Larger Organizational Context Research Articles

The mindset of recordkeeping: the intersection of records management and organizational psychology

Purpose This study aims to synthesize records and information management (RIM) with the professional literature of industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology to explain undesirable recordkeeping behaviors that may manifest in employees who interact with business records. Design/methodology/approach The author’s views are based on a literature review of both records management and organizational psychology trends and draw on case studies that identify undesirable recordkeeping behavior. Findings There is considerable overlap between the problems encountered by RIM professionals and the answers offered by I/O psychology. I/O psychology offers us the tools to better understand recordkeeping behaviors. Originality/value The author proposes using I/O psychology concepts to better situate RIM programs within the larger organizational context.

The Trouble with Teams… and Team Leadership: Toward a Research Agenda on the Paradoxical Nature and Reciprocal Dynamics of Vertical and Shared Leadership

The trouble with teams is that we need them, and the leadership that makes teams tick. Teams have become ubiquitous within the organizational landscape. They are deployed to address cutting-edge knowledge work and develop breakthrough innovation. Getting the most out of teams requires that they, to a large degree, lead themselves. Simultaneously, their efforts must be embedded within the larger organizational context, which typically requires vertical leadership from a hierarchical source. In addition, however, true team leadership generally also requires team member-based shared leadership from the team itself. Our curated collection of Academy of Management publications on team leadership illustrates how team leadership research has developed over time. This development includes the application of leadership models that are not specific to teams, as well as team-specific leadership theory. We discuss the value of both. We also highlight arguably the most important direction in developing the field: studying team leadership as a dynamic process in which formal, vertical leadership and informal, shared leadership mutually influence each other. We discuss how pursuing this direction requires the development of new theory and new empirical approaches that capture dynamics over time. Ultimately, it is time for a course correction in team leadership research.

Contextualising the role of external partnerships to innovate the core and enabling processes of an organisation: A resource and knowledge-based view

The knowledge-based view (KBV) theory argues that organisations gain a competitive advantage by adopting strategies to capitalise on their knowledge resources, e.g., organisational culture, managerial decision-making and innovative new processes. Large organisations partner with external technology suppliers to develop such technology-driven processes. However, within the context of large organisations, there remains a lack of insight into the motivation and structures of how and why large organisations collaborate with external partners to create such technology-driven processes. To explore the identified problem of understanding the collaborating mechanisms that contribute to technology-driven process innovation in large manufacturing organisations, we analyse and develop inductive concepts using multiple data points. Our research illustrates that external technology partners act as a mediating influence in process-innovation projects by contributing to the capabilities or capacity of an organisation.

New Vantage Points on Emotional Labor and Its Service Context: An Introduction to the Emotional Labor and Service Special Issue

This special issue introduces new perspectives on emotional labor in the service context. That is, while service work has been a focus of much of the emotional labor research world, explication of the context in which that service work occurs (including the customers served, the leadership of those who serve, and the larger organizational context) has not received much attention. In addition, the emotional labor of customers has also not been much explored. The papers included in this special issue explore these issues from the viewpoints of both the fields of organizational behavior and services management; they consider emotional labor from both employees’ and customers’ perspectives; and they explore the outcomes of emotional labor in ways that signal the common human experiences of people when in interaction with each other. Together, these papers offer new insights on emotional labor by translating service characteristics and service leadership into attitudes and experiences of service workers and customers, their behaviors and emotions, and ultimately into their health and wellbeing. This introduction provides a series of lenses useful for interpreting the papers in this special issue. We hope that the depth and diversity of new directions for emotional labor research and practice that are suggested by this special issue will inspire many researchers and practitioners navigating this world to provide both understanding of it and further the health and well-being of those involved in it.

Communicating science in higher education and research institutions

PurposeThe paper reports on a research project exploring the change in the organizational context of communicators and communication units in higher education and research institutions (HERIs), the importance of informal processes within their daily work and the great diversity of expectations communicators have to tackle.Design/methodology/approachBased on a literature review, a mixed-methods study combining expert interviews with 54 German HERI heads of communication units, an online-survey and a document analysis of organizational characteristics was conducted. Findings were validated in four focus groups.FindingsThe study illuminates the impact of organizational and operational structures of HERIs on communicators and their boundary spanning activities. Due to varying expectations of stakeholders, communicators constantly have to switch roles. Members of HERIs' executive boards affect status and working conditions for communicators in the organization.Research limitations/implicationsInterviews with other HERI actors, especially members of the executive board, are proposed to get more thorough insights into the organizational context of HERIs and the mutual expectations of different internal stakeholders.Practical implicationsInsights from the project may help HERI actors to reflect their organizational context and to identify potentially contentious structures or processes.Originality/valueCommunicating science sometimes clashes with complex organizational and operational structures. Despite the “organizational turn” in HERI research, there is a lack of data on the relation between communicators, their communication units and the larger organizational context. The exploratory study addresses this gap.

Psychological Detachment from Work during Nonwork Time and Employee Well-Being: The Role of Leader's Detachment.

Research has shown that psychological detachment from work during nonwork time is an important recovery experience and is crucial for employee well-being. Integrating research on job-stress recovery with research on leadership and employee mental health and well-being, this study examines how a leader's psychological detachment from work during nonwork time directly relates to subordinate psychological detachment from work and indirectly to employee exhaustion and need for recovery. Based on self-report data from 137 employees and their supervisors, this study revealed that leader psychological detachment was related to subordinate psychological detachment and that leader psychological detachment was indirectly related to low subordinate exhaustion and low subordinate need for recovery, also when controlling for negative affectivity and leader-member-exchange. Overall, this study demonstrates that leaders might have an impact on subordinate strain symptoms not only via leadership behavior at work but also via detachment processes during leisure time. These findings suggest that employee recovery processes might not only be regarded as an individual phenomenon, but could be seen as embedded in the larger organizational context.

Editorial

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I′m frightened of the old ones. – John Cage With this quote, we'd like to kick off the year 2017. May it be filled with novel ideas and let us work together to make this year a happy and good one – despite all the sorrows and fears many of us are feeling. Currently the world is changing at a rapid pace and we might wonder where our contribution as management scholars can be. Yet we feel that in our specific domain – creativity and innovation – we bring a lot to the table that can help the world to become a better place. We would like to call out to our readers to think with our research the unthinkable, to spot and develop the new and crazy ideas, to educate our students to think, act and live in an open-minded fashion, empathic to the needs of others, and then distribute our knowledge to a wide audience, making an impact beyond our small world of academia. Only with all of us working together, doing insightful research and contributing to our environment, will we be able to face the current challenges and provide answers to the questions emerging. Consequently, this issue addresses the call for new ideas – conceptually, methodologically and object-wise. It also presents articles on how to improve idea generation, which processes and tools might help, and what preconditions from an organizational and individual perspective are needed to generate and evaluate radical ideas. The first paper, ‘Studying Organizational Creativity As Process: Fluidity Or Duality?’, takes a novel and very important perspective on creativity. While we often focus on creativity as an outcome, we not so often look at the process of creativity. Neither do we know a lot about the way creativity develops and its stabilization within and across organizations. The paper takes both perspectives: ‘creativity as becoming’ and ‘creativity as practice’. The authors, Johann Fortwengel, Elke Schüßler and Jörg Sydow, develop two research agendas for studying organizational creativity as a process. Each of the two agendas promises to yield different but potentially complementary insights that bring ‘process pluralism’ to our field, and we very much look forward to the discussion and new papers this paper will stimulate. Further discussion and research impulses will probably also be generated by the second paper. In their paper ‘In Search of New Product Ideas: Identifying Ideas in Online Communities by Machine Learning and Text Mining’, Kasper Christensen, Sladjana Nørskov, Lars Frederiksen and Joachim Scholderer propose a text mining technique and a classification model for the automatic analysis of online community data. Using 2,803 texts from the Lego online community LUGNET (the Lego User Group Network), they use text mining techniques to train a classification model. They conclude that machine learning and text mining have a large potential for innovation management by detecting ideas in large amounts of text. However, they also mention that this kind of research is just at the beginning and that the next iterations are soon to come. We see this article as a wonderful example that we, as creativity and innovation researchers, should not be afraid of technology soon replacing us, but should view it as helping us to build the foundation to be even more creative in the future. This individual, human creativity that especially blossoms in interdisciplinary teams is also the focus of the third paper. In their paper ‘Individual Creativity during the Ideation Phase of Product Innovation: An Interactional Perspective’, Jing Guo, Qin Su and Qian Zhang analyse the interaction effects of personality and group diversity on employees' creative performance, focusing on the ideation stage of product innovation. In addition, the authors conduct an experiment based on a sample of 142 working adults. They show that openness to experience and extraversion are positively related to individual creativity, whereas neuroticism and conscientiousness are negatively related to individual creativity. Furthermore, the impacts of openness to experience and extraversion on individual creativity, respectively, are moderated by both functional diversity and gender diversity. It almost appears that the authors of the next paper have waited for these results when they conducted their research project. In their paper ‘Different Styles for Different Needs – The Effect of Cognitive Styles on Idea Generation’, Carina Lomberg, Tobias Kollmann and Christoph Stöckmann look at the precursors for innovation. Drawing on Kirton's Adaption-Innovation (KAI) Inventory, they test the assumption that cognitive styles differentiate between preferences for producing ideas in a certain way. In a study with 191 individuals, they find that the cognitive style originality associates with ideational fluency, whereas the rule governance style associates with the generation of original ideas. By providing a cognitive explanation for how ideas are generated, they deepen the understanding of the idea generation process and provide valuable insights on how the use of the KAI might help firms to assemble adequate teams. Once the ideas are generated, the question remains how to evaluate them and their innovative potential. In their article ‘From Creative Ideas to Innovation Performance: The Role of Assessment Criteria’, Marianne Harbo Frederiksen and Mette Præst Knudsen build on the existing creativity and innovation management literature to select three criteria – novelty, usefulness and market potential – to assess the innovation potential of early new product proposals. Industry and market experts make assessments of 106 student-generated projects and find proof for the distinctiveness of the three criteria. They also show the value of each criterion's independent role in assessing the innovation potential. The sixth paper also focuses on idea generation and thinking differently, but in a larger organizational context. In ‘The Role of Organizational Vision in Guiding Idea Generation within SME Contexts’, Graham Perkins, Jonathan Lean and Robert Newbery show that ignoring employee perception may result in a destructive impact on idea generation. Through in-depth qualitative research with a range of SMEs, their study shows that structure in the form of an outlining framework assists in opening a liminal space for ideation. Furthermore, they also show that organizational visions can act as a target, assisting the development of relevant ideas. SMEs need to consider not only the development of an outlining framework or structuring, which opens a space into which individuals can contribute ideas, but also how this framing or structuring will be perceived. Finally, in the last paper, ‘Design-Driven Innovation in Retailing: An Empirical Examination of New Services in Car Dealership’, Emilio Bellini, Claudio Dell'Era, Federico Frattini and Roberto Verganti look at what values need to be communicated to the customer in order to successfully capture new markets. They look at 104 examples of strategic innovation projects in the automotive retail sector. Their exploratory empirical analysis shows that a certain number of automotive retail firms choose design-driven innovation (DDI) as a strategy embodied in strategic innovation projects designed to achieve superior performance. Their findings suggest that radical innovation in meanings may be elicited by spatial reconfiguration and expansion, whereas temporal innovation does not seem to provide a fertile ground for DDI implementation. Consequently, entry into new markets requires a radical redefinition of the values proposed to consumers and additionally the identification of new meanings that may attract them. Last but not least, please be reminded that the 18th International CINet Conference will take place in Potsdam from 10 to 12 September 2017. This year's topic is ‘Digitalization and Innovation: Designing the Organization of the Future’. Please note that the deadline for submitting papers is 15 March. We are very much looking forward to welcoming many of you in the beautiful yet digitalized city of Potsdam!

First Telecom – India 2.0 strategy

Subject area This case looks at a recent shift in the way organizations look to leverage the benefits from India as a cost-effective destination to provide services. What started, around 15 years back, as an activity to outsource all non-core activities to Indian companies to take the advantage of cost-effective resources, has now given way to a new model where the focus is on two key aspects, namely, “insourcing of work” and “transfer of core activities to India”. This is because of the realization that outsourcing may be a short-term solution for non-core activities; however, to build a sustainable capability that is both cost-effective and value-oriented, insourcing is key. Also, it is not just non-core activities that can be supported remotely; many core activities that have been managed by on-shore teams are increasingly being shifted to India to leverage the depth of skills available in the country. First Telecom has undertaken pioneering work in this domain by moving some of the critical functions to India and has created Centers of Excellence (CoEs) providing niche services to rest of the world. Study level/applicability Target audience includes corporate executives, students of MBA/postgraduate program in management in strategic management and/or workshops for understanding the concept of insourcing, cost transformation, business environment analysis and growth strategies for future. Case overview First Telecom has adopted what could be termed as “India 2.0” as the strategy to transform their operations worldwide to utilize the full potential of “India” as a service sector-outsourcing destination. The focus is not only on cost-avoidance but also on standardization of processes and mobilization of resources in a CoE setting to maximize the benefits. This case attempts to understand the way to go about it and the expected returns in a quantifiable manner. Expected learning outcomes To develop an understanding of business environment in the context of large multinational organizations that are constantly evolving to improve their operational excellence. Also, to develop an understanding of the outsourcing market and how companies are looking to move their core services to cost-effective locations to achieve the next phase of cost transformation after the outsourcing (non-core services) wave. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS 1: Accounting and Finance

Loyalty card adoption in SME retailers: the impact upon marketing management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) retailers adopt and implement a loyalty card programme as a marketing management decision-making tool. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative and longitudinal case study research design is adopted. Data were collected from multiple sources, incorporating semi-structured interviews and analysis of company documents and observation within a retail SME. Findings – The findings presented focus on the loyalty card adoption process to reflect both the organisational issues and impact upon marketing management decision-making. Research limitations/implications – This research is restricted to one region within the UK, investigating loyalty card adoption within a specific industry sector. Practical implications – SME retailers operate in an industry environment whereby there is a competitive demand for loyalty card programmes. SME retailers need to carefully consider how to match the firm’s characteristics with customer relationship management (CRM) operational requirements as highlighted in this case. Originality/value – The evidence presented extends current knowledge of retail loyalty card programmes beyond the context of large organisations to encompass SMEs. The study also illustrates the value of a structured, formal CRM system to help SME retailers compete in a complex, competitive and omni-channel marketplace, adding new insights into the retail literature.

Strategy alignment boosts business results and employee satisfaction at Sandia National Laboratories

AbstractFaced with the challenge of meeting increased customer demands with a decreasing budget, the Responsive Neutron Generator Product Deployment Center of Sandia National Laboratories used a value‐creation process management system based on lean principles to cascade its strategic plan into lower‐level objectives, provide a means to monitor and control progress in a systematic way, and ensure a closed‐loop system for performing work. Over the past four years, the Center has improved performance and employee and customer satisfaction and significantly reduced operating expenses by aligning all work in the organization to its strategic objectives and developing a culture in which employees know how their work fits into the larger organizational context. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Small software organizations need explicit project portfolio management

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> The concept of managing new product development projects as an explicit portfolio originates from the context of large organizations. However, the question as to whether explicit portfolio management is relevant for small organizations is rarely discussed. We conducted a qualitative multiple-case study of six small organizations (with 15–40 people) that developed software and provided related services. Five of the organizations did not practice explicit portfolio management. They also seemed to suffer from problems that, in the literature, are considered symptomatic of inadequate portfolio management, such as having too many simultaneous projects, overcommitment in terms of workload, and ineffective executive decision making. In one of the studied organizations, the management personnel had recognized the need for explicit portfolio management and introduced portfolio management practices such as regular reviews of the project portfolio, appointing specific people for resolving cross-project conflicts, and limiting the number of concurrent projects to which a person can be assigned. The personnel we interviewed perceived clear improvements with respect to various challenges since the introduction of these practices. Our preliminary study suggests that explicit portfolio management is relevant for small software organizations, at least in cases in which the development personnel possess multiple roles and responsibilities and are concurrently performing many different types of activities. </para>

Extending Software Project Agility with New Product Development Enterprise Agility

AbstractMany new product development (NPD) companies must nowadays work under turbulent conditions. The market competition is often fierce, while at the same time new and sometimes even disruptive technological uncertainties emerge. Speed and flexibility are then key success factors. Agility is thus a prospective strategy for such companies. The (embedded) software product development projects working in such environments face the turbulence either directly or indirectly, and agile software methods could potentially help to cope with the challenges. However, in large NPD environments the software project agility must be combined with the overall enterprise agility in order for the company to meet the ultimate business goals. This exploratory article investigates software project agility from that point of view by constructing a framework of the considerations for larger NPD companies to achieve more overarching agility. The software process improvement (SPI) activities can then be focused accordingly. An industrial product development case example is illustrated, suggesting how software product development agility should be improved within the larger organizational context (SPI‐in‐the‐large). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

DEVELOPMENT OF A FRAMEWORK FOR WORLD-CLASS MAINTENANCE SYSTEMS

A world-class maintenance system (WMS) refers to the best practices in maintenance that are followed and adopted by various organizations to transform themselves to be a 'world-class manufacturer'. One of the important factors in developing a 'world-class' maintenance system within an organization is the adoption of a sound framework that provides the necessary conceptual and theoretical details of best practices to be followed, to reach the world-class status. Several authors, consultants and large organizations have proposed different frameworks representing the best practices in maintenance, which seem to have been developed and derived primarily from the context and experience of such large organizations and consultants respectively. A comparative study revealed that most of the frameworks are unique and proposes several unique best practices in maintenance. Hence, in this paper, an attempt has been made to identify such best practices from the existing frameworks and integrate these practices to develop and propose a new framework for world-class maintenance systems.

Avoiding failure by using a formal problem diagnosis process

PurposeSeeks to provide an overview of a formal method for diagnosing and resolving problems that arise during the system development process.Design/methodology/approachUsing a communicative problem‐solving model proposed by Lumsden and Lumsden, the author applies the model to the problem diagnosis process in systems development by way of a case study.FindingsApplying a formal model to problem diagnosis and resolution provides a way for the development team to truly understand the problem it is trying to solve and the implications of the solution. When the model is used, the problem can be analyzed within its larger organizational context, thereby creating more effective solutions that will be welcomed and embraced.Originality/valueThis paper will be of interest to systems developers and managers, especially those who need to diagnose and resolve issues within their larger organizational context. By situating the general model proposed by Lumsden and Lumsden within the systems development context, the paper describes a new approach to organizing this type of activity within the systems development function.

Prosocial Behavior: Multilevel Perspectives

Current research on prosocial behavior covers a broad and diverse range of phenomena. We argue that this large research literature can be best organized and understood from a multilevel perspective. We identify three levels of analysis of prosocial behavior: (a) the "meso" level--the study of helper-recipient dyads in the context of a specific situation; (b) the micro level--the study of the origins of prosocial tendencies and the sources of variation in these tendencies; and (c) the macro level--the study of prosocial actions that occur within the context of groups and large organizations. We present research at each level and discuss similarities and differences across levels. Finally, we consider ways in which theory and research at these three levels of analysis might be combined in future intra- and interdisciplinary research on prosocial behavior.

Agile software development in large organizations

The need to see compelling evidence before adopting new methods looms greater in large organizations because of their complexity and the need to integrate new technologies and processes with existing ones. To further evaluate agile methods and their underlying software development practices, several Software Experience Center (SEC) member companies initiated a series of activities to discover if agile practices match their organizations' needs. Although each organization evaluated agile methods according to its specific needs, here we attempt to generalize their findings by analyzing some of their common experiences in the particular context of large organizations with well-established structures and processes. We base this analysis on experience collected and shared among four SEC members namely ABB, DaimlerChrysler, Motorola, and Nokia.

The Sanitized Workplace

III. THE CONTEMPORARY CAMPAIGN 2087 A. The Legal and Cultural Environment 2087 B. Sanitizing the Workplace: A Summary of Current Developments 2090 C. Prohibiting Sexual Conduct 2094 1. The Zero-Tolerance Approach 2099 2. The Cultural Sensitivity Approach 2101 D. Punishing Sexual Transgressors 2103 E. Policing Sexual Relationships 2119

Measurement program success factors revisited

Success factors for measurement programs as identified in the literature typically focus on the ‘internals’ of the measurement program; incremental implementation, support from management, a well-planned metric framework, and so on. However, for a measurement program to be successful within its larger organizational context, it has to generate value for the organization. This implies that attention should also be given to the proper mapping of some identifiable organizational problem onto the measurement program, and the translation back of measurement results to organizational actions. We have extended the well-known ‘internal’ success factors for software measurement programs with four ‘external’ success factors. These success factors are aimed at the link between the measurement program and the usage of the measurement results. In this paper, we show how this combined set of internal and external success factors explains the success or failure of five industrial measurement programs.

Organizational Contexts and Conversation Patterns

We investigate whether the larger organizational context affects conversation patterns in informal same-sex task groups. We draw on Ridgeway's recent extension of status characteristics theory to make predictions about the effects of the social composition of an organization's authority structure and gender on conversation variables. Using a quasi-experimental design, we compare conversation patterns in all-male and all-female task groups at a coeducational college with a male-dominated authority structure to conversation patterns in all-female groups at a women's college with a female-dominated authority structure. We examine tentative and supportive forms of speech. In keeping with Ridgeway's extension, women at the women's college show lower rates of tentative behaviors than women at the coeducational college; contrary to her approach, however, they register higher rates of tentative behaviors than men at the coeducational college. Results of the analysis of supportive behavior show that women attending the women's college are more supportive in their groups than both coeducational men and coeducational women.

Maintenance communication in superior‐subordinate relationships: An exploratory investigation of group social context and the “Pelz effect”

This study explored effects of the larger organizational context of the work group on the use of maintenance communication behaviors in the superior‐subordinate relationship. Findings suggest that group social context and the “Pelz effect” have significant impacts on how individuals (subordinates) enact their communication behaviors in escalating, deteriorating, and routine strategic maintenance situations when attempting to maintain their superior‐subordinate relationships.