Viewing the leadership narrative through alternate lenses: an autoethnographic investigation

This conceptual-theoretical article revisits the work of Parry and Hansen on the nature of the organizational story as leadership. The present article is written in the autoethnographic style. The original narrative work is re-examined through the lenses of autoethnography, narrative theory, metaphor/discourse, critical realism and conventional quantitative research. The insights provided by this methodological triangulation are examined. The conclusion is that organizational stories will reflect leadership if they are plausible to the intended audience, give all organizational members an empowered part in the story, have a moral to the story, and have a happy ending. The overarching theme that is proposed is of leadership as the generation of individual hope for a better existence.

Is your organizational culture fit for business process management?

All processes are modeled, all process metrics defined, all process support systems are set up; yet still, processes are not running smoothly and departmental silos are more present than ever. Both practitioners and academics tell the same story. A successful business process management (BPM) implementation goes beyond using the right methods and putting the right systems in place. In fact, an important success factor for BPM is establishing the right organizational culture, that is, a culture that supports the achievement and maintenance of efficient and effective business processes.

Innovation & workplace culture in the Australian interactive entertainment industry : the Halfbrick story

A recent success story of the Australian videogames industry is Brisbane based Halfbrick Studios, developer of the hit game for mobile devices, Fruit Ninja. Halfbrick not only survived the global financial crisis and an associated downturn in the Australian industry, but grew strongly, moving rapidly from developing licensed properties for platforms such as Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and Playstation Portable (PSP) to becoming an independent developer and publisher of in-house titles, generating revenue both through App downloads and merchandise sales. Amongst the reasons for Halfbrick’s success is their ability to adaptively transform by addressing different technical platforms, user dynamics, business models and market conditions. Our ongoing case-study research from 2010 into Halfbrick’s innovation processes, culminating with some 10 semi-structured interviews with senior managers and developers, has identified a strong focus on workplace organisational culture, with staff reflecting that the company is a flat, team-based organisation devolving as much control as possible to the development teams directly, and encouraging a work-life balance in which creativity can thrive. The success of this strategy is evidenced through Halfbrick’s low staff turnover; amongst our interviewees most of the developers had been with the company for a number of years, with all speaking positively of the workplace culture and sense of creative autonomy they enjoyed. Interviews with the CEO, Shainiel Deo, and team leaders highlighted the autonomy afforded to each team and the organisation and management of the projects on which they work. Deo and team leaders emphasised the collaboration and communication skills they require in the developers that they employ, and that these characteristics were considered just as significant in hiring decisions as technical skills. Halfbrick’s developers celebrate their workplace culture and insist it has contributed to their capacity for innovation and to their commercial success with titles such as Fruit Ninja. This model of organisational management is reflected in both Stark’s (2009) idea of heterarchy, and Neff’s (2012) concept of venture labour, and provides a different perspective on the industry than the traditional political economy critique of precarious labour exploited by gaming conglomerates. Nevertheless, throughout many of the interviews and in our informal discussions with Halfbrick developers there is also a sense that this rewarding culture is quite tenuous and precarious in the context of a rapidly changing and uncertain global videogames industry. Whether such a workplace culture represents the future of the games industry, or is merely a ‘Prague Spring’ before companies such as Halfbrick are swallowed by traditional players’ remains to be seen. However, as the process of rapid and uncertain transformation plays out across the videogames industry, it is important to pay attention to emerging modes of organisation and workplace culture, even whilst they remain at the margins of the industry. In this paper we investigate Halfbrick’s workplace culture and ask how sustainable is this kind of rewarding and creative workplace?

A Story about a Message that was a Story: Message Form and its Implications to Knowledge Flow

Knowledge Flow, my dear friend! I would like to introduce you to a close relative of yours: Organizational Communication. You might want to take a moment to hear what your newfound kin has to say. As bright as you are dear Flow, you're missing a piece of the puzzle - for one cannot study any aspect of an organization relating to communication without acknowledging the message. Without a message, communication does not exist. Organizational Communication has always appreciated this. Perhaps the time has come for you to join rank and do so too? The main point of this work is to prove that the form of a message considerably affects communication, interpretation - and knowledge flow. As stories are at the heart of this thesis; and entertaining, reader-friendly communication its main argument, the entire manuscript is written in story form and is intentionally breaking academic writing tradition as far as writing style goes. Each chapter reads as a story of sorts and put together they create a grand narrative of my journey as a PhD student, the research I have conducted and the outcomes of this work. Thus if a reader hopes to make any sense of this title, she must read it in the same way one would read a novel, from beginning to end. This is a thesis with three aspirations. First, it sets out to prove that knowledge flow cannot be studied without a message. Second, it moves on to give the reader a once-over of a much used message form: storytelling. After these two goals are tackled the path is clear to research if message form indeed is as essential as claimed. I do so through both a qualitative and a quantitative study. The former acted as both a stepping stone into the research area and as an inspirational pilot, from which the research design for the larger quantitative study was drawn. Together, these two studies answered my research question - and allowed me to fulfill the third, final and foremost aspiration of this study - bridging the gap between two separate fields of knowledge management: knowledge flow and storytelling.

Getting to the Real Story: What Vietnamese business people wish foreigners understood about doing business in emerging and transition countries like Vietnam – BEFORE they start

Knowledge sharing typically examines organizational transfer of knowledge, often from headquarters to subsidiaries, from developed country sites to emerging country sites, or from host to local employees. Yes, recent research, such as Prahalad’s Bottom of the Pyramid, raises the question of reverse transfer of knowledge, or whether knowledge could and should be transferred from local sites to home country sites within an organization. As several emerging economies build their capabilities in knowledge, research and development, marketing, and the like, it only makes sense to consider what type of knowledge and how to transfer it in reverse or bi-directional manners. This paper takes one step back in the process. Rather than focusing on what knowledge transfer may make sense within an organization, we consider what types of knowledge are important for foreigners to know at the initial stages of engagement abroad as they consider whether to do business in an emerging country.

Ethical leadership and unethical pro-organizational behavior: A moderated mediation model of affective commitment and authenticity at work

Recently, unethical conduct in the workplace has been a focus of literature and media. Unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) refers to unethical conduct that employees engage in to benefit the organization. Given the complexity of UPB, there is an increasing need to understand how and under what conditions this attitude originates within organizations. Based on a sample of 167 employees and seven organizations, results support the moderated mediation model. An ethical leader increases employees’ organizational affective commitment which increases the likelihood to engage in UPB. However, the indirect relationship diminishes when employees feel authentic at work.

Leadership in Angola and Mozambique: How Portuguese leaders overcome the human resources challenge and contribute to organizational success

This Work Project presents human resources as one of the major challenges that Portuguese leaders meet in Angola and Mozambique. The main goal is to understand the role of leaders in translating this challenge into benefits for their own business and the African society. To conduct this study 13 leaders who work in Portugal and Africa were interviewed. Then, a framework was constructed based on the two ways these leaders recognize the importance of their employees for sustainable growth – financial incentives or/and personal development. The main conclusion here is that individually, incentives and personal development are not effective methods. Because of this, an employee empowerment process is proposed that encloses both, along with the leaders’ personal qualities needed to implement that “ideal” process.

Living in the Skin That I Am: An Organizational Autoethnography of an Adult Educator's Plight to Survive the Stigma of Invisible and Episodic Disability in an Academy of Administritiva

Through the reflective lens of an adult educator with invisible and episodic disabilities, this paper has been written as an organizational autoethnography. Through a process of autoethnographical sensemaking, it is intended to illuminate important gaps in organizational theory. Feminist/relational care ethics, critical reflection, and transformative learning serve as the educational theories that comprise its framework. In telling my story, embodied writing and performance narrative are used to convey the felt existence of a body exposed through words—where my “abled” and “disabled” professional teaching and learning identities may be studied against the backdrop of organizational policies and procedures. Words used to describe unfamiliar experiences and situations shape meaning for which new meaning may emerge. At the conclusion of this paper, an alternative frame of reference—a view from the margins—may be offered to articulate authenticity in the expectancy of workplace equity for adult educators with disabilities. Taken collectively on a larger level, it is hoped that this research may provide a source of inspiration for systemic organizational change in adult learning environments.

Co-operative explanatory capabilities in organizational design and personnel management

Based on an online image archive documenting the construction and history of an early computing company, the fictional story of "Co-Operative Explanatory Capabilities in Organizational Design and Personnel Management” follows the development of an experimental approach to worker productivity into a religious cult. The project investigates the place of creativity in efficiency management and the operation of bureaucratic systems in a post-industrial work environment. The project has spawned a series of collages, featured on the Economic Thought Projects 7" collaboration with Gelbart, The Eleventh Voyage, as well as the film of Co-Operative Explanatory Capabilities in Organizational Design and Personnel Management, which has also been published as a short story in Vertigo of the Modern and on Sacrifice Press.

The organizational legitimacy of the Bauhaus

Gaining and maintaining organizational legitimacy can be a major issue
for social and political structures such as cultural organizations. Legitimacy, sometimes called credibility, brings with it access to resources needed for survival and development. Organizations without legitimacy tend not to be successful in attracting grants, subsidies, and sponsorships. Research suggests that legitimate organizations may be seen as valuable social structures (Hybels 1995; Suchman 1995) and come to be “taken for granted” as part of the social fabric. In this article, I explore organizational legitimacy using the framework of institutional theory. I first define legitimacy and then discuss the key concepts of organizational legitimacy. Next, I present a case study based on an art/craft/design school. The school, known as the Bauhaus, existed between 1919 and 1933 in three German cities—Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. Deterministic views of the pre–World War II environment suggest that the Nazi party was responsible for the closure of the Bauhaus. I argue that other factors were apparent. The Nazi regime was becoming a significant force in the late 1920s, but the story of the Bauhaus becomes more complex when viewed under the rubric of arts management and organizational legitimacy. In this article, I discuss how the Bauhaus sought and managed legitimacy and the role that the state and other actors played in granting that legitimacy. In conclusion, I offer a summary of the relevance of legitimacy to contemporary arts organizations.

Conversion stories as shifting narratives of organizational change

This paper is concerned with how employees talk about their experiences of organizational change and focuses specifically on the construction of conversion stories. These are particularly positive narratives that consider change as a turning point in which individuals depart from an old way of life pre-change to embrace a post-change organization. In this study, employees seek conversion into management groups and report the values and philosophies of management in their narratives, thus highlighting the benefits of change while suppressing any negative aspects. This paper draws attention to the dramatic nature of the conversion story and explores the sharp distinction between the reporting of experiences prior to and after change. We also investigate the relationship between constructing conversion stories and gaining personal and career advancement at work and suggest that beneath the positive exterior of the conversion narratives lies a theme of silence, which may be related to career advancement. Our findings suggest that such stories of silence complicate the conversion story as an example of positive organizational change and discuss implications for both the theory and practice of narrative change research.

Islamic organizational leadership within a Western society: the problematic role of external context

This research tests qualitatively the relationship between leadership, organizational culture and organizational effectiveness in Islamic organizations in Australia in the early years of the 21st century. We also researched the contextual challenges faced by Islamic organizations in Western societies during the early years of the 21st century. Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed qualitatively. Theoretical sampling and theoretical coding generated a positive and negative story-line. A grand narrative of Muslim disenfranchisement and several micro-stories of organizational complexity brought to life the story-lines. One conclusion is that context invariably is problematic for leadership. Another conclusion is that leadership cannot be studied fruitfully out of context. A third conclusion from this substantive setting is that a challenge for Islamic leadership is to reconstitute the context of the organization. An underlying parallel with structure-agency theory is noted. The leadership of Islamic organizations is faced with the traditional leadership challenges found in the extant literature. In addition it must accommodate a problematic external context, a heterogeneous followership, the important role of religion, the influence of Imams, and increasing roles for women and young Muslims. © 2010.