Formal Coordination Mechanisms Research Articles

Spanning “Bleeding” Boundaries: Humanitarianism, NGOs, and the Civilian‐Military Nexus in the Post–Cold War Era

How do nongovernmental (NGO), international (IO), and military organizations cope with their dependencies and address their perceptual and real differences in order to coordinate their field operations? This question is addressed through the creation of a matrix grouping civilian (NGOs and IOs) and military operations into four general types: peacekeeping; disaster relief; complex humanitarian emergencies/warfare; and stabilization and reconstruction. Second, using Galbraith's information processing approach to organizational design, a range of formal coordination mechanisms that organizations use at the strategic and operational levels to help them cope with their dependencies in different field operations is identified. Third, the author underscores how communities of practice are emerging as informal mechanisms of coordination among civilian and military organizations. And finally, a framework of organizational forms that views communities of practice as an alternative to hierarchy and markets is offered. Believing communities of practice hold the most promise for coordination in the human security domain when hierarchies are politically untenable and markets lack accountability, the author concludes with implications for interorganization coordination research and practice.

Involvement in the Child Welfare System Among Mothers With Serious Mental Illness

Involvement in the Child Welfare System Among Mothers With Serious Mental Illness

Exploratory Innovation, Exploitative Innovation, and Performance: Effects of Organizational Antecedents and Environmental Moderators

Research on exploration and exploitation is burgeoning, yet our understanding of the antecedents and consequences of both activities remains rather unclear. We advance the growing body of literature by focusing on the apparent differences of exploration and exploitation and examining implications for using formal (i.e., centralization and formalization) and informal (i.e., connectedness) coordination mechanisms. This study further examines how environmental aspects (i.e., dynamism and competitiveness) moderate the effectiveness of exploratory and exploitative innovation. Results indicate that centralization negatively affects exploratory innovation, whereas formalization positively influences exploitative innovation. Interestingly, connectedness within units appears to be an important antecedent of both exploratory and exploitative innovation. Furthermore, our findings reveal that pursuing exploratory innovation is more effective in dynamic environments, whereas pursuing exploitative innovation is more beneficial to a unit’s financial performance in more competitive environments. Through this richer explanation and empirical assessment, we contribute to a greater clarity and better understanding of how ambidextrous organizations coordinate the development of exploratory and exploitative innovation in organizational units and successfully respond to multiple environmental conditions.

Restructuring of the healthcare system and the diffusion of telemedicine

This contribution focuses on the medical applications of new information and communication technologies (NICTs). We discuss the paradoxical nature of the spread of these technologies, related to the discrepancy between the promises held out by their use in a healthcare system searching for new mechanisms of coordination and their actual implementation, involving a series of experiments that to date have been short-lived. We then argue that solving this paradox requires understanding the complexity of the interaction process between NICTs and organisational changes. Thus while NICTs can facilitate the restructuring of provider networks, one of the principal challenges facing healthcare systems, they also reveal the tensions engendered by some new formal coordination mechanisms.