WHAT'S "NEW" ABOUT NEW FORMS OF ORGANIZING? PURANAM, PHANISH; ALEXY, OLIVER; REITZIG, MARKUS
The Academy of Management review,
04/2014, Letnik:
39, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In order to assess whether new theories are necessary to explain new forms of organizing or existing theories suffice, we must first specify exactly what makes a form of organizing "new." We propose ...clear criteria for making such an assessment and show how they are useful in assessing if and when new theories of organizing may truly be needed. We illustrate our arguments by contrasting forms of organizing often considered novel, such as Linux, Wikipedia, and Oticon, against their traditional counterparts. We conclude that even when there may be little that existing theory cannot explain about individual elements in these new forms of organizing, opportunities for new theorizing lie in understanding the bundles of co-occurring elements that seem to underlie them and why the same bundles occur in widely disparate organizations.
The promise of collaboration between humans and algorithms in producing good decisions is stimulating much experimentation. Drawing on research in organization design can help us to approach this ...experimentation systematically. I propose typologies for considering different forms of division of labor between human and algorithm as well as the learning configurations they are arranged in, as basic building blocks for this endeavor.
This article provides conceptual foundations for analyzing organizations comprising multiple legally autonomous entities, which we call meta-organizations. We assess the antecedents of the emergence ...of such collectives and the design choices they entail. The article identifies key parameters on which such meta-organizations' designs differ from each other. It also presents a taxonomy that elucidates how such forms of collective action vary and the constraints they must address to be successful We conclude with implications for research on meta-organizational design.
We develop a novel analytical framework to study epistemic interdependence between agents and the resulting need for predictive knowledge as a basis for understanding information processing ...requirements in organizations and the implications for organization design. These two new constructs help to sharply distinguish interdependence between tasks and between agents and highlight why even interdependence between agents need not imply any need for information processing between them. They also help to refine key ideas about organization design.
Research summary: Separating the individual from the social effects of incentives has been challenging because of the possibility of synergies in team production. We observe a unique natural ...experiment in a South Korean e-commerce company in which a switch from pay-for-performance to fixed (but different) salaries took place in a staggered and effectively random manner across employees. In this case, social and individual effects perspectives make opposing predictions, enabling a critical test. We find evidence consistent with social effects of incentives, particularly as predicted by goal framing theory. The results have implications for the design of incentives to foster collaboration, organizational learning, and organizational performance. Managerial summary: Managers often neglect the deeper hypothesis behind pay-for-performance schemes—that people primarily care about how much they are individually paid. An opposing school of thought contends that incentives have social effects too—that individuals care about not only what they receive but also what their peers receive. It is difficult to say whether individual or social effects would be more salient in a context, without a proper experiment with randomization. We exploit a rare opportunity provided by a company that changed its incentive system in a random order, thus unintentionally creating a natural experiment. The results strongly validate the existence of social effects of incentives, but also make the general case for the opportunity to learn from experimenting with organization design in a systematic manner.
We conduct a theory-guided review of the literatures on public–private partnerships and grand challenges (GCs). We adopt an organization design approach to review and identify constructs in ...public–private collaborations (PPCs) that address societal challenges. Our review identifies the complexities of organizing to tackle GCs, highlights the plurality of organizational forms in PPCs, and explores organizational design considerations in these partnerships. Given the elevated role of private actors in these collaborations, our review provides a new understanding of how they can shape a private-public interface that is robust to the scale and scope of global problems. This leads to a rich research agenda on when, why, and how public and private collaborations matter, and their implications for addressing societal challenges.
Using a simple but general formalization, we state the conditions under which one might expect a negative or positive relationship between preexisting trust and governance complexity, and whether ...crowding out or complementarity arguments are necessary for such outcomes. Our analysis provides a platform for simple but rigorous analysis of other possible relationships between trust and governance and also suggests that the debate about the relationship between governance and trust could be fruitfully redirected through greater attention to the analytical structure of the arguments.
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