Leading and Managing People in the Dynamic Organization

Randal D. Day, Randall S. Peterson, Elizabeth A. Mannix

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415649667
• eBook ISBN: 9781135629526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The current business environment requires that individuals, teams, and organizations are equipped to cope with an unpredictable marketplace and increasing competition. Organizations are forced to be kinetic, organic, and without boundaries if they are to remain successful. Given these environmental and marketplace demands, scholars must rethink the applicability of existing organizational theories and frameworks. In March 2001, a conference was held with the aim of developing and articulating this new model of organizations. Scholars contributed their expertise in areas, such as leadership, human resource management, negotiation and conflict, teams, entrepreneurship, organizational change, power and influence, and diversity. The contributors focused on their own area of expertise and considered how existing theories must be altered to fit a more agile, organizational form. Theoretical and empirical questions were raised, testable hypotheses were developed, and emerging themes were uncovered. The end result of the conference is this volume. It brings together the reflections of a diverse collection of organizational theorists and researchers on the implications of this new business model within their own areas of expertise. The book's goal is to inspire organizational scholars to develop a new theory and produce sound managerial advice for how to build and maintain a successful organization in a dynamic workplace. The chapters include a review of research literature with the highlights and citations that everybody working in a field must know, followed by how the research agenda is affected by the increasingly dynamic marketplace.

I

Introduction to Leading and Managing People in the Dynamic Organization

1

Introduction: Leading and Managing People in the Dynamic Organization

Elizabeth A. Mannix

Cornell University

Randall S. Peterson

London Business School

This volume is the result of the first event sponsored by Cornell University’s Center for Leadership in Dynamic Organizations (CLDO). The Center’s mission is to understand the unique form of leadership found in continuously changing, agile, dynamic organizations. Our goal is to be a catalyst, drawing the parties at the cutting edge of practice and research together. We hope to be a repository for the latest thinking and knowledge, and also work to actively promote organizational action, testing the limits of the new models and facilitating their application.

In March of 2001 we launched the CLDO with an event called Leadership Week. For 6 days we drew on the talents and expertise of faculty, corporate executives, and student leaders to examine the challenges of leadership in a rapidly changing and dynamic business environment. The week was divided into three components. The Corporate Conference focused on what innovative companies were doing to launch more agile and adaptive business models. The Graduate Business Conference brought together more than 150 MBA student leaders from 30 business schools to examine issues of 21st century leadership. Finally, and the focus of this volume, the Academic Symposium brought together more than 50 scholars from universities around the world to focus on the attributes and practices required for leaders in dynamic organizations.

From the very beginning the Academic Symposium—aptly titled “Understanding the Dynamic Organization”—was meant to be a learning experience for all involved. We began with a few assumptions to frame the conference. First, most organizations are faced with more external uncertainty than ever before. Ever-expanding global competition, fast-paced technologies, erratic economic fluctuations, unpredictable political instability—these factors have created an increasingly dynamic business environment. This brings us to our second assumption: In order to be successful, individuals within these organizations must be equipped to cope with an unpredictable marketplace and chaotic change. This requires leadership capabilities focused on leading and managing organizations that are in constant flux, facing new challenges that require new solutions virtually every day. As such, today’s managers and leaders must be fast and flexible problem solvers, able to mobilize others to diagnose problems, process data, generate effective solutions, and marshal the resources necessary to implement those solutions quickly and efficiently.

Our focus in this volume is primarily on understanding the people within the dynamic organization. In researching the background for this conference, however, we found that most of the work on organizational agility has focused either on strategy (e.g., Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998), or on organizational structure and design (e.g., Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick, & Kerr, 1995). Micro- and mesolevel scholars have not focused on the potential impact of organizational agility for their models of human behavior and interaction. As such, we had to ask several of our contributors to stretch past their current areas of expertise. We asked experts in fields such as motivation, learning, and negotiation to rethink their current models of organizational behavior and to consider a world in which organizations are forced to be dynamic, kinetic, and even without boundaries. If there is no longer a “steady-state” for organizations operating in a dynamic marketplace, what does that mean for our current models of organizational behavior? For example, the current reality of dispersed workgroups makes it impossible to rely on traditional theories of team dynamics. Even classic notions such as Lewin’s unfreeze → change → refreeze model of organizational change may no longer be useful when change is constant.

We applaud our contributors for being eager and willing to take on this challenge. Of course, in order to understand people within the dynamic organization, it is necessary to have a contextual framework. In the last decade or so, several scholars (as well as practitioners) have written about the characteristics of a more dynamic organizational form. Senge was perhaps the most celebrated advocate of the “learning organization” (Senge, 1990), whereas others described the kinetic organization (Fradette & Michaud, 1998); the boundaryless organization (Ashkenas et al., 1995); the adaptive organization (Fulmer, 2000; Haeckel, 1999); and the flexible firm (Volberda, 1998). These models vary in their specifics, but all tend to build on concepts from complexity theory (Maguire & McKelvey, 1999) and generally view organizations as organic systems (Burns & Stalker, 1961) capable of holding their own in dynamic or hypercompetitive markets (D’Aveni, 1994; Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998). For this conference we drew on our resident experts on organizational agility, Lee Dyer and Richard Shafer, to guide us (Dyer & Shafer, 1999).

Dyer and Shafer (1999; chapter 2, this volume) have specified a new organizational paradigm for dynamic organizations (also called agile organizations) that views organizational adaptation as a continuous process. Dynamic organizations strive to develop the capability to shift, flex, and adapt “as a matter of course” (Dyer & Shafer, 1999, p. 148). The goal is to keep internal operations at a level of diversity and flexibility that matches the degree of turmoil in the external environment—a principle known as requisite variety (Morgan, 1997; see also McGrath & Boisot, chapter 10, this volume).

In Dyer and Shafer’s model, organizations are characterized by high levels of direction, stability, and order, while simultaneously exhibiting high amounts of experimentation, discovery, and flexibility. Some firms that exhibit this seemingly contradictory set of attributes include HP, ABB, Nike, and 3M. How do they combine order and chaos in a way that optimizes both? Dyer and Shafer suggest that at least three strategic capabilities might be necessary: (a) the ability to continuously scan the external environment, locate and analyze emerging developments, and quickly turn the resulting information into actionable decisions; (b) the capacity to quickly and easily make decisions and, more important, move resources from where they are to where they need to be to activate these decisions; and (c) the ability to create, adapt, and use information and knowledge to not only improve current operations, but also constantly challenge current ways of thinking and operating.

Clearly, these capabilities have implications for the way in which organizations are designed (e.g., Anand & Jones, chapter 11, this volume), but they also have implications for the skills, abilities, and values that people bring to those organizations (e.g., Thomas-Hunt & Phillips, chapter 6, this volume), as well as how they interact with one another (e.g, Wageman, chapter 4, this volume). Given the relatively new ground on which we are treading, our contributors took some different components of the dynamic organization to emphasize. For example, Smith and Dickson (chapter 3) focus at the intersection of person-organization fit by asking “What kind of person can survive and thrive in a dynamic environment?” Boisnier and Chatman (chapter 5) look at another multiple-level interaction—the impact of subcultures on an organization’s ability to adapt and change. By contrast, Hodgson and White (chapter 9) emphasize the demands of the dynamic environment by examining how learning is affected by ambiguity and uncertainty. In addition, some of our contributors focus on the potential benefits of the dynamic organization (e.g., O’Connor & Adair, chapter 8), whereas others emphasize the potential detriments (e.g., Moreland & Argote, chapter 7). These different takes on the dynamic organization reflect the state of this relatively new paradigm.

Because we viewed this as a learning experience, and also as a “stretch assignment,” we also asked authors to do a fair amount of speculation. They have included many testable ideas, research propositions, agendas, hypotheses, and even full models that might be explored. We believe that scholars urgently need to understand the implications of this new business environment for supporting dynamic and agile organizations. The area is ripe for exploration. Our hope is that this volume is able to stretch readers’ minds and fill them with ideas for proceeding with new and stimulating research on this exciting topic.

References

Ashkenas, R., Ulrich, D., Jick, T., & Kerr, S. (1995). The boundaryless organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Brown, S., & Eisenhardt, K. (1998). Competing on the edge: Strategy as structured chaos. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Burns, T., & Stalker, G. (1961). The management of innovation. London: Tavistock.

D’Aveni, R. (1994). Hyper-competition: Managing the dynamics of strategic maneuvering. New York: Free Press.

Dyer, L., & Shafer, R. (1999). From human resource strategy to organizational effectiveness: Lessons from research on organizational agility. In P. Wright, L. Dyer, J. B. Boudreau, & G. Milkovich (Eds.), Strategic human resources management research in the 21st century, research in personnel and human resource management (pp. 145–174). Stamford, CT: JAI Press.

Fradette, M., & Michaud, S. (1998). The power of corporate kinetics. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Fulmer, W. E. (2000). Shaping the adaptive organization. New York: AMACOM.

Haeckel, S. (1999). Adaptive enterprise. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Maguire, S., & McKelvey, B (1999). Complexity and management: Moving from fad to firm foundations. Emergence, 1(2), 19–61.

Morgan, G. (1997). Images of organization (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Volberda, H. (1998). Building the flexible firm. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

2

Dynamic Organizations: Achieving Marketplace and Organizational Agility With People

Lee Dyer

Richard Shafer

Cornell University

Driven by dynamic competitive conditions, an increasing number of firms are experimenting with new, and what they hope will be more dynamic, organizational forms. This development has opened up exciting theoretical and empirical venues for students of leadership, business strategy, organizational theory, and the like. One domain that has yet to catch the wave, however, is strategic human resource management. In an effort to catch up, we here draw on the dynamic organization and human resource strategy literatures to delineate both a process for uncovering and the key features of a carefully crafted human resources strategy for dynamic organizations. The logic is as follows. Dynamic organizations compete through marketplace agility. Marketplace agility requires that employees at all levels engage in proactive, adaptive, and generative behaviors, bolstered by a supportive mindset. Under the right conditions, the essential mindset and behaviors, although highly dynamic, are fostered by a human resources strategy centered on a relatively small number of dialectical, yet paradoxically stable, guiding principles and anchored in a supportive organizational infrastructure. This line of reasoning, however, rests on a rather modest empirical base and, thus, is offered less as a definitive statement than as a spur for much needed additional research.

Increasingly, firms find themselves, either by design or circumstances, operating in business environments fraught with unprecedented, unparalleled, unrelenting, and largely unpredictable change. For them, competitiveness is a moving target. In this rough and tumble world, many stumble and a few fall, often because the rate of change in their marketplaces outpaces their organizational capacity to keep up (Foster & Kaplan, 2001). Naturally enough, this has led a number of firms to experiment with new, and what they hope will be more dynamic, organizational forms. This, in turn, has opened up exciting new theoretical and empirical venues for students of leadership, business strategy, organizational theory, and the like (Child & McGrath, 2001). One domain that has yet to catch the wave, however, is that of strategic human resources management.

Strategic human resources management is concerned with the contributions that human resource strategies make to organizational effective...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Lea's Organization and Management Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction to Leading and Managing People in the Dynamic Organization
• Part II: Managing the People in the Dynamic Organization
• Part III: Managing Information Flow in the Dynamic Organization
• Part IV: Leadership in the Dynamic Organization
• Part V: Conclusions
• Author Index
• Subject Index