Percieved Organizational Efficacy in Internationalized Companies: Application of Competing Values Approach and Collective Efficacy

This dissertation focuses on “organizational efficacy”, in particular on employees’ beliefs of organizational capacity to be efficacious. Organizational efficacy is considered from two perspectives – competing values approach and collective efficacy, and evaluated in internationalized companies. The dissertation is composed of three studies. The data were collected in thirteen Italian companies on different stages of internationalization for a total number of respondents is 358. In the first study the factorial validity of the competing values instrument (Rohrbaugh, 1981) was investigated and confirmed. Two scales were used to measure collective efficacy: a general collective efficacy scale (Bohn, 2010), and a specific collective efficacy scale, developed following suggestions of Borgogni et al. (2001), it evaluates employees’ beliefs of efficacy of organizations in the international market. The findings suggest that competing values and collective organizational efficacy instruments may provide a multi-faceted measurement of employees’ beliefs of organizational efficacy. The second study examined the relationship between organizational efficacy and collective work engagement. To measure collective work engagement the UWES-9 (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2003) was adapted at the group level; its factor structure and reliability were similar to the standard UWES-9. The findings suggest that organizational efficacy fully predicts collective work engagement. Also we investigated whether leadership moderates the relationship between organizational efficacy and collective work engagement. We operationalized leadership style with MLQ (Bass & Avolio, 1995); the results suggest that intellectual stimulation and idealized influence (transformational leadership) and contingent reward (transactional leadership) enhance the impact of organizational efficacy on collective work engagement. In the third study we investigated organizational efficacy and collective work engagement in internationalized companies. The findings show that beliefs of organizational efficacy vary across companies in different stages of internationalization, while no significant difference was found for collective work engagement. Limitations, practical implications and future studies are discussed in the conclusion.

Ethics in the flesh: formalizing moral values in embodied cognition

Values are beliefs or principles that are deemed significant or desirable within a specific society or culture, serving as the fundamental underpinnings for ethical and socio-behavioral norms. The objective of this research is to explore the domain encompassing moral, cultural, and individual values. To achieve this, we employ an ontological approach to formally represent the semantic relations within the value domain. The theoretical framework employed adopts Fillmore’s frame semantics, treating values as semantic frames. A value situation is thus characterized by the co-occurrence of specific semantic roles fulfilled within a given event or circumstance. Given the intricate semantics of values as abstract entities with high social capital, our investigation extends to two interconnected domains. The first domain is embodied cognition, specifically image schemas, which are cognitive patterns derived from sensorimotor experiences that shape our conceptualization of entities in the world. The second domain pertains to emotions, which are inherently intertwined with the realm of values. Consequently, our approach endeavors to formalize the semantics of values within an embodied cognition framework, recognizing values as emotional-laden semantic frames. The primary ontologies proposed in this work are: (i) ValueNet, an ontology network dedicated to the domain of values; (ii) ISAAC, the Image Schema Abstraction And Cognition ontology; and (iii) EmoNet, an ontology for theories of emotions. The knowledge formalization adheres to established modeling practices, including the reuse of semantic web resources such as WordNet, VerbNet, FrameNet, DBpedia, and alignment to foundational ontologies like DOLCE, as well as the utilization of Ontology Design Patterns. These ontological resources are operationalized through the development of a fully explainable frame-based detector capable of identifying values, emotions, and image schemas generating knowledge graphs from from natural language, leveraging the semantic dependencies of a sentence, and allowing non trivial higher layer knowledge inferences.