Conflicting Identities during Digital Transformation Efforts of an Incumbent Automotive Firm

Most manufacturing firms that undergo digital transformation fail to seize the expected benefits. A key reason is that those firms fail to extend their identity of operational excellence with a digital service provider identity, leading to tensions at the interface – the product. Although research has addressed individual aspects of organizational identity, it remains to be understood how organizational identity evolves in incumbent firms in a period of liminality. In a case study with a leading automotive manufacturer, we show how two conflicting identities lead to paradoxical tensions and how separating them through a spinoff shifts those tensions. This study provides the first results on conflicting organizational identities during the liminal period of digital transformation

Pathways for Digital Transformation: An Organizational Identity Perspective

In the rapidly evolving digital transformation (DT) landscape, understanding organizational identity (OI) complexities becomes imperative. Leveraging a comparative analysis of AutoCorp and its spinoff, SoftCorp, this paper unfolds OI tensions in the context of DT. Despite advances in the literature on OI and DT, a gap exists in understanding how conflicting identities within a parent company and its spinoff can impact the organizations and the products they develop. We unearth that the dominant identity in AutoCorp, rooted in traditional manufacturing, creates tensions with the digital service-provider identity in SoftCorp. Additionally, we find that such separation may temporarily relieve internal tensions but introduce new challenges at the organizations’ boundaries, affecting the digitized product. Our findings contribute to the theoretical discourse in OI and provide insights for companies undergoing DT. In our ongoing research project, we plan to develop an integrative framework reconciling these diverging identities for optimal digitized product development

Location of inertia and inertial mechanisms: spatial concepts for information systems-enabled organizational transformations

While an abundant literature describes what, when and why organizational inertia impedes Information Systems-enabled Organizational Transformations (ISOT), the question of where inertia lies and how it is maintained received scant attention. These questions are all the more important as emerging digital technologies such as AI, data analytics or blockchain fuel new waves of transformations and tie organizations’ transformation dynamics to external platforms, algorithms, gig workers or partners. This paper introduces two new concepts, namely the location of inertia and types of inertial mechanisms, as the foundation for a spatial approach to inertia. This approach aims to better locate inertia and what underlying mechanisms maintain it. We also discuss how these concepts can advance our understanding of ISOT and how they could further be developed into a broader theory

Hyperbolic Organizational Identity and Identity of Digital Artifacts: A Comparative Study of Healthcare Innovations

As digital technologies move toward the core of an organization’s offerings, the identity of many contemporary organizations is now born in association with the digital technology that characterizes them. Entrepreneurs largely rely on setting up high expectations to attract initial resources to materialize the idea for their digital innovation. However, such a tactic may be problematic when their eventual digital artifact contradicts their core organizational identity, leading to their legitimacy loss. In this ongoing study, we explore a novel phenomenon of hyperbolic organizational identity. Drawing on longitudinal archival sources, we conduct a comparative case study of IBM Watson and DeepMind, whose identities both became hyperbolic, yet experienced different outcomes in their healthcare innovations. From our findings to date, a preliminary dialectical process model is presented that depicts the interplay between organizational and technical identities of the digital artifact in leading to the formation and change in hyperbolic organizational identity

Clinical Decision Support Systems Continuance: Integrating Physicians’ Professional Identity with Delone & McLean IS Success Model

Despite the importance of sustained and continued use of healthcare information systems to reap their benefits of cost reductions and quality improvements, research on continuance use of these systems is limited. In this paper, we study physicians’ continuance to use a pain management clinical decision support system by developing a theoretical model that integrates Delone and McLean IS success model with physicians’ professional identity constructs, an integration that addresses the gap of separating information systems constructs from physicians’ idiosyncrasies constructs in extant literature. We conduct our study through a mixed methods longitudinal design that addresses our research questions. This study enhances our understanding of factors influencing physicians’ continuance behavior and extends current literature on healthcare information systems use

Managing Organizational Identity Through Ambidextrous Capabilities: A Dual Level Analysis

Organizations need to maintain enduring and stable organizational identity to gain long-term success while must adapt quickly to the increasingly volatile environment as a critical condition for profitability and survival. Such ongoing paradoxical challenge concerning management of organizational identity has been left unaddressed in the existing literature. Drawing on the ambidexterity and organizational identity literatures, this paper proposes two theoretical frameworks to systematically examine how organizations especially in the e-commerce industry should manage their organizational identities by leveraging on four types of balancing modes of ambidexterity. The case of Damai, which is China’s No.1 online ticket seller, was comprehensively analyzed on the basis of these two models. Our study not only contributes to knowledge of organizational identity and ambidexterity but also provides detailed means for practitioners to manage organizational identities at both strategic and operational levels

“CAVIIAR FOR ALL” A CASE STUDY OF AN INNOVATIVE APPLICATION FOR CATERING, TOURISM AND CULTURE

Many people think that when we want something like a product or a service it comes from a financial point of view, but what really makes businesses sustainable and growth is creativity and innovation. This paper presents a real case study that exemplifies the notion of “idea to product” of an innovative application for the information and propagation of catering, tourism and culture (caviiar.pt). This is an uninterrupted service, which is oriented to give “real time” information about catering services and regional or nearby culture and touristic points of interest. It also allows the promotion of gastronomic or cultural events with information relevant to the idea of the application. This project intends to create a new catering, touristic and cultural notion with a high level of interaction with clients and their necessities or wants, bringing to daylight a new touristic concept: “online assessment tourism”.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Issues and ideas organizational identity raises for scenario planning

Organizational identity (understood as a ‘logic of appropriateness’ such that organizations act based on how they define themselves) has emerged as one of the core concepts of management theory. Despite this, it has been under-attended to in scenario planning literature and practice, perhaps due to scenario planning’s heritage of focusing on an organization’s external environment. An organizational identity perspective is important to incorporate into scenario planning because scholars have shown that identity becomes highly salient under conditions in which scenario planning is used (turbulence, uncertainty and disruption) unsettling taken for granted assumptions leaders have about who the organization is and raising questions for them about their capacity to adapt. Organizational identity also mediates what is observed in the external environment and acted on - in scenario planning terms, shaping what drivers of change are deemed most important, what scenarios are developed, and the strategic options that are created. And finally, for organizations to adapt, their identity must co-evolve with strategy and changes in the environment placing identity at the core of scenario work. This paper explores the implications of an organizational identity perspective for the process of scenario planning and in doing so contributes to the call in the literature for a better understanding of why scenario planning is not always successful