A strongly identified workforce presents a paradox during times of radical organizational change. Though it may bind people together behind the change initiative, strong organizationwide identification often blinds and potentially blocks the view of new possibilities. Prior research on identity change has tended to either ignore the paradox or resolve it by advocating some middle ground such as hybrid organizational identities or group-level identifications. This paper presents an identity transformation model that capitalizes on the paradoxical tensions over time by unpacking the processes by which individual and organizational levels of identity interact. It operationalizes the model by suggesting linguistic markers that describe the different stages of the process and rhetorical techniques that leaders can use to guide people through the process. To illustrate the model and its application, the paper highlights moments across a 10-year period at Tech-Co, a high-technology company undergoing a significant identity transformation.

Forces that set in motion a strategic decision making process were uncovered from 352 strategic decisions. Decision making was initiated by claims from stakeholders that pointed out salient concerns and difficulties and prompted directions to be set that guided a search for ways to respond. The study identified the types of claims and directions that prompted action and how these claims and directions influenced decision making success, looking for best practices. Success improved when claims were performance based and when the search for alternatives was directed by agreed upon performance expectations. Success declined when claims and directions inadvertently limited search or framed the strategic choice as an action to be taken.

Organizational learning, like individual learning, involves the development of new and diverse interpretations of events and situations. Unlike individual learning, however, collective learning also involves developing enough consensus around those diverse interpretations for organized action to result. Traditional measures of organizational consensus are unable to capture the multiplex nature of collective agreement that encompasses both unity and diversity. Traditional wisdom thus suggests that to achieve unity in groups, one must sacrifice diversity. This study breaks the notion of consensus into two component parts: consensus around interpretations embedded in the content and in the framing of communications. Communicated content consists of the labels people use to convey their “pictures” of reality, e.g., pictures of issues as threats or as opportunities. The framing of communications refers to the form people use to construct a picture, regardless of its content, e.g., rigid or flexible perceptions of an issue. People may hold very different pictures of reality and still agree on the way they frame them. It is thus possible for groups to simultaneously agree and disagree, an essential component of collective learning. Simultaneous agreement and disagreement is especially important in corporate innovative efforts. Successful corporate innovation requires that decision makers develop a collective understanding that incorporates the new and the different. This paper describes the changing pictures and frames communicated in a new-venture development process in a large financial institution over a two-year period. Several linguistic analyses show how the venture team members developed unified ways of framing their arguments, while at the same time maintaining diversity through differences in the content of team members' interpretations. The results reveal one way that organizations manage to combine the unity and diversity needed for collective learning. The managerial implications present a challenge for anyone wishing to promote learning as a community: managers must actively encourage the development of different and conflicting views of what is thought to be true, while striving for a shared framing of the issues that is broad enough to encompass those differences.

One hundred and sixty-three decision cases were explored to determine how managers carry out formulation during organizational decision making. Four types of formulation processes were identified (called idea, issue, objective-directed, and reframing) as well as the tactics decision makers apply to carry out each process type. Decision adoption, merit, and duration were used to determine the success of each process and tactic. The implications of these findings for decision makers and researchers are discussed.

This study examines the ten U.S. provinces of the largest religious order of Catholic priests and brothers, the Jesuits, and explores the structural/organizational adaptations which these ten provinces employed to accommodate dramatic reductions in membership. The organizational placement of roughly 11,000 individual members of these provinces is traced between the years 1965 and 1979. The research indicates that, by increasing interorganizational cooperation and exchange of information and by enhancing the administrative component, these organizations were able to reduce slack resource requirements and were largely able to protect their core operations from the impact of decline. These observations differ dramatically from those reported in typical, for-profit organizations (e.g., Harrigan 1980). Finally, to the extent that cutback did reach the core, an attempt is made to examine the width and depth of retrenchment at both the divisional and departmental levels and to determine whether the mode of retrenchment affected individuals' willingness to subsequently invest in the organization. The analysis suggests that narrower, deeper cuts at the departmental level may have had a positive effect on members' willingness to invest in the organizations, while narrower, deeper cuts at the division level may have contributed to more members deciding to leave the organizations.

The evolution of new organizational forms has attracted growing theoretical and empirical attention, but little research has considered the microsocial processes that promote the emergence of groups of quasi-similar organizations that sometimes evolve into new organizational forms. Drawing from social psychological and sociological theories of identity formation, we explain processes of individual identification and collective identity development that precede and promote the formation of similar clusters, which audiences can then recognize and distinguish from established organizational populations and other emerging similarity clusters.

This study is an integrative examination of three aspects of joint venture formation: complementarity of the partners, ownership/control and joint venture autonomy. Past research has examined each of these concepts individually without considering potential interactive effects. Moreover, most past studies have used global measurements ignoring critical dimensions within each concept. For example, most studies of ownership/control have examined the effects of dominant control by one partner versus shared influence. This approach overlooks the possibility that joint venture parents may exert varying degrees of control over decision making in the different functional areas. Personal interviews of 98 managers involved in oil and gas exploration and production joint ventures are used in an investigation of the three joint venture concepts. In this industry, complementarity had little if any effect on joint venture performance. In fact, complementarity actually appeared to have a negative impact on several dimensions of joint venture performance. Qualitative data suggest that joint venture partners with distinctive competencies in different functional areas may experience difficulties in implementing potential complementarities. Moreover, it may be important for all joint venture partners to perceive some influence over the strategic decisions of the joint venture, regardless of their actual influence over those decisions. Perhaps the most important implications of this study are for future joint venture research. First, a dimensionalized approach to the issues of implementation and performance is justified. Examining ownership/control over each functional area provided additional insights into issues of joint venture management and aided in explaining the results of tests using global measures. Second, analyses of joint venture autonomy and ownership/control produced different results based on the functional area under consideration. Thus, the use of global measures is likely to result in the loss of information. Third, joint venture performance is a multidimensional concept. The results of the analyses related to performance varied according to the dimension of performance under consideration. Some measures of performance were actually negatively related to others. It is believed that this outcome is appropriate. Performance is measured relative to the various goals established for a joint venture. Some goals may be in conflict with others or present managers with tradeoffs to consider. Research that fails to consider multiple dimensions of performance may lose some of the richness of the performance concept. Finally, joint ventures are particularly likely to be subject to goal conflicts since they are formed by two or more firms, each with its own set of goals. Ultimately, a joint venture is measured by the extent to which the venture meets the goals and expectations of the individual partners. As a result, it is necessary for joint venture research to examine performance related issues from the perspective of the individual partners.

The objective of this research was to determine the effects of a firm's control system and dimensions of the work task environment upon ethical judgments made by salespeople. Industrial field salespeople are likely to encounter ethical conflicts on a daily basis in their dealings with customers, competitors, and their own management. How they resolve such conflicts is believed to be a function of both individual characteristics and factors in the situation. This study focuses on situational factors in the form of organization design variables, particularly control system and task environment. The firm's control system includes its method of monitoring, supervising and compensating salespeople. The study develops fourteen ethics-related selling scenarios and assesses, via projective questioning, how 446 salespeople would react to them. Findings indicate that organization design does influence the behavior a salesperson considers appropriate to cope with ethical conflicts. In particular, salespeople operating under a more bureaucratic, input-based control system advocate more ethical behavior than do salespeople operating under a more output-based, laissez-faire control system. Also, salespeople who perceive the market to be competitive recommend less ethical behavior. However, the proportion of salary versus commission in the salesperson's compensation system does not have an effect on response. Differences are also discovered with respect to the salesperson's seniority, rank, and certain features of the task environment.

This paper explores the cognitive aspects underlying industries in hypercompetitive environments. Hypercompetition represents a state of competition with rapidly escalating levels of competition and reduced periods of competitive advantage for firms. In hypercompetitive industries member firms act boldly and aggressively to create a state of competitive disequilibrium. In this paper we explore the particular conditions that managers encounter in making sense of hypercompetitive industries and argue that the nature of these conditions is such that conventional sensemaking frameworks will not work. We then describe the “adaptive sensemaking” practices established in the literature for dealing with temporary turbulence and suggest that in hypercompetition those processes continue indefinitely. We argue that these processes can become institutionalized as standard operating procedures within firms, and as shared recipes within industries, which in turn perpetuates hyperturbulent conditions.

To describe human action as purely the product of rational calculation leaves unanswered the question of how human beings can act in the absence of any structure for calculating the likely outcome of their actions. If the answer is that they cannot, how can any such structure be stable and comprehensive enough to enable action without becoming either inert or deterministic? In this paper, we seek to understand how free will and social context can interact to produce both structure and action. This is accomplished through the development of a framework based on the notion of convention. Organizations, in this view, are grounded in “effort conventions” of what constitutes “normal” effort at work, that structure the action of those who work within the organization, and in turn reinforce these structures. We show how humans can calculate within a context of socially constructed beliefs, and how these beliefs can evolve, provided that they remain essentially nonjustified and beyond the reach of rational calculation. It is this mix of rational calculation and nonrational beliefs that form the core of our model. We begin by defining the nature of a convention and its properties. We then describe the evolutionary dynamics of conventions, and show that conventions exist in competition with other conventions and evolve over time. Our model of convention is then linked to other notions, advanced in the managerial literature, which point to a kind of ‘deep structure’ that lies at the heart of organizations. We conclude by outlining how this notion can shed new light on the analysis of organizations.