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Given the pace of industry change and the rapid diffusion of high reliability organization (HRO) approaches, lags and divergences have arisen between research and practice in healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to explore several of these theory-practice gaps and propose implications for research and practice.

Classic and cutting-edge HRO literature is applied to analyze two industry trends: delivery system integration, and the confluence of patient-as-consumer and patient-centered care.

Highly reliable integrated delivery systems will likely function very differently from classic HRO organizations. Both practitioners and researchers should address conditions such as how a system is bounded, how reliable the system should be and how interdependencies are handled. Additionally, systems should evaluate the added uncertainty and variability introduced by enhanced agency on the part of patients/families in decision making and in processes of care.

Dramatic changes in the sociotechnical environment are influencing the coupling and interactivity of system elements in healthcare. Researchers must address the maintenance of reliability across organizations and the migration of decision-making power toward patients and families.

As healthcare systems integrate, managers attempting to apply HRO principles must recognize how these systems present new and different reliability-related challenges and opportunities.

This paper provides a starting point for the advancement of research and practice in high-reliability healthcare by providing an in-depth exploration of the implications of two major industry trends.

High-reliability performance and high-hazard are intertwined in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) operations; these organizations are highly safe, highly hazardous and highly significant for the modern society, not only for the valuable resources they have, but also the indispensable services they provide. This research intend to understand how HROs could produce high quality performance despite their challenging and demanding contexts. The research followed an emic approach to develop an organizational framework that reflects the contribution of the seeming traits of the organizations to the operations safety based on the workers point of views about the safety of workstations.

This research adopted mixed methods of in-depth interviews and literature review to identify the structural characteristics of high-reliability organizations (HROs) embedded in the organizations studies and developed a theoretical based structural framework for HROs. Furthermore, a systemic literature review was adopted to find the evidence from the organizations literature for the identified characteristics from the interviews from the first stage. The setting for this study is six Chinese power stations, four stations in Hubei province central China and two stations in the southern China Guangdong province.

The organizational framework is a key determinant to achieve high-reliability performance; however, solely it cannot explain how HROs manage the risks of hazard events and operate safely in high-hazard environments. High-reliability performance is attributed to the interaction between two sets of determinants of safety and hazard. The findings of this research indicate that HROs systems would be described as reliable or hazardous depending on the tightly coupled setting, complexity, bureaucracy involvement and dynamicity within the systems from one hand, and safety orientation, failure intolerance, systemwide processing, the institutional setting and the employment of redundant systems on other hand.

The authors developed an organizational framework of organizing the safety work in HROs. The applied method of interviewing and literature review was not adopted in any other researches.

Organizations in need of strategic turnaround often seek charismatic leaders to lead change efforts. With the growing popularity of democratizing workplaces, team‐based approaches to strategic change are emerging. The literature on each of these change approaches is reviewed. Several research propositions are offered which suggest that strategic teams can be a better choice than charismatic leaders for turning around an organization. The authors also note the need for future research to compare the effectiveness of charismatic leaders with the effectiveness of strategic teams in planning and initiating strategic change.

Manufacturing companies increasingly have to deal with uncertainty and complexity without being sufficiently prepared for it. High-reliability organizations (HROs) successfully deal with dynamic and unknown situations. The authors ask the question whether learning concepts of HROs can be a role model for manufacturing companies and if their learning principles can be successfully applied there. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors’ research is based on high-reliability theory and former qualitative empirical studies on learning and development of mission-based HRO. The authors compare their learning practice with learning and development demands of the own empirical cases studies of three manufacturing firms.

Learning concepts in the manufacturing firms are disconnected from their practical demands. In HRO in contrast, learning and development follows a distinct choreography, with a focus on collective reflection. Manufacturing firms can learn from HROs about learning principles especially with respect to collective reflection-on-action in order to develop situational awareness. However, the HROs’ learning should not be seen as a strict role model as their work organization differs significantly from that of manufacturing firms.

The research is based on in-depth case analyses (e.g. interviews and observation). The outcomes are case specific and focus on manufacturing firms. Hence, only patterns or principles can be generalized. To gain a more complete picture, the authors suggest further case analyses in different industries.

Manufacturing firms can benefit from learning principles of HROs, like combining formal and informal learning and collective reflection on practice.

The paper connects previous research on HRO with original empirical research on manufacturing firms. Through the matching of data, the authors contribute to the discussion on whether the concept of HROs can be seen as a role model for learning and development in manufacturing firms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that gender plays in choice of research methods.

The publication patterns of men and women in four prominent management journals over two decades were analyzed in three North American journals – Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science – and one European journal – Journal of Management Studies. The authors coded the research methodology– qualitative or non‐qualitative – and author gender for each article from 1986 through 2008, other than Organization Science which began in 1990. The authors also coded the stage of career for the journals whose author bios provided this level of detail and conducted chi‐square tests of the gender authorship between qualitative and non‐qualitative journals.

It was observed that women are over‐represented and men are under‐represented in published qualitative studies as compared to non‐qualitative authors. This trend remained steady across the study period. As well for each journal, this relationship was significant. Quantitative findings about trends in authorship of qualitative research were connected to three theoretical perspectives that help explain these findings – information processing theory, separate vs connected ways of knowing, and social identity theory.

Management scholars work in a profession that rarely speaks of itself in terms of gender. One may control for gender or explore gender implications in studies of organizational behavior, but gender is not spoken of as a factor that influences the tools used to study organizations. In this study, the authors use quantitative methods to address trends in gender and type of methodology in published papers across two decades and four academic journals.