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While the competencies required for global leaders' boundary-spanning have been significantly explored in literature, less attention has been paid to the processes involved in this work. This chapter examines global leaders' boundary-spanning actions, highlighting the need for leadership practices that enhance team cohesion and reinforce an organization's identity to global members. We introduce the organizational-theory concept of identity custodianship and demonstrate its use for understanding the social processes involved in global leaders' boundary-spanning.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of perceived external image and similarity in values, beliefs and interests with an organization's leaders and other members on organizational identification.

The paper presents results of a field survey research in two non‐work organizational contexts, a professional association, and a college business fraternity. Hypotheses were tested with ordinary least squares regression and mediation analyses.

Perceived external image and perceived similarity with the organization's leaders and other members influence organizational identification. Perceived similarity partially mediates the relationship between external image and identification.

The study implements a cross‐sectional design and relies on self‐reports. The results have important implications for organizational identification and related behaviors both in work and non‐work contexts.

The study presents implications for enhancing member identification with an organization, which is related to increased involvement and continued membership. A positive external image may increase the likelihood that organizational members internalize values, beliefs and interests held by the organization's leaders and other members.

The study is based on a model of identity orientation that differentiates across personal, relational, and collective orientations. It measures perceived similarity with social referents in values, beliefs and interests, and study traditionally overlooked non‐work contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence mechanism of job satisfaction and positive affect on knowledge sharing among project members in Chinese construction industry, and test the moderating role of organizational commitment between them in order to find a new approach from the perspective of psychology to improve the knowledge sharing performance within project management organizations in China constantly.

An empirical study was used based on confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical regression analysis with a sample of 540 project members from 80 project management organizations in China.

Research results showed that job satisfaction and positive affect of project members both have a significant positive impact on knowledge sharing; organizational commitment could moderate the influence of job satisfaction and positive affect on knowledge sharing among project members partially within the Chinese context.

A questionnaire study from China only represents the relationship and regular pattern within a shorter time interval in the Chinese context. It is necessary to continue to implement a longitudinal study in a relatively long period in future research.

Knowledge sharing among project members can be enhanced through improving job satisfaction and positive affect, and strengthening project members’ organizational commitment can amplify the influence effect of job satisfaction and positive affect on knowledge sharing.

This paper clarifies the direct influence mechanism of project members’ job satisfaction and positive affect on explicit knowledge sharing (EKS) and tacit knowledge sharing (TKS), and further tests the partial moderating effect of organizational commitment on the influence relationship of job satisfaction and positive affect on EKS and TKS.

The purpose of this paper is to address the following question: In times of permanent connectivity, what forms of freedom need to be considered to prevent permanent availability as an unintended consequence? By using the Hegelian perspective on freedom, the paper categorizes three forms of freedom to transfer them to a common, contemporary understanding of freedom relating it to freedom through human-to-human digital communication. The aim is to show that freedom is not only about independence and realizing choices but also about embedding and committing oneself.

This mainly conceptual paper derives implications based on the Hegelian theory. This is supplemented by an interdisciplinary approach, whereby categories of other philosophers, ethicists, economists and sociologists are applied. The analysis of the contemporary perspective on freedom is enriched by referencing empirical studies.

Digital communication offers new freedom such as working with fewer restrictions from time and space, especially for knowledge workers. It is theoretically possible to work 24 h per day from anywhere (independence), as well as to decide on the final location and timing of one’s work (realizing choices). When solely focusing on these – seemingly advantageous – forms of freedom in times of permanent connectivity, unintended consequences such as the expectation of permanent availability develop. The key message of the paper is that considering one’s temporal and social dependencies (embeddedness) is an indispensable part of actual freedom to avoid unintended consequences.

Organizations need to invest in moral discernment to understand unintended consequences, as well as to cope with them.

Applying the Hegelian theory on freedom based on digital communication to better understand social dynamics of digital communication is a largely unexplored avenue in the existing scientific literature. The decision to undertake this venture resulted from the identified necessity of understanding freedom better. It is often not clear what is meant by freedom through digital communication. Although freedom is a complex construct, it is often reduced to independence/having a choice and realizing choices. When solely focusing on independence and realizing choices, unintended consequences such as permanent availability often go unnoticed. It is exactly because of these issues that this paper endeavors to examine the (deep) meaning of the powerful, yet complex, term of freedom.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how legacy organizational identity and death relate to each other and, thereby, contribute to closing the gap in knowledge on organizational identity constructions in times of death.

The paper opted for an exploratory study relying on primary data from in-depth narrative interviews with 20 organizational members of a bank that went bankrupt. The primary data, as well as documents like websites, newspapers, magazines, booklets, minutes, and reports, were complemented by secondary interviews with other members of the financial industry.

The paper finds that members of a dead organization construct a bankruptcy narrative that is also a legacy organizational identity narrative including a legacy organizational identity transformation and several identities that have positive and negative aspects and are conflicting but integrated into a coherent narrative. Furthermore, the paper provides empirical insights on how members of a dead organization draw upon their legacy organizational identity to justify their (lack of) past interpretations and responses to an unfolding bankruptcy. Finally, it provides empirical evidence on ways that legacy organizational identity from a dead organization play a substantial role in a living organization.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability.

The paper holds insight that can help practitioners understand members of a dying organization – including the ways they come to form and perform in a new organizational context; an understanding that is a prerequisite for helping and supporting these members in coming to perform satisfyingly in the new organization.

This paper addresses an apparent gap in the literature on identity and death; exploring identity narratives in a bankrupted bank, the paper considers constructions of legacy organizational identities in times of disruptive death.

To understand how identification and commitment can be sustained among members of a development organization where high performance is of paramount importance and success has important human consequences. This study examined members' identification and commitment within a development organization patterned after the Grameen model. This organization is based on a set of values by which the members can work hard to overcome their situation caused by poverty.

Members of Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia (AIM) were interviewed to analyze the characteristics that make AIM special, to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of members' interactions, and to explore how members influence and control one another.

The approach used in the study yields interesting insights into members' identification and commitment in a human development organization; and how this identification and commitment are linked to the members' success as well as the organization's success.

The insights to organizational identification and commitment should assist the field of management development to sustain and improve identification and commitment towards the organization and towards other organizational members. Female organizational members can also achieve economic success when they are given an opportunity in their rural villages.

This study applies western theories in a non‐western environment. The findings contribute to the conceptual understanding of the subject. Areas for future research were also suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for conducting an organizational assessment/diagnosis.

The model provides practitioners with a method to identify the breakdown(s) in the organizational system that is motivating a significant number of individuals to manifest dysfunctional organizational behaviors.

When organizational systems are dysfunction, stress levels increase among employees. Following increased stress, individuals create a contagion group that, if not addressed, can interfere with achieving the organization's mission.

The information is readily applied to real‐world settings for those who are facing dysfunction within organizations and has repeated been successful.

This paper provides a perspective on consulting with dysfunctional organizations that combines the expertise of psychologist and business consultants. It provides information to those in the working in the field and academics seeking new models to test.

In this study, the authors unpack the micro-level processes of knowledge accumulation (experiential learning) and knowledge application (problem solving) to examine how task allocation structures influence organizational learning. The authors draw on untapped potential of the classical garbage can model (GCM), and extend it to analyze how restrictions on project participation influence differentiation and integration of organizational members’ knowledge and consequently organizational efficiency in solving the diverse, changing problems from an uncertain task environment. To isolate the effects of problem or knowledge diversity and experiential learning, the authors designed three simulation experiments to identify the most efficient task allocation structure in conditions of (1) knowledge homogeneity, (2) knowledge heterogeneity, and (3) experiential learning. The authors find that free project participation is superior when the members’ knowledge and the problems they solve are homogenous. When problems and knowledge are heterogeneous, the design requirement is on matching specialists to problem types. Finally, the authors found that experiential learning creates a dynamic problem where the double duty of adapting the members’ specialization and matching the specialists to problem types is best solved by a hierarchic structure (if problems are challenging). Underlying the efficiency of the hierarchical structure is an adaptive role of specialized members in organizational learning and problem solving: their narrow but deep knowledge helps the organization to adapt the knowledge of its members while efficiently dealing with the problems at hand. This happens because highly specialized members reduce the necessary scope of knowledge and learning for other members during a certain period of time. And this makes it easier for the generalists and for the organization as a whole, to adapt to unforeseen shifts in knowledge demand because they need to learn less. From this nuanced perspective, differentiation and integration may have a complementary, rather than contradictory, relation under environmental uncertainty and problem diversity.

Following Bakhtin, organizational discourse scholars have examined ways in which organizational actors draw on and negotiate historical texts, weave them with contemporary ones, and transform them into future discourses. This paper examines how this practice occurs discursively as members in a high‐tech corporation conduct an organizational change.

This paper interprets discourse excerpts from meetings of a project team in the western US. Through participant‐observation and discourse analytic methods, the data gathered consists of field notes, over 33 hours' worth of team meeting conversation and five hours of interview data.

Through the use of represented voice, organizational members work out how an action or practice has sounded in the past as spoken by another member, and they articulate how proposed organizational changes might sound in the future. By making these inferences, members are able to discursively translate between a single situated utterance and organizational practices.

The analysis suggests that organizational change occurs when people temporarily stabilize the organization through the voicing of current practices (as references to what “usually happens” via what is “usually said”) and new practices (as references to what might be said in the future). It is when these practices are solidified and made real through these translations between identity, voice, and organizational practices that members are able to draw comparisons and transformations between “past” and “future” language, and thereby experience and achieve organizational change.

The paper furthers our knowledge of how organizational members discursively negotiate meanings during the process of organizational change through a specific discourse pattern.

As organizations move toward organizational learning the responsibilities of members change. Organizational members, themselves, should be giving consideration to what these new responsibilities should be, rather than leaving this task to management. Six possible responsibilities are suggested here to begin such a discussion. These responsibilities call on organizational members to accept greater responsibility for the generation and sharing of knowledge, but equally important is determining the organization’s purpose and sharing in its governance.