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We offer a critical inquiry into the faltering entry of an anthropomorphised AI (ro)bot, an algorithm without physical or visual form, into the workplace in a media consultancy company. While living a digital life in the virtual world, the ro(bot) was given a human name. We highlight the unexpected consequences the humanisation of an early form of artificial intelligence (AI) has on the affects circulating between people and the new technology and between members of different organisational groups. We argue that anthropomorphising technologies such as AI influences the affective life of organisations and amplifies existing discontent between organisational members, complicating the introduction of the technology. Focusing on human–AI interaction, our analysis reveals a rift between managers who are excited and hopeful about the future capabilities of AI and employees who are frustrated and angry about its present shortcomings. We conclude that collective affects play a central role in contemporary technology-driven organisations in which the role people play in relation to the avalanche of AI technologies is often neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can organizational culture be intentionally changed? And if so, what are the pathways to success versus failure? We address these questions by employing a configurational perspective, which allows us to examine the impact of multiple combinations of employee perceptions and traits on planned organizational culture change. Although employees have long been the focus of culture change research, the complex interactions of factors affecting their reactions have been largely ignored. With such a focus, the study empirically identifies pathways to successful versus failed organizational culture change, drawing rare empirical evidence from 59 interviews and secondary data from one of the longest surviving examples of industrial democracy, John Lewis Partnership, which underwent change geared away from a 'civil-service' towards a high-performance culture. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we identify multiple equifinal combinations of employee perceptions and traits (e.g., perceived organizational support, empowerment, and tenure) associated with successful or failed organizational culture change. Interestingly, we find more pathways leading to positive (i.e., 'comparing', 'acquitting', and 'tolerating') versus negative (i.e., 'disillusioning' and 'dissociating') reactions to culture change. We leverage these findings to show that employee reactions are more complex than currently considered, illustrating the value of a configurational perspective in such efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of strategic leadership groups in radical organisational change. Previous research has focused on how 'heroic' individual leaders guide change. In contrast, we argue that strategic leadership groups are indispensable to understanding and supporting radical organisational change. Building on a longitudinal study in a global European company, our research identifies four phases of 'negotiated order' that shape group and organisational responses to change. Our findings reveal that strategic leadership groups help manage emotions and understand the shifting authority relations that inevitably arise during periods of change. Drawing upon the psychoanalytic concept of 'projective identification', we develop a theoretical framework for understanding the tensions of change. The model shows how emotional coalitions that develop in strategic leadership groups afford a source of political and psychological containment against the anxieties of radical organisational change. These formations offer transitional spaces for change, providing opportunities for progress. The advantage of this new perspective on radical change is that it helps to move the organisation beyond periods of ambivalence and conflict, with positive implications for leadership practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power literature's focus on criticizing power relations comes at the cost of deliberate attempts to improve organizational practices. How can critical performativity and other scholars address power as an enabling force, thereby also allowing for more engagement with practitioners? We integrate the literature on power in and around organizations with studies of organizational change and behavior. By focusing on enabling instead of restrictive power, we draw attention to the potentially pivotal role of key actors—managers, other practitioners, and scholars—in fostering empowerment and emancipation within organizations. Our review points at four social mechanisms that drive enabling power: formal authority, language-shaping-action, community formation, and the dynamics of safety and trust. Furthermore, we identify various types of actions that can trigger these mechanisms that, in turn, may give rise to outcomes such as empowerment and emancipation. The main contribution of this article involves an integrated framework of power as an enabling force. By synthesizing various separate discourses, this framework extends prior reviews focusing on power-over, resulting in a systemic understanding of enabling power and thereby creating novel avenues for research on power. The integrative framework also provides a foundation for an intervention-oriented body of knowledge on enabling power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems natural to understand organizational democracy as granting members of the organization the right to choose the rules that govern their actions. But what meaning does a rule have if one can choose to change rather than follow it? By investigating the understudied dimension of democracy I call revisability, this article suggests that an organization's rules can be meaningful – they can effectively coordinate action – while remaining continually open to democratic modification. To support this claim, I present an activist ethnography of the Open Food Network, an alternative organization that builds open-source software for the decentralized coordination of short food chains, working in a democratic, non-hierarchical manner. Using the communicative constitution of organizations literature to conceptualize the requirements of democratic revisability and coordinating rules, I argue that this case demonstrates the possibility of achieving both ends simultaneously through the affordances of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This article thus contributes an account of the concept of democratic revisability, and a generalized model of one means by which democratically revisable and effective coordinating rules can be established and maintained with the support of ICT affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global commodity capitalism necessitates the fast and efficient movement of all manner of entities across the globe. Importantly, this commercial flow needs to be secured against the undocumented and unregulated flow of illegitimate people, finance and information, counterfeits, drugs, terror and other undesirables. The organizational practices of business logistics are central for achieving this objective. Yet they have received little attention in management and organization studies to date. We suggest a fruitful avenue is via Foucault's notion of 'biopower' – particularly his less discussed concept (in management studies, at least) of an apparatus of security. This is useful for understanding the emergent organizational/management practices of security in the border spaces in which business logistics operate. If 'Society Must Be Defended', as Foucault ironically notes in his famous lecture series that introduces biopower, then so too must contemporary organizations and their net-like activities within the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexwork, that is, the combination of shared offices and telework, is one of the major changes affecting the workplace these days. But how do employees react to these transformations of their work environment? In this article, we investigate employees' resistance to the introduction of flexwork in a large Belgian organization. We show employees resisting this workspace transformation through the use of personal objects as means to physically reconnect to the place, using objects to convey their claims and objectively occupy places. Though space has become a key analytic concept in the study of organizations, research still largely neglects the concrete role played by personal objects in the capacity of workers to resist change in the occupation of workspaces. We highlight the mutual constitution of objects and space in practices of resistance to workspace change. We show specifically how the politicality of these materials – referred to here as objectal resistance – comes from the meaning that people assign to objects when they place them in order to re-establish workers' bodily presence at work – that is, from acts of objects embodiment and emplacement. We contribute to studies of resistance in the workplace by showing that objectal resistance is a complex combination of overt and covert activities, which leads to seeing the classic opposition between recognition and post-recognition politics in a new light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations operating in extreme contexts regularly face dangerous incidents they can neither prevent nor easily control. In such circumstances, successful sensemaking can mean the difference between life and death. But what happens afterwards? Our study of emergency management practitioners following a major bushfire reveals a process of post-incident sensemaking during which practitioners continue to make sense of the incident after it ends, during the subsequent public inquiry, and as they try to implement the inquiry's recommendations. Different varieties of sensemaking arise during this process as practitioners rely on different forms of coping to develop and share new understandings, which not only make sense of the original incident, but also enable changes to help the organization deal with future incidents. Our study also shows that practitioners experience a range of emotions during this process, some of which inhibit sensemaking while others – particularly different forms of anxiety – can facilitate it. Our study makes an important empirical contribution to recent theoretical work on varieties of sensemaking and provides new insights into the complex role of emotions in sensemaking in extreme contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several large organizations underwent agile transformation processes over the past few years, despite limited theory and empirical research on agile working. The present study draws from the taskwork–teamwork distinction and the proactivity literature to develop a new multilevel model of agile working. We tested this model in a sample of 114 teams (N = 476 individuals) undergoing an agile transformation at a large German transport and logistics organization. Teams at the end of the agile transformation scored significantly higher on agile work practices, proactivity norms, and team performance than teams at the beginning of the transformation. Results of multigroup structural equation modeling indicated that agile taskwork related indirectly to team performance through a positive relationship with proactivity norms. The positive relationship of agile teamwork with team performance was not mediated by proactivity norms, unlike hypothesized. Finally, we found that agile taskwork increased the likelihood that individual employees benefited from engaging in proactive behavior (specifically, employee intrapreneurship) in terms of in-role performance (i.e., cross-level interaction). This was presumably because of the favorable proactivity norms of teams practicing agile taskwork (i.e., mediated moderation). We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on proactive behavior in teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that being alternative is not a question of adhering to certain principles or applying certain practices, but rather a question of freedom. It does so by exploring three empirical cases of alternative organizing, namely the sustainable fin-tech start-up SusPens, teachers of mindfulness meditation, and the UK minor party Independents for Frome. The article first identifies a common trajectory, according to which alternative organizing usually begins with a rejection of the dominant socio-economic order. However, in seeking to increase their impact on the world, alternatives are often appropriated by the very order they were meant to depart from. On that basis, we explore how freedom can be articulated and enacted as emergent tactics that break free from this common trajectory and constitute alternativity as the 'other' within the existing order; in the cracks and crevasses that evade (discursive) regulation and where liberties can be taken. More specifically, we identify three emergent tactics of endurance, germination, and reiteration and discuss what they may teach us about organizing for freedom in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New and residual challenges related to digital technology, COVID-19, precarious employment and scientific management are a reminder of research published in the early years of Human Relations that laid the foundation for socio-technical systems theory and its later conceptual offspring, the quality of working life. Analysing the evolution, challenges, legacy and lessons of socio-technical systems and quality of working life, we develop guiding principles for the theoretical development and practical implementation of socio-technical systems and quality of working life for the 21st century. These principles are needed to optimize the benefits of new technology and improve job quality. They would enable an effective and sustained humanization of work through stakeholder involvement, inter-disciplinary partnerships and institutional support, producing positive outcomes for employees and employers as well as wider society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations that operate in extreme contexts have to develop resilience to ensure the reliability of their operations. While the organizational literature underlines the crucial role of slack when facing unanticipated events, a structural approach to slack says little about the concrete ways in which organizational actors produce and use this slack. Adopting a practice-based perspective during a 14-month ethnographic study in a French Critical Care Unit, we study the slack practices, which consist in gathering, arranging and rearranging resources from both inside and outside the medical unit. This permanent process is captured in a dynamic model connecting situations, their evolutions and slack practices. Our research highlights the importance of situational slack production practices to ensure resilience. We also argue that these micro-practices are constitutive of the context in which actors are evolving. Finally, we discuss why these slack practices, although essential for ensuring resilience, can be endangered by the New Public Management context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shifting an organization's temporal order can be a key mechanism for accomplishing organizational change, but it is also fundamentally problematic: instead of helping an organization accomplish change, it may simply reinforce an already failing course of action. Our current understanding of the roles that temporal shifts play in enabling organizational change is inconclusive in terms of when and how temporal shifts contribute to the success of organizational change. We exploit an in-depth case study of a new digitalized design approach implemented at Advanced Construction to demonstrate how a temporal shift can increase temporal awareness, among organizational members, of the salient and differing temporalities involved. In this case, the increased temporal awareness facilitated improved temporal coordination, which in turn figured prominently in making actual change possible. Our study identifies three complementary roles of change-inducing temporal shifts—namely, in connection with past experience, current activities, and future directions. Thus, we develop a deeper understanding of the relation between temporal shifts and organizational change, and offer a novel account of how the establishment of a temporal zone harbors those three roles of temporal shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fast-response organizations excel in mounting swift and coordinated responses to unexpected events. There are a multitude of conflicting explanations why these organizations excel. These range from acknowledging the strengths of centralized command and control structures, towards stressing the importance of decentralized, improvised action. Though this dichotomy is derived from studies offering either structure or action-based explanations, we were able to reconcile these insights by looking into the process of how fast-responders organize themselves during an unfolding crisis. We analyzed 15 high-speed police pursuits crossing multiple administrative units and jurisdictions, and interviewed and observed officers at work in multiple operations centers, police cars, and helicopters. Our analysis uncovered that fast-responders regularly transition between designed, frontline, and partitioned modes of organizing, each characterized by practices that shape command, allocation, and information sharing. Success and failure are rooted in the ability of the responders to adapt their mode of organizing by tacking back and forth between these practices. Based on our findings, we constructed a process model that provides a deeper understanding of fast-response organizing that informs future studies on organizing in extreme contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organization change failure has typically been viewed as occurring when expected outcomes of change have not been met. This view downplays key, but frequently hidden organizational dimensions such as deep structures and temporality. In this article, drawing inspiration from the story of Alice in Wonderland, we distinguish between surface-level intervention approaches to change, deeper process approaches and, deeper yet, structuration approaches, and suggest the different ways they approach change failure as well as the implications of these. On the basis of our exploration we propose a three-fold way forward: adopting a process-based, empirically grounded and reflective approach to understanding change and its often-failed outcomes; adopting methodologies that can capture deep structures and temporal dimensions; and incorporating expanded conceptions of time as a multi-level, nested construct. We illustrate our ideas of deep structures and temporality by drawing from a particularly important illustration of long-term successful change that includes multiple short-term failures, that of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States (NASA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite what we know about how organizations and their members respond to change, organizations continue to spend an inordinate amount of time confronting, mitigating, and dealing with failure during change. This special issue focuses on what happens when organizational change fails. Its goal is to enhance knowledge and advance theory regarding the processes and mechanisms that underlie the emergence of organizational change failure. In this editorial, we first take stock of the established perspectives on failure, and introduce an integrative approach to offer a more holistic account of the process of change failure. The framework constitutes a multilevel, interlocking strategy for future scholarship. It highlights how the evolving experience defines, creates, and enacts failure during change across three structures: the surface (i.e., context), intermediate (i.e., building block dimensions), and deep (i.e., enduring aspects) structures of failure. With this frame as its basis, the articles in the special issue prompt discussion of what exactly failure means for organizations and their members dealing with different accounts of change failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how employees craft narratives of organisational change failure through the lens of their work identity. We analysed change recipients' retrospective sensemaking accounts of an organisational re-structuring in a university, finding these accounts to be filled with widely varying descriptions of failure – of errors, dysfunction, and loss. We explored how employees' organisational, professional, and work-group identities were intertwined with, and fundamentally challenged by, their sensemaking about the change and its failure. Our inductive analysis revealed four distinct narrative trajectories – Identity Loss, Identity Revision, Identity Affirmation, and Identity Resilience – each characterised by distinct cognitive, affective, and behavioural patterns. We discuss the unique contributions that this study makes to the literatures on organisational change failure, sensemaking, and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does failure emerge and develop during organizational change? As organizations are pushed for change, the notion of failure that relates to change becomes gradually ingrained in contemporary research. However, with studies having primarily added to the conversation from a static outset, extant scholarly work might not fully capture the transience that marks change in essence. This article contributes to the literature on failure in change by advancing a dialectical perspective, offering the scholarly community insight in the emergence and development of failure as happening in three processes. In a retentive process, change agents adhere to a change approach deemed successful in spite of alternatives emerging, causing tensions to gradually build within the organization's social atmosphere. In a reactive process, looming tensions find themselves affirmed and flare up, instigating the display of a new change approach that is antithetical to the one initially adhered to. Finally, in a recursive process, organizational members collectively recall the positive aspects of prior failure, smoothening organizational change towards re-combinatory synthesis. Marking failure's emergence and development as a dialectic, this article notes failure in organizational change to be as generative as it is deteriorating, paving the way for both success and failure to continuously remit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we use the Other to make sense of who we are? A common assumption is that people positively affirm social identities by excluding an inferior Other. This article challenges that restricted notion by focusing on the variation and situational fluidity of alterity construction (othering) in identification work. Based on an ethnographic study of a change project in a public hospital, we examine how nurses, surgeons, medical secretaries, and external management consultants constructed Others/otherness. Depending on micro-situations, different actors reciprocally differentiated one another horizontally and/or vertically, and some also appropriated otherness in certain situations by either crossing boundaries or by collapsing them. The article contributes to theorizing on identification work and its consequences by offering a conceptualization of the variety of othering in everyday interaction. It further highlights relational agency in the co-construction of social identities/alterities. Through reciprocal othering, 'self' and 'other' mutually construct one another in interaction, enabled and constrained by structural contexts while simultaneously taking part in constituting them. As such, othering plays a key role in organizing processes that involve encounters and negotiations between different work- and occupational groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retaining key employees is often one of the most crucial goals when an acquirer buys a target firm. However, what determines whether employees stay or leave once the firm has been bought? This article investigates how organizational and occupational identification influence employee exit intentions. Based on a longitudinal configurational study in two acquired hospitals, our findings challenge the popular belief that identification with the organization consistently increases retention, and we stress the important effect of occupational identification, which has been largely neglected by research on post-acquisition integration. We find that under certain conditions, occupational identification increases employees' exit intentions but that neither identification with the firm nor identification with the occupation are necessary or sufficient to entice employees to stay or leave. Instead, their effects are contingent on the professionalization of an occupation and the degree to which employees' expectations have been disappointed. Our findings further suggest that attention is an important mediating mechanism linking identification and exit intentions, as employees focus predominantly on topics that relate to the social entities they most strongly identify with. This article develops theory on the effects of social identification on exit intentions after acquisitions and contributes to research on multi-focus identification and post-acquisition integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is resistance a pervasive feature of organizations? We seek to add to the established ways of understanding resistance by arguing that it may emerge owing to the rationality and irrationality, order and disorder that imbues organizations. We explore how such conditions create ambivalent situations that can generate resistance that is ambivalent itself as it can both facilitate and hinder the operation of organizations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a manufacturing organization, we introduce the concept of pragmatic resistance as a means to grasp the everyday resistance that emerges through and reflects cracks in the rational model of organizations. Rather than being anti-work, we demonstrate how pragmatic resistance is bound up with organizational disorder/irrationality, competing work demands and the prioritization of what is interpreted as 'real work'. Overall, the concept of pragmatic resistance indicates that resistance may be far more pervasive and organizations more fragile and vulnerable to disruption than is often assumed to be the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a social actor in a disadvantaged position achieve field level change? Using a longitudinal case of 'Capability' Brown, an individual rising from humble origins to shape and refine the British landscape, we examine how an actor's unfolding efforts to move from a social position at the periphery of a field, to a social position at the centre of a field, may present them with opportunities to influence field level change. In doing so, we employ Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, and unexplored notion of 'position taking'. We argue that an actor's tactics to shape change, and position taking to enhance social position, should be considered in conjunction with one-another, and that position taking strategies may be viewed as a core component of the work undertaken by social actors in trying to influence field level change. Further, we suggest that tensions between an agent's accumulated capital and the social position typically afforded to their role in the field, may lead to efforts to 'take' or 'create' new positions, providing opportunities to influence the developing institution, with symbolic capital playing a pivotal role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What shapes micro-political contest in the subsidiary of a multinational corporation? We use observational and interview data from a Pakistani subsidiary of a global company to address this question. We trace debate surrounding the entry of modern (self-service) retail through multiple voices. Following postcolonial theory, we show how top management create a narrative that combines the progressiveness of modern retail with the locally salient discourse of izzat /honour. This hybrid narrative defines the terrain and terms of micro-political contest for all others in the subsidiary. Our analysis shows how some workers adapt this hybrid story to support their interests, whilst the attachment of izzat to the modern restricts the possibility of resistance for others. We examine how the narrative enables the establishment of an elite and a dominated group. The postcolonial approach allows us to argue that the subsidiary is a specific site of micro-political struggle where both geo-political factors and relationships with other parts of the multinational corporation shape micro-political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief commentary highlights the importance of three key points in Desmond and Wilson's (2018) critique of Coch and French's (1948) study of resistance to change: (1) researchers need to make explicit the normative frame of reference guiding their research; (2) care is needed to consider the roles that formal or informal worker organizations have on organizational processes and outcomes; and (3) more attention needs to be paid to the expectations that workers have for a voice in organizational policies and workplace conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an invitation for authors to offer critical interrogations of the meaning of freedom and its current and potential relationship with social relations in and around work.

This article revisits the famous Harwood studies overseen by Kurt Lewin to include the neglected union perspective that differs markedly from conventional accounts. We explain this discrepancy as arising from unitarist and pluralist views, which assume very different understandings of organization. The researchers framed the Harwood organization from a unitarist perspective as monolithic, assuming its members are bound by allegiance to a common cause represented by management. This helps explain their relative indifference to unions and framing of concepts in a manner conducive to management that was incomprehensible from a union perspective. From this we contend that the Harwood studies are best understood as a cautionary tale against the assumption of a monolithic view that equates the interest of management with that of the organization. This is especially relevant given the dominance of a unitarist perspective across several fields of organization today, when management are argued to be increasingly authoritarian and union membership in several countries approaches an all-time low. Recognizing that organization is a balance struck between partially conflicting interests represents a more ethical stance to forestall accusations of partisanship and manipulation and to build towards the establishment of a fairer and more sustainable workplace for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has focused on individuals' beliefs about change when considering the antecedents of employee change readiness. Our study is unique as we identify beliefs and positive emotions about change as proximal antecedents of change readiness. In Study 1, a cross-sectional study of 252 government workers, measures of change beliefs, positive emotions about change and change readiness were developed and tested. Study 1 examined relationships between these constructs. In Study 2, we collected data at two time points separated by 3 months from 199 employees. Study 2 examined the direct and indirect relationships among change beliefs, positive emotions about change, change readiness and change-supportive behaviors. Structural equation modeling results provided support for the validity of our measures. In both studies, cognitive beliefs about change and positive emotions about change were significantly associated with change readiness. Study 2 provided support for indirect and direct relationships between change beliefs and positive emotions and change behaviors. An implication of this research is that failure to consider positive emotions about change means ignoring a key source of variation in change readiness. Practically, results suggest a need to develop both change beliefs and positive emotions about change to enhance employees' change readiness and change-supportive behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do professionals engage in or aid misconduct, rather than rejecting it as a threat to their legitimacy and labor market survival? This article contributes to the scholarly agenda by drawing on an ethnographic study of professionals who facilitate offshore tax avoidance for the ultra-wealthy. This form of expert advisory work has become highly controversial, and is increasingly classified as a form of professional wrongdoing. Building on theories of institutional work and categorization, the study theorizes practitioners' responses to field-level legitimacy threats. Specifically, the article models a process in which misconduct is recategorized in terms of the core norms that underpin professional legitimacy. Through this process, practitioners create institutional change by altering the way they see themselves and their work, transforming the 'vice' of tax avoidance into the professional 'virtues' of public service and expert neutrality. This model advances knowledge compared to previous research on professional misconduct, which was situated primarily at the organization level, and responds to calls for analysis of 'agentic self-categorization' processes in creating the micro-foundations for legitimacy in the professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we understand the nature of organizational creativity when dealing with complex, composite ideas rather than singular ones? In response to this question, we problematize assumptions of the linearity of creative processes and the singularity of ideas in mainstream creativity theory. We draw on the work of Bakhtin and longitudinal research in two contrasting cases: developing hydrocarbon prospects and concepts for films and TV series. From these two cases, we highlight two forms of work on ideas: (i) intertextual placing, whereby focal ideas are constituted by being connected to other elements in a larger idea field; and (ii) legitimating imaginings, where ideas of what to do are linked to ideas of what is worth doing and becoming. This ongoing constitution and legitimating is not confined to particular stages but takes place in practices of generating, connecting, communicating, evaluating and reshaping ideas, which we call idea work. The article contributes to a better understanding of the processual character of creativity and the deeply intertextual nature of ideas, including the multiplicity of idea content and shifting parts–whole relationships. Idea work also serves to explore the neglected role of co-optative power in creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars typically view employee responses to psychological contract (PC) fulfillment as a form of reciprocity; in exchange for the organization fulfilling its promises, the employee willingly contributes their time and effort toward company goals. In this article, we ask if employee responses are based not on gratitude, but rather on the employee's desire to maintain the benefits associated with PC fulfillment. Specifically, we argue that PC fulfillment embeds employees in the organization by increasing the costs of leaving ('sacrifices'), and this in turn motivates their extra-role performance. Furthermore, we expect this effect to be even stronger for employees with strong ties to colleagues or work groups ('links') or good fit with job demands or organizational values ('fit'). Data from 149 employees and their immediate supervisors supported our predictions: PC fulfillment was positively related to organizationally-directed citizenship behaviors and work-role innovation through its positive relation to sacrifices. Furthermore, these indirect effects were stronger for employees with stronger links and better fit. The present findings provide a novel theoretical account of how and when PC fulfillment relates to positive employee behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications for managing employees' PCs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While hybrid managers are increasingly important in contemporary organizations (especially in the public sector), we know little about why or how they become hybrid managers, or how this is shaped by the interplay of professional experience and organizational circumstances. In pursuit of a more variegated, contextualized and dynamic understanding of hybrid management, this article focuses on how individuals transition into managerial hybrids, emphasizing the dynamic and emergent nature of hybrid management identity. Studying managers in English healthcare, we employ the concept of identity work as expressed through career narratives to examine the influence of career trajectories and organizational experiences on emerging hybrid manager identity. The study identifies three broad managerial career narratives – aspirational, ambivalent and agnostic – and relates them to experiences of doctor and nurse hybrid managers in three healthcare settings. An interpretive analysis of these narratives reveals a more variegated, situated and dynamic interpretation of hybrid managerial identities than previously considered and underscores the importance of personal and organizational experiences in shaping emergent hybrid professional/managerial identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer the first field experiment showing how job assignments create social ties at work and influence their persistence. Pairs of managers were assigned at random to project teams. We show that once those pairs work together and become interdependent, they are more likely to create informal relationships (friendships and advice ties). Interdependence also increases the persistence of the informal ties that existed prior to team assignments; the magnitude of this effect decreases with tie strength. As organizations extend their use of teamwork, they also create and maintain social networks across functional and geographic boundaries. Thus, transitory project teams forge an enduring organizational legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where do new organizations come from, and how do they persist? Based on an ethnographic study of two creative hubs in Amsterdam, in which creative independent workers rented studio space, we show how space plays a role in constituting new organizations and making them last. Focusing on challenging moments in the development of these two creative hubs, we propose that space, understood as a material assemblage, participates in providing endurance to organizing practices. It does so because space and practice reflexively account for each other. In other words, space may constrain or enable practices, and provide them with meaning, as the literature abundantly illustrates, but practices also define and shape space. Rather than emphasizing either of these two options, we argue that they should be understood as integral to each other. Furthermore, it is precisely their reflexive relation that contributes to the emergence of new organizations. Our study contributes to the literature on the communicative constitution of organizations, and more broadly to the knowledge of organizing in the creative industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work has highlighted how brands play an important role within organizational practice. To extend this discussion, we ask: how do gendered media brands come into being in an organization by connecting ideas, objects and people? This article challenges the assumption that brands simply reflect management norms by positioning the brand as an 'assemblage' of multiple connections and linkages, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by those that partake in its production. Employees engage in 'brand work'; that is, the negotiation of the assemblages of the brand in situated and gendered practices. Brand work is explored here in the gendered creative labour of producing girls' magazines. Two studies of pre-teen and teenage girls' magazines in the UK and a Nordic country were analysed in relation to how multiple brand fragments were situated in gendered practices and power relations. Brand work offers an alternative, fragmented perspective to normative forms of control, introducing a simultaneous territorialization and deterritorialization process of stabilization and contestation of the assemblage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations benefit from proactive employees who initiate improvements at work. Although evidence suggests happy employees are more likely to become proactive, the emotional journeys employees take during the process of making things happen, and their implications for future proactivity at work, remain unclear. To develop an understanding of patterns of emotions in the process of proactivity, I conducted a qualitative study based on 92 proactivity episodes by employees and their managers in the service centre of a multinational organization. Findings, through the lens of narrative, indicate that emotional journeys in proactivity took different forms. First, a proactivity-as-frustration narrative captured individuals' emotional patterns of proactivity as a consistently unpleasant action when initiated and seen through. Second, a proactivity-as-threat narrative captured instances of proactivity that derailed at the onset, owing to feelings of fear. Third, a proactivity-as-growth narrative, although initially characterized by negative emotions, gave way to feelings such as excitement, joy and pride in the process, as well as to sustained motivation to engage in proactivity. Overall, findings of this research show that as employees embark in showing initiative in their organization, they are set on different emotional paths that, in turn, likely impact their future willingness to become proactive at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing organizations is difficult. In this article, we analyze how sensemaking that follows the initiation of change projects relies on the interplay of prospective and retrospective aspects, and we elucidate how organization members' frames develop over time based on this interplay. Our data, 38 in-depth interviews with nursing and medical staff held at four different points in time, reveal how expectations impact the dynamics of meaning construction in change processes. Our findings demonstrate that the frames through which actors make sense of change initiatives develop continuously, although the expectations embedded in them are 'sticky' to some extent. The degree of 'stickiness' depends on expectations that are formed through initial prospective sensemaking, as these expectations influence actors' tolerance regarding dissonant cues. Change initiatives fail when this tolerance becomes exhausted. Our study contributes to theory on sensemaking and change by elaborating on the undertheorized role of prospective sensemaking during change processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses contemporary issues relevant to understanding the changing nature of management and managerial work. The argument is developed in four parts. First, to provide context, we offer an overview of the literature on the organization and control of managerial work, tracing contributions mainly from the early 1950s onwards. Second, we discuss the first of two related concerns relevant to understanding the contemporary nature of managerial work – strategies of organizational restructuring: an analysis highlighting the role of downsizing and delayering within corporate campaigns promoting 'post-bureaucratic' systems. Third, we extend this discussion by addressing how such corporate restructuring affects managers in their everyday work – notably in relation to the perceptions and realities of growing job insecurity and career uncertainty: an analysis that frequently draws upon our own investigations to establish an agenda for future research. The article concludes by summarizing the content of four research articles whose arguments relate to issues discussed in this analysis of managerial work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased reliance on interorganizational collaborations (ICs) has created new challenges for leaders. They must attempt to apply leadership theories and behaviors developed primarily for leading within one organization or group to leading collaborations of multiple organizations and stakeholders. To provide insight into this issue, this study examines leadership behavior in an IC developing a strategic plan to promote changes to address public health and safety concerns related to substance abuse. Combining observations and interviews, we followed a statewide interagency taskforce in a southwestern state of the United States from its inception through completion of its strategic plan within a 10-month deadline. Findings show different leadership behaviors were integrated and evolved over time to strike a balance between decision-making effectiveness and efficiency. In particular, the findings support recent research on examining leadership behavior holistically to develop a 'fuller full-range' leadership perspective (Antonakis and House, 2014), especially in terms of how collectivistic and instrumental leadership should complement transformational leadership, and by demonstrating that the combinations of leadership change over time and occur at multiple levels. These findings provide guidance for future practice and research on ICs promoting change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'How do we introduce democracy democratically to people who are not sure they want it?' This question was posed to us at the outset of what became a three-year experiment in seeking to implement more democratic organizational practices within a small education charity, World Education (WE). WE were an organization with a history of anarchist organizing and recent negative experiences of hierarchical managerialism, who wanted to return to a more democratic organizational form. This was an ideal opportunity, we thought, for the type of critical performative intervention called for within Critical Management Studies. Using Participant Action Research, which itself has a democratic ethos, we aimed to democratically bring about workplace democracy, using a range of interventions from interviewing, whole organization visioning workshops through to participating in working groups to bring about democratic change. Yet we failed. WE members democratically rejected democracy. We reflect on this failure using Jacques Derrida's idea of a constitutive aporia at the heart of democracy, and suggests the need to more carefully unpack the difficult relationship between power and equality when seeking to facilitate more democratic organizational practices. The article presents an original perspective on the potential for, and limits of, critical performativity inspired interventions in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that institutional fields evolve around issues, but has devoted less attention to explain why certain issues trigger substantial field-level changes while others remain largely inconsequential. In this article, I argue that the extent to which an issue is likely to trigger field change and the type of field change triggered depend on the structure of the field and the ways in which the issue is framed. I develop a model linking two types of issue frames (adversarial vs collaborative issue frames) with two types of field structures (centralized vs fragmented). The model explains how the likelihood of field change and type of field change vary across four configurations of these issue frames and field structures. In particular, I highlight four types of field change that entail different re-distribution of power within a field (weakening vs reinforcing the field’s elite; aligning vs polarizing fragmented actors). Overall, I contribute a much called-for comparative approach to institutional fields, explaining how the effects of issue frames on field change vary across different fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational identification is conventionally defined as a sense of oneness. Yet this is static and inhibits a process view of identification, in which organizational identity is continuously adjusted. Most studies of organizational identification are of members and not stakeholders, despite evidence that suggests that stakeholders have a significant role and that organizational identity and image are reciprocally connected. We ask the question: how is organizational identification discursively constructed? We suggest that stakeholders play a key role in organizational identification processes. The forward movement of the process, from Performative to Instrumental to Interactional to Reciprocal, is one of reinforcement in which soft power enrols a virtuous circle of willing support. The backward movement of the process, from Reciprocal to Interactional to Instrumental to Performative, is one of functional justification involving hard power as coercion by communicating the organization’s expectations to the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is it that we do when we say to our business partner that we trust them? Or when we hint that we would consider a withdrawal from cooperation a betrayal? Relying on a systemic functional grammar analysis, interorganizational relationships (IORs) are in this study shown to be characterized by a recurring dilemma: the involved partners are expected to be transparent and explicit regarding their intentions while at the same time being open to opportunities that the IOR may present. In the struggle to balance between these opposing demands, trust is used by trustees to promise both explicitness and opportunity. Conversely, trustors of IORs pressure the trustee to continue the cooperation by evoking latent accusations of betrayal. The intended result of these rhetorical strategies is to prolong the IOR until it can be properly evaluated. While this prolongation accrues to the systems of IORs and to participating organizations, the costs for the involved individuals can be considerable. The trustor risks feeling betrayed, and the trustee risks being accused of betrayal for reasons that are beyond his or her control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slack is an elusive concept in organizational research, with studies documenting a variety of relationships between slack and firm performance. We advocate treating slack not as a resource, but as a practice - a sequence of events and responses over time. A longitudinal analysis of the Dutch East India Company (1700-1795) highlights the use of slack as a response to a resource constraint (the shortage of skilled labor). After documenting the negative performance effects of skill shortage, we identify a trade-off in the use of human resource slack (number of sailors above what is operationally required), in which slack enhanced operational reliability, but reduced efficiency. Derived from a historical context, this trade-off has contemporary relevance and is helpful in reconciling contradictory evidence on slack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite existing research examining snapshots of employee reactions to organizational mergers and acquisitions (M&A), there is a complete absence of work theorizing or exploring rates of change in employees’ organizational identification with the merged entity. We address this gap using two three-wave longitudinal panel samples from different M&A settings, tracking change in identification through a two-year period. Theorizing trajectories of change in identification across the organizations in both settings, we make predictions linked to expected antecedents of change in identification. Our research context (M&A-1) involves a merger of three Finish universities tracking 938 employees from each organization in three waves (nine months pre-merger to 24 months post-merger). Our second context (M&A-2) involves a multinational acquisition tracking 346 employees from both the acquired and acquiring organization in three waves (from two to 26 months post-acquisition). Using Latent Growth Modelling, we confirm predicted trajectories of change in identification. Across both samples, a linear increase (across Time 1, Time 2 and Time 3) in justice and linear decrease in threat perceptions were found to significantly predict a linear increase in identification across the post-M&A period. We discuss organizational identification development trajectories and how changes in these two antecedents account for changes in identification across M&A contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cybervetting - employers' use of online information from social media and search engines to evaluate job candidates - may displace, supplement or shape conventional personnel selection and employment relationships in unexpected ways. Analysis of 45 interviews suggests that typically extractive approaches to cybervetting have the potential to displace less recognized, yet valuable, relational functions of more interactive practices depending on the functions and values users apply to the adoption and use of particular information and communication technologies. These findings highlight the need to consider how people implicitly and explicitly compare the functions of emerging technology-enabled practices with conventional organizational practices and salient values to understand when an emerging practice may displace, supplement or have no effect on a conventional practice. This study offers a preliminary framework for understanding how emerging sociotechnical practices evolve and with what effect, thereby providing insight into information and communication technology adoption and use beyond personnel selection contexts. It also suggests the emergence of a type of parasocial employment relationship should employers conflate interacting with applicants' information with interacting with applicants themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]