Alignment and Organizational Cohesion Flashcards
Ates et al. (2020)
Summary: Present a dark side to visionary leadership where misalignment between team manager and CEO harms team strategic consensus.
Major Contribution 1: ID managers as the bridge between c-suite strategy formulation and team-level strategy implementation. Alignment here is crucial to actualizing strategy that is formulated at the top level.
Major Contribution 2: Challenges view of visionary leadership as a purely positive idea. Looks at how this can actually be a hindrance when there is misalignment of goals between different organizational levels.
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological) measured strategic alignment using a Pearson correlation of strategic priority ratings between team managers and CEOs.
Battilana and Lee (2014)
Summary: Overview of the concept of “hyrbid organizing,” which authors define as “the activities, structures, processes, and meanings by which organizations make sense of and combine multiple organizational forms.”
Major Contribution 1: By their nature, the competing forms and identities of hybrid organizations create tensions that they need to manage – both in terms of internal operational tensions and external legitimacy tensions.
Major Contribution 2: “Integrated activities” are tactics employed by hybrid organizations that serve both of its goals at one time. (Ex: work reintegration programs provide labor/jobs, develop skills, but also produce a product to sell).
Major Contribution 3: Spaces of negotiation are needed for a constant and frequent dialogue about maintaining a balance between various and sometimes competing objectives of hybrids.
Berthon et al. (2023)
Summary: Explores the rise in virtue signaling and explores the short and long-term consequences of virtue signaling.
Major Contribution 1: Virtue signaling can be verbal, symbolic, or visceral/emotive. Can have benefits (increased reputation/group solidarity) and drawbacks (increased skepticism re: a true commitment, negative blowback).
Major Contribution 2: Propose 3 dimensions of [virtue] signaling: honesty, cost (investment), and meta-commitment (higher purpose).
Major Contribution 3: The primary argument of the paper is that virtue signaling “works” when it maintains all three of the aspects outlined above (it is genine, costly, and in service of a higher purpose)
Brown et al. (2022)
Summary: Critical discourse analysis of public statements released by academic organizations in the wake of George Floyd murder.
Major Contribution 1: Critical discourse analysis (CDA) = qualitative approach to addressing social problems by systematically analyzing language as a social practice. Uncovers explicit and implied ideologies in the contexts in which a discourse is situated.
Major Contribution 2: Institutional discourse distorted and minimized discussions of racism, racial violence, police brutality. Statements often released by powerful, white people framing racism as an extra-institutional problem.
Major Contribution 3: Lack of critical introspection, lack of support for BLM, perhaps from fear of backlash. Statements are merely symbolic and do not signal or raise confidence in legitimate change-oriented action.
Floyd and Wooldridge (1992)
Summary: Strategy literature – strategic consensus.
Major Contribution 1: strategic consensus = shared beliefs regarding organizational priorities, purpose, and direction
Major Contribution 2: condition under which actors at various levels of the organization – from executives, to middle managers, to employees, are aware of and believe in the direction of the organization. Alignment between awareness and beliefs between these two levels results in an organizational context where individuals at all levels are actively contributing to shared goals and priorities, without the push-and-pull of misaligned values or beliefs.
Major Contribution 3: Meta-analytic studies have found a positive relationship between strategic consensus and organizational performance and negative relationship when strategic consensus is broken.
Goldman and Zhang (2024)
Summary: Firms disclosing commitments to DEI in 10-K filings.
Major Contribution 1: DEI 10-K filings associated with higher employee ratings of DEI (glassdoor).
Major Contribution 2: DEI 10-K filings associated with higher employee productivity (sales/employees).
Major Contribution 3: DEI 10-K filings associated with higher market valuations among orgs that credibly communicate DEI commitments (and are not social washing).
Kellermans et al. (2011)
Summary: One contribution – positive association between strategic consensus and organizational performance.
Milgrom and Roberts (1995)
Summary: Complementarities. Economic perspective on alignment.
Major Contribution 1: Activities represent complementarities “if doing (more of) any one of them increase the returns to doing (more of) the others
Major Contribution 2: (e.g.) flexible production processes are complementary to a diversified set of products, whereas rigid processes are complementary to a focused/static product set.
Nadler and Tushman (1980)
Summary: Development of the congruence model. OB perspective on alignment.
Major Contribution 1: argues that in order to function effectively, organizations’ key performance components – tasks, people, structure, and culture– need to fit together in a logical and cohesive manner.
Major Contribution 2: views components as the intermediaries between inputs and outputs, and essential parts that “make or break” the translation of goals and commitments into practical accomplishments.
Major Contribution 3: explicitly identify periods of change as a context in which organizations may experience incongruence among their different components and a crucial period for organizations to restore or maintain alignment among their different parts.
Powell (1992)
Summary: Alignment as competitive advantage.
Major Contribution 1: Alignment is a response suited to an external environment where organizations align policies and practices to best function in a given context.
Major Contribution 2: High performance through alignment in response to contextual pressures provides a competitive advantage over peer organizations.
Major Contribution 3:
Spence (1973)
Summary: Foundation of signaling theory.
Major Contribution 1: Information asymmetry assumes that two actors within a given arena possess different levels of knowledge about relevant information, and that an actor wishes to communicate this information to the party currently lacking knowledge.
Major Contribution 2: Signaling is a way to communicate (outside of direct conversation) information that one party lacks and another wishes to acquire.
Major Contribution 3: Can be through communication, but also through structure (Meyer 1979).
Meyer (1979)
Summary: Structure as signaling.
Wilton et al. (2020)
Summary: Diversity dishonesty
Major Contribution 1: Diversity dishonesty = a false inflation by an organization about its actual commitment to diversity.
Major Contribution 2: Contributes to a lower sense of fit and perceived ability to authentically express oneself at work.
Major Contribution 3: Evidence-based cues (providing a glimpse into an org) were more powerful in predicting diversity dishonesty ratings than expressed cues (telling what an org’s stance on diversity is).
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