Building Organizational Identity: an Insider Action Research from a Founder’s Viewpoint

This paper features the implementation of an extensive insider action research, exhaustively following the framework of Coghlan and Brannick (2010, 2014). It consisted of two action research projects - the thesis action research and the core action research - which were done in a parallel manner, both following the iterative cycles of constructing, planning, taking, and evaluating action. The thesis action research was aimed at developing a theory on building organizational identity from the viewpoint of an organizational founder. On the other hand, the core action research was focused on promoting the specific identity of the Institute for Integrality, Inc. Quality and rigor were observed in the implementation of the action research cycles. In the fieldwork, there were three main cycles undertaken – understanding organizational identity, fine-tuning the practice of this identity, and designing the integration of this identity in organizational culture. Thereafter, significant learnings were derived from meta-learning in the form of content, process, and premise reflections. Finally, through the critical reflection of the project in the light of the experience and theory, A-Founder’s Integrative Theory of Organizational Identity Building was derived.     

Working Within Organizational Cycles—A More Suitable Way to Manage Action Research Projects in Large Organizations?

This article proposes that action research projects in a large business context may need to fit within organizational funding and political cycles. It outlines some of the problems that may occur in attempting to implement an action research project in a large organization. It gives a case study of such a project that aimed to introduce a systemic human resource strategy to bring about organizational cultural change. Part way through the completion of the project the cycle changed, funds were cut, and the project was abolished, although significant portions of it had been implemented and other parts were later reestablished. The article establishes a link to punctuated equilibrium theory in exploring the political and funding cycles that influenced the decision to cut funding. It considers whether this could have been foreseen, and gives some recommendations for future action research projects.     

高层变革型领导行为与组织绩效间关系的理论整合与实证检验

变革型领导理论自提出后在近20多年来一直处于领导理论研究的核心地位, 通过对现有文献的回顾可以发现, 现有研究大多是从个体和团队层次来探讨变革型领导行为对其直接下属和其所在团队成员的影响, 从组织层面上来研究高层变革型领导行为对整个组织发生影响的成果则相对较少. 即使在有限的关于高层变革型领导行为与组织绩效之间关系的研究之中, 学者之间的研究结论尚不一致且存在冲突之处. 在归纳已有研究成果的基础上, 通过引入情境因素运用一个整合的理论分析框架不仅囊括了已有的研究, 而且对现有研究做了进一步的补充和扩展. 运用中国297家企业样本进行实证研究后发现, 在不同的外部环境下, 高层变革型领导行为对组织绩效的影响效果存在明显差异, 并且发现高层变革型领导行为并不只对组织绩效产生积极作用, 在特定情境下还会产生消极作用. 最后对研究结论、研究贡献和一些额外发现进行了讨论.     

C4ISR系统组织互操作性研究

当前对于系统互操作的研究主要集中在技术层面,关注于系统间如何有效交换及利用所交换的数据.如何从战略理念,组织结构,业务进程等更高的组织层面分析系统的互操作性问题,指导体系设计,在系统众多、协作关系复杂的C4ISR系统中尤为重要.本文首先给出组织互操作基本概念,分析了我军指挥信息系统的互操作需求;在此基础上基于权变理论给出组织互操作框架及相关制品;最后,以某前沿阵地防空系统为例论述了组织互操作框架在体系分析与设计中的应用.     

组织地位感知对创新性前摄行为的作用——基于心理资本的中介作用与变革型领导的调节作用

在相关理论研究的基础上构建了员工组织地位感知、心理资本、变革型领导与前摄行为之间关系的概念模型；运用调研数据，采用回归分析进行实证检验。结果显示：员工企业地位感知和工会地位感知均对员工前摄行为具有显著的正向影响，而心理资本在员工组织地位感知与前摄行为之间具有明显的中介作用，变革型领导在员工组织地位感知与前摄行为间具有调节作用。     

Leadership by Activity Theory and Professional Development by Social Construction

Culture and human development come together as one. Contradictions and challenges abound in the transformation of social practices of leadership and management. Globalization, organizational, and professional development bring local realities together. Research must embrace characteristic discourses in order to constitute a modified perspective to current approaches. Research must direct attention to the predominant conceptions of leaders, contexts, and relations. Leaders are discoursed objects capable of individual action, acting rationally in order to structure their contexts. Their ability to relate to others is an individual act and a source to progress. Good discourses displace attitudes, personal properties, and individual acts and highlight relations. One shift of attention goes from transcendental notions of truth, right, and suitability to local–historical constructions of reality. Another shift goes from reality as a singular and independent state to multiple socially constructed realities. In the processes of social construction people create individual worlds where unique relations emerge. Coordinated training and research enable different modes of relating to each other in systemic practice.     

Leadership and Learning: A Critical Reexamination of Senge’s Learning Organization

From its inception the concept of the learning organization has been identified with a particular type of organization or new forms of organizational learning. But it is often forgotten that Senge’s ‘system thinking’ formulation of the learning organization was inseparable from an attempt to reformulate a new way of thinking about change agency and leadership in organizations. Here it is argued that Senge’s learning organization can be re-conceptualised as a partial fusion of ‘systems thinking’ and learning theories that leads to a concept of organizational learning as a form of ‘distributed leadership’. However, the concept is critically flawed because it cannot theorise the organizing practices by which learning to lead and leading to learn are shared or distributed in organizations. It is concluded that Senge’s under-theorized focus on distributed leadership consistently neglects issues of practice and issues of power. As such his work does not provide an exploration of the possibilities for increasing the dispersal of human agency, power, knowledge and autonomy within the workplace.     

组织协作网与决策树

基于组织基本组成元素(决策者、平台和任务)的定义描述了组织协作网与决策树。通过对组织协作网与决策树的描述分析提出了组织结构设计的新思路:基于决策个体在任务上的协作关系设计最佳的决策树(组织决策的层次结构)。并描述了从组织协作网到决策树的生成过程,对生成过程的求解采用了优化协作树算法。针对案例对决策树的产生进行了求解和分析。     

组织决策过程及其涌现性研究

取得决策优势是信息化战争的关键问题之一。重大的战略决策往往是组织决策。如何对组织决策过程进行有效管理和控制，以实现整体大于部分之和的组织增效潜力，是组织决策理论需要研究解决的重点问题。本文研究了组织决策过程的复杂性及其中的涌现现象，分析了涌现性对组织决策效能的作用和影响，提出对组织决策过程中的涌现性进行控制，是组织决策过程管理控制的重心，也是提高组织决策效能的重要途径。     

Power-Based Arbitrary Decisional Actions in the Resolution of MIS Project Issues: A Project Manager's Action Research Perspective

As a management information systems (MIS) project manager and an action researcher, the author examined, over time, the influence on information system development (ISD) of the informal sociopolitical organizational actions. The paper reports two cases of action research findings concerning the effect on ISD project implementation processes of power-based arbitrary decisional actions in bureaucratic environments. The research focused on the relationship of such unilateral actions to the interconnected subprocesses of deliberate and conscious attempts by the ISD project members to define and resolve system implementation issues. A suggested conceptual framework for the issue-resolution processes (IRP's) and obstacle-coping processes (OCP's) is based on the author's IRP/OCP-related behavioral constructs and theoretical models dealing with soft-systems issues, especially appreciative system theory and soft-systems methodology, and innovative flexible, "complementarist" (Sinn, 1998) or pluralist problem-solving approaches.     

Perspectives on executive information systems

Executives who consider the acquisition of Executive Information Systems (EIS) may encounter several major problems already in their selection and introduction stages. Key issues are the following: Can the EIS's really match our managerial needs and support decision making in our organizational contingencies? How widely in the leadership levels can they be introduced? Are they easy-to-learn, easy-to-use and easily customizable? Do they utilize the newest information technology, e.g. graphics and modern interface technology? Can they work in our computer network? In order to facilitate elegant solutions of the selection problems, we construct an evaluation framework which guides the selection of an EIS product to match the managerial needs according to the organizational contingencies. This framework is useful immediately after the specification of the decision making support requirements of the executive. The effectiveness of the framework is shown by applying it and analyzing 13 EIS products. We also offer introduction and use experiences from four English and four Finnish large companies covering the opinions of 132 EIS users. In this paper we give general answers to the questions above and discuss other relevant issues.     

Systemic Design for Applying the Combined Use of SSM and CDA to Social Practices

In this paper, we propose a framework for applying the combined use of soft systems methodology (SSM) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) based on social semiotic systemic functional linguistics to social practices. In the social practice, ‘participation’ mode of Checkland’s SSM is used for ‘problem-solving’ whilst CDA is used to problematize ‘problem-solving’ processes within the practice. During the meta-process of problematization of our research, we used Churchman’s systems approach and its theory of ‘boundary critique’ in order to explore issues such as governance, inequality of power, and social values within the organization examined for this study. In other words, the process-oriented methodology proposed in this paper consists of two processes: that of ‘problem-solving’ based on SSM and of problematization of naturalized discourse from the perspective of CDA and two phases of boundary critique in social practice. A detailed account of a case study of Korean social enterprise is given to demonstrate how our proposed framework of the combined use of SSM and CDA is applied into practice. Reflecting the outcome of the case study, this paper argues that critical social research from systemic inquiry using what we call ‘process-oriented methodology’ is useful to address some of the social and complex issues related to understanding dynamic relation between power and discourse amongst participants in the social enterprise in Korean contexts.     

Systems Thinking and Systems Practice: Working in the Fifth Dimension

This paper describes how a messy organizational problem was tackled using a systems approach which led to a resolution of the problem and to an improvement in the working relationships of the people involved. The example also shows how people who are not familiar with systems thinking, as such, can quickly be helped to develop a shared systemic view of a complex situation using activity modeling. At a deeper level, the paper also shows how the underlying dynamics of the problem situation was altered as a result of using a cooperative, dialogical working method, leading to an improvement in the quality of service provided by that part of the organization. The paper uses Peter Senge's five disciplines of a learning organization, together with various systems concepts, as a framework for describing how the process of change was brought about through the simultaneous management of task and social processes, leading to both individual and organizational learning.     

组织结构模具特征分析

本文试图从组织理论的另一个侧面对组织的结构性特征进行研究 .本文主要讨论了组织结构的使用策略 ;组织模具形态分析 ;建立有效模具单元——工作群体等内容.     

IDEA: A Collaborative Organizational Design Process Integrating Innovation, Design, Engagement, and Action

This paper describes an innovative and successful 1-year organization change process. It captures a design-based inquiry that simultaneously applies creative, purposeful, and systemic thinking to a complex set of issues. Three significant findings result from this research. First, this paper discusses how the change process created the necessary and sufficient conditions allowing for the creation of an innovative organizational design that embeds both optimization and innovation. Second, Design Thinking was used to develop a 2-day participative design process we have called IDEA, an acronym for integrating innovation, design, engagement, and action. We believe that the IDEA organizational design process is replicable. Third, it describes an emergent and co-created change process. This paper concludes by raising questions for future transformative organizational design efforts.     

组织决策及其支持系统的分析与设计

对组织决策的结构要素和过程要素进行了分析,阐明了组织所需要的决策支持．探讨了组织决策支持系统（ＯＤＳＳ）的特征和设计影响因素．针对网络结构组织,提出了ＯＤＳＳ的一种结构设计框架     

Facilitating Trust Building in Networks: A Study from the Water Technology Industry

This paper analyses how action researchers can facilitate trust building processes in inter-firm networks and develops a framework for network development. A longitudinal case study of developing a regional network of water technology SMEs constitutes the empirical base. The paper argues that researchers can directly facilitate processes with a capacity to build two types of trust in different phases of network development, both characteristic-based and process-based trust. The findings indicate that processes to build characteristic-based trust can be facilitated through dialogue processes in temporary groups at network meetings. Processes to build process-based trust are stimulated by practical inter-firm teamwork. Furthermore, there seems to be a mutually reinforcing relationship between these two forms of trust formation, which can be influenced by action researchers. When the level of trust has reached a point of critical mass, new-coming firms seem to jump quickly through characteristic-based trust towards a relatively high level of process-based trust.     

The institution as an “Ideological system”: How morals maketh organization

A dominant current view of institutions sees them as task-performing entities and hence views improvements and change as functional in nature. Systems views of managing change in institutions are particularly guilty of adopting this view. Recommendations for change take the form of improving the task and organization structures to make the functions more efficient and effective in performance. This paper argues that such a functionalist view of an institution is limited and can be dangerous when considering recommendations for change. A different view of an institution is proposed. This view is interpretivist and uses the notion of organizational culture to show how institutions may be usefully viewed through the notion of “ideological system.” The theoretical framework for this notion is that of institutional members sharing and developing a common interpretive schema and exploiting this in their making of judgments about appropriate and inappropriate actions and change. This framework is then developed into the view that ideologies express the morals of institutional life and that so-called functional activities can be seen as essentially moral in action and intention. It is the symbolic nature of such moralities that allows the institutional life to be understood by its members and decisions to be made about what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior. The argument is made that this view of organizations is fundamentally important in analysis so that prioritization decisions can be understood and appropriate recommendations for change can be made. This paper shows how systems approaches can be used from this framework but that a different notion of institution, and hence change, needs to be adopted. An interpretative approach to organizational analysis is then developed and presented. Reference is made to various cases to illustrate the argument.