The Organizational Fitness Navigator: Creating and Measuring Organizational Fitness for Fast-Paced Transformation

In the fast-changing environment of today dynamic capabilities to manage organizational transformation are regarded as crucial for business survival and improved performance. Although dynamic organizational capabilities have been receiving intense scrutiny by researchers and practitioners in the past few years, relatively little attention has been directed towards creating a systemic model of dynamic capabilities, and how to effectively measure what the authors call organizational fitness capabilities. This paper builds on the concepts of organizational fitness and its profiling (OFP), and proposes the organizational fitness navigator (OFN) as a systemic model of dynamic organizational capabilities. Part of the OFP model is a systemic scorecard (SCC) as a measurement tool for organizational fitness - in contrast to the well-known balanced scorecard (BSC) - for improving business survival and performance in increasingly networked environments.dynamic capabilities, organizational fitness, organizational fitness profiling, organizational fitness navigator, systemic scorecard

The Wheel of Business Model Reinvention: How to Reshape Your Business Model and Organizational Fitness to Leapfrog Competitors

In today's rapidly changing business landscapes, new sources of sustainable competitive advantage can often only be attained from business model reinvention, based on disruptive innovation and not incremental change or continuous improvement. Extant literature indicates that business models and their reinvention have recently been the focus of scholarly investigations in the field of strategic management, especially focusing on the search for new bases of building strategic competitive advantage, not only to outperform competitors but to especially leapfrog them into new areas of competitive advantage. While the available results indicate that progress is being made on clarifying the nature and key dimensions of business models, relatively little guidance of how to reshape business models and its organizational fitness dimensions have emerged. This article presents a systemic framework for business model reinvention, illustrates its key dimensions, and proposes a systemic operationalization process. Moreover, it provides a tool that helps organizations to evaluate both existing and proposed new business models.

Robust Organizational Fitness for Reinventing Strategy in Rapidly Changing Industry Landscapes

In fast-changing industry landscapes, companies are often engaged in both adaptive (reactive) and inventive (proactive, newly-shaping) change processes, and these require different types of organizational fitness capabilities. Our research of more than a decade conducted in a wide range of industries (See "About our Research") reveal that many companies are predominantly focused on past successes and internal difficulties, and do not possess the necessary robust capabilities to also inventively deal with rapidly changing industry landscapes. This seems due to the fact that many individual and group managerial minds are not able to view organizational fitness in its proper perspective, because of inadequate traditional strategy approaches being utilized. The paper provides insights into the concept and application of organizational fitness, and indicates how managers could benefit from guidelines to develop and manage robust organizational fitness capabilities.

Social Value Orientation, Expectations, and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas:A Meta-analysis

Interdependent situations are pervasive in human life. In these situations, it is essential to form expectations about the others' behaviour to adapt one's own behaviour to increase mutual outcomes and avoid exploitation. Social value orientation, which describes the dispositional weights individuals attach to their own and to another person's outcome, predicts these expectations of cooperation in social dilemmas—an interdependent situation involving a conflict of interests. Yet, scientific evidence is inconclusive about the exact differences in expectations between prosocials, individualists, and competitors. The present meta-analytic results show that, relative to proselfs (individualists and competitors), prosocials expect more cooperation from others in social dilemmas, whereas individualists and competitors do not significantly differ in their expectations. The importance of these expectations in the decision process is further highlighted by the finding that they partially mediate the well-established relation between social value orientation and cooperative behaviour in social dilemmas. In fact, even proselfs are more likely to cooperate when they expect their partner to cooperate

Social Value Orientation, Expectations, and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas:A Meta-analysis

Interdependent situations are pervasive in human life. In these situations, it is essential to form expectations about the others’ behaviour to adapt one’s own behaviour to increase mutual outcomes and avoid exploitation. Social value orientation, which describes the dispositional weights individuals attach to their own and to another person’s outcome, predicts these expectations of cooperation in social dilemmas—an interdependent situation involving a conflict of interests. Yet, scientific evidence is inconclusive about the exact differences in expectations between prosocials, individualists, and competitors. The present meta-analytic results show that, relative to proselfs (individualists and competitors), prosocials expect more cooperation from others in social dilemmas, whereas individualists and competitors do not significantly differ in their expectations. The importance of these expectations in the decision process is further highlighted by the finding that they partially mediate the well-established relation between social value orientation and cooperative behaviour in social dilemmas. In fact, even proselfs are more likely to cooperate when they expect their partner to cooperate

Same talk, different reaction? Communication, emergent leadership and gender

Purpose: We investigate the role of gender in linking communicative acts that occur in the interactions of self-managed teams to emergent leadership. Specifically, this study presents a framework that differentiates between agentic and communal task- and relations-oriented communication as predictors of emergent leadership, and it hypothesizes that men and women do not differ in what they say but do differ in how they are rewarded (i.e. ascribed informal leadership responsibilities) for their statements. Design/methodology/approach: Interaction coding was used to capture the meeting communication of 116 members of 41 self-managed teams. Findings: Men and women exhibited the same amount of agentic and communal task- and relations-oriented communication and were equally likely to emerge as leaders. However, men experienced an emergent leadership advantage when engaging in agentic and communal task-oriented behaviors. Agentic and communal relations-oriented behaviors did not predict emergent leadership. Research limitations/implications: The findings imply that theories could be more precise in differentiating between objective behaviors (i.e. actor perspective) and perceptions thereof (i.e. observer perspective) to understand why women experience a disadvantage in assuming leadership roles. Practical implications: Although women displayed the same verbal behaviors as men, they experienced different consequences. Organizations can provide unconscious bias training programs, which help increase employees' self-awareness of a potential positive assessment bias toward men's communication. Originality/value: This research utilizes an innovative, fine-grained coding approach to gather data that add to previous studies showing that, unlike men, women experience a disadvantage in terms of emergent leadership ascriptions when they deviate from stereotypically expected behavior

Age and Workplace Deviance: A Meta-Analytic Test of Two Mediating Mechanisms

In the current meta-analysis, we examine the relation between age and workplace deviance, and find a small but significant negative correlation (rho = -.092, k = 198). More importantly, we test two complementary mechanisms to help explain this relation. Specifically, based on the neo-socioanalytical model of personality change, we hypothesized that those Big Five personality domains that change with age and trait negative affect would mediate this relation. These hypotheses were supported, as the Big Five traits conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism, as well as trait negative affect simultaneously mediated the negative relation between age and workplace deviance. These findings highlight two important underlying mechanisms for this relation and suggest several opportunities for organizations to reduce the occurrence of workplace deviance. Further theoretical and practical implications as well as limitations and future research ideas are discussed