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1 – 10 of 416The purpose of this paper is to present a general framework for the comprehension and advancement of sociocultural homeostasis (not to be confused with a steady state, but a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a general framework for the comprehension and advancement of sociocultural homeostasis (not to be confused with a steady state, but a dynamic constantly evolving process) in order to increase worker engagement, productivity and innovation within the enterprises.
Design/methodology/approach
The latest research findings in neuroscience, social neuroscience and social network analyses are used to determine what types of organizational dynamics best support voluntary worker engagement.
Findings
The paper offers convincing evidence why certain organizations prosper while others falter depending on their knowledge and advancement of sociocultural homeostasis principles.
Practical implications
The paper provides practical suggestions in how to move an organization from an environment of structure and compliance to one reliant on emergence and individual commitment.
Social implications
The general framework/models presented in the paper can be applied to any social institution (for profit or non‐profit) interested in boosting member voluntary engagement.
Originality/value
It is a unique work suggesting how to apply the latest research findings in the rapidly advancing fields of neuroscience and social neuroscience to business management in order to increase productivity and innovation. It also shows how to identify and expand the organizational sweet spots (emergent innovative/productive organizational domains defined by the author) and their vital importance to the success of every venture.
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Albi Thomas and M. Suresh
The purpose of this study is to identify organisational homeostasis factors in the context of healthcare organisations and to develop a conceptual model for green transformation.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to identify organisational homeostasis factors in the context of healthcare organisations and to develop a conceptual model for green transformation.
Design/methodology/approach
The organisational homeostasis factors were determined by review of literature study and the opinions of healthcare experts. Scheduled interviews and closed-ended questionnaires are employed to collect data for this research. This study employed “TISM methodology” and “MICMAC analysis” to better comprehend how the components interact with one another and prioritise them based on their driving and dependence power.
Findings
This study identified 10 factors of organisational homeostasis in healthcare organisation. Recognition of interdependence, hormesis, strategic coalignment, consciousness on dependence of healthcare resources and cybernetic principle of regulations are the driving or key factors of this study.
Research limitations/implications
The study's primary focus was on the organisational homeostasis factors in healthcare organisations. The methodological approach and structural model are used in a healthcare organisation; in the future, these approaches can be applied to other industries as well.
Practical implications
The key drivers of organisational homeostasis and the identified factors will be better comprehended and understood by academic and important stakeholders in healthcare organisations. Prioritizing the factors helps the policymakers to comprehend the organisational homeostasis for green transformation in healthcare.
Originality/value
In this study, the TISM and MICMAC analysis for healthcare is proposed as an innovative approach to address the organisational homeostasis concept in the context of green transformation in healthcare organisations.
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Richard J. Pech and Katherine E. Oakley
Can managers prepare their organisations for the unexpected and unforeseeable? The purpose of this paper is to argue that organisations that endure and survive a serious…
Abstract
Purpose
Can managers prepare their organisations for the unexpected and unforeseeable? The purpose of this paper is to argue that organisations that endure and survive a serious disruption to homeostasis may as a consequence be better equipped to survive further and more devastating attacks.
Design/methodology/approach
This hypothesis is based on a naturally occurring biological survival mechanism termed hormesis. Hormesis describes a controversial biological phenomenon where the organism overcompensates and adaptation occurs after exposure to low doses of toxins. Hormesis protects the organism against subsequent repeat exposure to more lethal doses.
Findings
Hormetic effects may occur in an organisation just as it does in a biological entity following exposure to a life‐threatening disruption, inoculating it against potentially more lethal recurrences. Disruption in an organisational context may include negative environmental impacts, incidences of management incompetence, or consequences of competitive hostilities. It is argued that lessons can be applied from examples of biological hormesis, particularly lessons related to the hormetic recovery stages of overcompensation and adaptation as part of an evolutionary survival mechanism for organisations.
Practical implications
Organisational hormesis may have the potential to produce growth and advancement that would not normally occur under ordinary circumstances. Hormesis demonstrates more than a step in an organisational learning process as it conveys an adaptive response designed to prevent future disruptions. Hormesis is a healing process with foresight, “designed” with the intent of increasing organisational fitness within a rapidly changing environment. It has been “designed” with the knowledge that the environment may yet dispense an even greater challenge, still to be met. In this respect the hormetic process defies evolutionary dogma which claims that evolutionary processes are blind that evolution can only react to and compensate for past pressure rather than being able to predict and prepare for future threats. After recovery from disruption, managers may, for cost cutting and other expedient purposes, cease recovery or restructuring activities. This action may unwittingly interfere with the hormetic overcompensation stage, thereby interfering with evolutionary adaptation processes. As a consequence, the organisation's ability to repel more severe disruptions may be compromised. Some firms are prematurely liquidated or downsized before they can develop hormetic response mechanisms. As demonstrated by the Xerox example, liquidation in 2000 would have been a catastrophic mistake.
Originality/value
Provides a post‐mortem examination searching for possible explanations for organisational phenomena that have as yet been adequately explained.
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Ralph Adler, Toshiro Hiromoto and Hiroyuki Suzuki
The purpose of this paper is to extensively discuss the performance management system characteristics of amoeba management and organizational ambidexterity to provide conceptual…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to extensively discuss the performance management system characteristics of amoeba management and organizational ambidexterity to provide conceptual comparisons between the two and assist scholars and practitioners in their respective research design and adoption decisions.
Design/methodology/approach
Management databases that included Science Direct, ABI/INFORM Global, Business Source Premier and Scopus (and their Japanese counterparts), as well as a number of journals known for publishing work on amoeba management and organizational ambidexterity, were used to identify relevant published work. An initial identification of almost 2,500 books and articles was reduced to the paper’s approximately 100 references. Feedback from presenting the paper at management conferences and university seminars supports the comprehensiveness of the assembled literature.
Findings
This paper shows that prior research’s conflating of amoeba management and organizational ambidexterity is misguided. While the two performance management systems share a common overarching philosophy on how to successfully operate in highly competitive environments and adopt a similar urgency about the need for business units to feature relatively small numbers of employees, significant differences involving the enactment of strategy, organizational structure, organizational culture, planning horizon, performance measures, employee involvement, employee selection and leadership prevail.
Originality/value
By providing scholars and practitioners with better, more holistic understandings of amoeba management and organizational ambidexterity, the paper seeks to advance theoretical and practical understandings of the two performance management systems. The model provided helps scholars incorporate into their research more complete theoretical constructions and operational representations of these two performance management systems and helps practitioners make better informed adoption choices.
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Nick Beech, David Devins, Jeff Gold and Susan Beech
This paper aims to explore the concept of resilience set within a family business context and considers how familiness and the nature of noneconomic factors, such as relationship…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the concept of resilience set within a family business context and considers how familiness and the nature of noneconomic factors, such as relationship dynamics influence performance. This paper provides new insights into the nature and impact of familiness as a mediating device, uncovering the potential for reframing resilience theory and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on a review of the extant literature in the areas of resilience and familiness as a means of developing a deeper understanding of the social-ecological system of the family firm.
Findings
The study reveals family business as a complex interrelationship between complimentary social-ecological systems. It highlights the complexity of family business and the challenges of the relational nature of familiness and how this presents additional layers of complexity in the decision making process and implementation.
Research limitations/implications
The paper draws on literature that is dominated by western culture and may partially or not at all reflect the issues associated with organisational resilience in family firms with such backgrounds and their culturally bound social-ecological systems.
Originality/value
The paper seeks to fill a knowledge gap by exploring the key elements of organisational resilience in the context of familiness. The work calls for further research into the nature of familiness connections mediating the nature of family relational dynamics. It further provides a framework indicating how these elements can shape and subvert day-to-day management events, raising implications for theory and practice and calls for deeper empirical research to be undertaken.
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Alexander Kouzmin, Elke Löffler, Helmut Klages and Nada Korac‐Kakabadse
Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder’s interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing…
Abstract
Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder’s interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an instrument for assessing organizational performance and for facilitating management transfer and learning from other benchmarked organizations. The introduction of benchmarking into the public sector is still in its early stages. Technical problems, scepticism about usefulness and the appropriateness of transferring putative private sector competencies into public administration and the resistance in accepting organizational change as a necessary consequence of benchmarking exercises in the public sector, prevent the widespread acceptance and use of benchmarking in public sectors, arguably “punch‐drunk” with systemic change. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging examples of benchmarking within the public sector. This paper critically analyzes these examples in order to establish the vulnerability points of such measurement instruments which, possibly, need more research in order to establish the specific learning dimensions to benchmarking and to illustrate the importance of such benchmarking and learning within the highly risky, information technology (IT)‐driven experiences of systems development and failure.
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Doug Paxton and Suzanne Van Stralen
“We live at a hinge time in history, a threshold time when societies and cultures are being recomposed. We are learning that the way life used to work—or the way we thought it…
Abstract
“We live at a hinge time in history, a threshold time when societies and cultures are being recomposed. We are learning that the way life used to work—or the way we thought it should— doesn’t work any longer” (Parks, 2009, p. xv). This article is about learning, culture change, practice and leadership. Many wise minds have articulated the leadership mindset we need for the future, and what remains stubbornly elusive is how we get there. We believe the difficult challenge of developing a new mindset--a new view of the world--to address the complexity and dynamic nature of the 21st century is of central importance to leadership education today. As Einstein famously conveyed, we cannot address the problems of today with the same mindset that created those problems. Our inquiry explores the following questions: “How do we develop the skills, capacities and consciousness necessary for bringing creativity, innovation and a new mindset to our most strategic and pressing organizational challenges? How do we practice our way into a new paradigm of leadership?” We invite you to join us in this inquiry into leadership
Kenneth J. Smith, Patricia L. Derrick and Michael R. Koval
Considerable progress has been made over the past 20 years toward the construction of a global stress paradigm for accountants in the workplace. Over this time period, a number of…
Abstract
Considerable progress has been made over the past 20 years toward the construction of a global stress paradigm for accountants in the workplace. Over this time period, a number of antecedents and consequences of personal and organizational stress have been identified and empirically verified. These efforts have provided the foundation for future investigations, which will likely provide additional guidance to those seeking to implement strategies aimed at enhancing individual well-being and organizational efficiency. This chapter synthesizes the findings of these studies to construct a model of the stress dynamic among accountants aimed at guiding future efforts designed to refine our understanding of this critical phenomenon.
Presents an interdisciplinary literature review and research agendaand suggests a number of propositions, in advance of new fieldwork, todiscover a revised or new theory of…
Abstract
Presents an interdisciplinary literature review and research agenda and suggests a number of propositions, in advance of new fieldwork, to discover a revised or new theory of internal marketing as it relates to organizational change management. The literature on marketing, services marketing, corporate strategy, total quality management, operations management, human resource management, and organizational development reveals a body of work referring to or describing an “internal marketing” concept or internal customer concept. This seems to have grown out of an organizational internal communications perspective and the notion of an “inner market” in the organization comprising “internal customers”. Provides an extensive overview of tactical and strategic issues relating to internal marketing. Presents a resulting model and includes a comprehensive bibliography is included, with suggestions for some themes for possible fruitful research in this area of change management and service quality management.
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Wayne D. Kearney and Hennie A. Kruger
The purpose of this paper is to discuss and theorise on the appropriateness and potential impact of risk homeostasis in the context of information security.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss and theorise on the appropriateness and potential impact of risk homeostasis in the context of information security.
Design/methodology/approach
The discussion is mainly based on a literature survey backed up by illustrative empirical examples.
Findings
Risk homeostasis in the context of information security is an under-explored topic. The principles, assumptions and methodology of a risk homeostasis framework offer new insights and knowledge to explain and predict contradictory human behaviour in information security.
Practical implications
The paper shows that explanations for contradictory human behaviour (e.g. the privacy paradox) would gain from considering risk homeostasis as an information security risk management model. The ideas discussed open up the prospect to theorise on risk homeostasis as a framework in information security and should form a basis for further research and practical implementations. On a more practical level, it offers decision makers useful information and new insights that could be advantageous in a strategic security planning process.
Originality/value
This is the first systematic comprehensive review of risk homeostasis in the context of information security behaviour and readers of the paper will find new theories, guidelines and insights on risk homeostasis.
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