This paper describes and explains how balancing organizational structures can build traits for organizational resilience. Organizational resilience is a holistic and complex concept. In this paper, we move beyond focusing on sudden and disruptive events in favour of anticipating the unexpected in daily organizing. Organizational resilience is understood here as building traits of risk awareness, preference for cooperation, agility and improvisation and is analysed by means of a longitudinal qualitative case study. The paper contributes to the field by showing how balancing organizational structures can foster organizational resilience traits. We show that power distribution and normative control can create preparedness for unexpected events and foster action orientation at the same time as supporting organizational alignment.
Contemporary business society shows many examples of industrial customers that manage their smaller, dependent suppliers by using bureaucratic mechanisms. The restrictions these control processes put on the suppliers" freedom to act have not been recognized in most studies within the field. The purpose of this article is to provide an understanding of how bureaucratic mechanisms interrelate with social mechanisms in coordinating interorganizational processes where the customer has a dominating role in the market. The article is based on observations with complementary interviews of relationships between an industrial customer and two of its suppliers. Dominated suppliers in power-based business relations may see the role of bureaucratic mechanisms as primarily protecting the relationship. A strong argument for interorganizational coordination lies in the need for different capabilities to manage dissimilar activities. However, if the dominated actors prioritize protecting the relationship over striving for efficiency, the dominating organization will be alone in deciding on the agenda for interorganizational control. Social coordination mechanisms may to some extent create flexibility in rigid bureaucratic control mechanisms. However, although social mechanisms may have the potential to enable bureaucratic mechanisms to be shunned temporarily, they are less helpful in changing the agenda of bureaucratic control. Further research is suggested on how local concerns can be included in dominating actors" process of setting agendas for interorganizational control.
Performance measurement (PM) has become increasingly popular in the management of public sector organizations (PSOs). This is somewhat paradoxical considering that PM has been criticized for having dysfunctional consequences. Although there are reasons to believe that PM may have dysfunctional consequences, when they occur has not been clarified. The aim of this research is to conceptualize the dysfunctional consequences of PM in PSOs. Based on complementarity theory and contingency theory we conclude that dysfunctional consequences of PM are a matter of interactions between PM design and PM use, between control practices in the control system and between PM and context.
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