Putting context into organizational intervention design:Using tailored questionnaires to measure initiatives for worker well-being

Realistic evaluation emphasizes the importance of exploring the mechanisms through which organizational interventions are effected. A well-known mechanism in organizational interventions is the screening process. Standardized questionnaires, in popular use, neither consider individuals’ appraisals of working conditions nor the specific context of the workplace. Screening with items tailored to intervention contexts may overcome the limitations of standardized questionnaires. In the present study, we evaluate an approach to develop a tailored questionnaire to measure employees’ appraisals of their specific working conditions. First, we interviewed 56 employees and 17 managers and, later, developed tailored items focused on the working conditions in a postal service. In follow-up interviews, we explore participants’ experiences with the tailored questionnaire, including the development of initiatives, compared to their previous experiences with the company´s annual attitude survey that used standardized scales. Results indicated that participants felt the tailored questionnaire highlighted issues that had previously been ignored, that initiatives were easier to develop due to its specificity, and that the feedback strategy was useful in prioritizing questionnaires. Overall, it can be concluded that tailored questionnaires may be appropriate for use in organizational intervention research and more broadly that evaluations of organizational interventions need to be contextually grounded

What lies beneath? The role of informal and hidden networks in the management of crises

Crisis management research traditionally focuses on the role of formal communication networks in the escalation and management of organisational crises. Here, we consider instead informal and unobservable networks. The paper explores how hidden informal exchanges can impact upon organisational decision-making and performance, particularly around inter-agency working, as knowledge distributed across organisations and shared between organisations is often shared through informal means and not captured effectively through the formal decision-making processes. Early warnings and weak signals about potential risks and crises are therefore often missed. We consider the implications of these dynamics in terms of crisis avoidance and crisis management

Developing Leadership for Creative Efforts: A Preface

Michael D. Mumford is the George Lynn Cross distinguished research professor of psychology at the University of Oklahoma where he directs the Center for Applied Social Research. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Georgia in 1983 in the fields of industrial and organizational psychology and psychometrics. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 3, 5, 10, 14), the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the American Psychological Society. He has written more than 270 articles on leadership, creativity, innovation, planning, and ethics. He has served as senior editor of The Leadership Quarterly, and he sits on the editorial boards of the Creativity Research Journal, The Journal of Creative Behavior, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and Ethics and Behavior, among other journals. He has served as principal investor on grants totaling more than US$30 million from the National Science Foundation, The National Institute of Health, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, and the Department of State. He is a recipient of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Organizing to counter terrorism: sensemaking amidst dynamic complexity

publication-status: Acceptedtypes: ArticlePre-print draft (version 1). ‘The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Human Relations September 2013 66(9): 1201–1223, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © [The Author]Organizations increasingly find themselves contending with circumstances that are suffused with dynamic complexity. So how do they make sense of and contend with this? Using a sensemaking approach, our empirical case analysis of the shooting of Mr Jean Charles de Menezes shows how sensemaking is tested under such conditions. Through elaborating the relationship between the concepts of frames and cues, we find that the introduction of a new organizational routine to anticipate action in changing circumstances leads to discrepant sensemaking. This reveals how novel routines do not necessarily replace extant ones but instead, overlay each other and give rise to novel, dissonant identities which in turn can lead to an increase in equivocality rather than a reduction. This has important implications for sensemaking and organizing amidst unprecedented circumstances

The liminality of trajectory shifts in institutional entrepreneurship

In this paper, we develop a process model of trajectory shifts in institutional entrepreneurship. We focus on the liminal periods experienced by institutional entrepreneurs when they, unlike the rest of the organization, recognize limits in the present and seek to shift a familiar past into an unfamiliar and uncertain future. Such periods involve a situation where the new possible future, not yet fully formed, exists side-by-side with established innovation trajectories. Trajectory shifts are moments of truth for institutional entrepreneurs, but little is known about the underlying mechanisms of how entrepreneurs reflectively deal with liminality to conceive and bring forth new innovation trajectories. Our in-depth case study research at CarCorp traces three such mechanisms (reflective dissension, imaginative projection, and eliminatory exploration) and builds the basis for understanding the liminality of trajectory shifts. The paper offers theoretical implications for the institutional entrepreneurship literature

The golden circle: A way of arguing and acting about technology in the London ambulance service

This paper analyses the way in which the London Ambulance Service recovered from the events of October 1992, when it implemented a computer-aided despatch system (LASCAD) that remained in service for less than two weeks. It examines the enactment of a programme of long-term organizational change, focusing on the implementation of an alternative computer system in 1996. The analysis in this paper is informed by actor-network theory, both by an early statement of this approach developed by Callon in the sociology of translation, and also by concepts and ideas from Latour’s more recent restatement of his own position. The paper examines how alternative interests emerged and were stabilized over time, in a way of arguing and acting among key players in the change programme, christened the Golden Circle. The story traces four years in the history of the London Ambulance Service, from the aftermath of October 1992 through the birth of the Golden Circle to the achievement of National Health Service (NHS) trust status. LASCAD was the beginning of the story, this is the middle, an end lies in the future, when the remaining elements of the change programme are enacted beyond the Golden Circle

Annotation management: a Group decision support system for nurses tasks

International audienceWe develop a 5-year empirical investigation that is giving us broad and deep insights to characterise activity management in the palliative ward of an oncology hospital, and offer effective support for group decision-making and collaborative activity of caregivers. Following this observation period, we propose a software prototype based upon annotations in which dealing with patients’ state and evolution is a complex organisational task. We based our conception of an annotation tool on the observations of the rich writing practices of medical professionals. We rely on the innovative strategy of intermediate management to introduce a new technology able to bridge heterogeneous, valuable data flows that addresses both management support and activity support in a single tool

Individual leader to interdependent leadership: A case study in leadership development and tripartite evaluation

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Sage Publications.The Problem - In this case study we see a move away from orthodox views of school leadership as “headship” to a more contemporary model of educational leadership wherein we note a departure from functional, curricula-based school leadership toward more human resource development (HRD) approaches. The aim of this study was to consider the effectiveness of an educational development program for middle leaders within an educational establishment. The Solution - We examined the impact of a bespoke higher education leadership development intervention in Leadership (and Change) on the formation and cohesiveness of a newly formed innovative leadership structure. The Stakeholders - The leadership development intervention was designed through a tripartite collaboration including a university, senior school leaders, and staff. The intervention was designed to shift leadership from individual leader agency to interdependent human leadership agency. Through tripartite evaluation we uncover leadership development praxis that transcends the boundaries of conventional educational leadership and reemphasizes the benefits of bridging the academic/practitioner divide and the application of theory to praxis

Denying What Workers Believe Are Unethical Workplace Requests: Do Workers Use Moral, Operational, or Policy Justifications Publicly?

This message-production experiment demonstrates workers’ tendency to use organizational policy justifications when publicly denying what they privately believe are unethical requests. Working adults (N = 234) responded to an unethical request from a supervisor, coworker, or subordinate. Participants avoided using explicitly moralized justifications for their noncompliance publicly and thus engaged in issue crafting. Specifically, content and statistical analyses revealed that (a) most participants invoked policy justifications to deny requests and (b) differences in hierarchical relationships were not significantly associated with policy justification frequency. These dynamics afford important face-saving functions but hold implications for the moral learning capacity of organizations. The essay concludes with implications for crafting organizational ethics policy.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline