Search results

Presents a case study of a new approach to collective storytelling in companies using a highly participative approach in order to create believable and authentic corporate films. An Australian company in the process industry had undergone a large‐scale organizational change project; in order to disseminate the experiences and knowledge gained during the project a corporate film was produced that told the story of the change project. The story and dialogue have been developed by the employees involved in the change project, and shop‐floor workers were cast as the characters of the film. The resulting corporate film has been highly accepted by the employees, who considered it a true and believable representation of their collective experience. Therefore corporate films produced with high levels of employee involvement and participation can provide a powerful and efficient means to capture and disseminate organizational knowledge.

This paper introduces a contemporary model developed by a Sydney‐based consulting firm, ChangeTracking Research. The model was developed through an initial survey of 146 companies based in 27 countries.

The authors present a change development model which uses Hofstede's work as a foundation for understanding cross‐cultural differences in organizations from across the world and how that affects change management in these cultures. The model is informed by initial surveys of employees from 27 nationalities in 146 companies working in a variety of industries.

The paper presents a model that identifies six key drivers arising from different cultural dimensions that determine success in change management projects.

The model developed in this paper introduces new knowledge of the cross‐cultural dynamics in change management projects which would prove useful to change managers throughout the world.

The paper presents a unique model that presents six key drivers that determine the success of change management. A subset of clusters under each driver presents an in‐depth understanding of the critical issues to be recognized and managed in differing cultural contexts.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of how emotional dynamics play out in organizations, a better understanding of the underlying structure of emotions in the workplace is needed. This study set out to investigate the emotional reality of work teams that are confronted with organizational change and to create a feeling scale that can be used to analyze and evaluate the emotional experience of employees involved in and affected by the change. This chapter outlines the results of an iterative statistical analysis to determine the underlying structure of emotions and basic dimensions on which emotions can be categorized. Feeling scales ranging in length from 22 to 42 feeling items were answered by up to 26,900 respondents as part of employee surveys that were used to investigate the subjective perception of organizational change. Factor analysis and self-organizing maps (SOMs) analysis were used in order to cluster and differentiate the underlying basic categories of emotions. The results show that feelings are mainly differentiated as either positive or negative and that those two main factors consist of seven underlying categories, which are summarized as the emotion scales: “Passion,” “Drive,” “Curiosity,” “Defiance,” “Anger,” “Fear and Distress,” and “Damage.” The basic dimensions of the emotions were “hedonic tone” and “affective focus.”

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a proprietary survey instrument – “ChangeTracking Survey^®” – which measures employees' perceptions of organizational change and captures their experiences during the course of change management in their organizations.

The authors present an empirical study of employees involved in change management projects in 146 organizations situated in 27 countries across a variety of industries, nationalities and languages, using robust statistical analysis. Hofstede's work is used as a foundation for understanding cross‐cultural differences in organizations from across the world.

The paper finds significant differences in certain characteristics of change projects between different nationalities.

The findings present new and recent knowledge of the cross‐cultural dynamics in change management projects, which would prove useful to change managers throughout the world.

This research is recent and is extensive in its examination of the effects of national cultures on change management initiatives internationally.

The political nature of technology design and implementation is explicitly addressed in “human centred” projects to introduce technologies that support job enrichment, group autonomy and industrial democracy. Yet the political meaning of such projects does not simply manifest itself in pure form from the methods employed or the intentions of the humanistic actors but, rather, from the complex configuration of these and other factors present in the design and implementation context. Illustrates this theme in an analysis of a case study human centred project. Argues that an improved understanding of the configurational politics surrounding such projects is not only an important research area but is also of practical significance in improving humanistic and other interventions in innovation processes in modern organisations.

The chapters in this volume are drawn from the best contributions to the 2008 International Conference on Emotion and Organizational Life held in Fontainebleau, France. (This bi-annual conference has come to be known as the “Emonet” conference, after the listserv of members). In addition, these referee-selected conference papers were complemented by additional, invited chapters. This volume contains six chapters selected from conference contributions for their quality, interest, and appropriateness to the theme of this volume, as well as seven invited chapters. We again acknowledge in particular the assistance of the conference paper reviewers (see appendix). In the year of publication of this volume, the 2010 Emonet conference will be held in Montreal, Canada, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, and will be followed by Volumes 7 and 8 of Research on Emotions in Organizations. Readers interested in learning more about the conferences or the Emonet list should check the Emonet website http://www.emotionsnet.org.

Joanne Abbey

David Ahlstrom is a professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD in management and international business in 1996, after having spent several years in start-up firms in the data communications field. His research interests include management in Asia, entrepreneurship, and management and organizational history. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, and Asia Pacific Journal of Management. He also co-authored the textbook International management: Strategy and Culture in the Emerging World. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of International Business Studies and Journal of Small Business Management in addition to APJM. Professor Ahlstrom has guest edited two special issues of Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice. At APJM, he has also guest edited two special issues (turnaround in Asia in 2004 and Managing in Ethnic Chinese Communities, forthcoming in 2010), and served as a senior editor during 2007–2009. He became editor-in-chief of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management in 2010.