Summary
Summary ALL articles - The Adaptive Organisation MSc BA: Strategy UvA
- Course
- Institution
A summary of all course literature, with important concepts market and explained. Covers all readings.
[Show more]
5 reviews
By: mathilde-verwaaijen • 2 year ago
By: timdejong • 4 year ago
By: jetstuvia • 4 year ago
Thank you, Tim! Success:)
By: coertst • 4 year ago
By: freshkid • 5 year ago
By: kvdelsen • 5 year ago
Seller
Follow
jetstuvia
Reviews received
Content preview
THE ADAPTIVE ORGANISATIONSUMMARY
ARTICLES
The Adaptive Organisation
MSc Business Administration: Strategy
University of Amsterdam
2019/2020
Week 1. Foundations of adaption p.2
• Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization.
• Abatecola, G. (2014). Research in organizational evolution. What comes next?
• Feldman, M. S., & Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of
Flexibility and Change.
• Burgelman, R. A. (1991). Intraorganizational Ecology of Strategy Making and Organizational
Adaptation: Theory and Field Research.
Week 2. Drivers of adaption p.9
• Argote, L. & Epple, D. (1990). Learning curves in manufacturing.
• Levinthal, D. A., & March, J. G. (1993). The Myopia of Learning.
• Greve, H. R. (2003). A behavioral theory of R&D expenditures and innovations: Evidence from
shipbuilding.
• Leonard-Barton, D. (1992). Core capabilities and core rigidities: A paradox in managing new product
development.
Week 3. Capabilities for adaption p.14
• Agarwal, R., & Helfat, C. E. (2009). Strategic Renewal of Organizations.
• Zahra, S. A., & George, G. (2002). Absorptive capacity: A review, reconceptualization, and extension.
• Eisenhardt, K. M., & Martin, J. A. (2000). Dynamic Capabilities: What Are They?
• Teece, D., Peteraf, M., & Leih, S. (2016). Dynamic Capabilities and Organizational Agility.
Week 4. Organizing for adaption p.18
• Lawrence, P. R., & Lorsch, J. W. (1967). Differentiation and Integration in Complex Organizations.
• Jansen, J. J. P., Tempelaar, M. P., van den Bosch, F. A. J., & Volberda, H. W. (2009). Structural
Differentiation and Ambidexterity: The Mediating Role of Integration Mechanisms.
• Sanchez, R., & Mahoney, J. T. (1996). Modularity, Flexibility, and Knowledge Management in Product
and Organization Design.
• Birkinshaw, J., & Gibson, C. (2004). Building Ambidexterity Into an Organization.
Week 5. Managing adaption I p.26
• Lungeanu, R., Stern, I., & Zajac, E. J. (2016). When do firms change technology-sourcing vehicles? The
role of poor innovative performance and financial slack.
• Maula, M. V. J., Keil, T., & Zahra, S. A. (2012). Top Managements Attention to Discontinuous
Technological Change: Corporate Venture Capital as an Alert Mechanism.
• Schildt, H. A., Maula, M. V. J., & Keil, T. 2005. Explorative and Exploitative Learning from External
Corporate Ventures.
• Wolcott, R. C., & Lippitz, M. J. 2007. The Four Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship.
Week 6. Managing adaption II p.34
• Floyd, S. W., & Lane, P. J. (2000). Strategizing Throughout the Organization: Managing Role Conflict in
Strategic Renewal.
• Ling, Y., Simsek, Z., Lubatkin, M. H., & Veiga, J. F. 2008. Transformational Leaderships Role in
Promoting Corporate Entrepreneurship: Examining the CEO-TMT Interface.
• Ren, C. R., & Guo, C. 2011. Middle Managers Strategic Role in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Process:
Attention-Based Effects.
• Kotter, J. P. 2001. What Leaders Really Do.
1
, THE ADAPTIVE ORGANISATION
Week 1 | Foundations of adaptation
Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization.
We look at organizations like they’re living organisms, and see that some are better adapted to their
environment than others. With this metaphor, scholars have studied:
- organizations as open systems
- the process of adapting organizations to environments
- organizational lifecycles
- factors influencing organizational health and development
- different species of organizations
- the relations between species and their ecology
Discovering organizational needs
Before the organism metaphor, there was a machine metaphor, that viewed organization design as a
technical problem. From the 1920s on, limitations got attention and social needs in organizations where
recognized: the informal organization could exist next to the documented formal organization. The new
idea: individuals and groups work better when their needs are satisfied (levels of Needs, Maslow’s
hierarchy). Job enrichment came up hand in hand with a more employee-centered leadership-style. Since
the 1960s, human resources management received a major focus. Dual focus: sociotechnical systems
(integrating human and technical aspects of work).
Recognizing the importance of environment: organizations as open systems
The systems approach views organizations as open systems, like organisms: open to their environment and
must achieve an appropriate relation with it to survive. The open systems approach focuses on three key
issues:
1. Emphasis on the environment in which the organizations exist - understanding the immediate ‘task’ or
‘business environment’ defined by the organizations direct interactions with customers, competitors,
suppliers, labor unions and government agents, as
well as the broader ‘contextual’ or ‘general
environment’.
2. Defines an organization as interrelated subsystems -
organizations contain individuals who belong to
groups or departments that belong to larger
organization devisions. Everything depends on each
other.
3. Attempt to establish congruencies or ‘alignments’
between different systems and to identify and
eliminate potential disfunction.
These ideas allow us to break free of bureaucratic
thinking, and are placed under the ‘contingency theory’.
Contingency theory: adapting organization and environment
The main ideas in a nutshell:
- Organizations are open systems that need careful management to satisfy and balance internal needs
and to adapt to environmental circumstances.
- There is no one best way of organizing. The appropriate form depends on the kind of task or environment
with which one is dealing.
- Management must be concerned above all else with achieving alignments and ‘good fits’.
- Different approaches to management may be necessary to perform different tasks within the same
organization.
- Different types or ‘species’ of organizations are needed in different types of environments.
2
, THE ADAPTIVE ORGANISATION
The variety of the species
- Machine bureaucracy & Divisionalized form: ineffective except when tasks and environment are
simple and stable. Highly centralized, inappropriate for market driven or environment driven firms.
- Professional bureaucracy: allows greater autonomy of staff, appropriate for dealing with relatively
stable conditions where tasks are relatively complicated. Since the 1980’s it’s not as effective anymore
due to the changing environment.
- Simple structure: informal and flexible organization with a chief executive (often entrepreneur), ideal for
achieving quick changes. Successful in unstable environments, especially for young and innovative
companies.
- Adhocracy: project teams that just come together for tasks, sometimes called a virtual or network
organization. Temporary organization design, successful in turbulent environments with complex tasks.
New species that arise because of the turbulent environment:
- Matrix organization: systematically attempt to combine functional structure of bureaucracy with
project-team structure. This and other team-based organizations provides means of breaking down
barriers between specialisms and allowing members from different backgrounds to fuse their skills and
abilities in an attack on common problems.
Problems arise when there are conflicts between teams, often when members of a team are held
accountable for their whole team/department.
Contingency theory: promoting organizational health and development
We need to pose questions about the existing relations internally and between organization and
environment. These can be used to identify organizational characteristics and to determine the
compatibility between the different elements.
The task of successful organizational change
and development often hinges on bringing
variables into closer alignment, so that the
organization can meet the challenges and
opportunities posed by the environment.
Natural selection: the population-ecology
view of organizations
So far the contingency theory was posed,
identifying patterns of good fit and showing
how to achieve those. However, critique is
growing and the idea of natural selection
gains in popularity: more focus on the
external environment as a powerful force
instead of main focus on internal flexibility:
the population ecology view. ‘Organizations
like organisms in nature, depend for survival
on their ability to acquire and adequate
supply of the resources necessary to sustain
existence. In this effort, they have to face competition from others, where only the fittest survive’: the
environments selects the fittest firms. Building on the variation (possible CA), selection, retention and
modification model.
Critics on this view is that it’s one-sided in that the focus is on resource scarcity and competition. From
this, a more optimistic view of the ecology of organizations emerged.
Organizational ecology: the creation of shared futures
So, both the population-ecology and contingency view organizations and environments as separate
phenomena. But organizations rather exist as elements in a complex ecosystem. It’s now widely believed
that the evolution process can only be understood at the level of the total ecology, suggesting that
evolution is always evolution of a patterns (not separate units) of relations, embracing organisms and their
environments. Survival of the ‘fitting’ instead of ‘fittest’. It becomes clear that the organization is not just
3
, THE ADAPTIVE ORGANISATION
influenced by its environment, but also influences its environment. Collaborations are important in this
perspective.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Abatecola, G. (2014). Research in organizational evolution. What comes next?
Aim of article: provide with a discussion of past and contemporary research on organizational evolution
literature by strategists.
The approach of organizational evolutionists distinguishes itself from others with the application of
biological metaphors. While some schools of thought in the strategic management field have adopted the
label of evolution for focusing on organizational change in general, some others have tried to develop
theories of organizational evolution more formally.
It is conceptual in that the article provides its readers with updated insights about what heterogeneous
schools of thought can be included within the organizational evolution research area to date. At the same
time, the contribution is methodological in that the specific taxonomy produced in the article can help
both interested scholars and practitioners to grasp what differences.
What is organizational evolution?
Biological evolution = a constant, but slow, change within and between different species of living beings.
Evolutionary approaches
- Population ecologists say: 'the primary goal of organizational ecology has been understanding mutual
interactions within and among the populations and communities comprising organizational ecosystems,
and the mechanisms and processes underlying their growth, regulation and decline’. They attempted to
use the Darwinian structural process of variation, selection and retention for understanding the
evolution of organizational populations and/or communities.
- Evolutionary economists aim to explain a number of evolutionary processes mostly at the macro-
economic level, with their focus thus including investigations on industrial dynamics or cross- country
structural changes. Rather than on the Darwinian biological metaphor only, evolutionary economists
heavily rely also on the Schumpeterian assumption of creative destruction as the conceptual basis for
their studies.
- There are numorous models of organizational lifecycles developed, conceptualizing growth trajectories
of organizations in biological terms. Some of them attempted to apply to organizations the suggestive
theory of punctuated equilibrium.
Adaptive approaches
- Deterministic: logic of biological adaption: the process witnessing organisms in search for the most
appropriate fit into the external environments.
- Voluntaristic: ‘organizational adaptation is proactively driven by the internal forces within organizations,
with their beliefs about organizations much more oriented towards subjectivity and bounded rationality’.
- Until the 1980s, this dichotomy appeared much stronger than it is currently. Dialectical thinking =
considering adaptation as the joint outcome of environmental determinism and strategic voluntarism.
Dialectical thinking
In order to understand the relationship between organizations and environments properly, focus on
understanding the process through which these entities interact than on understanding their behaviour
separately.
Domain definition (voluntaristic) regards the environmental enactment and the setting of organizational
performance. Domain navigation (deterministic) regards the organizational behaviour within the chosen
environment, with this behaviour now guided by the principles of environmental selection.
Bourgeois: 'Any future theory of organizational adaptaption should consider the ‘possibility of reciprocal
causation among external factors, strategic decisions, and internal factors'.
4
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller jetstuvia. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for $6.98. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
Can Stuvia be trusted?
4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)
52510 documents were sold in the last 30 days
Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy study notes for 14 years now