The coordination of workarounds: Insights from responses to misfits between local realities and a mandated global enterprise system

Workarounds as generative mechanisms for bottom‐up process innovation—Insights from a multiple case study

“…Building on structuration theory and its foundational observations on the duality of social structure and human agency (Giddens, 1984;Schmitz et al, 2016), our results document how workarounds innovate coworkers' activities, organisational structures, and IT artefacts. This view implies that workarounds play an active role for restructuring an organisation, complementing earlier studies that focus on explaining how and why workarounds occur based on the structure of an organisation (Alter, 2014;Davison et al, 2019;Pollock, 2005;Zamani & Pouloudi, 2021). This duality implies that the diffusion of workarounds needs to be analysed regarding their antecedents and consequences, considering that workarounds interact with their environment in a dynamic process.…”

“…Although workarounds are commonplace in organisations (Li et al, 2017), the mechanisms of their diffusion are still under‐investigated and under‐theorised (Davison et al, 2019; Malaurent & Karanasios, 2019; Zamani & Pouloudi, 2021). The extant research focuses on exploring workarounds as user behaviour to remedy constraints that limit the effectiveness or efficiency of performing their day‐to‐day work (Alter, 2014; Davison et al, 2019; Pollock, 2005; Zamani & Pouloudi, 2021), but it is unclear what consequences they can have at an organisational level, beyond their initiators.…”

“…Workarounds are goal‐driven deviations from standard operating procedures that employees perform to resolve perceived constraints at work, cope with a perceived poor task‐technology fit (Goodhue & Thompson, 1995), and improve effectiveness (Davison & Ou, 2013) or productivity (Zamani & Pouloudi, 2021). Although workarounds are common in organisations (Davison et al, 2019), they are rarely acknowledged as drivers for bottom‐up innovation or managed as a way of improving processes (Alter, 2014; Laumer et al, 2017). Nevertheless, workarounds have also been much discussed in the context of technological change (Röder et al, 2016), where they are seen as a natural consequence of digitalization, with “new controls inspir[ing] new workarounds” (Pentland et al, 2020, p. 20).…”

“…Although workarounds are commonplace in organisations (Li et al, 2017), their diffusion and impact on organisational structures and IT artefacts are still under‐investigated and under‐theorised (Davison et al, 2019; Malaurent & Karanasios, 2019; Zamani & Pouloudi, 2021). Previous research stopped at identifying antecedents and types of workarounds, and elicited how and why employees work around perceived constraints on an individual level (Wolf & Beverungen, 2019).…”

“…On the negative side, they can diminish an organisation's ability to control and perform its operations effectively and efficiently, leading to a loss of control and compliance, inferior process quality, loss of revenue, fraud, or penalties (Alter, 2014). On the positive side, workarounds can be seen as a source of improvement, creativity, or innovation (Petrides et al, 2004;Röder et al, 2014), which organisations can use to adapt or innovate their operations (Davison et al, 2019). Indeed, even if such positive deviances in business processes actually constitute an improvement (Beerepoot & Van de Weerd, 2018;Röder et al, 2016), most organisations lack a structured approach to innovate their day-to-day processes through workarounds (Weinzierl et al, 2021).…”