Survival and Sensemaking: Organizational Resilience in a Wall Street Trading Room After 9/11

How do organizations cope with extreme uncertainty? The existing literature is divided on this issue: some argue that organizations deal best with uncertainty in the environment by reproducing it in the organization, whereas others contend that the orga nization should be protected from the environment. In this paper we study the case of a Wall Street investment bank that lost its entire office and trading technology in the terrorist attack of September 11 th. The traders survived, but were forced to relocate to a makeshift trading room in New Jersey. During the six months the traders spent outside New York City, they had to deal with fears and insecurities inside the company as well as outside it: anxiety about additional attacks, questions of professional identity, doubts about the future of the firm, and ambiguities about the future re-location of the trading room. The firm overcame these uncertainties by protecting the traders' identities and their ability to engage in sensemaking. The organization held together through a leadership style that managed ambiguities and created the conditions for new solutions to emerge.

Organizational Choice and Environmental Change

We explain the choice between franchising and vertical integration by estimating a model of relative performance in a sample of 250 Spanish car distributors, controlling for self-selection and including environmental factors. The method allows us to estimate performance counterfactuals. Organizational choice seemingly aims to contain moral hazard for both distributors and manufacturers but it is subject to start-up constraints and switching costs. While the market for franchises remained underdeveloped, information asymmetries led to the opening of integrated outlets. Their subsequent conversion into franchised outlets probably involved prohibitive transaction costs. Consequently, they performed worse than would have been expected had they been independent, as confirmed by the systematic improvement observed when they were in fact converted. The timing of such conversions suggests that switching costs were prohibitive until firms developed a substantial cushion of temporary contracts, previously forbidden by regulation.

The organizational culture of a Brazilian public hospital

The objective of this research was to analyze the organizational culture of a Brazilian public hospital. It is a descriptive study with quantitative approach of data, developed in a public hospital of São Paulo State, Brazil. The sample was composed by 52 nurses and 146 nursing technicians and auxiliaries. Data were collected from January to June 2011 using the Brazilian Instrument for Assessing Organizational Culture – IBACO. The analysis of the organizational values showed the existence of hierarchical rigidity and centralization of power within the institution, as well as individualism and competition, which hinders teamwork. The values concerning workers’ well-being, satisfaction and motivation were not highly valued. In regard to organizational practices, the promotion of interpersonal relationship, continuous education, and rewarding practices were not valued either. It becomes apparent that traditional models of work organization support work practices and determine the organizational culture of the hospital.


Avaliação da Cultura Organizacional e Liderança – O Caso do Instituto Nacional de Providência Social – Empresa Pública

Ao longo dos últimos anos, com às crescentes mudanças no mundo empresarial, tanto no meio académico, quanto no meio profissional, as relações entre a cultura organizacional e a liderança têm atraído considerável atenção e alguns estudos da área têm apontado a interdependência entre ambos (Schein, 1992; Bass & Avolio, 1993). O presente trabalho de investigação científica, tem por objectivo, avaliar a existência dessa mesma relação através de um estudo de caso, aplicado aos trabalhadores e três gestores, a uma empresa pública de segurança social, cabo-verdiana – Instituto Nacional de Previdência Social – INPS, nos anos 2000 a 2010. A metodologia, consistiu primeiramente numa pesquisa bibliográfica, exploratória e descritiva e ainda foi feito um estudo de caso à empresa. Para a recolha dos dados, foram aplicados questionários com perguntas fechadas aos trabalhadores e gestores com o consentimento do Conselho de Administração. Para a análise dos dados foram utilizadas técnicas quantitativas e qualitativas, feito através das respostas obtidas dos questionários. Com os resultados da pesquisa, conclui-se que a pergunta de partida foi respondida através dos 94% da população inquirida que confirmaram a existência da relação entre a cultura organizacional e liderança e a sua influência dentro da organização. The existent relationship between the organizational culture and the leadership in social safety sector. Along of the last years, with the growing changes in the business world as in the academic middle as in the professional middle, the relation between organizational culture and the leadership have attracted considerable attention and some studies of the area have been pointed the interdependence between both (Schein,1992;Bass Avolio,1993). The present scientific investigation work has the purpose to evaluate the existence of that same relationship through a study of case, applied to the workers and three managers, to a public company of social safety, capverdean-National Institute of Social Precaution-INPS, in years 2000 and 2003. The methodology constitutes firstly in a small one bibliographical, exploratory and descriptive and it was still made a study of case to the company. For it collects of data were applied questionnaires with closed questions to the workers and the three managers with the consent of the Council of Administration. For the analysis of the data quantitative and qualitative techniques were used, done through the obtained answers of the questionnaires. With the results of the research, it is ended that the question of departure was answered through the 94% of the population inquired that confirm the relationship existence between the organizational culture and the leadership and its influence inside of the organization.

Decision-Making in Social Enterprises: Exploring the Link between Employee Participation and Organizational Commitment

This article studies the influence of the procedural justice resulting from participation in decision-making on employees' affective commitment in social enterprises. It also examines whether any potential link between participation and commitment is due to social exchange, as is the case with for-profit companies. The study is based on data from employees of French work integration social enterprises. The results confirm the positive relationship between procedural justice and affective commitment and the mediating role of perceived organizational support and leader-member exchanges. Managerial recommendations are then given to best maintain or increase employees' involvement in the decision-making processes of social enterprises.

Determinants of organizational form: Transaction costs and institutions in the European trucking industry

We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators(as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling outdifferences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypothesesin organizational economics, which have been shown to explain the choice of organizational form inUS industry, also apply in Europe. We then argue that the preference for subcontracting oververtical integration in Europe is the result of European institutions particularly, labor regulationand tax laws that increase the costs of vertical integration.

Organizational capital and employment fluctuations

In this paper I present a model in which production requires two types of labor inputs: regular productive tasks and organizational capital, which is accumulated by workers performing organizational tasks. By allocating more workers from organizational to productive tasks, firms can temporarily increase production without hiring. The availability of this intensive margin of labor adjustment, in combination with adjustment costs along the extensive margin (search frictions, firing costs, training costs), makes it optimal to delay employment adjustments. Simulations indicate that this mechanism is quantitatively important even if only a small fraction of workers perform organizational tasks, and explains why the hiring rate is persistent and why employment is slow to recover after the end of a recession.

Managing by values in the next milenium: Cultural redesign for strategic organizational change

The system of beliefs and values, that shaped the model for management and organizations during the 20th century, is just not good enough today. In order to keep a business functioning well and competing successfully in markets that are increasingly more global, complex, professionally demanding, constantly changing and oriented towards quality and customer satisfaction a new model is needed. In this paper, we will propose that both Management by Instructions (MBI) and Management by Objectives (MBO) today give notoriously inadequate results. By contrast, description of a new approach labeled: Management by Values (MBV), seem to be emerging as a strategic leadership tool. The paper outlines this approach and discusses the implementation of MBV as a tool to redesign culture in organizations and prepare them for the next millenium.

Benchmarking for routines and organizational knowledge

We use best practice benchmarking rationales to propose a dynamic research design that accounts for the endogenous components of across-firms heterogeneous routines to study changes in performance and their link to organizational knowledge investments. We thus contribute to the operationalization of management theoretical frameworks based on resources and routines. The research design employs frontier measures that provide industry-level benchmarking in organizational settings, and proposes some new indicators for firm-level strategic benchmarking. A profit-oriented analysis of the U.S. technology industry during 2000-2011 illustrates the usefulness of our design. Findings reveal that industry revival following economic distress comes along with wider gaps between best and worst performers. Second stage analyses show that increasing intangibles stocks is positively associated with fixed target benchmarking, while enhancing R&D spending is linked to local frontier progress. The discussion develops managerial interpretations of the benchmarking measures that are suitable for control mechanisms and reward systems.

Mothers' and fathers' views of the interdependence of their relationships with their infant: a systems perspective on early family relationships.

This study examined the interrelatedness of mother-infant and father-infant relationships as they develop over the first 4 months postpartum as well as the dynamics used by the couple to balance these relationships. First-time mother-father couples (n = 18) were interviewed separately at 1, 6, and 16 weeks postpartum using the Parent-Infant Relationship Interview. The data were analyzed using in-depth qualitative strategies. The parents' core themes of their early family relationships ranged from an undifferentiated unit at 1 week, to being a highly disorganized unit at 6 weeks, to a more integrated unit at 16 weeks. These results suggest that one should be thinking of early family relationships and parenting in terms of "messy processes" out of which new ways of being together are created. This disorganization plays a fundamental role in the establishment of early family relationships and warrants further empirical and clinical attention.

Aggregate shocks or vertical tax interdependence? Evidende from gasoline and cigarettes

[cat] Besley i Rosen -1998- van ser els primers autors en estimar empíricament la rellevància de les externalitats impositives verticals. Aquests autors varen fer-ho per al cas dels impostos sobre la benzina i el tabac, en concret, per al cas dels EEUU. Ara bé, no varen tenir en compte les diferències en el nivell de vida entre Estats: àrees amb un nivell elevat paguen menys en termes reals que àrees amb un nivell de vida baix, doncs l'impost unitari sobre la benzina o sobre el tabac no difereix d'acord amb l'Estat on l'impost s'aplica. En conseqüència, proposem que la competència impositiva vertical sigui estimada deflactant totes les variables monetàries utilitzant l'anomenat "House Price Index (HPI)", el qual està disponible al nivell dels Estats. Això genera una variable impositiva federal expressada en termes reals i que presenta variació entre Estats. Aquesta estratègia empírica ens permet diferenciar entre la interdependència vertical entre els tipus impositius federals i els estatals de shocks agregats al llarg del temps, utilitzant dades per als EEUU durant el període 1975 a 2006 per a benzina i tabac. Trobem una nivell significatiu de competència impositiva horitzontal, la qual és més elevada en el cas del tabac, però en cap cas reacció impositiva vertical. Els resultats són robustos al període analitzat.