Many researchers have searched for evidence of organizational improvements from the huge sums invested in ICT. Unfortunately, evidence for such a pay back is spotty at best (e.g., Brynjolfsson, 1994; Meyer and Gupta, 1994; Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 1998). On the other hand, at the individual level, computing and communication technologies are increasingly merging into work in ways that make it impossible to separate the two (Gasser, 1986; Zuboff, 1988; Bridges, 1995).

Organizations are occasionally faced with technology-based and accident-triggered crises that may cause costly disasters if not handled properly. Questions arise: How should organizations, with their complex processes and human involvement, be designed if they are to perform well in such crises? Would organizations benefit from structural changes during crises? From a neo-information processing perspective that views organizations as composed of cognitively restricted, socially situated, and task-oriented actors, we argue that the causes and consequences of crises may be better understood through the systematic examination of both environmental and organizational factors. We address our research questions using a rather unique approach: a matched analysis of 80 real organizational cases and 80 computer-simulated organizations. The findings show that a crisis can present critical challenges to organizational performance both externally and internally, and that there is no design guarantee that a high-performing organization will continue to perform well during a crisis situation. In addition, when organizations restructure to adapt to crisis situations, they often face the serious challenges of having to understand not only the external environment, but also organizational design traps. Key words: organizational performance; organizational design; computational modeling; real-crisis cases Whether theories of organization can be applied to nonconventional events or crisis situations has largely been assumed but certainly not fully explored (Carley

This paper provides a multi-level theoretical model to understand why business organizations are increasingly engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and thereby exhibiting the potential to exert positive social change. Our model integrates theories of micro-level organizational justice, meso-level corporate governance, and macro-level varieties of capitalisms. Using a theoretical framework presented in the justice literature, we argue that organizations are pressured to engage in CSR by many different actors, each driven by instrumental, relational and moral motives. These actors are situated within four “levels ” of analysis: individual, organizational, national and transnational. After discussing the motives affecting actors at each level and the mechanisms used at each level to exercise influence, as well as the interactions of motives within levels, we examine forces across levels to propose the complex web of factors, which both facilitate and impede social change by organizations. Ultimately, this proposed framework can be used to systematize our understanding of the complex social phenomenon of increasing CSR engagement, and to develop testable hypotheses. We conclude by highlighting some empirical questions for future research, and discussing a number of managerial implications.

To my parents

Managed care—the dominant mode of health care organizing and financing today—may threaten physicians ’ satisfaction with practicing medicine, but research has revealed that it is not dissatisfying for physicians in all organizational settings. The institutional theory of organizational communication (ITOC) offers a multileveled explanation of physicians ’ reactions to managed care based on their institutional identifications and communication with managed care organizations. A multileveled analysis of data from physicians (n = 1,049) in practices (n = 492) investigates this explanation. The results suggest that institutional identifications moderate the relationship between the experience of managed care and physician satisfaction, and offer evidence for the importance of the communication between managed care representatives and physicians. The results also provide an example of the applicability of multilevel modeling for organizational and health communication research.

As an exploratory step toward integrating differing views in the field of top management succession, this study takes an open system’s perspective and examines the effect of top management succession on organizational performance, in particular decision-making accuracy, under conditions where various organizational and environmental factors can interact. Through a formal computer simulation model that captures the basic behaviors of human decision making and the fundamental characteristics of organizational and environmental settings, the results show that whether top management successions may affect organizational performance, and if so, how organizational performance may be affected, depends on such contextual variables as industry environment, organizational structure, succession type, and organizational age. This study has also demonstrated the importance of moving toward a more systematic and precise contingency approach and the power of computer modeling in understanding the multilevel process of top management succession in complex and dynamic organizations.

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The increasing emphasis on team-based knowledge work, or work that involves a significant investment of intellectual capital by a group of skilled professionals, is forcing us to expand our traditional models of leadership, as vested in one individual, to encompass more complex models of leadership. Although teams are an increasingly prevalent aspect of organizations, they often fail to live up to their potential. These disappointing outcomes may be attributed in part to an inability to smoothly coordinate team members ’ actions and a lack of effective leadership to guide this process. Recently, both self-leadership and shared leadership have garnered an increasing amount of attention from researchers and practitioners interested in how to foster more effective teams. These two theories, albeit from different levels of analysis, explicitly focus on the need for novel approaches to leadership that address the new challenges that organizations face as they flatten, diversify, and confront increasingly complex problems. However, there has been little theoretical or empirical attention devoted to the relationship between these two theories. Accordingly, we develop a meso-level theoretical model that outlines the relationship between self- and shared leadership, focusing on the

The industrial marketing as well as the strategic management literature stress the importance of innovation in order to create/sustain competitive advantage and to rejuvenate the business. In this paper, we focus on the construct “value innovation ” within the broad field of innovation studies. We relate value innovation to a reconceptualization of the supply chain of an industry. It involves a redefinition of a business whereby roles taken

Draft. Comments are welcome.