Cutting the cord : mutual respect, organizational autonomy, and independence in organizational separation processes

Based on a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of developments in the English National Health Service, we develop a process model of how organizations divest or spin off units with the aim of establishing two or more autonomous organizational entities while simultaneously managing their continued interdependencies. We find that effective organizational separation depends on generating two types of respect—appraisal and recognition respect—between the divesting and divested units. Appraisal respect involves showing appreciation for competence or the effort to achieve it, while recognition respect requires considering what someone cares about—such as values or concerns—and acknowledging that they matter. The process model we develop shows that open communication is crucial to the development of both. We also find that certain attempts to gain organizational independence and respect may unintentionally undermine the development of autonomy. Counterintuitively, we find that increasing or maintaining interorganizational links via communication may facilitate organizational separation, while attempts by units to distance themselves from one another may unintentionally inhibit it. By linking organizational separation, autonomy, independence, and respect, this paper develops theory on organizational separation processes and more generally enhances our understanding of organizational autonomy and its relations with mutual respect

Improvisation during a crisis : hidden innovation in healthcare systems

Background Crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, risk overwhelming health and social care systems. As part of their responses to a critical situation, healthcare professionals necessarily improvise. Some of these local improvisations have the potential to contribute to important innovations for health and social care systems with relevance beyond the particular service area and crisis in which they were developed. Findings This paper explores some key drivers of improvised innovation that may arise in response to a crisis. We highlight how services that are not considered immediate priorities may also emerge as especially fertile areas in this respect. Conclusion Health managers and policymakers should monitor crisis-induced improvisations to counteract the potential deterioration of non-prioritised services and to identify and share useful innovations. This will be crucial as health and social care systems around the world recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and head into another potential crisis: a global economic recession

Habitual leadership ethics : timelessness and virtuous leadership in the Jesuit Order

This paper is about the relationship between leadership, organisational morals, and temporality. We argue that engaging with questions of time and temporality may help us overcome the overly agentic view of organisational morals and leadership ethics that dominates extant literature. Our analysis of the role of time in organizational morals and leadership ethics starts from a virtue-based approach to leading large-scale moral endeavours. We ask: how can we account for organizational morality across generations and independently of the leader? To address this question, we studied the leadership model of the Jesuits, a Catholic Religious Order. Our case reveals that a virtue-based model of leadership does not necessarily imply that those who are selected to lead the organization are themselves virtuous, but that the processes underpinning the exercise of leadership are cyclical and repeated as truthfully as possible. Virtuous leadership, for the Jesuits, is therefore about the construction of an ideal type of leadership against which the processes which sustain it were designed. Our theoretical contribution is twofold. First, we propose an habitual understanding of moral forms of leadership, in which the procedural is constitutive of moral forms of organising; second, we explain how “timelessness”, understood as the quality of not changing as years go by, allowed the Jesuits to centre the processes which sustain their ethical model on the repetition, across space and time, of said processes, rather than on their outcome. We conclude that the search for virtue might be more relevant for large-scale moral endeavours than virtue itself

GPs are from Mars, Administrators are from Venus: The Role of Misaligned Occupational Dispositions in Inhibiting Mandated Role Change

Research on mandated occupational role change focuses on jurisdictional conflict to explain change failure. Our study of the English National Health Service highlights the role of occupational dispositions in shaping how mandated role change is implemented by members of multiple occupational groups. We find that tension stemming from misaligned dispositions may emerge as members of different occupations interact during their role change implementation efforts. Depending on dispositional responses to tension, change may fail as members of the different occupations avoid interactions. This suggests that effective role change can be elusive even in the initial absence of conflicting occupational interests

Collaborative uncoupling : how to break up and stay together

Divestitures and other forms of organizational separation are not commonly associated with continuity and ongoing collaboration in inter-organizational relationships. Instead, separation is often equated with terminating relationships and gaining independence. Here, the authors argue that achieving separation does not require terminating relationships and that ongoing collaboration between separating entities may actually contribute to successful separation. The authors base this argument on the assertion that the objective of organizational separation is to achieve organizational autonomy for all entities involved and that separating entities can enable each other’s development of autonomy while remaining interdependent. The authors also discuss how collaborative separation may contribute to a range of benefits, as well as why it may nevertheless fail to emerge in practice. In this respect, the authors consider the relevance of ethical perspectives and emotional dynamics related to feelings of (dis)respect, (dis)trust, pride and shame. The authors conclude by discussing activities that may contribute to, and undermine, effective collaborative separation

Conscious uncoupling : the difficulty of establishing and enforcing new organizational boundaries

This paper examines how managers struggled to implement the mandated separation of a unit from its parent organization within the English National Health Service (NHS) and how their attempts shaped subsequent inter-organizational dynamics. It demonstrates that enacting organizational separation, and thus aligning behavior with newly defined boundaries, involves potentially complex and interrelated forms of boundary work. Specifically, a qualitative analysis of this case suggests that attempts to separate stakeholders by limiting interaction across formal boundaries may unintentionally maintain connections and thus, paradoxically, counteract organizational separation. At the same time, attempts to establish connections may facilitate the organizational separation process by allowing stakeholders to negotiate and accept a new division of roles and responsibilities. Hence, I find that boundary spanning may be a useful strategy not only in the context of organizational integration but also in enabling organizational separation by inhibiting boundary-breaching attempts and facilitating boundary closure. The findings contribute to theories of organizational boundaries and boundary work and provide an enhanced understanding of the increasingly important, and yet understudied, phenomenon of organizational separation