Organizational Change and the Identity Cycle: Understanding the Effect of Change on Individual Attitudes and Behaviors Through a Combined Social Identity Theory/Identity Theory Perspective

The study of roles and role behavior is particularly relevant today as individuals acquire more roles in the complexity of the 1990s. One environment that has been significantly prone to change is the workplace, where multiple committees, teams, and departments have transformed the nature of work and are altering the way that jobs are defined. In addition to the fact that workers are now taking on multiple roles within organizations, the roles themselves are changing at an accelerated pace. Reengineering, downsizing, mergers, acquisitions, and total quality initiatives are just a few of the interventions that businesses are implementing in order to become leaner, flatter, and more responsive to their environments. This paper draws from social identity theory and identity theory to understand how employees respond to organizational change. Given the fairly low success rates of major change efforts (estimates are between 10% and 50%), it is suggested that a more thorough understanding of the effect of these programs on an individual\u27s role within the organization is necessary. This paper begins by first defining, comparing, and contrasting social identity theory and identity theory. This has, to date, not been done, and it is particularly important because a number of authors appear to be using the two theories interchangeably. Next, social identity theory and identity theory are used to build a broader framework for understanding human behavior, and this model, called the identity cycle, is used to develop a set of propositions regarding the effects of organizational change on employee attitudes and behavior

Structured Review of Code Clone Literature

This report presents the results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to assemble a conceptual model of clone-related concepts which helps us to reason about clones. This conceptual model unifies clone concepts from a wide range of literature, so that findings about clones can be compared with each other

Human Resource and Employment Practices in Telecommunications Services, 1980-1998

[Excerpt] In the academic literature on manufacturing, much research and debate have focused on whether firms are adopting some form of “high-performance” or “high-involvement” work organization based on such practices as employee participation, teams, and increased discretion, skills, and training for frontline workers (Ichniowski et al., 1996; Kochan and Osterman, 1994; MacDuffie, 1995). Whereas many firms in the telecommunications industry flirted with these ideas in the 1980s, they did not prove to be a lasting source of inspiration for the redesign of work and employment practices. Rather, work restructuring in telecommunications services has been driven by the ability of firms to leverage network and information technologies to reduce labor costs and create customer segmentation strategies. “Good jobs” versus “bad jobs,” or higher versus lower wage jobs, do not vary according to whether firms adopt a high- involvement model. They vary along two other dimensions: (1) within firms and occupations, by the value-added of the customer segment that an employee group serves; and (2) across firms, by union and nonunion status. We believe that this customer segmentation strategy is becoming a more general model for employment practices in large-scale service | operations; telecommunications services firms may be somewhat more | advanced than other service firms in adopting this strategy because of certain unique industry characteristics. The scale economies of network technology are such that once a company builds the network infrastructure to a customer’s specifications, the cost of additional services is essentially zero. As a result, and notwithstanding technological uncertainty, all of the industry’s major players are attempting to take advantage of system economies inherent in the nature of the product market and technology to provide customized packages of multimedia products to identified market segments. They have organized into market-driven business units providing differentiated services to large businesses and institutions, small businesses, and residential customers. They have used information technologies and process reengineering to customize specific services to different segments according to customer needs and ability to pay. Variation in work and employment practices, or labor market segmentation, follows product market segmentation. As a result, much of the variation in employment practices in this industry is within firms and within occupations according to market segment rather than across firms. In addition, despite market deregulation beginning in 1984 and opportunities for new entrants, a tightly led oligopoly structure is replacing the regulated Bell System monopoly. Former Bell System companies, the giants of the regulated period, continue to dominate market share in the post-1984 period. Older players and new entrants alike are merging and consolidating in order to have access to multimedia markets. What is striking in this industry, therefore, is the relative lack of variation in management and employment practices across firms after more than a decade of experience with deregulation. We attribute this lack of variation to three major sources. (1) Technological advances and network economics provide incentives for mergers, organizational consolidation, and, as indicated above, similar business strategies. (2) The former Bell System companies have deep institutional ties, and they continue to benchmark against and imitate each other so that ideas about restructuring have diffused quickly among them. (3) Despite overall deunionization in the industry, they continue to have high unionization rates; de facto pattern bargaining within the Bell system has remained quite strong. Therefore, similar employment practices based on inherited collective bargaining agreements continue to exist across former Bell System firms

From Bureaucracy to Enterprise? The Changing Jobs and Careers of Managers in Telecommunications Service

This paper analyzes how organizational restructuring is affecting managerial labor markets. Drawing on field research from several Bell operating companies plus a detailed survey of managers in one company, this paper considers how organizational restructuring affects the employment levels, the nature of work, and the career trajectories of lower and middle level line managers. Does restructuring lead to a loss or managerial power and a convergence in the working conditions of managerial and nonmanagerial workers? Or, conversely, do managers stand to gain from the flattening of hierarchies and devolution of decision-making to lower organizational levels? The paper\u27s central argument is that a new vision of organization has taken hold – one that replaces bureaucracy with enterprise. This vision, however, entails sharp contradictions because it relies on two competing approaches to organizational reform: one that relies on decentralizing management to lower levels to enhance customer responsiveness; the other that relies on reengineering and downsizing to realize scale economies. While the first approach views lower and middle managers as central to competitiveness, the second views them as indirect costs to be minimized. The central question is whether or how the two approaches can be reconciled. The evidence from this case study shows that restructuring has had the unintended consequence of creating new organizational cleavages: between lower and middle level managers on the one hand, and top managers on the other

Assessing architectural evolution: A case study

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerThis paper proposes to use a historical perspective on generic laws, principles, and guidelines, like Lehman’s software evolution laws and Martin’s design principles, in order to achieve a multi-faceted process and structural assessment of a system’s architectural evolution. We present a simple structural model with associated historical metrics and visualizations that could form part of an architect’s dashboard. We perform such an assessment for the Eclipse SDK, as a case study of a large, complex, and long-lived system for which sustained effective architectural evolution is paramount. The twofold aim of checking generic principles on a well-know system is, on the one hand, to see whether there are certain lessons that could be learned for best practice of architectural evolution, and on the other hand to get more insights about the applicability of such principles. We find that while the Eclipse SDK does follow several of the laws and principles, there are some deviations, and we discuss areas of architectural improvement and limitations of the assessment approach

Software evolution prediction using seasonal time analysis: a comparative study

Prediction models of software change requests are useful for supporting rational and timely resource allocation to the evolution process. In this paper we use a time series forecasting model to predict software maintenance and evolution requests in an open source software project (Eclipse), as an example of projects with seasonal release cycles. We build an ARIMA model based on data collected from Eclipse’s change request tracking system since the project’s start. A change request may refer to defects found in the software, but also to suggested improvements in the system under scrutiny. Our model includes the identification of seasonal patterns and tendencies, and is validated through the forecast of the change requests evolution for the next 12 months. The usage of seasonal information significantly improves the estimation ability of this model, when compared to other ARIMA models found in the literature, and does so for a much longer estimation period. Being able to accurately forecast the change requests’ evolution over a fairly long time period is an important ability for enabling adequate process control in maintenance activities, and facilitates effort estimation and timely resources allocation. The approach presented in this paper is suitable for projects with a relatively long history, as the model building process relies on historic data