Today's Organizations Research Articles

EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL TRAINING FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

We live in a time that is measured in seconds. Time for decision making almost does not exist as a category - everything is happening now and right away. Adaptation capacity becomes necessary for survival in a dynamic environment. For success it takes something more.In the era of knowledge, the organization doesn’t have an alternative solution, other than the development and application of the concept of knowledge management. Some studies in the developed economies show that today's organizations are increasingly investing in intangible property - research and development, employee education, etc., comparing to investments in tangible property. The main reason for increasing the importance of intangible property is that the new value in the organization is created with the knowledge, not with the material resources and routine work. Intellectual capital constitutes of the knowledge of employees - human resources. From the knowledge of employees, their skills and abilities depend on how the organization works, ie from the intellectual capital depends on the organization's competitive advantage.The pressure on the free market and competition imposes the need of organizations to demand from their employees specific knowledge, skills and abilities to achieve the set goals. What an organization can do to have competitive employees that will be up to date with current developments in the environment is continuous learning through employee training.Training is a process of acquiring the qualifications required to perform certain tasks. Not always held training achieves its goal, especially when it comes to training for "soft" skills. In organizations, the training would be done well, the evaluations would be excellent, but at a certain time, there would be no change in the behavior of the employees who were trained.In order for the training to achieve the goals and be effective, ie. after the completion of the training the employees apply the acquired knowledge and skills, it is necessary for the (knowledge) managers to be actively involved in the processes before and after the training. Above all, proper planning and preparation for the training is necessary. This process involves determining the need for the training (knowledge gaps), setting the objectives of the training, and a preparation for the target group - the participants who would be trained. After the completion of the training, it is necessary to take the follow up activities, to monitor the application of the new knowledge in the organizational work. These follow up activities can be particularly useful in supporting the transfer: action plans, performance assessment, meetings, oversight consultations, and technical support.

Teams in a New Era: Some Considerations and Implications.

Teams have been a ubiquitous structure for conducting work and business for most of human history. However, today’s organizations are markedly different than those of previous generations. The explosion of innovative ideas and novel technologies mandate changes in job descriptions, roles, responsibilities, and how employees interact and collaborate. These advances have heralded a new era for teams and teamwork in which previous teams research and practice may not be fully appropriate for meeting current requirements and demands. In this article, we describe how teams have been historically defined, unpacking five important characteristics of teams, including membership, interdependence, shared goals, dynamics, and an organizationally bounded context, and relating how these characteristics have been addressed in the past and how they are changing in the present. We then articulate the implications these changes have on how we study teams moving forward by offering specific research questions.

Executive leadership performance according to Culture Variety in Iranian organizations (Case Study: Social Security Insurance of Main Provinces in Iran

Today's organizations are face with many challenges, such as maintaining the quality through reduced resources, improve financial management, to receive more research support, development of new intrusions and skills, assist members to cope with the increasing work pressure, maintaining motivation and work spirit, innovation in education and research. The purpose of this investigate research is to analysis and examine the executive leader’s behaviors and the managers with the culture difference in Iranian organizations based on Hofstede's cultural indicators in the large companies’ contacts of main provinces of Iran. The current study applied and descriptive-correlative and analyses the situation on of executive leaders in different culture throw the work at large companies with the employees by different cultures and behaviors. The statistical population of the survey is carried out by the employees of the central offices of Social Security Insurance, which was reported in 2017 by more than 6,000 people population. The sample size is 351 according to the Morgan table and selected by proportional random sampling. The main method of gathering the information’s in this research is with the designed questionnaire combination of a researcher idea and Hofstede's theory. Also, the validity of the questionnaire was verified by factor analysis ANOVA and 6 factors explained the total of variance of 51.59%. The calculated reliability coefficient for the culture questionnaire by the Cronbach coefficient test was 0.795, which shows an acceptable reliability. The results of this research showed that there are different cultures based on geographic regions and it has direct impacts on the behaviors of employees and executive leader’s performance. Finally, some suggestions for leaders and managers were explained with regard to the existing cultural differences.

Review on the KM Applications in Public Organisations

The rise in awareness of knowledge management as a viable organisational resource and potential source of competitive advantage has been the subject of a myriad of research to date. The phenomenon covers a multitude of disciplines, roles and procedures, and its subjectivity has at times mitigated its potential for pertinent study. Add to this mix, the public sector, which exhibits unusual, specific, bureaucratic and insular hierarchies which can make it difficult to assess it from a research perspective, and a pertinent case can be made for investigating the process of implementing knowledge management initiatives in this area. Today's public organisations are confronted with considerable challenges in the dynamic knowledge economy and continuously adapt to shifts in societal needs, behaviour, and expectations. To keep pace with global trends and new demands, public sector organisations have to embrace new paradigms that place the management of intangible assets at the core of their strategies. Recognising the vital role of knowledge resources in driving organisations can lead to better performance. The idiosyncratic nature of governmental institutions creates peculiar barriers for attempts to manage knowledge within the public domain. Public organisations tend to be highly bureaucratic and cloistered in rigid hierarchies which require knowledge management (KM) strategies that are able to address their specific context, and equally consider their unique cultural and legal implications. The purpose of this paper is to present an inclusive literature review of the current state of KM research in the public sector in order to further research. An extensive review collated KM articles that have interest in public organisations during the last number of years. Initial findings of this research indicate that KM in the public sector is relatively under‑researched compared with its private sector counterpart. Despite the existing research that has been undertaken, more efforts are required towards the development of applied frameworks to support public KM initiatives. Inducing culture changes in public organisations and introducing mechanisms of accountability have also been revealed as imperative issues of importance in the context of KM. From an application perspective, most studies have been conducted within the education and healthcare organisations, with a dearth of research in certain important government departments such as the Police and Army forces.The purpose of this paper is to highlight the level of research into KM in the public sector and assess the benefits of taxonomising the literature. This will offer significant new insights into public sector literature and will benefit future researchers in the field. The historically dichotomous roles of public and private sector research present a unique case for reviewing the nuances of public sector KM and investigating whether there is a case for unilateral supposition of the public sector and its unique nuances and if so, is it fortuitous for this to continue. A total of 3000 articles published in peer reviewed journals over selected time periods have been analysed for content pertaining to public sector knowledge management. From this analysis a total of 150 papers have been selected for their direct relevance to public sector knowledge management.There are viable areas of demarcation in public sector literature, and these serve to illustrate a lack of research in some crucial areas, such as the emergency services and the military. The research also suggests that efforts to marry the principals of private sector KM to the public sector are difficult as the uniqueness of public sector culture and orientation makes KM reform challenging.

Multiple team membership and empowerment spillover effects: Can empowerment processes cross team boundaries?

In today's organizations, employees are often assigned as members of multiple teams simultaneously (i.e., multiple team membership), and yet we know little about important leadership and employee phenomena in such settings. Using a scenario-based experiment and 2 field studies of leaders and their employees in the People's Republic of China and the United States, we examined how empowering leadership exhibited by 2 different team leaders toward a single employee working on 2 different teams can spillover to affect that employee's psychological empowerment and subsequent proactivity across teams. Consistent across all 3 studies, we found that each of the team leaders' empowering leadership uniquely and positively influenced an employee's psychological empowerment and subsequent proactive behaviors. In the field studies, we further found that empowering leadership exhibited by one team leader influenced the psychological empowerment and proactive behaviors of their team member not only in that leader's team but also in the other team outside of that leader's stewardship. Finally, across studies, we found that empowering leadership exhibited on one team can substitute for lower levels of empowering leadership experienced in a different team led by a distinct leader. We discuss our contributions to the motivation, teams, and leadership literatures and provide practical guidance for leaders charged with managing employees that have multiple team memberships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Home Healthcare Nurses' Attitudes, Confidence, and Engagement in Evidence-Based Practice.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is becoming standard in today's healthcare arena and home care organizations are not exempt from integrating evidence into practice to improve patient outcomes. There is a scarcity of research literature that examines the behaviors and attitudes of home healthcare nurses (HHNs) regarding EBP. In this study, a descriptive survey design was used to investigate HHNs' a) information-seeking behaviors when providing nursing care, b) administrative support for EBP (as perceived by HHNs), c) attitudes toward EBP, and d) EBP engagement and confidence in providing EBP nursing care. Self-reported data were collected by internet and paper survey. The survey consisted of a 65-item questionnaire that included the Nurses' Attitudes Toward Evidence-Based Practice Scale, which has previously established validity and reliability. A convenience sample of 95 HHNs participated in the study. Results suggest HHNs' EBP attitudes are positive. A positive and significant relationship was found between attitudes and hours worked (r = 0.21, p = 0.047) and educational level (r = 0.45, p = 0.0001); 95% confidence level. Confidence levels in providing EBP care were moderate, and HHNs did not perceive EBP as an agency priority. HHNs need to be supported and encouraged in the facilitation of EBP, a task made easier when they are knowledgeable about EBP, have confidence in their EBP skills, and have the support of their organizations.

To link or not to link? Multiple team membership and unit performance.

Multiple team membership is common in today's team-based organizations, but little is known about its relationship with collective effectiveness across teams. We adopted a microfoundations framework utilizing existing individual- and team-level research to develop a higher-level perspective on multiple team membership's relationship with performance of entire units of teams. We tested our predictions with data collected from 849 primary care units of the Veterans Health Administration serving over 4.2 million patients. In this context, we found multiple team membership is negatively associated with unit performance, and this negative relationship is exacerbated by task complexity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION COMPETENCY AMONG MANAGERS: A STUDY ON ORGANIZATIONS IN MALAYSIA

Purpose: This study aims to highlight the necessary competencies among the middle level managers, especially the cross-cultural communication competency. This study was designed to investigate the cross-cultural communication competencies in organizations through the focus group conducted among the senior management levels. Methodology: This study applied the beauty of qualitative research by conducting a focus group of ten participants, where all of them were from various industries in Malaysia. They are well mixed of women and men Senior Managers level and above, where the minimum level of them was the Director, General Manager, and Vice President of private enterprises. Data from the focus group discussion was analyzed and presented in the findings in this article. Results: The findings of this paper proven the need of cross-cultural communication competency currently in Malaysia through the ten (10) participants involved in the focus group research and ten (10) cases were presented in this article. Different participant provided different findings however, the data summarization was presented in the table in results. Majority concluded that employees nowadays are conscious competence and agreed that cross-cultural communication is the most crucial competency needed by all organization today. Implications: This should provide several ideas to the senior management levels in incorporating this aspect into their management training programmes or other activities in all organizations. Further studies could be expanded through the methodology used. Novelty of Study: As past research concentrated more on the leadership and other management competencies, this study was looking at the specific issue of cross-cultural communication competencies among these employees in organizations. With the peculiar scenario in Malaysia, this paper contributed to the management field as a reference for the higher and middle level managers.

Accelerating time to impact: Deconstructing practices to achieve project value

Accelerating time to impact is a serious and important challenge for today's organizations. This paper combines the literatures of project acceleration and benefit management to inquire into the possibilities of accelerating time to impact. Specifically, it explores a practitioner-driven Danish initiative targeted at increasing the speed at which project benefits are attained, and it analyzes why some projects were able to achieve benefits faster than others. The initiative functions as a major social experiment, where the same project methodology was implemented in several Danish project-based organizations. We analyze five of these organizations. We identified reasons for the differences and grouped them in a conceptual model: the ‘house of time to impact’ with three areas: valuing speed, owning speed and entraining speed in the organization. The paper's contribution is the bridge between the literatures on benefit and time management, bringing two pressing issues together. The contribution to practice lies in the considerations and stories of other organizations attempting to reconcile the increasing need for effectiveness.

Systematic Review on Employee Engagement and its Impact on Employee Retention

The core idea of this paper is to escalate the readers’ speculation in the domain of employee engagement and employee retention. The focus lies on the influence of the former on the latter, where both act as important tool in human resource development. This paper also strives to probe and provide an in depth understanding of the domain of employee engagement specifically as a tool for retention of employees in today's organizations. The paper is grounded on secondary research in the areas of employee engagement and retention. This review is based on papers of last 10 years only, that is, 2009–2019. This body of work is based upon the existing literatures reviewed by the authors in order to develop deeper understanding on the topic and its impact on today's organizational framework. This paper seeks to bring clarity and explore trends in employee engagement. The authors have tried to reveal the drivers of employee engagement and retention by making a methodical search in online database of Emerald insight and Google scholar of the keywords “Employee Engagement and Retention”. Out of a massive result, papers pertaining to last 10 years and owing the key interest areas of authors were selected and scrutinised. The paper deals with the driving factors of employee engagement and retention in today's organization. Effect of employee engagement on organizational performance. Drivers of employee engagement and retention. The effect of employee engagement on employee retention. Enhancing strategies for employee engagement and retention. The outcomes of this study are based on 13 scholarly articles, and are relevant to the area of study only. Thus, articles have been examined in accordance to the selected domain of the study only. Thirteen scholarly articles on drivers of employee engagement and retention of organizations thus indicate further scope of research opportunities in these selected domains.

How to recruit employees: application of selected personnel marketing tools in regions of the Czech Republic and Germany

It is important for today's organisations to attract and retain talented employees. Especially in case of the low unemployment, there is a big fight for talents among companies. It is therefore advantageous if the company knows and uses tools of personnel marketing. The perceived importance of selected factors related to personnel marketing was identified within the quantitative research among companies in the Liberec region in 2016. These factors were further used to compare selected indicators obtained by the SHARPEN project survey in 2018 in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Liberec and West Saxony region. The aim of the paper is to answer the question whether there are differences in the application of personnel marketing tools in the Liberec region and in West Saxony, further to map and compare the application of personnel marketing with a focus on recruitment tools. The findings also present challenges which SMEs in these regions face today and evaluate how external personnel marketing is applied to the addressed businesses. The outputs of both realized surveys, in which the authors participated, are used to formulate recommendations in the area of human resources management with a focus on recruitment.

Managing digital infrastructures: negotiating control and drift in service provisioning

The digital infrastructure literature provides important perspectives on the intrinsic relations between information systems in today's organisations. However, little attention has been paid to the challenges involved in providing requisite digital infrastructure services to organisations. In this paper, we argue digital infrastructure service providers operate in highly complex and uncertain environments. Rather than adopting a traditional approach to control, providers must therefore continuously negotiate a balance between control and drift as two complementary strategies. Our argument is based on a retrospective longitudinal case study of a Swedish infrastructure service team within a large international firm. Using the encounter-episode process model as structuring principle and focusing on the tension between control and drift, we analyse the evolution of the provider's efforts to manage a portfolio of digital infrastructure services over a period of ten years. Based on these analyses, we uncover the involved complexities and dynamics, how control efforts and drift were constituted and how the infrastructure services were managed by continuously balancing control and drift. In conclusion, we relate the findings to extant literature to discuss new insights into provider management of digital infrastructure services.

Information technology and the supply chain integration: a business executives' context

Despite the abundance of research dealing with the impact of supply chain management on today's organisations, such research tended to emphasise discreet relationships. A cross-sectional sample of Portuguese organisations is used to test several hypotheses pertaining to organisational resources, competencies, different levels of supply chain integration and organisational performance. Based on the findings, the impact of information technology infrastructure flexibility exhibited mixed results on the constructs studied. Executive information technology competencies tended to positively influence the different types of supply chain integration. Internal integration was found to have a direct influence on organisational performance. Such internal integration is being encouraged by external entities including customers and suppliers. In this context, more integration might lead to more effective organisational performance. Therefore, it is concluded that organisations should integrate their resources, processes and in the process encourage effective utilisation of information.

Managing Digital Infrastructures: Negotiating Control and Drift in Service Provisioning

The digital infrastructure literature provides important perspectives on the intrinsic relations between information systems in today's organisations. However, little attention has been paid to the challenges involved in providing requisite digital infrastructure services to organisations. In this paper, we argue digital infrastructure service providers operate in highly complex and uncertain environments. Rather than adopting a traditional approach to control, providers must therefore continuously negotiate a balance between control and drift as two complementary strategies. Our argument is based on a retrospective longitudinal case study of a Swedish infrastructure service team within a large international firm. Using the encounter-episode process model as structuring principle and focusing on the tension between control and drift, we analyse the evolution of the provider's efforts to manage a portfolio of digital infrastructure services over a period of ten years. Based on these analyses, we uncover the involved complexities and dynamics, how control efforts and drift were constituted and how the infrastructure services were managed by continuously balancing control and drift. In conclusion, we relate the findings to extant literature to discuss new insights into provider management of digital infrastructure services.

Information technology and the supply chain integration: a business executives' context

Despite the abundance of research dealing with the impact of supply chain management on today's organisations, such research tended to emphasise discreet relationships. A cross-sectional sample of Portuguese organisations is used to test several hypotheses pertaining to organisational resources, competencies, different levels of supply chain integration and organisational performance. Based on the findings, the impact of information technology infrastructure flexibility exhibited mixed results on the constructs studied. Executive information technology competencies tended to positively influence the different types of supply chain integration. Internal integration was found to have a direct influence on organisational performance. Such internal integration is being encouraged by external entities including customers and suppliers. In this context, more integration might lead to more effective organisational performance. Therefore, it is concluded that organisations should integrate their resources, processes and in the process encourage effective utilisation of information.

Presenting a Productive and Sustainable Model of Integrated Management System for Achieving an Added Value in Organizational Processes

The present research mainly aims at a presenting of productive and sustainable integrated management system model, which can create or increase an added value in all organisational processes and sub-processes. The key tools for the realisation of this goal are the important units mostly observable in today's organisations. The main core of the study is developed to implementing the mentioned model by including the three international standards (ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001) in a selected industry. The first innovation of this research is the introduction of process capability indices in the form of comprehensive tables and descriptions of each unit's role in achieving the desired productivity and sustainability. Also, for the first time, proper control charts are used to provide assurance of the controlled flow of data. The second novelty of the study is the verification path the model proceeds in the determined scope.

Barriers to Agility in a Large Company's IT Organization

The ability to detect and respond to change with ease, speed, flexibility and dexterity – referred to as agility – has become a necessary ability for almost any IT organization. In fact, today's IT organizations need to deliver products and services faster and in a more agile manner than before. Despite its importance, there is a lack of research on what barriers exists towards achieving agility in IT organizations. This article explores what factors inhibit agility within an IT organization in a large company in Sweden. The data was collected using interviews, internal documents and observations. An IT organization agility dimensions framework was used to identify and contextualize the barriers to agility. The findings, show that agility is as much a tactical and managerial issue as it is operational. The holistic approach of exploring barriers to agility in an IT organization fills a knowledge gap in research literature, and extends the existing body of knowledge concerning agility for IT organization.

Effective, justifiable, necessary: the panel's assessment of Australia's tobacco plain packaging measures

A key challenge facing the World Trade Organisation (WTO) today is the rapidly eroding trust in the trade liberalising values it embodies. Among other criticisms, its rules have long been perceived as constraining the ability of national governments to intervene in economic practices to advance important societal goals, such as public health. Refuting this popular belief, Australia's successful defence of its tobacco plain packaging (TPP) measures in a recent WTO dispute stands as a welcome reaffirmation of the WTO's capacity to adequately balance trade obligations with members' right to regulate. This paper examines the Panel's findings in the TPP dispute in relation to two provisions of the WTO Agreements which reflect a balance between trade and non-trade values; Article 2.2 of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement or TBT) and Article 20 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement or TRIPS).

A simple decision-making approach for information technology solution selection

Information technology (IT) is an indispensable tool for any organisation today, so the choice of adequate IT solutions is a critically important skill. In the literature, many methods for selecting IT solutions have been proposed, but often they use vague criteria that are very difficult to quantify and complex methods to compare alternatives. So, the application of these methods outside the theoretical articles is restricted, since practitioners need simpler approaches. We propose a simple method of the evaluation of alternative IT solutions based on five criteria, namely the cost of ownership, the time for the change, security risks, acceptance by users, and confidence in the supplier's ability to implement the solution. In accordance with the theory of probabilistic mental models, a reference class is proposed for each criterion and variables that can be measured quantitatively are chosen on its base. To simplify the decision-making process, a weighted production model is used for the comparison of alternatives.

Democracy and worker representation in the management of change: Lessons from Kurt Lewin and the Harwood studies

This article revisits the famous Harwood studies overseen by Kurt Lewin to include the neglected union perspective that differs markedly from conventional accounts. We explain this discrepancy as arising from unitarist and pluralist views, which assume very different understandings of organization. The researchers framed the Harwood organization from a unitarist perspective as monolithic, assuming its members are bound by allegiance to a common cause represented by management. This helps explain their relative indifference to unions and framing of concepts in a manner conducive to management that was incomprehensible from a union perspective. From this we contend that the Harwood studies are best understood as a cautionary tale against the assumption of a monolithic view that equates the interest of management with that of the organization. This is especially relevant given the dominance of a unitarist perspective across several fields of organization today, when management are argued to be increasingly authoritarian and union membership in several countries approaches an all-time low. Recognizing that organization is a balance struck between partially conflicting interests represents a more ethical stance to forestall accusations of partisanship and manipulation and to build towards the establishment of a fairer and more sustainable workplace for all.