Adm. Sci., Volume 7, Issue 3 (September 2017) – 13 articles

Research on cognitive style has gathered momentum over the past 40 years, especially with respect to learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. This investigation adapts Tetlock’s hedgehog–fox scale for German-speaking respondents through three large-scale studies (n = 17,072) and examines the influence of cognitive style on employees’ public value assessments of their employing organizations. Our data led us to propose a revised and more economical HedgeFox Scale. In contrast with Tetlock’s findings, our results provide empirical and theoretical arguments for a two-factor structure. This shift in dimensionality affects the nature of the construct and aligns hedgehog–fox research with the latest developments in cognitive style research. Our results contribute to the ongoing interest in the dimensionality of cognitive styles and support the call for a more diverse picture. Finally, we provide recommendations for individuals and organizations. Full article

Background: Evidence-based clinical care delivery begins with comprehensive assessments of patients’ priority needs. A Canadian health sciences corporation conducted a quality improvement initiative to enhance clinical care delivery, beginning with one acute care site. A real-time staffing tool, the synergy tool, was used by direct care providers and leadership to design and implement patient-centered care delivery. The synergy tool is the patient characteristics component of the Synergy Model™, developed by an expert panel of nurses in the 1990s. Since then, the tool has been effectively used to assess a variety of patient populations on eight important characteristics, informing real-time staffing decisions. Methods: Plan-Do-Study Act cycles were managed by department-based project teams with assistance from business analytics and a quality/safety officer. Results: Initial findings demonstrate reductions in nurse missed breaks, improved workload management, and significant increases in staff engagement. Conclusions: The synergy tool is an easy-to-use tool that can be used to highlight priority care needs for individual patients or specific patient populations. The tool informs real-time staffing decisions, ensuring a better fit between patient needs and nurse staffing assignments. Although this initiative began with nurses, project work is expanding to include inter-professional teams. Full article

Private, public, and not-for-profit organizations come together in cross-sector alliance projects and programmes (CSA) to bring about large-scale changes. CSA can often face determined competition from other alliances that oppose large-scale change or propose alterative large-scale changes. Competition can be related to people’s deeply held beliefs arising from their ideologies, cultures, and/or other sources of entrenched preconceptions. In previous CSA research, there has been little consideration of competition between CSA involving people’s deeply held beliefs. Accordingly, in this paper, a conceptual framework for better understanding CSA competition is introduced. This encompasses the influence of people’s beliefs and related underlying determinants. This is necessary because there are many large-scale challenges that involve private, public, and not-for-profit organizations working together in projects and programmes against competition. Full article

The lack of women in leadership across higher education has been problemitised in the literature. Often contemporary discourses promote ‘fixing the women’ as a solution. Consequently, interventions aimed at helping women break through ‘the glass ceiling’ abound. This article argues that the gendered power relations at play in universities stubbornly maintain entrenched inequalities whereby, regardless of measures implemented for and by women, the problem remains. The precariousness for women of leadership careers is explored through two separate but complementary case studies (from different continents and different generations) each one illuminating gender power relations at work. The article concludes by arguing that it is universities themselves that need fixing, not the women, and that women’s growing resistance, particularly of the younger generation, reflects their dissatisfaction with higher education leadership communities of practice of masculinities. Full article

The past few decades have been characterized by a growing body of profit-seeking public service areas with the understanding that profit-seeking organizations will deliver public services more efficiently than government can. These sectors include, but are not limited to, health care, corrections, education and garbage collection. Governments have created quasi markets to attract private providers of services in these sectors, with varying results. Organizational economics has provided the primary explanation for quasi markets, but questions about the sought-for efficiencies actually realized through these markets persist. We integrate resource dependence theory and organizational economics to provide a more comprehensive explanation of the persistence of quasi markets. Full article

Albert and Whetten defined organizational identity (OI) as the central, distinctive and enduring characteristics of an organization. Scholars found OI to be a difficult construct to apply to organizations and, over time, they defined it from functionalist, social constructionist, postmodernist and psychodynamic perspectives. All of these perspectives made great theoretical contributions to the field, but they were largely unable to integrate practice and theory in a way that could benefit organizations. Hatch and Schultz’s work is exceptional in this regard: they provided a theory that has the promise of practical implications for organizations in regard to organizational continuity. They perceived organizational continuity as existing in the balanced/responsible behavior of an organization’s members, among themselves and with key external stakeholders. They provided an effective model in this regard, but they overlooked how individuals’ political interests overshadow balanced behavior. Politics that arise as a result of individuals’ identity are generally considered to be psychological in origin and link OI to organizational learning (OL) as a co-evolving process. The present research hence operationalizes Hatch and Schultz’s model by reference to a Winnicottian framework to understand how OI is socially constructed and psychologically understood in the political interests of the management and employees, among themselves and with key external stakeholders. In doing so it explores the political implications of OI for OL, as perceived in an organization’s continuity. The context of the research is the Pakistani police. Full article

The aim of this paper is to add to existing work on the theme of power, emotion, and organizational learning. The study was undertaken in Kazakhstan, where tensions between old and new regimes provide an environment that is rich in emotion and power/politics; and offer an opportunity to study the interplay between emotion and power during individual and organizational attempts to learn. The social unconscious is used as a conceptual frame to identify underlying dynamics that impact on organizational learning. The empirical study illustrates a social fantasy concerning the fear of mistakes and its consequences. This fantasy is sustained through blaming and punishing the people who make mistakes, and through feelings of internalised embarrassment and guilt that are enacted through interpersonal relations of shaming and being ashamed. Our contribution to knowledge arises from employing a concept (social unconscious) that has not been used to study organizational learning within a social and organizational context for organizational learning (Kazakhstan) that has not yet been studied. The practical purpose of this paper is to improve our knowledge of the social and political context of organizational learning in post-Soviet Kazakhstan through understanding unconscious dynamics that both inform and undermine attempts to learn. Full article

This paper argues that interest differences are the key to understanding the nature of organizational learning and the processes by which it occurs, yet the concept of ‘interest’ is very much underdeveloped in the organizational learning literature. Drawing on the work of Habermas and Lukes, the paper proposes a model of the relationship between shared learning and interests and elaborates on it using a case study of pay and performance management change at a large Australian finance-sector company, DollarCo. The case study provides many examples of shared learning associated with both common and competing interests, including a great deal of learning resulting from tensions between DollarCo’s economic and technical interests, on the one hand, and employees’ ontological interests on the other. By doing so, it underlines the value of foregrounding interests and interest differences in studies of workplace and organizational learning and raises questions about the extent to which many published accounts of so-called ‘organizational’ learning are actually describing ‘shared interest group’ learning. Full article

This study aims to analyze whether E-governance matters for political modernization in Asia. According to the literature review, E-gcovernance can be operated by three elements: open data, online service, and E-participation. Political modernization can also be divided into three elements: the government’s transparency, the offline political participation, and the level of liberty. Analyzing second-hand data from several databases, this study draws such conclusions. Firstly, the development of E-governance will lead to the improvement of political modernization in Asia. Specifically, open data have a positive impact on the government’s transparency. E-participation has a positive impact on the offline political participation and the level of liberty. Secondly, it is difficult to confirm which aspect of E-governance has the greatest impact on political modernization, as open data and E-participation have an impact on different aspects of political modernization. Based on the result, Asian countries should emphasize the importance of E-governance so that political modernization in this region could be improved continuously. Full article

Social impact bonds (SIBs) have been welcomed enthusiastically as a new funding tool for social innovation, yet also condemned as an instrument that neglects beneficiaries’ and taxpayers’ interests, opening profit opportunities in the field of social politics for smart private investors. We will shed a more analytical light on SIBs, assuming that, like any contract, SIBs try to align interests between partners with partly converging, partly diverging goals. Thus, it remains mainly a matter of negation, and non-profit social service providers as well as public agencies should avoid particular perils and pitfalls. Full article

Decision-making is a multifaceted, socially constructed, human activity that is often non-rational and non-linear. Although the decision-making literature has begun to recognize the effect of affect on decisions, examining for example the contribution of bodily sensations to affect, it continues to treat the various processes involved in coming to a decision as compartmentalized and static. In this paper, we use five theories to contribute to our understanding of decision-making, and demonstrate that it is much more fluid, multi-layered and non-linear than previously acknowledged. Drawing on a group experience of deciding, we investigate the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and collective states that are at play. These states are shown to be iterative: each being reinforced or dampened in a complex interaction of thought, affect, social space and somatic sensations in a dynamic flux, whilst individuals try to coalesce on a decision. This empirical investigation contributes to theory, method and practice by suggesting that Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) is a human condition. VUCA permeates and impacts decision-making in a multitude of ways, beyond researchers’ previous understanding. The innovation generated through this paper resides in a set of propositions that will accelerate progress in the theory, method, and practice of decision-making. Full article

The focus of the study is to examine and relocate gender equality in higher education using Capability Approach as the background frame. The paper discusses how gender relations are rooted in the socio-cultural matrix in India. It attempts to explore the factors prevalent in the structure which impacts woman’s opportunities and functionalities in the higher education. The database includes faculty from one of the central universities of South India, the study deals with the dynamics of constructs in Science and Technology indicating socio-psychological obstructions faced by women. Based on thorough analysis, the oppressed capabilities are conceptualized thereby enabling the researchers to relocate the gender equality and the capabilities that need to be enriched for women can be contemplated which helps in reducing the existing disparity. The intention of the study is essentially not to quantify the attributes of inequality to make them measurable but to choose attributes which enable an effective comparative basis to address inequality. The empirical study reveals an existence of the element of stereotyping as a single entity and capability approach restores the uniqueness by the fractional combination of capabilities listed. Full article

Prior research indicates that just 4.5 percent of mainland China’s higher educational institution leaders are female. This article extends theory and research by drawing attention to identity and Discourse as an important, yet under-researched, aspect of the problem of women’s underrepresentation in higher education leadership. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with nine female academics in Chinese universities and informed by discursive approaches to identity and constructionist views, we analyze how women construct multiple identities, the interplay of identities, and the influence of broader societal Discourses of gender and leadership. The findings highlight the interplay between competing multiple identities, and illustrate how the women’s identities are shaped and constrained by dominant historical and cultural Discourses in Chinese society, which results in identity regulation (Alvesson and Billing 2009), notably identity positioning that is congruent with social norms and conventions. A key finding is that the female academics reject the leader identity. This is true for those in middle management positions, as well as women in early career stages, who might otherwise aspire to leadership. Implications for the leadership pipeline in China’s universities is discussed and recommendations are made for future research directions. Full article