Brief introduction of four papers about flexibility bottom up

Citation

Wu, Y., Xi, Y. and Liang, Q. (2011), "Brief introduction of four papers about flexibility bottom up", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 24 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2011.02324caa.001

Brief introduction of four papers about flexibility bottom up

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 24, Issue 3

In turbulent environments, firms are challenged to increase spans of attention for market and technological information. However, hierarchical bureaucracies are questioned by individuals and groups articulating new social values. Therefore, bottom-up flexibility should be built to promote adaptive organizational change. But how? This themed section tries to explore this question. The themed section contains four papers which are well suitable to the call for papers by exploring different aspects of bottom-up flexibility: top management team, leadership and bottom-up learning.

First, the paper “Top management team diversity and strategic change: the moderating effects of pay imparity and organization slack” offers an in-depth analysis of how team pay disparity and resource slack moderate the effects of TMT diversity on strategic change. The findings show that pay imparity negatively moderate the effects of TMT diversity and resource slack also has important moderating effects. Furthermore, the moderating effects of resource slack differ in firms with low and high team pay imparity. This research guides the firms to match the pay structure with resource condition to leverage the role of TMT diversity for organizational change.

Second, two papers investigate the role of leaders. The paper named as “Does transactional leadership count for team innovativeness? The moderating role of emotional labor and the mediating role of team efficacy”, investigates the relation between transactional leadership and team innovativeness by focusing on the moderating role of emotional labor and the mediating role of team efficacy. They find that transactional leadership is negatively associated with team innovativeness when emotional labor is high whereas, the association is positive when emotional labor is low. This finding offers managers ways in which to apply transactional leadership and emotional labor to foster innovation. The paper “Charismatic leadership and self-leadership: a relationship of substitution or supplementation in the contexts of internalization and identification” investigates the role of self-leadership and charismatic leadership. The findings show that self-leadership skills act as a supplement/enhancer of charismatic leadership behaviors, except for self-talk. This research argues that managers takes responsibility for explaining change failure and seeking employees’ feedback to prevent employees from developing negative self-talk.

Third, the paper “Bottom-up learning, organizational formalization, and ambidextrous innovation” combines the information processing view and organizational inertia view to explore how bottom-up learning affect exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation and if the effects are contingent on organizational formalization. This research provides a complete picture on how firms built exploitative and exploratory innovation through bottom-up learning aligned with appropriate organizational structure.

Overall, the four papers cover the views of all levels, such as top management teams, leaderships and also the learning from bottom employees. The findings drawn from these four papers provide a whole picture of bottom-up flexibility, extend our understanding and promote relevant theoretical research.

Yong Wu, Youmin Xi, Qiaozhuan LiangGuest Editors