A review of the literature on organizational rankings across management, sociology, education, and law reveals three perspectives on these complex evaluations-rankings are seen as a form of information intermediation, as comparative orderings, or as a means for surveillance and control. The information intermediation perspective views rankings as information products that address information asymmetries between the ranked organizations and their stakeholders; the comparative orderings perspective views them as representations of organizational status and reputation; and the surveillance and control perspective emphasizes their disciplining power that subjects ranked organizations to political and economic interests. For each perspective, we identify core contributions as well as additional questions that extend the current body of research. We also identify a new perspective-rankings entrepreneurship-which has been overlooked to date but presents significant opportunities to extend our understanding of the production and consumption of rankings.
Shared leadership in teams is believed to be beneficial for team effectiveness. Yet recent empirical evidence shows that it may not always bring positive effects. On the one hand, the team leadership literature suggests that shared leadership allows for frequent interactions among members, improving intrateam harmony and reducing conflicts. On the other hand, the team power literature suggests that frequent influence interactions among multiple leaders can form an arena in which members fight over their power turfs, thereby triggering conflict. Drawing on dominance complementarity theory, we suggest that team power base diversity-the variety in power bases among team members from which they derive their informal influence-is an important contingency that moderates the impact of shared leadership on relationship conflict to influence team performance. In a sample of 70 project-based teams, we find support for the proposition that at high levels of team power base diversity, shared leadership has a positive downstream effect on team performance through reduced team relationship conflict. We discuss the contributions to knowledge about shared leadership and highlight practical implications for temporary teams with no formally designated leaders.
Management of meaning, an activity central to mobilizing action both inside and outside organizations, has been studied in the analyses of organizational culture, identity, change, innovation, stakeholder management, and environmental enactment. This review of the conceptual and empirical work in these areas suggests that although meaning-making involves managing symbols, it is not concerned only with symbolic actions and their consequences. Meaning-making is central to the generation of substantive actions that affect organizations and their strategies in fundamental ways. Greater research attention to the importance of meaning management as a managerial and organizational capability, and the links between organizational cultures as systems of beliefs, and the societal culture as a toolkit, is recommended.
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