Abstract
<p>Taking into consideration the popularity of organizational aesthetics in organizational behavior literature, and adapting dynamic capabilities perspective, we suggest that organizational aesthetic capability is an important competence that enables organizations to cope with the environmental uncertainty. Nonetheless, organizational aesthetic capability is rarely addressed in the technology and innovation management literature. Specifically, we know little about what organizational aesthetic capability is, its ingredients and benefits, and how it works in innovation context. Addressing this particular gap in the literature, this study contributes in two ways. First, we conceptualize organizational aesthetic capability and its sub-dimensions that are alert imagination, to act and defer, awareness of dissonance, analyzing past actions, prefiguring future trajectories, preserve existing modes of operation, willingness to change direction, recognizing symbols in use, and awareness of language. Second, the theoretical framework we proposed highlights the effects of organizational aesthetic capability on product and process innovativeness.</p>
Highlights
In a world that is becoming increasingly discontinuous to the point that the present is no longer an effective predictor of the future (Merritt & DeGraff, 1996), organizations cannot only act based on their rational, logical, instrumental reasoning (Hansen, Ropo and Sauer, 2007), but they should increase their intuitive strengths
Organizational scholars begin to pay attention to organizational aesthetics as an emerging research area that hasthe potential to provide a range of novel and informative insights into the structuring and maintenance of organizational activities, as aesthetics provides a philosophical point to offer a different way of knowing in contrast to intellectual knowing, and enables intuition guiding action in a spontaneous way (Chelariu, Jonston, & Young, 2002)
It should be noted that organizational aesthetics scholars take different approaches to adapt aesthetics to organizational research, and examine the subject from different perspectives and within different contexts such as beauty of efficiency (White 1996; Guillen, 1997; Harding, 2008), organizational culture (Nissley, Taylor, & Butler, 2002), physical design of workplace (Cairns, 2002), leadership (Merritt & DeGraff 1996; Palus & Horth, 2005; Ladkin, 2008), and sense perception (Strati, 2002; Taylor & Ladkin, 2009; Hansen et al, 2007; Gagliardi, 1996)
Summary
In a world that is becoming increasingly discontinuous to the point that the present is no longer an effective predictor of the future (Merritt & DeGraff, 1996), organizations cannot only act based on their rational, logical, instrumental reasoning (Hansen, Ropo and Sauer, 2007), but they should increase their intuitive strengths In this sense, 21st-century organizations need a new insight that will bring a fresh perspective to organizational research by linking feelings, intuition and thoughts (Hansen et al, 2007), develop an alternative to the mainstream paradigm that emphasized traditional tools of logic, and rationality that leaves individuals‘ emotional and symbolic responses unnoticed (Bathurst, Jackson, & Statler, 2010), andnon-rational‘ elements of organizational life unrecognized (Warren, 2008).
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