Perceptions of organization development in South Korea: the use of a sensemaking approach

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study explores how employees engage in sensemaking during Organization Development (OD) initiatives in chaebols, that is, large family-owned firms in South Korea. In adopting a case study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 37 respondents drawn from different levels of a chaebol to address three research questions. First, what key contextual factors are associated with employees’ sensemaking at different levels of an organization? Second, how do individuals at different levels of the organization make sense of an OD initiative through the ‘searching for plausibility’ property of sensemaking? Third, what contextual cues are influential when employees engage in ‘identity construction’ in sensemaking in response to an OD initiative? The findings and implications of the study demonstrate multiple subjective realities, which employees from different levels construct, indicating that the prevailing norms and practice within the existing culture, which have been influential in constructing the identities of employees should be identified when attempting to implement OD to change the organizational culture.     

Federated marketing—A practical approach to export for the smaller company or division

This paper summarizes the main features of federated marketing of exports. It shows how companies can benefit from these new arrangements at costs which are a fraction of those which would apply going it alone. It gives the background information to recall the main problems of selling goods and services to distant and expensive markets, outlines how these problems have been successfully tackled by Japan and Germany and then develops the main lines of the new methods of federated marketing.     

Unterschiede zwischen Coaching und Psychotherapie

Differences between coaching and psychotherapyCoaching is not a hidden psychotherapy with managers, though the methods are similar. Unlike psychotherapy, coaching mainly refers to the professional context, it requires normal capacities of self regulation and addresses to managers. A coach cannot take the place of a psychotherapist, and therapists cannot do the work of a coach without a respective education and role definition. The author describes these and other differences.     

Managerial and professional beliefs influencing public health privatization: results of a national survey of local health department directors

This article describes managerial and professional beliefs underlying decisions to privatize public health services. We drew a stratified, nationally representative sample of local health departments and interviewed 347 department directors by telephone. We used logistic regression to establish the independent effects of various beliefs on the decision to privatize. Over half of directors did not believe that there was valid evidence that privatization results in more efficient performance, and those who believed there was such evidence were not more likely to privatize. However, directors held professional and managerial beliefs that influenced their decision to privatize. Directors most likely to privatize were those who believed that local health departments should exclusively focus on the core public health functions, those who asserted that public health should become involved in an increasingly diverse array of social problems, and those who believed that employees should be used on a temporary and contractual, rather than permanent, basis wherever possible.     

Engaging men as social justice allies in ending violence against women: evidence for a social norms approach

The field of sexual assault prevention is shifting attention to educational interventions that address the role of men in ending violence against women. Recent studies document the often-misperceived norms men hold about other men's endorsement of rape-supportive attitudes and behaviors. The authors provide further evidence supporting the design of population-based social norms interventions to prevent sexual assault. Data from this study suggest that men underestimate the importance that most men and women place on consent and willingness of most men to intervene against sexual violence. In addition, men's personal adherence to only consensual activity and their willingness to act as women's allies are strongly influenced by their perceptions of other men's and women's norms. These findings support the proposition that accurate normative data, which counters the misperception of rape-supportive environments, can be a critical part of comprehensive campus efforts to catalyze and support men's development as women's social justice allies in preventing sexual violence against women.     

Market-based Organizational Learning and Market Performance Gains

Building upon the market orientation-performance thesis, many investigators are now concerned with broader organizational learning considerations and the antecedents that underlie the analytical properties of learning about competitors and markets. Described as a process of market-based organizational learning, an empirical test of a model is provided which indicates that: when organizations exhibit more favourable learning values (three value-based constructs), their market information processing behaviours and analytical capabilities improve (three knowledge-based constructs), which thereby directly impacts upon market-based outcomes (a market performance construct) that the organization is able to generate. This model is tested with a path-analytic approach from data generated in the UK financial services industry. Discussion of these findings is made in the light of pertinent literature streams, and several implications for future research are provided.     

The Emergence of Flexible Networks in the UK Television Industry

‘Flexibility’ became a management buzz word in the mid-to-late 1980s. Environmental pressures drove firms in many industries towards more flexible structures – away from internal, classical hierarchies towards agent networks brought together on individual project-task grounds. The goal of many organizations, according to proponents of this trend, became that of seeking ‘flexible specialization’– integrating specialist resources in a dynamic, flexible fashion. Critics of the drive towards flexibility argue that the phenomenon has been overemphasized, and that large-scale bureaucracies geared for mass production are still the dominant structural form. This paper overviews the arguments concerning flexibility and related arguments concerning the emergence of networked forms of organization. Flexibility trends within the UK television industry are then explored to illustrate the emergence of ‘flexible specialization’ and a ‘dynamic network’ form of organization. Television thus serves as an important counter-factual to the dismissive claims of the critics of flexibility.     

Regional Patterns of Organizational Dominance: 1955–1975*

The ecological notion of metropolitan dominance is explored through the examination of a hierarchy of urban places. This hierarchy is based on organizational bases rather than functional characteristics as has been the case in most past research. This approach is preferable to the more traditional method in that organizational bases are more easily measured, and they offer an observable medium through which dominance is exercised. The hierarchy of metropolitan areas is perceived as comprising a social network, with influence accruing to a metropolis on the basis of its relationships with all other places in the system. The data are aggregated to the regional level in order to facilitate comparisons, and it is observed that power is becoming more diffuse spatially as it becomes more concentrated organizationally. Furthermore, the regional structure of the system of influence relations is being altered as the sunbelt metropolitan areas become more powerful. Other changes are found in the nature of the influence exercised by the growing urban areas of the southern and western regions. The data on organizational bases of dominance consist of corporate linkages reflecting the intraorganizational division of labor. The corporations themselves are drawn from the group of industrial corporations listed on the American Stock Exchange or the New York Stock Exchange in either 1955 or 1975.     

Integrating mailed personalized feedback and alcohol screening events: a feasibility study

This study characterized a sample of college students attending National Alcohol Screening Day (NASD), and tested the feasibility of using NASD as a platform for initiating the delivery of mailed personalized feedback forms. Participants (N = 153, 65% female) attended NASD and completed the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT [1]). A subset of at-risk drinkers completed additional questionnaires about their alcohol use and received personalized feedback through the mail. Thirty-four percent of the participants scored above the recommended clinical cutoff on the AUDIT. Men reported higher levels of alcohol consumption and alcohol-related negative consequences. The subset of at-risk drinkers reported frequent occasions of binge drinking and relatively high blood alcohol concentrations (BAC). NASD is an effective way of identifying college students with clinically significant levels of alcohol use, and provides an efficient mechanism for initiating the delivery of personalized feedback. More research on the combined effects of NASD and personalized feedback is warranted.