The activities of the organizational boundary spanners during the Covid19 pandemic: the case of a profit organization

In the first period of emergency from Covid19, only workplace organizations with essential production activities were able to continue to carry out their work. This required them the implementation of organizational strategies useful to contrast the risk of the pandemic and to protect production performance. The qualitative study conducted in a Lombard company, through semi-structured interviews, aimed at figures with different levels of responsibility, wanted to investigate: (i) which boundary spanning activities were used to manage the emergency? (ii) what factors allowed the effectiveness of the result in terms of contrasting the pandemic and guaranteeing the productivity (iii), what were the perceived effects on the company? Findings highlight the importance of the activities of organizational boundary spanners in emergency management and of those factors that, by supporting the socio-emotional dimension, have determined the organization’s productive advantage. Le attività dei boundary spanners organizzativi durante la pandemia da Covid19: il caso di un’organizzazione profit. Nel primo periodo della diffusione dell’emergenza sanitaria da Covid19, solo le organizzazioni lavorative con attività produttive essenziali hanno potuto continuare a svolgere il loro lavoro. Questo ha richiesto loro la messa in atto di strategie organizzative utili a contrastare il rischio della diffusione della pandemia e a salvaguardare la performance produttiva. Lo studio qualitativo condotto, in un’organizzazione profit lombarda, tramite interviste semistrutturate, rivolte a figure con diversi livelli di responsabilità ha voluto investigare: (i) quali attività di boundary spanning sono state utilizzate per gestire l’emergenza? (ii) quali fattori hanno consentito l’efficacia di risultato in termini di contrasto alla pandemia e di garanzia produttività (iii), quali sono state le ricadute percepite sull’organizzazione? I risultati ottenuti evidenziano l’importanza delle attività dei boundary spanners organizzativi nella gestione dell’emergenza e di quei fattori che sostenendo la dimensione socio-emozionale ne hanno determinano il vantaggio produttivo dell’organizzazione.

Transformational Ability of Energy Network Companies: The Role of Institutional Logics and Boundary Spanners

Energy network companies play a vital role in energy transitions. The transformational ability of these companies influences the process of energy transitions and the effectiveness of policies in this domain. This study shows the need for managers of network companies as well as scholars and policy makers operating in the midst of energy transitions to acknowledge the importance and value of boundary spanners in improving the transformation ability of these companies to play their role in facilitating energy transitions. Evidence comes from an in-depth analysis of an energy network company in the Netherlands. Our findings show that the transformation ability of energy network companies depends on various instances of boundary spanning as these organizations address differing or conflicting intra- and inter-organizational institutional logics when contributing to an energy transition. In the context of energy transitions, inter-organizational boundary spanning generally demands more resources and attention than the spanning of intra-organizational boundaries. Additionally, intra-organizational boundaries affect inter-organizational relationships, particularly in the policy arena. Our findings indicate that to carry out the type of institutional change that an energy transition requires, more attention and resources should be dedicated to intra-organizational boundary spanning, even as the need to connect external stakeholders increases.

The Effect of Seeking Resource Diversity on Post-Alliance Innovation Outcomes

Prior research has studied the influence of R&D resource diversity, but such work only examined a single level of resource diversity. Although alliance partners engage in multiple levels of resource diversity to expand their organizational boundary, we have limited knowledge of how to utilize internal and between partners’ R&D resources. Drawing upon the perspectives of the tensions-based view and organizational boundary, we test the effects of three different levels of resource diversities, simultaneously, on post-alliance innovation outcomes. Using a dataset of 320 U.S. publicly traded firms that participated in a strategic alliance and had a patent filing between 1985 and 2010, our results reveal that internal R&D resource diversity, the R&D diversity between partners, and the similarity of industry level negatively effects innovative outcomes. However, both internal R&D resource diversity and similarity of industry level diminish the negative influence of newly acquired R&D resources from partners. We not only contribute to the existing body of work by investigating multiple levels of diversity but also provide insight to practitioners when engaging in such diversities with different levels.

Push Button as a mediating technology of organization

This chapter analyses push buttons as media of organization. These ubiquitous and often-trivialized technical objects are crucial for the organization of space and practice, providing means of control and participation beyond the local situation or the organizational boundary. A closer look at push buttons’ mediating activity reveals not only their agential force, but also points to opposing or contradicting properties and conditions that are unified in object-related practices, like the simultaneity of de-skilling and empowering or the situational complexity of simplified functions. These ambiguities show the variety of conditions that can become meaningful in the understanding of media and/in organizational practices.

Digging deep into the enterprise innovation ecosystem

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how Chinese enterprises overcome their lack of resource and capabilities and eventually fulfill global resource accumulation, fast innovative commercialization and significant technological breakthrough by establishing and coordinating innovation ecosystem at firm level. Design/methodology/approach This paper first reviewed the literature on the structure and coordinating mechanism of enterprise innovation ecosystem and identified two important gaps on the characteristics of ecosystem actors and the logic of innovative coordination. Then, the paper adopted grounded analysis about the construction and evolution of Haier’s innovation ecosystem based on longitudinal case data. On the basis of the case study, the construct of firm-level innovation ecosystem and new logic of coordination are formed. Findings This paper found the emerging phenomenon of sub-organizational ecosystem actors and depicted that the establishing process of firm-level innovation ecosystem went through three majors stages, and the corresponding coordinating logic changed from proactive intervention to reactive self-evolution. Originality/value This paper tried to make contributions to the studies of structure and coordinating mechanism of enterprise innovation ecosystem, and proposed the enterprise itself could build firm-level ecosystem within its organizational boundary and interact with external ecosystem. The findings enlightened the nested structure of ecosystem, opened the black box of organizational boundary and broke the limitation that existing researches only analyse innovation ecosystem at system level and regard firms as basic analytical unit. Besides, this paper proposed that the coordination of innovation ecosystem can be passively fulfilled by network effect and ecological evolution, where previous studies mainly focused on proactive institutional intervention and resource investment. This point could provide Chinese enterprises with good references.

A Percolation-Like Process of Within-Organization Collective Corruption: A Computational Approach

This study investigates how collective corruption appears, using a computational method. Specifically, acknowledging that the characteristics of collective corruption process are analogous to percolation phenomena, we illuminate that collective corruption is formed by ongoing social interactions in an organizational boundary. By formulating a percolation-based system dynamics model, we consider the behavioral characteristics of collective corruption in terms of individuals’ corruption preferences governed by personal attributes on corruption. We also propose and examine scenarios regarding the formation of collective corruption.