Virtual Organizational Structure Research Articles

Reliability-Seeking virtual organizations at the margins of systems, resources and capacity

High reliability organization (HRO) principles have been used to reduce risk and enhance safety, embracing such tenets as high tempo, operational decision-making; clear and repeated communication; an open organizational culture; and the importance of knowledge-sharing and trust. Increasingly, HROs have incorporated remote and virtual organizational structures, where members work in coordinated ways over long distances. These reliability-seeking virtual organizations (RSVOs) apply HRO principles in settings where members are virtual and work is challenging, whether due to geography or operational demands. Research suggests that organizational structuring, trust and knowledge sharing are essential in RVSOs. Yet, as virtualization extends into areas that stress or exceed human capacity, due to the nature of the area (e.g., polar regions or warzones) or speed (e.g., fully-automated contracts), we expect the increasing participation of machines and artificial intelligence in maintaining organizational reliability. This mixed human-AI operation raises questions about the traditional principles of high reliability. This research therefore explores the challenges of applying HRO principles to RSVOs that operate in resource-poor and extreme settings. We explore issues in organizational structure, trust, culture, and communication, in a case study of Arctic emergency response networks and other remote RSVOs at the margins.

COVID-19 Induced New Workplace HR Practices: Practitioners’ Perspectives from India

The purpose of this article is to provide a first-hand account of how human resources (HR) practitioners from India are revisiting their traditional perceptions of managing HR in the wake of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This study applies an in-depth interview method to probe the mindset of 13 top-level HR practitioners from India. The time duration of each interview ranged between 45 minutes and 1 hour. The data generated from the qualitative interviews are analysed through latent thematic analysis. The findings throw light on how HR managers in India are rethinking their traditional practices to adjust to the new normal. The themes point to a shift towards a virtual organizational structure, with emphasis given to developing virtual empathy and virtual team building. There is also the resonance of being more future-ready for the potential recurrence of such types of economically disruptive shock events. There is more willingness to hire gig workers and freelancers now given the increased risk of overstaffing in the post-pandemic market. This study provides practitioners with a lot of validity about the way forward in the new world of work-from-home and virtual employment contracts. This is a novel exploration of what some of the senior HR practitioners from India are doing to counter the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic-induced workplace disruption.

Digital Leadership As A Requirement For The New Business Ecosystem: A Conceptual Review

Organizations need to move their businesses to the virtual environment to reduce costs, eliminate being physically tied to a place, benefit from a qualified workforce and respond quickly to expectations. Innovative thoughts, information that can be turned into tangible products and digital skills are seen as the main factors of production in virtual organizations. Managing all these competencies requires a new understanding of leadership different from traditional organizational structures and management understanding. This new form of leadership, called digital leadership, is of great importance in adapting to the conditions of the digital age. Integrating the skills of the digital age with the digitalizing world necessitates digital leadership. For this reason, it is thought that digital leadership is becoming more and more important in virtual organizational structures. Digital leaders stand out as leaders with broad imaginations, advanced intellectual aspects, and high digital competencies. The main purpose of this section is to focus on the transformative aspect of digital leadership, which is a requirement of virtualization in organizations with the spread of remote working. In addition, it is aimed to contribute to the literature on the concept of digital leadership.

ВІРТУАЛЬНА ОРГАНІЗАЦІЙНА СТРУКТУРА ІТ-КОМПАНІЇ: МАРКЕТИНГОВИЙ ТА УПРАВЛІНСЬКИЙ АСПЕКТИ

The article attracts attention to a fairly common type of organizational structure of management, which is a virtual organization, due to the digitalization of the economy and the functioning of a significant number of enterprises in virtual space. The implementation of a virtual organizational structure promotes better interaction of structural units of IT company, as well as provides prompt management decisions both within the organization and outside. This allows the organization to respond in a timely manner to changes in a dynamic market environment and, thus, better interact with counterparties in communication channels and marketing channels in general. The article highlights the issue of building a virtual organizational management structure in IT company, given that the organization can be considered as a set of hardware and software and technological, marketing and management components that are interconnected. The importance of the company’s interaction virtualization with other elements of its internal and external environment has been updated. In this regard, the virtual structure of the organization is considered as a complex concept that combines marketing, including communication, and management aspects, and HR-management is considered as a component of management. The article presents a comparative description of marketing communication tools for real and virtual organization, as well as focuses on the importance and place of HR-marketing in the system of virtual organization, taking into account its marketing and management aspects. In particular, the difference between Internet marketing as a tool of marketing communications and marketing in Internet has been determined, which reveals the essence of the organization’s use of traditional marketing tools using the Internet. The role of HR-marketing as an activity aimed at improving the company’s position in the labor market has been highlighted and the relationship of this category as an activity with the management and marketing elements of a virtual organization has been identified.

Multi Structures-Scales (MSS) in Project Execution Management (PEM)

This research study focuses on project organization structure, multi-tasking, issues, challenges, and limitations that occur during the project execution for a conventional and virtual team. This research aims to understand the importance of the technical labor force in the organization and fill the human resources gap in project engineering, construction, and management implementation. The project is unique and must be dealt with highly technical by the project team. Projects might be the same structure and scale but in different conditions, parameters, and requirements. In general, dealing with and executing other projects is challenging. The design guidelines are formatted, although not entirely the same. The process model uses model-based optimization to compare the conventional and virtual MSS organizational structures to optimize, innovate, and multi-tasking project staff, personnel, and direct technical members. The study will include the importance of global virtual teams (GVT) and the contribution of software collaboration, including cloud-based software (CBS). Multi structures-scales (MSS) concept can be a diversified, optimized, and innovative way to increase team effectiveness, technical dependence, and utilize existing resources. It uses organizational productivity and the individual living of project team members. However, even though the MSS concept seeks to lower the labor cost and reduce individual participation, the labor issue, technical workforce, challenges, disputes, and other problems are not inevitable. As a result, in this implementation, the corporate organization will solidify the project team structure into multi-project execution even to long-term employment and operation. The PE/S can perform simultaneously in different stages of the same type of project. In contrast, a PM can perform additional steps even on other kinds of projects. Furthermore, in the study, PS and PM can effectively function if not more than three (3) projects; otherwise, low-performance evaluation and low-quality product results occur. In this regard, further study and research related to this topic for better implementation in the field.

To Build Sense of Belonging in Young Workforce of 21st Century: Coaching Style Leadership

We are living in a period of strengthening of social networks and weakening of social ties. We observe communication problems even between the same generation employees. Within virtual organizational structures, where digitalization and mobility are on an advanced level, business vision is changing so fast. Rapid changes occurring in the organizational structures increase managerial uncertainty in the companies and raise a need for revision of employee behavior. Virtually addicted human resources of 21st century need to be managed in a different way. In 21st century, young workforce retention concerns raise first and foremost the question of how to manage. In particular, the characteristics of Y generation that will have a large share in global labor force, create a need to arrange the management in a coaching style. Coaching style leadership becomes even more important in order to understand working perception of Y generation, to make them gained by the company, to retain them, to develop organizational commitment, to guide their talents, to meet their expectations and to build long-term relationships with them. This study is focused on coaching style leadership in order to build sense of belonging for the Y generation, the young workforce of 21st century. Because, expected to form %75 of global labor force as of 2025, this generation is shaping talents market with its work perceptions and expectations.

Design of organizational innovations: model of virtual organizational structure for enterprise management

The objects of research are the organizational enterprise management structures. It was revealed that enterprises have mixed types of their own organizational structures, among which the network organizational forms are the most effective. It was established that the main requirements for the development of an efficient organizational structure is its ability to quickly and adequately respond to the nature of the disturbance problem. It was revealed the key issue of traditional types of organizational structures – remarkable inertia of mechanisms for generation and management decisions that require immediate response of management system in response to the emergence of problem situations. A constructive way to overcome the mentioned conflict is a simulation of virtual organizational structures for enterprise management, which exist in parallel with real organizational structures using the principles of modelability andscientificity. This will transfer the management of problematic situations in cyberspace, enable «programmed» accelerated transformation of base virtual organizational structure in the «problem» with predetermined properties. The main preferences is the speed and adequacy of solving actual problems using a virtual model of organizational structure provided «physical» immutability of real management structure. The author developed methodological principles for virtual modeling of virtual organizational structures and for enterprise management and build the model in analytical and graphical forms. Areas for further prospective studies were marked.

Management in the Knowledge Society: Tendencies and Prospects

Background/Objectives: The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibilities and the prospects of management under the conditions of emerging knowledge society, defining fundamental management models and revealing their dynamics. Method/Statistical Analysis: Applying methods of social and philosophical analysis the authors study the prerequisites for modern society transformation, stipulated by the fact that knowledge is being turned into the basic factor predetermining social move to a new stage, to knowledge society. Such approach is based on the systematic method, according to which the knowledge society is treated as a complex system. Conceptual analysis of scientific studies in management and management sociology was conducted. Findings: It is shown that the process of moving towards the knowledge society results in appearance of a pronounced trend to abandoning the functional management principles and to developing management by objectives. This trend is expressed in decentralization of management, in abandoning the hierarchy and the administration-by-fiat management methods, in higher significance of the information component. The study justifies an assumption, according to which the increase in complexity and nonlinearity of the new organizational forms results in higher demand for adaptive management models based on applying such advanced solutions in information technologies as artificial neural networks and Аrtificial Life method. Due to wide-spread deployment of the network type organizations possessing complex systems of interconnections and interrelations, there is a probability of synergetic effects (fluctuations, occurrence of dissipative structures), which would require implementing nonstandard solutions in the sphere of management. Establishment and development of virtual organizational structures and virtual management processes make this trend even more pronounced. Applications/Improvements: Social and philosophical analysis of the principal trends and prospects for development of management in the knowledge society is not only theoretically but also practically focused and can be used by organizations/corporations interested in establishing effective management practices.

Virtuality, Technology Use, and Engagement Within Organizations

Multinational organizations are turning to collaborative technology to enable virtual organizational structures. While collaborative technology provides distributed workers with new affordances to form relationships and share knowledge, collaborative technology also has complex, interwoven implications for virtual organizing. To disentangle these concerns, this study considers four key dimensions of virtuality—spatial dispersion, temporal dispersion, dynamic structure, and functional diversity—in relation to technology use and engagement with peers within an organization. Survey data were collected in a multinational organization that facilitates work through extensive use of collaborative technology. The results of structural equation modeling reveal connections between two dimensions of virtuality, use of collaborative technology and peer engagement in the organization. Findings suggest that understanding interactions in virtual organizations requires a more nuanced approach to virtuality and active management of technology implementation. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that managers need to actively manage the deployment of new collaborative technology by focusing on specific characteristics of work groups.

Системотехника проектирования виртуальных организационных структур предприятий строительного комплекса

Системотехника проектирования виртуальных организационных структур предприятий строительного комплекса

Electronic human resource management and organizational innovation: the roles of information technology and virtual organizational structure

In the information age, firms increasingly incorporate information technologies (ITs) into human resource management (HRM) to cope with technological challenges. HR managers can achieve their goals with the analyzed information produced by IT. Besides, with the help of the evolving IT, HRM has entered into electronic-HRM (e-HRM) era with features of self-service and intranet based. Since e-HRM is gaining more attention nowadays, it is necessary to introduce e-HRM in the working organizations. From business theory and practice, this study demonstrated that e-HRM has two critical cornerstones: IT adoption and virtual organization (VO) adoption. On the basis of hierarchical regression analyses from 86 information and electronics companies in Taiwan, this study demonstrated that IT and VO adoptions positively affect organizational innovation. Furthermore, IT and VO adoptions also positively moderate the relationship between employees' creativity and organizational innovation. As mechanisms to strengthen creativity-innovation transformation processes in organizations, IT and VO thus become crucial core competences that build and maintain organizational competitive advantages. Coping with the changing environment and keen competition, HR managers should keep themselves informed regarding the latest developments in IT and VO to create winning companies.