Academic literature on the topic 'Management innovations alternative to hierarchical organization'

This paper addresses the paradox that despite all organizational change towards flatter and postmodern organizations, hierarchical order is quite persistent. We develop a differentiated understanding of hierarchy as either formal or informal and apply this analytical framework to several types of organization. The analysis reveals that hierarchy is much more widespread than thought; in particular, postmodern, representative democratic and network organizations are much less ‘alternative’ and ‘hierarchy-free’ than their labels and common understanding may suggest. The main argument is that the persistence of hierarchy in different types of organization can be explained by different dynamic relationships between formal and informal hierarchy.

This article extends the critique of the boundaryless career concept by focusing on how organizational members may experience boundaries as ambiguous within contemporary career development in organizations. As an alternative to the concept of the boundaryless career, we introduce that of the liminal career. We consider a liminal career as occurring when the normal career path within an organization becomes a state of ‘betwixt and between’, wherein distinctions between social domains and work roles become diffuse, indeterminate and difficult to comprehend. We engage with this concept in relation to three boundaries that remain central within career development: organizational boundaries establishing a distinction between that which is internal and external to the organization, hierarchical boundaries separating employees and managers, and functional boundaries demarcating different work domains. Using a case that illustrates how employees experience ambiguous organizational, hierarchical and functional boundaries, we argue that the concept of the liminal career captures the essence of situations in which there is a lack of clear categories, trajectories and schemes from which to structure career paths in organizations.

Purpose In the current business environment, no organization is assured of survival without continuous innovation. Employees’ innovative behavior is critical to enhance the innovation of an organization. While most literature on innovative behavior has focused on employees in the private sector, the purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that affect innovative behaviors in the government sector. In particular, it examines how proactivity, leader-member exchange (LMX), and climate for innovation affect employees’ innovative behavior in the Korean government sector, which is generally characterized as highly hierarchical, structured, and formalized. Design/methodology/approach The authors selected a sample of government employees in the Ministry of Education in Korea. Through the researchers’ contacts, ten government agencies agreed to recruit their employees to participate in the study. Data from 1,011 respondents were analyzed in two steps using structural equation modeling. First, to examine the construct validity of the measures, the authors examined the measurement model using the confirmatory factor analysis. Second, the interrelationships among the four variables were assessed. The hypothesized structural model was examined and compared to several alternative models to explore the best model fit to the data. The authors then examined the regression coefficients to determine the hypothesized relationships in the final structured model. Findings The results revealed the following: proactivity and climate for innovation had positive relationships with innovative behavior; LMX had a positive relationship with proactivity although it did not have a direct relationship with innovative behavior; and organizational climate for innovation did not ensure proactivity of employees. Originality/value The antecedents included in this research have been studied in relation to innovative behavior in several studies, but studies have called for further study. Few studies have examined innovative behavior in the public sector and they have examined innovation in the public sector which has mostly been focused on environmental factors surrounding government organizations or policy choices of government leaders while ignoring the individual traits of public workers, relational dynamics among people, and the cultural aspects of the organizations. This study investigated the interrelationships among the antecedents in the process of impacting innovative behavior in the public sector in Korea. In addition, little research has examined the antecedents of innovative behavior together. This study expands our knowledge of the roles and interrelationships of proactivity, LMX, and organizational climate for innovation as they relate to innovative behavior.

We outline the dominant, positivist approach to conceptualizing and researching organizations through multi-level research that views levels as independently existing, hierarchically nested entities, and problematize this view by offering an alternative approach based on embodied realism. We operationalize this approach through a study of three organization development workshops where organizational actors constructed artifacts we label embodied metaphors. We propose that analysis of embodied metaphors can enable access to actors' first-order conceptions of organizational levels and related organizational dimensions and reveals alternative qualities and interrelations among them; can support a clinical approach to organizations; provides a window to organizational, divisional or task identities; and poses substantial challenges to established conceptions of ontology and method in organization theory.

PurposeThis article addresses why movements towards less-hierarchical organizing may be unsustainable within organizations.Design/methodology/approachEschewing hierarchy may prove sustainable if alternative forms of management are acceptable to both employees and managers accountable for those employees’ performance. Developing alternatives means dealing with the fundamentally contradictory functions of coordination and control. Through a qualitative case study of a manufacturing company that removed first-line supervisors, this article analyses how issues of control and coordination were dealt with formally and informally.FindingsRemoval of the formal supervisor was followed by workers’ and middle managers’ efforts to informally reconstruct hierarchical supervision. Their efforts to deal pragmatically with control and coordination were frustrated by formal prescriptions for less hierarchy, leading to contested outcomes. The article identifies upward and downward pressures for the hierarchy’s reconstruction, undermining the sustainability of less-hierarchical organizing.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is limited by the use of cross-sectional data and employees’ retrospective narratives. Future research on the sustainability of less-hierarchical organizing should preferably be longitudinal to overcome these limitations.Practical implicationsUnless organizational changes towards less hierarchy engage with issues of managerial control and upward accountability, they are likely to induce pressures for hierarchy’s reconstruction.Originality/valueThe article offers an original approach to the classical problem of eschewing hierarchy in organizations. The approach allows us to explore the interrelated challenges facing such restructuring, some of which are currently unacknowledged or underestimated within the literature.

Interest in modeling longitudinal processes is increasing rapidly in organizational science. Organizational scholars often employ multilevel or hierarchical linear models (HLMs) to study such processes given that longitudinal data in organizational science typically consist of observations over a relatively small number of time intervals ( T) nested within a relatively large number of units ( N; e.g., people, teams, organizations). In this paper, we first distinguish change and dynamics as common research foci when modeling longitudinal processes and then demonstrate that a unique set of inferential hazards exists when investigating change or dynamics using multilevel models. Specifically, multilevel models that include one or more time-lagged values of the dependent variable as predictors often result in substantially biased estimates of the model parameters, inflated Type I error rates, and ultimately inaccurate inference. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the bias and Type I error rates for the standard centered/uncentered hierarchical linear model (HLM) and compare them with two alternative estimation methods: the Bollen and Brand structural equation modeling (SEM) approach and the Arrelano and Bond generalized method of moments using instrumental variables (GMM-IV) approach. We find that the commonly applied hierarchical linear model performs poorly, whereas the SEM and GMM-IV approaches generally perform well, with the SEM approach yielding slightly better performance in small samples with large autoregressive effects. We recommend the Bollen and Brand SEM approach for general use when studying change or dynamics in organizational science.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationships between promotion, development, and recognition opportunities at work and organizational commitment, and whether these relationships are moderated by the job opportunities employees have in other organizations. Design/methodology/approach An opportunity model of organizational commitment is developed based on social exchange theory and several streams of opportunity research. Factor analyses and hierarchical multiple regression analyses are carried out to test the hypotheses using data from 550 white-collar employees. Findings The results of the analyses show that opportunities for development and recognition are predictors of organizational commitment, that job opportunities employees have in other organizations negatively moderate the relationship between recognition opportunity at work and organizational commitment, and that promotion opportunity does not predict organizational commitment. Research limitations/implications Future researchers could study the issue in the context of other cultures using data from multiple sources. Practical implications Employers who seek to increase their employees’ organizational commitment are advised to divert their energies from struggling to create promotion opportunities for their employees to creating opportunities for development and recognition. Originality/value The study explores the under-researched concept of opportunity at work and connects several streams of opportunity research by drawing on social exchange theory as a theoretical framework. The model is the first to address the effects of opportunity and alternative opportunities on organizational commitment.

Purpose The article reports on anti-hierarchical approaches to managing work outside the U.S. and independent of software development as evidenced in presentations at the November Drucker Forum by the French group, Vinci and the Chinese group, Haier. Design/methodology/approach The article looks at how radical innovations in organization structure, management processes and mindsets are being adopted by companies seeking the rapid-paced, customer-focused continuous innovation needed to survive in today’s dynamic marketplaces. These approaches are spreading throughout many established organizations. For traditionally managed hierarchical organizations, the transformation often involves radical shifts in power, attitudes, values, mindsets, ways of thinking and ways of interacting with stakeholders—customers, employee talent, shareholders and partners. Findings The Vinci Group is organized with 3,500 business units, so that there are in effect 3,500 entrepreneurs, all intent on developing good ideas. The Haier Groups has transformed its organization into a flat platform with thousands of micro-enterprises. There are no more than eight people in each one. Practical implications The Haier platform enables the microenterprises to interact closely and intensively with users, allowing them to participate in the development and production process. The goal is to align Haier’s people and the value they can create for customer users. The need is to unleash people’s potential so as to maximize value to users. Originality/value The article reveals that when companies disrupt the traditional “efficiency-based” organizational structure the do so in unique ways. Typical of the homegrown approach to post-bureaucratic organizations, Zhang Ruimin, CEO of Haier, pioneered a management model called “Rendanheyl,” which entails three disruptions: disrupting employees, disrupting organizational structures and disrupting compensation structures.

The focus of this paper is outsourcing activities, where the contracting worker is formally self-employed but the conditions of work are similar to those of employees. It is argued that the outsourced workers are dependent on or integrated into the firm for which they work. We investigate the mechanisms by which firms mix governance structures and give evidence of how these `hierarchical' forms of outsourcing create dependency. The key argument of this paper is that firms have established governance structures based on markets, hierarchies and self-enforcing relational contracts so that they are able to keep a substantial amount of control despite sourcing out of labour. Furthermore, we argue that such hierarchical forms of outsourcing produce dependency. Using empirical evidence of the Austrian insurance industry, it is demonstrated that dependency is created, firstly, by the contractual restriction of alternative uses of resources, secondly, by support measures that bind the worker closely to the outsourcing firm, thirdly, by relationship-specific investments made by the worker and, fourthly, by authority elements.

The article analyzes the legal aspects of prostitution prevention and proposes an approach to legal change and criminalization of human trafficking, child and involuntary prostitution as well as the possibility of accepting the liberal alternative related to the regularization of voluntary provision of sexual services. The model of prostitution as a form of exploitation and violence has been adopted, which forces public authorities to protect victims of sexual abuse. The main categories of the prevention system determine the hierarchical subordination of the structural prostitution organization as well as the role of organized crime in legalizing the business.

Les innovations managériales (IM) portant une philosophie gestionnaire alternative à celle de l’organisation hiérarchique suscitent l’intérêt croissant des entreprises et de la recherche académique. Leur adoption par des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises (PME) apparaît a priori inattendue au regard des spécificités des PME, notamment leur vulnérabilité et la forte centralité du dirigeant. Le contexte exacerbé qu’est celui de la croissance de la PME rend d’autant plus inattendue l’adoption de telles IM, car il amène de multiples bouleversements et tensions déstabilisatrices, et tend à faire évoluer la PME vers une organisation hiérarchique classique sur le plan organisationnel. Or, la littérature existante fait état d’un faible nombre d’études menées sur l’IM en PME, et a fortiori sur les IM alternatives à l’organisation hiérarchique dans les PME en croissance, n’apportant pas un éclairage suffisant sur ces phénomènes. Dans un premier axe de recherche, ce travail doctoral a donc pour objectif d’identifier les motivations poussant des PME en croissance à adopter une IM alternative à l’organisation hiérarchique. Dans une perspective plus dynamique, notre second axe de recherche s’intéresse à l’évolution de telles IM lorsque la PME connaît une croissance postérieure à son adoption. Notre choix s’est porté sur une méthodologie qualitative pour répondre à ces questionnements, méthodologie cohérente avec notre paradigme épistémologique interprétativiste. Nous étudions trois cas de PME en croissance dans le cadre de notre premier axe de recherche, et deux cas de PME connaissant une croissance postérieure à l’adoption d’une première IM dans le cadre de notre second axe. Nos résultats mettent en évidence que les PME étudiées adoptent des IM alternatives à l’organisation hiérarchique car elles refusent, dans le cadre de leur croissance, d’évoluer vers une organisation hiérarchique perçue comme éloignant la PME de son identité et de ses valeurs originelles. Elles adoptent de telles IM dans l’intention de pérenniser leurs valeurs originelles et leur histoire. Notre axe 2 montre que les deux PME étudiées mettent en place une deuxième IM alternative à l’organisation hiérarchique afin de faire face au nouveau palier amené par leur croissance. Cette deuxième IM est alignée avec la philosophie de la première IM, elle-même congruente avec les valeurs originelles que la PME souhaite pérenniser
There is a growing interest from companies and academic research in Management Innovations (MIs) carrying a managerial philosophy alternative to that of the hierarchical organization. Their adoption by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) appears a priori unexpected given the specificities of SMEs, in particular their vulnerability and the strong centrality of the manager. The exacerbated context of the growth of the SME makes the adoption of such MIs all the more unexpected, as it brings multiple upheavals and destabilizing tensions, and pushes the SME to evolve towards a classical hierarchical organization. However, existing literature reports a small number of studies carried out on MIs in SMEs, and a fortiori on MIs that are alternative to hierarchical organization in growing SMEs, thus not shedding enough light on these phenomena. Therefore, as a first line of research, this doctoral work aims to identify the motivations that push growing SMEs to adopt a MI alternative to the hierarchical organization. From a dynamic perspective, our second line of research is concerned with the evolution of such MIs when the SME experiences a new phase of growth after its adoption. To answer these questions, our choice was to go with a qualitative methodology, a methodology that is consistent with our interpretative epistemological paradigm. We are studying three cases of growing SMEs as part of our first line of research, and two cases of SMEs experiencing growth after the adoption of a first MI as part of the second line of research. Our results show that the studied SMEs adopt MIs alternative to hierarchical organization because they refuse to evolve towards a hierarchical organization because of their growth. The hierarchical organization is perceived as distancing the company from its identity and its original values. They adopt such MIs with the intent of perpetuating their original values and history. Our second line of research shows that the two studied SMEs are setting up a second MI alternative to hierarchical organization in order to overcome the challenges brought by a new growth stage. This second MI is aligned with the philosophy of the first MI, philosophy that is congruent with the original values of the SME, values that it wishes to thereby perpetuate

This chapter presents a novel model to represent the relative results that different innovation strategies can be expected to attain in respect of technological spaces defined by different complexity levels. The model representing complexity is based on Kauffman's fitness landscape (known, also, as NK fitness landscape). However, contrary to the original proposal, we used a functional and deterministic representation of complexity defined over a real-valued space, replacing a stochastic and statistical-based definition of complexity in binary-valued spaces. The search strategies proposed are inspired to hierarchical organizations like companies. Low-level employees are assumed to have a full (technical) knowledge of a sub-set of the organization's functions, but lack the global vision necessary to assess the impact of a change on the overall organization's performance. Higher-level management has the task to weight different alternative proposals and select the best one for the benefit of the company as a whole, even though they are not able to explore directly technical solutions. The results confirm the results already known in the literature, though in much clearer and robust way, and suggest a large number of possible extensions.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the relationship between three entities: hierarchical organization, information management and human collaboration. This relationship is composed of two parts: the first part is the relationship between the hierarchical organization and information management where the role of the hierarchical organization to facilitate the information management processes is discussed. The second part is the relationship between information management and human collaboration where the role of information management to improve human collaboration in problem solving is discussed. The information management processes are illustrated through an information management life cycle model. This model has three major stages: active, semi-active and inactive stages and has three major phases: creation, searching and utilization phases. The creation phase includes: information creation and using, information authoring and modifying and information organization and indexing. The searching phase includes: information storage and retrieving and information exchange. The utilization phase includes: information accessing and filtering processes. The arguments about the role of hierarchical organization in information management and human collaboration are also discussed. The author showed that the hierarchical organization acts as a facilitator for common information management processes which are required in team collaboration such as: information gathering, organization, retrieving, filtering, exchange, integration or fusion, display and visualization. Human collaboration models are discussed with emphasis on the team collaboration structural model which has four unique but interdependent stages of team collaboration. These stages are: team knowledge construction, collaborative team problem solving, team consensus, and product evaluation and revision. Each stage has four levels: meta-cognition process which guides the overall problem solving process, the information processing tasks which is required by the team to complete each collaboration stage, the knowledge required to support the information processing tasks and the communication mechanisms for knowledge building and information processing. The author focused on the role of information management to improve human collaboration across the four collaboration stages of the team collaboration structural model. He showed that the hierarchical organization is more efficient for information management processes and team collaboration rather than other alternative organizations such as flat, linear and network organizations.

Hierarchical Mobile IP (HMIP) reduces the signaling delay and number of registration messages to home agent (HA) by restricting them to travel up to a local gateway only. It uses centralized gateways that may disrupt the communications, in the event of a gateway failure, between a gateway and the mobile users residing with underlying foreign agents (FAs) in a regional network. Dynamic mobility management schemes, using distributed gateways, proposed in literature, tend to circumvent the problems in HMIP. These schemes employ varying regional network sizes or hierarchy levels that are dynamically selected according to call-to-mobility ratio (CMR) of individual user. In reality, this information cannot be readily available in practice. Also, any unusual alterations in CMR values may hamper the system performance. This paper proposes a new mobility management strategy for IP-based mobile networks, which is independent of individual user history. The proposed scheme uses subnet-specific registration areas and is fully distributed so that the signaling overheads are evenly shared at each FA. The scheme provides a viable alternative to dynamic mobility management schemes for its simplicity, performance, and ease of implementation.

The topic of freight transport by rail is a complex theme and, in recent years, a main issue of European policy. The legislation evolution and the White Paper 2011 have demonstrated the European intention to re-launch this sector. The challenge is to promote the intermodal transport system to the detriment of road freight transport. In this context intermodal freight terminals, play a primary role for the supply chain, they are the connection point between the various transport nodes and the nodal points where the freight are handled, stored and transferred between different modes to final customer. To achieve the purpose, it is strengthen the improvement of existing intermodal freight terminals and the development of innovative intermodal freight terminals towards higher performance (ERRAC, 2012). Many terminal performances improvements have been proposed and sometime experimented. They are normally basing on combinations of operational measures and innovative technologies (e.g. automatic horizontal and parallel storage and handling, automated gate and sensors for tracking systems data exchange) tested in various terminals, with often-contradictory results. The research work described in this paper (developed within the Capacity4Rail EU project) focusses on the assessment of effects that these innovations can have in the intermodal freight terminals combined in various alternative consistent effective scenarios. The methodological framework setup to assess these innovations is basing on a combination of analytical methods based on sequential algorithms and discrete events simulation models. The output of this assessment method are key performance indicators (KPIs) selected according to terminals typologies and related to different aspects (e.g. management, operation and organization). The present paper illustrates the application of the methodological framework, tuned on the operation of various intermodal terminals, for the validation on today operation and the assessment of possible future scenarios to the case study of the Principe Felipe sea-rail terminal in Valencia.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/CIT2016.2016.3406