Technology champions are members of organizations presenting new technology to fellow members who are potential users. They are widely accepted as instrumental in many implementation settings. In the perspective that dominates the current literature, champions are allied with outside technology, and users are slow to adopt innovation. Much effort has gone into describing traits of champions and solving problems in the process of getting users to accept the new technology. This focus emphasizes one particular view of the champion role, and leads to a constrained set of alternatives to manage technology championing. We propose instead that champions can be seen as agents of potential users, and implementation described in terms of constructs familiar in the agency model. This approach challenges some fundamental premises in the existing literature and introduces new propositions to the research on technology champions. They address alignment of self-interest between champions and users, implicit contracts, incentives and penalties, risk-bearing, and performance evaluation.
This paper examines processes of trial-and-error learning during the development of a technological innovation by an interorganizational joint venture created expressly for developing and commercializing products from the new technology. We develop a model of adaptive learning, which incorporates elements from laboratory models of learning and applies them to the field research setting. The learning model focuses on relationships between the goals, actions, and outcomes of an innovation team within the joint venture as it develops the innovation over time, and the influences that environmental events and external interventions by resource controllers in parent companies have on the learning process. The model is tested based on a real-time longitudinal study of the development of a biomedical innovation (therapeutic apheresis) from 1983 to 1988. Different patterns of learning were observed in different periods of innovation development. Event time series analyses clearly contradict the learning model during an initial expansion period, but strongly support the model during a subsequent contraction period. Explanations for why these different patterns of organizational learning occurred over time are provided, and focus on a set of organizational structures and practices which are commonly used to manage innovation development, but which inhibit learning.
This paper explores executive succession as an important mechanism for organization learning and, thus, for organization adaptation. We argue that executive succession can fundamentally alter the knowledge, skills and interaction processes of the senior management team. These revised skills and communication processes improve the team's ability to recognize and act on changing environmental conditions. Especially in turbulent environments, succession may be critical for improving or sustaining the performance of the firm. We explore continuity and change of CEOs and their executive teams as associated with first- and second-order organization learning, which are differentially important under stable versus turbulent environmental conditions. We also link these organization learning ideas to the nature of organization evolution. A series of hypotheses link executive-team succession and strategic reorientation to subsequent organization performance. Results in a study of 59 minicomputer firms, all founded between 1968 and 1971, indicate that succession exerts a positive influence on organization performance. We also show that it is important to distinguish between CEO succession and executive-team change, which independently improve subsequent organization performance. The positive impact of succession is accentuated when it coincides with strategic reorientation. Finally we examined how longer term patterns in succession and reorientation affect organization performance. We discovered two modes of organization adaption in this turbulent industry. The most typical mode combines CEO succession, sweeping executive-team changes, and strategic reorientations. A more rare, and over the long-term more effective, adaptational mode involves strategic reorientation and executive-team change, but no succession of the CEO. Consistently high-performing organizations are managed to sustain a relatively high level of learning (through turnover of senior executives and strategic reorientation), and at the same time to maintain links with established organizational competencies (through retention of the CEO).
The impact of personnel turnover on an organization's ability to learn, and hence on its ultimate performance, is explored for organizations with different structures and different tasks. A model of organizational decision making is presented where: (1) the organization is faced with a continuous sequence of similar but not identical problems; (2) each problem is so complex that no one person has access to all of the information nor the skill to comprehend all of the information necessary to make the decision; (3) individual decision makers base their decisions on their own previous experience; and (4) there is personnel turnover. Using simulation the impact of turnover on the rate and level of learning for hierarchies and teams is examined. This research suggests that while teams in general learn faster and better than hierarchies, hierarchies are less affected by high turnover rates particularly when the task is nondecomposable. Institutionalized memory, as embodied in the memories of distributed individuals and in the advisory relationships between individuals, determines the consequences of personnel turnover.
The conventional view of transaction processing, which has focused primarily on highly structured transactions, oversimplifies the information processing environment confronting most organizations. This exploratory field study investigates how U.S. Senate offices answer constituent mail on legislative issues. The study develops a model which views transaction processing systems (TPS) as an organizational information system. Using this model, the paper next develops the position that when TPS are viewed this way, the design and functioning of all TPS may be analyzed using the answers to three questions: (1) what transactions will be accepted by the organization for processing, (2) what rules will be used for processing transactions, and (3) how will feedback about these transactions be routed upward? Unlike most structured transactions, mail transactions are designed by the correspondent rather than the organization. As a result, the task of answering mail is characterized by low analyzability and high variety not found in most other routine transaction processing applications. Implications for the design of systems to support the processing of unstructured transactions in other contexts are discussed.
This paper examines the effectiveness of organizational problem solving in response to technological change in the production process. First, the paper measures the degree of uncertainty associated with a given technological change by examining (1) the novelty of specific new features and functions, and (2) the required departure from established operating assumptions and organizational relationships. Second, the paper identifies three modes of problem solving that organizations use in dealing with technological change: modification prior to implementation (preparatory search), joint work with external technical experts during production start-up (joint search), and integration of engineering and manufacturing functions engaged in start-up (functional overlap). The effectiveness of these approaches is then tested on a sample of 48 new process introductions undertaken in eight plants by a leading global producer of precision metal components. Results indicate that the measured characteristics of technological change are significant predictors of the difficulties encountered in introducing new process technology. Findings also suggest that intensive problem solving efforts can significantly improve change outcomes, both shortening the period of disruption experienced and increasing the operating gains achieved. In addition, there was some evidence that the three organizational problem solving activities discussed here are not equally effective for responding to all types of process change. Specifically, the higher the level of technical novelty involved, the less useful was overlap between engineering and manufacturing functions. This challenges the general prescription that cross-functional team involvement in major technical projects always should be maximized, regardless of the nature of the change involved.
This paper reports on research designed to test a dynamic model of the causes of organizational innovation. Two communication variables (level of information and group communication) and three motivational variables (perceptions of equity, expectations of benefits, and perceived social pressure) were derived from equity theory, expectancy theory and the theory of reasoned action. These variables were used to predict the number of innovative ideas contributed by members of the organizations. Weekly data were collected for over a year from five firms and were analyzed with multivariate time series techniques. The results indicated that the communication variables were causes of organizational innovation but the motivational variables were not. Across the five firms, the variance explained by the model ranged from a low of 30 percent to a high of 78 percent. In four of the five firms, the forecast accuracy for the amount of individual innovation ranged from a low of 77 percent to a high of 85 percent.
A critical challenge facing organizations is the dilemma of maintaining the capabilities of both efficiency and flexibility. Recent evolutionary perspectives have suggested that patterns of organizational stability and change can be characterized as punctuated equilibria (Tushman and Romanelli 1985). This paper argues that a learning model of organizational change can account for a pattern of punctuated equilibria and uses a learning framework to model the tension between organizational stability and change. A simulation methodology is used to create a population of organizations whose activities are governed by a process of experiential learning. A set of propositions is examined that predict how patterns of organizational change are affected by environmental conditions, levels of ambiguity, organizational size, search rules, and organizational performance. Implications of this learning model of convergence and reorientation for theory and research are discussed.
The increasing reliance on teams in organizations raises the question of how these teams should be formed. Should they be formed completely of engineers or should they include a range of specialists? Should they be made up to people who have long tenure in the organization, or those with a wide range of experience? As teams increasingly get called upon to do more complex tasks and to cross functional boundaries within the organization, conventional wisdom has suggested that teams be composed of more diverse members. This study suggests that the answer may not be so simple. Using 409 individuals from 45 new product teams in five high-technology companies, this study investigates the impact of diversity on team performance. We found that functional and tenure diversity each has its own distinct effects. The greater the functional diversity, the more team members communicated outside the team's boundaries. This communication was with a variety of groups such as marketing, manufacturing, and top management. The more the external communication, the higher the managerial ratings of innovation. Tenure diversity had its impact on internal group dynamics rather than external communications. Tenure diversity is associated with improved task work such as clarifying group goals and setting priorities. In turn, this clarity is associated with high team ratings of overall performance. Yet diversity is not solely positive. While it does produce internal processes and external communications that facilitate performance, it also directly impedes performance. That is, overall the effect of diversity on performance is negative, even though some aspects of group work are enhanced. It may be that for these teams diversity brings more creativity to problem solving and product development, but it impedes implementation because there is less capability for teamwork than there is for homogeneous teams. These research findings suggest that simply changing the structure of teams (i.e. combining representatives of diverse function and tenure) will not improve performance. The team must find a way to garner the positive process effects of diversity and to reduce the negative direct effects. At the team level, greater negotiation and conflict resolution skills may be necessary. At the organization level, the team may need to be protected from external political pressures and rewarded for team, rather than functional, outcomes.