Changes In Organizational Design Research Articles

Antecedents to management accounting change: a structural equation approach

This paper reports on a survey of manufacturing companies, and uses structural equation modeling to examine the relationships between the changing competitive environment, and a range of organizational variables as antecedents to management accounting change. The results indicate that an increasingly competitive environment has resulted in an increased focus on differentiation strategies. This, in turn, has influenced changes in organizational design, advanced manufacturing technology and advanced management accounting practices. These three changes have led to a greater reliance on non-financial accounting information which has led to improved organizational performance.

Organizational Design and Management Accounting Change

Changing management accounting systems requires more than appropriate implementation.It is argued that structural characteristics of an organization, centralization in particular, should also be taken into account when deciding on a change.Centralization implies higher costs of communication because the decision-maker has to obtain information from organizational participants who have incentives to inffluence the decision.A limit on communication reduces inffluence costs but at the same time it also lowers the quality of the decision.As a result of that, centralized organizations (i) will implement changes in their accounting systems less often than decentralized ones (ii) will more often implement top-down, i.e. ignore local information.

The Role of Electronic Commerce in the Transformation of Distance Education

The distance learning industry has served society well for the continued education of professionals on a part-time, flexible, and remote basis. However, with the explosive development and deployment of advanced information technology (IT) such as digital libraries and electronic publishing, distance education will undergo major changes in organizational design and structure and in the way courses are taught, grades are assigned, and degrees are certified. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) as a form of IT is not just a new technological means that can make the conventional business model of distance education more efficient; it will also induce the transformation of the existing educational processes and organizational structures, thus creating new and more effective learning environments. In this article, we discuss why e-commerce will reshape the entire distance learning sector and how this change might come about. We examine conventional distance learning models, investigate the potential of automating distance learning processes, discuss relevant economic mechanisms, and propose a novel theoretical model for an e-commerce-based, distributed distance education (distriducation). Finally, we present some empirical evidence supporting our theory.

Relationship between Sociotechnical Joint Optimization and Perceived Department Performance in Manufacturing Organizations

Over the last decade, organizational change has promoted flatter management structures. Organizations typically have less middle management through the integration of those tasks into upper management or lower management responsibilities. A sociotechnical systems framework was used to examine the impact of recent organizational design changes on managerial time allotment. Ninety-one transformation and downstream first-level managers participated in a research study examining time allotment to STS subsystems, level of joint optimization, value of time use, and performance in their departments. The study showed a significant relationship between the perceived level of joint optimization and perceived department performance.

Effect of just-in-time purchasing relationships on organizational design, purchasing department configuration, and firm performance

Just-in-time (JIT) purchasing relationships with suppliers involves close collaboration on product development and specifications, and on both product and information flows. The results of a study of 200 U.S. manufacturers demonstrate that the effects of JIT purchasing relationships are pervasive. First, organizational design changes as JIT purchasing increases, and the firm becomes more formalized in performance measurement, more integrated, and more specialized. Decentralization occurs in line-operating decisions but not scheduling. Second, performance is enhanced, with weeks of inbound inventory decreasing and both financial and market performance increasing. However, the configuration of the purchasing function does not change.

Internationalizing the Business School—Responding to the Customer's Needs

The trend toward internationalizing business curriculum at American colleges and universities should be incorporated as a strategy throughout the United States. The catalyst that has led most business schools to adopt a systematic acceptance of the internationalization of their curriculum was the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) 1984-1985 Standards and Guidelines for business school accreditation. Most would agree that without AACSB mandates, the transition would be slower, but inevitable, due to the focus on worldwide business issues. The global economy is rapidly evolving and the needs for competencies in international business are becoming very important to the U.S. and its economic well-being. Because of this, industry is looking for a new kind of employee, the kind that understands both the importance of international business and how to operate within it successfully. The halls of academia must respond to this pressing need by going much further than providing a sporadic array of “elective” international topics. Their response has to be synergistic with university presidents, deans and faculties fully supportive of an organizational design change that promotes a new way of thinking. The new organization is one in which there must be an international focus throughout the business school. With that synergy in place, the process of internationalizing students, the university, curriculum and faculty can move forward.

Does Decision Making Make a Difference? Patterns of Change Within Canadian National Sport Organizations

The theoretical rationale underpinning this study was that decision making structures are tightly coupled to the core values of organizations and thus have a high impact on organizational design change. Taking a fine-grained approach to the analysis of decision making, the purpose of this study was to determine whether amateur sport organizations have shifted away from the dominant paradigm of volunteer-led decision making in favor of professional staff authority and autonomy over strategic decisions. Data from a population of 36 Canadian national sport organizations were used to show that changes in decision making have occurred. However, the shift in control from volunteers to professionals has not been established. In addition, change in decision making varied according to the direction of change, the decision making dimension, and the decision topic.

Organization design implications of computer‐integrated technologies

AbstractThere is a growing realization that the benefits promised by integrated technology are not being delivered. One of the main reasons put forward for this is the failure to design an adequate form of manufacturing organization to support exploitation. The project described in this article set out to investigate the organizational designs supporting a wide variety of 46 applications of integrated technology in 28 companies. The companies were selected on the basis of appearing as exemplars of successful implementation. The findings showed overwhelming evidence of wide ranging organizational change at all levels. This article presents two contrasting case studies from the research sample giving anecdotal evidence for the key organizational design changes at the workplace, managerial, and interorganizational levels. It also presents a brief study of changes in the way in which work is coordinated in these companies. The examples provide some interesting insights into the shifts taking place in “best practice” manufacturing organizations as they exploit the benefits of integrated technologies in the 1990s.

The Design of Insurance Contracts When Liability Rules Are Unstable

The Design of Insurance Contracts When Liability Rules are Unstable ABSTRACT Recent troubles in liability insurance markets have been associated with a destabilization of liability rules. A nautral policy response is seen in proposals for legislative reform of liability rules with the aim of increased stability. An alternative track explored here examines the design of insurance contracts. The effects of judicial and legislative process on the insurance pooling function are examined in a rational expectations setting. It is then shown that the conditions for closure of policies characterized as premium are weaker than for traditional contracts given instability of liability rules. Finally, it is shown that the insurance market has responded to recent crises by organizational and contractual innovations that embody the random premium design. These responses include the emergence of mutual like forms of organization and the policy. Baruch Berliner, 1982, outlined the ideal conditions for the functioning of an insurance market. Amongst other conditions is a requirement that there be a large number of independent loss exposures. This condition ensures the operation of the Central Limit Theorem and the insurer's risk will essentially be diversified away. Failure to satisfy this condition appears to be at the heart of many of the recent troubles in liability insurance markets. For example, the recent liability insurance crisis in the United States appears to be a response to a destabilization of the legal system.(1) Insurers argue that they are able to insure the liabilities of clients arising under an unchanging set of liability rules, but they cannot insure against changes in the rules themselves. Liability insurance markets have responded with different designs of insurance or risk bearing contracts and with changes in the forms of organizations that bear risk. For example, liability insurers have introduced the so called contract which, in effect, shortens the period over which changes in the level of expected loss may commonly affect all outstanding policies. A more dramatic change has been the shift from stock forms of insurance organization to mutuals, group captives, industry pools and reciprocals. These structures share the risk among a group of firms (or individuals) commonly exposed. Equity in the structure is held by the policyholders. Such structures are referred to in the current article as mutuals. These changes in contract or organizational design have a similar effect. The premium for any given period of cover is random. It is subject to retroactive adjustment on the basis of new information concerning the aggregate loss in the pool. For example, the mutual may pay a dividend (positive or negative) to its policyholders which is related to the aggregate loss in the pool. The policy holder buying a claims made policy will find that losses which may have arisen, but which have not been presented as claims, within the policy year will be priced in the future in a future insurance contract. The policyholder does not know how much he or she will have to pay to insure this year's liabilities. The premium is, in effect, random. The next section of the article describes how correlations arising both from the incidence of losses and the generation of new information can lead to undiversified insurance portfolios. This section also shows how judicial and legislative processes can lead to such problems. A subsequent section presents a formal analysis of optimal insurance purchase with random premiums showing the conditions under which random premium contracts are preferred. The final section addresses the contractual and organizational innovations which have emerged in theses troubled markets. The insurance markets described are mainly for corporate insurance buyers. …

Studying Changes in Organizational Design and Effectiveness: Retrospective Event Histories and Periodic Assessments

This paper describes assumptions, rationale, and track-offs involved in designing the research methodology used in a longitudinal study of the relationships among changes in organizational contexts, designs, and effectiveness. The basic research question concerns when how, and why do different types of organizational change occur. Given this research question and a desire to develop and test generalizable theory about changes in organizational design and effectiveness, we conducted a longitudinal study of over 100 organizations. Data concerning the changes were obtained through four interviews spaced six months apart with the top manager in each organization. Each interview provided a short-term retrospective event history over the preceding 6-month interval in aggregate, the four interviews provided a 24-month event history for each organization. Additionally, periodic assessments of the state of the organization's context, design, and effectiveness were collected with two questionnaires spaced one year apart. Finally, in each organization, the top manager's personal characteristics were assessed after all other data were obtained. This paper examines the alternatives, advantages, and disadvantages of the research design decisions. With some hindsight, we also offer some suggestions for future researchers with similar goals of developing and testing generalizable explanations of change processes in organizations.

A Theory of the Effects of Advanced Information Technologies on Organizational Design, Intelligence, and Decision Making

This article sets forth a theory of the effects that computer-assisted communication and decision-aiding technologies have on organizational design, intelligence, and decision making. Several components of the theory are controversial and in need of critical empirical investigation. The article focuses on those technology-prompted changes in organizational design that affect the quality and timeliness of intelligence and decision making, as contrasted with those that affect the production of goods and services.

Making Organizational-Design Changes Effective: An Approach Based on Indian Experience

This paper is primarily concerned with organizational-design-change interventions, the roles of the intervening consultants, and the subjec tion of the organization to the redesign. It illustrates several aspects of organizational-design-change interventions in India. Participation of corporate managers at various levels is shown to be a critical determi nant of effective organizational changes. The approach is based on the author's perceptions and ideas that have come from professibnal work experience in this field.