in the construction of risk objects as sources of harm–benefit, our analysis also contributes to the literature on dualities. It shows that while immediate trade‐offs between harm–benefit occur, prioritizing one element of the duality is ultimately a means for attaining the other. Thus, while initial imbalance is evident, prioritization can be an enabling approach to navigating duality.     

Pluralism in Organizations: Learning from Unconventional Forms of Organizations

The bureaucratic organization is still regarded as the conventional organizational form, but is ill‐suited to an increasingly pluralistic world. Research on the variety of organizational forms has increased dramatically over the past three decades and offers the potential to understand better how pluralism is manifested and managed within organizations. However, this research remains fragmented. The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize research on unconventional organizations to explore how organizations resolve or attenuate the tensions related to pluralism. Drawing from research in leading management journals, it covers seven distinct literatures: ‘referent organization’, ‘temporary organization’, ‘pluralistic organization’, ‘meta‐organization’, ‘bridging organization’, ‘hybrid organization’ and ‘field‐configuring event’. For each literature, the authors trace the genealogy of the key concepts and review their distinct insights regarding organizational pluralism. They then synthesize and discuss their collective contributions and conclude with avenues of research for pluralism in organizations.     

An Empirical Investigation in Sustaining High‐Quality Performance

Many organizations that were once quality leaders have had challenges sustaining high‐quality performance. Although research has examined frameworks and concepts that lead to high‐quality performance, few studies examine how to sustain high‐quality performance. Sustaining performance may require additional capabilities from what it takes to achieve it. Drawing on quality management literature, organizational resilience literature, and the theory of dynamic capabilities in the strategy literature, this study empirically investigates the effects of four capabilities that help sustain high‐quality performance. The analysis shows that capabilities in improvement, innovation, sensing weak signals, and responsiveness all help sustain high‐quality performance. This suggests that what it takes to achieve high‐quality performance is different, in part, from what it takes to sustain it. The data comes from a survey of 147 manufacturing business units. The analysis shows that the relative benefits of these capabilities may depend on the level of competitive intensity and environmental uncertainty. The findings provide empirical support for a theoretical model and practical guidance for sustaining quality performance.     

‘Bureaucracy‐lite’ and Continuities in Managerial Work

This paper questions three frequently asserted, interrelated claims about developments in management: that centralized, regulated bureaucratic organizations characterized by hierarchy and rules are inevitably giving way to decentralized and empowered post‐bureaucratic organizations characterized by internal networks and an internal market; that, as a consequence, the traditional managerial role of command and control is being superseded by one of facilitation and coordination; and that, in turn, managerial work as routine administration of work processes is being supplanted by the ‘new managerial work’ of non‐routine leadership and entrepreneurship. It is argued that these claims often rest on caricatures of bureaucracy and network organization and are neither new nor well supported by evidence. Against these claims, the paper adduces case‐study evidence which shows that, despite claims about ‘decentralization’ and ‘empowerment’, organizational change may entail not a radical shift to network organization, but more limited change to a different form of bureaucracy in which hierarchy and rules have been retained but in an attenuated and sharper form –‘bureaucracy‐lite’. Consequently, managerial roles continue to be defined in terms of individual responsibility and vertical accountability for an organizational sub‐unit, and managerial work continues to be preoccupied with monitoring and maintaining work processes, routine direction and control of staff and processing information in order to deal with the ambiguities inherent in the dimensions of managerial ‘responsibility’.     

Designing innovative systems

Some current authors of management theory suggest that formal systems and procedures are inconsistent with innovative behaviour in organizations. Yet many organisations are developing increasingly formal strategic planning and control systems to assure organisational change and responsiveness to dynamic environments. In this article, the author suggests that these trends are not as paradoxical as they initially seem. However, formal systems design—to assists the innovation process—must exhibit different characteristics from the traditional design methods used by systems analysts, industrial engineers, or writers of policies and procedures.     

Strategic Renewal: Past Research,Theoretical Tensions and Future Challenges

Strategic renewal has become a prominent theme in a variety of organization and management research domains in recent years. It refers to the process that allows organizations to alter their path dependence by transforming their strategic intent and capabilities. With contributions from an increasing range of theoretical perspectives and research contexts, the strategic renewal literature has become fragmented and lacks common definitions and conceptual clarity, which prevent cross‐fertilization and harm further development. This study systematically reviews the various literature streams on strategic renewal to provide a more integrative perspective. The authors identify three key theoretical tensions at the heart of strategic renewal research, namely learning vs. resource, induced vs. autonomous, and co‐alignment vs. co‐creation. By exploring these key tensions, the authors define strategic renewal's conceptual core, identify gaps in the past literature, and provide guidance for future research.     

The Role of Operational Capabilities in Enhancing New Venture Survival: A Longitudinal Study

We investigate relationships between operational capabilities and new venture survival. On the basis of operations management and entrepreneurship literature, we develop a contingency framework of operational capabilities especially appropriate at different life phases of a new venture's evolution. We expect that in the first years of a new venture's life, entrepreneurs should emphasize high inventory turnover to preserve working capital, support customer responsiveness, and aid firm adaptability. As new ventures grow, entrepreneurs should emphasize internal working capital generation via larger gross margins to support production ramp‐up. Later, new venture entrepreneurs should emphasize employee productivity to buttress sustainable volume production. We analyze a 6‐year longitudinal sample of 812 Swedish manufacturing new ventures using a gamma frailty‐based Cox regression. The findings show that specific operational capabilities, while always supporting new venture survival, have exceptional influence in specific new venture life phases. The three hypotheses are confirmed, suggesting that higher inventory turnover, gross margin, and employee productivity further increase new venture survival likelihoods, respectively, in the venture's start‐up, growth, and stability phases. This suggests a phased‐capabilities approach to new venture survival. This study contributes to operations management and entrepreneurship theory and practice, and sets a foundation for future research on operations strategy for new ventures.     

Routines and transactive memory systems: Creating,coordinating, retaining,and transferring knowledge in organizations

This chapter compares and contrasts the effects of two knowledge repositories, routines and transactive memory systems (TMSs), on knowledge creation, coordination, retention and transfer. We provide overviews of research on the two knowledge repositories, with particular attention to how they form and change. We then discuss the relationship between routines and TMSs. We also compare and contrast routines and TMSs in terms of their capabilities to promote knowledge creation, coordination, retention and transfer in organizations. Routines can transfer across organizations, and they are resilient to member turnover. Although routines can be a source of inertia, they can also enable change. TMSs are susceptible to member turnover and are not easily transferred to other organizations. TMSs promote innovation and are particularly valuable under conditions of uncertainty. We argue that TMSs and routines are reciprocally related. Routines can seed TMSs and TMSs can crystalize into routines. We hope that our chapter stimulates future research on the interrelationship between routines and TMSs and their effects on knowledge creation, coordination, retention, and transfer in organizations.     

Two Types of Vigilance Are Essential to Effective Hazard Management: Maintaining Both Together Is Difficult

Flexibility and adaptability are key capabilities for coping with persistent and pervasive uncertainties. The systematic organization of these capabilities is often called “adaptive management”; it is key to effective hazard management and important in risk governance. Vigilance is a requirement for effective adaptation. However, two distinct types of vigilance are necessary. Type 1 vigilance directly supports adaptive management. It is vigilance when you know what you are looking for: warning signals, filling gaps in knowledge, making sure that systems are working, etc. Vigilance of another sort, type 2 vigilance, is needed to address the surprises and institutional failures that are not part of orderly adaptive planning. Type 2 vigilance is vigilance when you don't know what to look for: observing and reflecting on confusing signals, anomalies, unacknowledged responsibilities, and surprises. The two types of vigilance require different institutional capabilities, and hence may work against each other in practice. Type 1 vigilance requires focus and a strong, knowledge‐based organizing framework. Type 2 vigilance, in contrast, requires defocusing and a questioning approach to both observations and concepts. This dilemma, coupled with demands for flexibility, is a severe challenge for organizations. There are a variety of actions and arrangements at various levels of societal organization that could maintain and enhance vigilance in managing hazards. Necessary, however, is the societal and institutional recognition that vigilance of more than one type is an essential part of hazard management and the commitment to follow through. Maintaining vigilance requires effort and must be an ongoing process.     

Drivers and Performance Outcomes of Innovativeness: An Empirical Study

The issue of innovativeness within organizations has attracted considerable attention in the literature. However, limited knowledge exists about the drivers of and their simultaneous effects on innovativeness and the role of innovativeness in enhancing performance. We adopt the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm and insights from the literature on capabilities to investigate specific capability types serving as antecedents to innovativeness and to examine its performance outcomes. From a sample of 218 Greek manufacturers, the results indicate that managerial, entrepreneurial and technical capabilities facilitate the establishment of innovativeness, which in turn enhances business performance. The study lends support to prior research that highlights the importance of innovativeness in enhancing organizational performance and sharpens understanding of the drivers of innovativeness and the way they collectively operate through innovativeness to boost performance. The study further provides new insights into the role of innovativeness from the perspective of the RBV, while highlighting certain firm capabilities that might both enable and impede competitive advantage and superior performance creation. As such, this study contributes to the effective management of the innovativeness process within organizations.     

Dynamic Capability Building in Service Value Networks for Achieving Service Innovation

Service organizations increasingly create new service offerings that are the result of collaborative arrangements operating on a value network level. This leads to the notion of “elevated service offerings,” our definition of service innovation, implying new or enhanced service offerings that can only be eventuated as a result of partnering, and one that could not be delivered on individual organizational merits. Using empirical data from a large telecommunications company, we demonstrate through structural equation modeling (SEM) that higher‐order dynamic capabilities in services are generated as a result of collaboration between stakeholders. Furthermore, it is through collaboration and education of the stakeholders that additional higher‐order capabilities emerge (customer engagement [CuE], collaborative agility [CA], entrepreneurial alertness [EA], and collaborative innovative capacity), all of which influence the service innovation outcome. Our study also reveals empirical evidence for an ongoing process of continuous dynamic capability building in accordance with the changing dynamics of business. Managers of service organizations should recognize the potential embedded in these higher‐order skill sets, starting from collaboration, learning, and management of creative ideas for both strategic and operational benefits. Moreover, the capabilities of CA, EA, and CuE are even more important in managing the flexibility, timely delivery, and reliability of service offerings. Managers should take measures to inculcate, promote, and manage these dynamic capability skill sets to foster innovation in services.     

Open strategy-making with crowds and communities: Comparing Wikimedia and Creative Commons

In the wake of new digital technologies, organizations rely increasingly on contributions by external actors to innovate or even to fulfill their core tasks, including strategy-making processes. These external actors may take the form of crowds, where actors are isolated and dispersed, or of communities, where these actors are related and self-identify as members of their communities. While we know that including new actors in strategy-making may lead to tensions, we know little about how these tensions differ when either crowds or communities are concerned. Investigating this question by analyzing open strategy-making initiatives conducted by two non-profit organizations (Creative Commons and Wikimedia), we find that tensions with communities may be resolved with increasing openness in strategy-making, while crowds are better compatible with more exclusive strategy-making practices.     

Problematizing ‘Relevance’ in the Business School: The Case of Leadership Studies

In recent years, the discourse of ‘relevance’ has risen to prominence in the university‐based business school. At the heart of this discourse is the suggestion that management researchers should align their research practices more closely with the needs of practitioners in external organizations. One important but under‐researched strand of this debate focuses on the way in which ‘relevance’ is pursued by business scholars via forms of practitioner engagement such as management consulting, corporate presentations, executive education and personal coaching. Drawing on extensive semi‐structured interviews, this paper explores the motivations, rewards and tensions experienced by leadership scholars in the process of engaging with practitioners. This study suggests that the pursuit of ‘relevance’ may come into conflict with norms of scholarly conduct, which in turn gives rise to a series of trade‐offs and compromises. Ultimately, the authors argue that the prevailing discourse of relevance provides an alibi for scholars to orient themselves towards practitioners in ways that contravene their academic identity and research ethos (whether post‐positivist, interpretivist or critical).     

Leveraging Big Data Analytics to Improve Quality of Care in Healthcare Organizations: A Configurational Perspective

Big data analytics (BDA) is beneficial for organizations, yet implementing BDA to leverage profitability is fundamental challenge confronting practitioners. Although prior research has explored the impact that BDA has on business growth, there is a lack of research that explains the full complexity of BDA implementations. Examination of how and under what conditions BDA achieves organizational performance from a holistic perspective is absent from the existing literature. Extending the theoretical perspective from the traditional views (e.g. resource‐based theory) to configuration theory, the authors have developed a conceptual model of BDA success that aims to investigate how BDA capabilities interact with complementary organizational resources and organizational capabilities in multiple configuration solutions leading to higher quality of care in healthcare organizations. To test this model, the authors use fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis to analyse multi‐source data acquired from a survey and databases maintained by the Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The findings suggest that BDA, when given alone, is not sufficient in achieving the outcome, but is a synergy effect in which BDA capabilities and analytical personnel's skills together with organizational resources and capabilities as supportive role can improve average excess readmission rates and patient satisfaction in healthcare organizations.     

Life cycles of growing organizations: A review with implications for knowledge and learning

Conceptualizing growth trajectories of organizations in organismic terms describing transitions through a series of stages, from birth to maturity, has considerable intuitive appeal. Recently, the assumptions underpinning the life‐cycle perspective (growth is linear, sequential, deterministic and invariant) have been argued not to pertain to organizations. This paper reviews the literature on life‐cycle growth models, traces the development of a growing sophistication of conceptualizing growth and highlights some of the limitations of the literature. The authors make a contribution by proposing an alternative conceptual framework for thinking about growing businesses. The framework consists of two dimensions. First, a typology of key issues that are likely to be faced by all growing firms, and the discussion is shaped by M. Gladwell's (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Little Brown, 2000) notion of ‘tipping points’. The second dimension is developed by drawing on the knowledge management literature and the concept of absorptive capacity ( Cohen, W.M. and Levinthal, D.A. (1990 ). Absorptive capacity: a new perspective on learning and innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35 , 128–152). This concept is applied to a discussion of the state of an organization regarding its ability to absorb and use new knowledge. Further, it is suggested that the framework has value for both policy and practice and can be used for the design and specification of interventional support and, to identify and evaluate their impact. If interventions are to help firms to grow, they must provide the right knowledge or support in forms that the firm can utilize. Together, these two dimensions provide a framework to examine firm growth issues and to analyse the effectiveness of different interventions on firms in different states within this framework.     

Dynamic stability: Unfolding dynamics of vicious cycles in a design firm

Paradoxes generate tensions and contradictions in organizations. In this paper, we contribute to the paradox literature by developing a complex systems approach to how organizational members experience tensions generated by the strategic intent paradox. Specifically, we focus on the unfolding dynamics of vicious cycles experienced by organizations dealing with paradox. Drawing on a case study of a design firm, we demonstrate how a vicious cycle forms through feedback loops and develops dynamic stability over time. On the basis of our findings, we develop a micro-level understanding of vicious cycles, which incorporates defence mechanisms at staff and senior management levels. Our main contribution is a theoretical model of unfolding dynamics of vicious cycles. Our model shows the importance of (1) feedback loops that underpin a vicious cycle and (2) importance of circular causality, reinforcing cycles, and micro-mechanisms in theorizing vicious cycles.     

Methodology‐as‐Technique and the Meaning of Rigour in Globalized Management Research

This paper analyses the genre of ‘methodology‐as‐technique’, which we suggest provides the underpinning logic for a particular conception of scientific rigour that is increasingly regarded as normal in globalized management research. Based on a qualitative interview study of management researchers in the peripheral context of India, we associate the methodology‐as‐technique genre with social scientific methods of organizing, conducting and disseminating knowledge founded on Western neo‐imperialism and colonialism. Our analysis draws attention to the consequences of the genre of methodology‐as‐technique which relate to a narrowing and displacement of research goals, erasure of context, and devaluation and marginalization of alternatives. By providing insight into how methodology‐as‐technique comes to dominate in peripheral locations such as India, we suggest that these normative constraints also present an opportunity for denaturalization, by making what is increasingly seen as normal appear alien or strange. We conclude by arguing that countering restrictive definitions of rigour in management research relies on development of a more expansive and inclusive conception of the global that fosters indigenous ways of knowing and promotes decolonizing methodologies.     

On the emergence and management of paradoxical tensions: The case of architectural firms

Paradoxical tensions are pervasive and unavoidable in the everyday practice of creativity-based contexts, such as architectural firms. Whilst the existing literature has extensively explored both coping strategies and multiple ways of approaching paradoxical tensions, we still have a limited understanding of how individuals engage with paradoxical tensions and how organizations support their members' efforts to sustain such tensions. Accordingly, my purpose here is to explore paradoxical tensions in the context of architectural firms and explain how firms and their members make sense of these tensions. I use a multiple case study to investigate empirically the salient paradoxical tensions central to architectural firms and to develop an understanding of what makes them salient. I explain how triggers evoke latent tensions and make them salient and also outline salient paradoxical tensions prevalent within this context. In exploring how architectural firms and their members make sense of these tensions, I outline and explain the importance of a paradoxical mindset, a paradoxical practice, and supporting organizational arrangements. I conclude by discussing the interplay among mindsets, practices, and arrangements as an organizing platform—a conceptual framework that future studies could explore further.     

Complexity leadership in bureaucratic forms of organizing: A meso model

We consider Complexity Leadership Theory [Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly.] in contexts of bureaucratic forms of organizing to describe how adaptive dynamics can work in combination with administrative functions to generate emergence and change in organizations. Complexity leadership approaches are consistent with the central assertion of the meso argument that leadership is multi-level, processual, contextual, and interactive. In this paper we focus on the adaptive function, an interactive process between adaptive leadership (an agentic behavior) and complexity dynamics (non-agentic social dynamics) that generates emergent outcomes (e.g., innovation, learning, adaptability) for the firm. Propositions regarding the actions of complexity leadership in bureaucratic forms of organizing are offered.