Employee reactions to planned organizational culture change: A configurational perspective

Can organizational culture be intentionally changed? And if so, what are the pathways to success versus failure? We address these questions by employing a configurational perspective, which allows us to examine the impact of multiple combinations of employee perceptions and traits on planned organizational culture change. Although employees have long been the focus of culture change research, the complex interactions of factors affecting their reactions have been largely ignored. With such a focus, the study empirically identifies pathways to successful versus failed organizational culture change, drawing rare empirical evidence from 59 interviews and secondary data from one of the longest surviving examples of industrial democracy, John Lewis Partnership, which underwent change geared away from a ‘civil-service’ towards a high-performance culture. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we identify multiple equifinal combinations of employee perceptions and traits (e.g., perceived organizational support, empowerment, and tenure) associated with successful or failed organizational culture change. Interestingly, we find more pathways leading to positive (i.e., ‘comparing’, ‘acquitting’, and ‘tolerating’) versus negative (i.e., ‘disillusioning’ and ‘dissociating’) reactions to culture change. We leverage these findings to show that employee reactions are more complex than currently considered, illustrating the value of a configurational perspective in such efforts.publishedVersio

Human resource management and circular economy: a critical perspective

While there is an increase in the number of organisations disclosing their commitment or intentions to embrace the circular economy for sustainable futures, the role of individuals found within these organisations and their management remains inconspicuous. Current disclosures on Human Resource (HR) and the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) at firm level Circular Economic (CE) transitions and practices are conceptual and few, which limits both academics and practitioners’ understanding regarding the practical implications of CE on organisations HR and how these could be managed. This research, therefore, addresses this gap and intends to provide critical, empirical evidence and interpretations of HR and the role of HRM within organisations CE pursuits – using six organisations (case studies). The case studies included in this paper forms about ten per cent of the cases - to be analysed for the second part of the study. These six case studies are selected to facilitate a pilot study, to test the research approach/methods adopted to derive the research findings. Previous research findings on firm-level CE functional areas has predominantly focused on product and process design, supply chain, marketing and sales management; however, analysis of these case studies found that currently, HRM role as a functional area that includes training, recruitment/selection, performance and rewards management process are not captured in firm-level CE transitions. Nonetheless, in terms of a critical perspective of HR and the role of HRM within CE organisations, the analysis of these case studies captured the broader social outcomes such as job creation, improvement in wellbeing and a change in organisational culture. But it remains to be seen if similar trends would be identified within a wider sample of business cases the researchers intend to examine to extend this research

On the consequences of scarcity mindset:How 'having too little' means so much for ethnic venture failure

Drawing on the psychological concept of scarcity mindset as a lens, we explore UK-based ethnic entrepreneurs' accounts of their behaviors and choices to theorize ethnic business venture failure. Our findings suggest the constraints of 'having too little' entrepreneurial resources can induce three organizing tensions in organizing, community embeddedness, spatial and segment spawning, and dispositional optimism––which may operate in combination or serially to precipitate ethnic venture failure. Our findings contribute to research on conflicting demands in entrepreneurship by showing how resource constraints, sometimes played out in the form of enduring inequalities within markets and society-at-large stymies the conversion of contradictory yet mutually constituting demands in organizing into potentially productive outcomes

Ethnic business failure: a scarcity mind-set perspective

We integrate insights from the psychological concept of ‘scarcity mindset’ and mixed embeddedness to theorise ethnic venture failure. We explore the sentiments and choices of UK-based ethnic entrepreneurs to theorise the ‘cause-of-death' of their unsuccessful ventures. The scarcity mind-set lens we develop suggests the constraints of ‘having too little’ can induce four organising tensions – spatial spawning, ethnic embeddedness, dispositional optimism, and service nepotism – which operate in combination or serially to precipitate ethnic venture failure. We contribute to research on conflicting demands in entrepreneurship by finding that a paucity of resources stymies the conversion of contradictory yet mutually constituting demands into productive outcomes. In this way, we illuminate contextualised entrepreneurial organising demands that require reconciliation to capture value. In advocating the purposeful pursuit of paradoxes as a means of addressing failure, our study analyses stories of unsuccessful ventures in ways that explicitly acknowledge enduring inequalities within markets and society at-larg