Carole Groleau, Christiane Demers and Yrjö Engeström
The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special themed section which explores the relationship between contradiction and organizational change.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special themed section which explores the relationship between contradiction and organizational change.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyzes the four papers included in this special themed section, drawing links between the different texts.
Findings
A review of the papers shows that they contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of organizational change by focusing on how contradictions manifest themselves and how they are managed in various change contexts.
Originality/value
This introduction provides readers of the themed section with an overview of the four papers.
Details
Keywords
Christiane Demers, Nicole Giroux and Samia Chreim
This study uses a discursive perspective to analyze the way in which top managers legitimize change in official announcements. It focuses on the foundations of legitimacy invoked…
Abstract
This study uses a discursive perspective to analyze the way in which top managers legitimize change in official announcements. It focuses on the foundations of legitimacy invoked using both Weber's typology, based on modes of authority, and the conventionalist model, stressing the constitutive frameworks that justify collective action. We use a narrative approach to examine four texts intended for employees in the context of mergers‐acquisitions in the Canadian financial services sector. We look at those announcements as wedding narratives. A framework based on the canonical schema and Greimas's actantial model was applied to the texts. The analysis reveals that these narrations of corporate marriages, while describing the same event, give distinct versions of it. These distinctions bring out differences between firms in terms of the foundations of legitimacy invoked, the contribution of the various actors, and the narrative style favoured.
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Yong Wu, Zelong Wei and Qiaozhuan Liang
The purpose of this paper is to describe the building of a theoretical model to explore how team pay disparity and resource slack moderate the effects of top management team (TMT…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe the building of a theoretical model to explore how team pay disparity and resource slack moderate the effects of top management team (TMT) diversity on strategic change and if the moderating effects of resource slack differ in firms with a low or high level of pay disparity.
Design/methodology/approach
Nine hypotheses are proposed and tested with a sample from 391 listed Chinese firms. Archival data are collected from annual reports to form the sample. The hypothesized model relationships are tested through regression analysis.
Findings
The findings show that pay imparity negatively moderates the effects of TMT diversity and resource slack also has important moderating effects. Furthermore, the moderating effects of resource slack differ in firms with low and high team pay imparity.
Originality/value
TMT demography diversity has an important effect on strategic change. However, two conflicting views exist on the relationship. Although some literature suggests that diversity may be sources of explorative activities such as strategic change, others suggest that diversity may cause integration difficulty and thus has a negative effect on strategic change. This paper contributes to extant debate regarding the effects of TMT diversity on strategic change by including TMT pay imparity and resource slack to explain that the effect of diversity on strategic change is contingent on the level of pay imparity, resources slack, and their interactive effects. This research also contributes to understanding organization slack by reasoning that the moderating effect is contingent on pay imparity level.
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Achieving specific changes within autonomous organizations is often a necessary condition for the success of strategic public policy. Wherever it is impossible to induce such…
Abstract
Purpose
Achieving specific changes within autonomous organizations is often a necessary condition for the success of strategic public policy. Wherever it is impossible to induce such changes by regulations, a frequently used tool is inducing their occurrence with financial stimuli. This practice appears to have been fully substantiated by the early systems-evolutionary understanding of the relationship between organizations and their environment, whose peak popularity in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the appearance of new international organizations formulating strategic policies on a previously unprecedented scale. The conceptual framework available at that time failed, however, to provide a solid ground for operationalization and systemic evaluation of such interventions. As a result, even though it was implicitly presumed that policy implementation depended on organizational changes taking place in a large number of organizations, a conceptualization of the exact ways of how to ensure and assess such changes was hardly pronounced. This paper aims to uncover the problematique of that missing conceptualization.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the author draws on the second-order stream of systems thinking, arguing that without such a deliberate operationalization, it seems much more likely that the external financing of organizational changes functions merely as organizational “perturbations” which do not crystallize into lasting changes, as they are mitigated by equally potent “compensation” to cancel out the perturbations. Using the theory of social system’s autopoiesis, the author posits that adaptive fluctuations evoked in organizations by the interferences of the policymakers may thus be considered “change” just as well as non-change.
Findings
Once the behavior of an autopoietic organizational system is seen as a continuous perpetuation of its own identity pattern, fashioned discursively as the organization’s self-description, then the only change which seems worthy of the publicly assigned resources and efforts is a shift in that pattern.
Originality/value
It is argued that the assessment of whether target organizations are indeed implementing or only superficially performing (and instantly compensating for) the desired changes should be inferred from a qualitative analysis of the daily discursive practices that forge the target domains rather than by a comparison of the measurable parameters, which are currently dominating in the evidence-based paradigm.