Search results

This study investigated the interplay between business process management (BPM) and digitalization in organizations and developed principles for designing their interaction.

This study was explorative and used a questionnaire-based survey that involved experts in BPM and digitalization who were actively engaged in these two domains in their organizations to come up with the design principles. The survey and the design principles were based on Rosemann and vom Brocke's (2010) six core elements of BPM.

Digitalization was seen as influencing how BPM is practiced in organizations by strengthening organizations’ focus on BPM, and conversely, BPM was perceived as beneficial for digitalization and digitalization outcomes. In addition, based on Rosemann and vom Brocke’s six core elements of BPM, we proposed six principles for designing the interplay of BPM and digitalization in organizations.

Our empirical investigation was situated in a Norwegian context and included 104 respondents. While we have no reason to believe that our findings should not be valid and useful in other regions, this is a limitation in generalizing our findings, and a natural follow-up would be to investigate our research questions in other geographical areas. We are also aware of the potential response bias in our sample. Moreover, to outline the principles for designing the interactions of BPM and digitalization, we applied the six core elements of BPM by Rosemann and vom Brocke (2010) as our theoretical lens. We acknowledge that there are more issues related to the interplay of BPM and digitalization than we have dealt with in this study.

This study has several implications for organizations. First, managers may use our proposed design principles to decide how to integrate BPM and digitalization. Second, although this study showed that each discipline nurtures its own culture, building an organizational culture that combines values from each discipline can enable a process-oriented organization to innovate its operations and services with digital technology. Third, managers should align the responsibilities and tasks of process owners with the demands for the digitalization of business processes. Fourth, managers, when integrating BPM and digitalization, should take care not to impede the generative attributes of each discipline.

Processes and digital technologies play important roles in society at all levels. BPM seeks to understand how processes unfold and explores how new practices may better serve individuals, organizations and society (vom Brocke et al., 2021), while digitalization is concerned with how various kinds of modern digital technologies may trigger organizational and social changes (Markus and Rowe, 2023; Suri and Jack, 2016).

This study is one of the first studies to investigate the interplay between BPM and digitalization – how digitalization affects BPM practices in organizations and how BPM influences digitalization outcomes. In addition, this study offers novel principles for designing the interaction between BPM and digitalization.

The term strategic communication has become firmly established in recent years. The emergence of the term was associated with the hope of finding a more fitting description for overlapping communication processes, since existing approaches can hardly fulfill these expectations. To date, the research has been dominated by communication-focused and, in particular, organization-focused approaches that show little interest in the alternative perspective. An integrating perspective can overcome the wall that exists between the communication level and the organizational level.

The integrating communication and organizational theory framework is developed on the basis of Niklas Luhmann’s “Theory of Social Systems” (TSS), which can be attributed to the “Communication Constitutes Organization” (CCO) perspective. This perspective seems appropriate because its communication theory integrates the sender and addressee perspectives, and its extended organization theory can be used to describe in detail the organizational structures of strategic communication.

The communication theoretical framework states that one of the functions of strategic communication is to reduce complexity to a single follow-up option. From the sender’s perspective, strategic communication can be defined as an attempt to encourage acceptance of a follow-up option proposed out of self-interest. The organizational theory framework that both builds on this and is linked to it first shows the diversity of strategic organizational communications before explaining their formal and informal structures.

This paper is the first to offer a comprehensive framework that integrates concrete strategic communication activities as well as the (in)formal organizational structures that lead to their emergence. On the one hand, this enables a more differentiated description of all relevant aspects of communication theory (e.g. tonality, clarity vs. ambiguity and technical dissemination medium). On the other, the organizational theoretical framework offers a systematization that can be used to describe various formal and informal structures comparatively. Above all, this kind of inclusive, integrating framework is the prerequisite for research that relates the diverse concrete strategic communication activities to an organization’s formal and informal rules and thus understands them as (primarily) the result of organizational decisions.

This study aims to analyze how startups organize their purchasing activities to improve operative excellence and become attractive customers.

The authors use a two-phase exploratory approach with semistructured interviews and a World Café. In total, 20 startup purchasers and suppliers participated. It is an international study with participants from eight countries (Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, the UK and the USA).

The authors find that startups organize the purchasing function in five ways: partial outsourcing, transactional-oriented, strategic only, outsourced purchasing and full department. Each type has advantages and disadvantages regarding operative excellence. The authors identify type-specific antecedents to operative excellence: forecasting, payment habits, ordering process, contact accessibility and quick decision-making.

The value of this paper is that it offers entrepreneurs a framework to organize startup purchasing activities, including outsourcing options. Furthermore, it provides theoretical contributions that expand the topic of purchasing and supply organization and operative excellence to the startup context.

The value of this paper is that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first to explore purchasing organization and operative excellence in startups.

The authors propose the concept of “Autonomic Cycle for innovation processes,” which defines a set of tasks of data analysis, whose objective is to improve the innovation process in micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).

The authors design autonomic cycles where each data analysis task interacts with each other and has different roles: some of them must observe the innovation process, others must analyze and interpret what happens in it, and finally, others make decisions in order to improve the innovation process.

In this article, the authors identify three innovation sub-processes which can be applied to autonomic cycles, which allow interoperating the actors of innovation processes (data, people, things and services). These autonomic cycles define an innovation problem, specify innovation requirements, and finally, evaluate the results of the innovation process, respectively. Finally, the authors instance/apply the autonomic cycle of data analysis tasks to determine the innovation problem in the textile industry.

It is necessary to implement all autonomous cycles of data analysis tasks (ACODATs) in a real scenario to verify their functionalities. Also, it is important to determine the most important knowledge models required in the ACODAT for the definition of the innovation problem. Once determined this, it is necessary to define the relevant everything mining techniques required for their implementations, such as service and process mining tasks.

ACODAT for the definition of the innovation problem is essential in a process innovation because it allows the organization to identify opportunities for improvement.

The main contributions of this work are: For an innovation process is specified its ACODATs in order to manage it. A multidimensional data model for the management of an innovation process is defined, which stores the required information of the organization and of the context. The ACODAT for the definition of the innovation problem is detailed and instanced in the textile industry. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques required for the ACODAT for the innovation problem definition are specified, in order to obtain the knowledge models (prediction and diagnosis) for the management of the innovation process for MSMEs of the textile industry.

With the advent of transformational and digital technologies, companies are striving to integrate digital transformation strategy (DTS) into their business models to stay competitive. However, in many cases, the implementation of DTS fails because managers lack knowledge about the opportunities and challenges associated with this strategy.

First, a bibliometric analysis was conducted with data related to DTS from the Scopus database for the period 2011–2023 to identify scientific trends in the field of DTS. Subsequently, 2,363 documents were collected and analyzed using Vosviewer software. Finally, the opportunities and challenges within the field of DTS were identified as one of the latest trends through a meta-synthesis method.

The findings of this research highlight the current scientific trends in the field of DTS. Also, the challenges of implementing the DTS are lack of instructions and rules, financial weakness, lack of alignment, inappropriate organizational structure, lack of digital organizational culture, challenges related to employees, lack of a digital leader and cyber threats. In addition, DTS implementation opportunities can be divided into three groups: improving customer experience, improving business processes and strategic renewal and creation of new business models.

The present research introduces two key innovations. The first is to offer a summary of prior research in the field of DTS. The second is identifying the opportunities and challenges associated with adopting this strategy, which is one of the latest trends.

This paper aims to critically examine traditional approaches to paradoxes and propose a new approach and perspective that views “chiasmic” organizing as a intertwining combination of structure and processes that facilitate the handling of multiple interrelations for processing paradoxes and harness their creative potential in organizations.

Employing a cross-disciplinary approach, a literature review and a critical lens, along with conceptual work (typology), are used to identify problems and deficiencies in existing research on paradoxes. Specifically, it draws on Merleau-Ponty's process-oriented phenomenology and post-Cartesian ontology to gain a comprehensive understanding of post-dualistic forms of chiasmic organizing and its relationship with paradoxical phenomena.

The process-oriented phenomenology and post-Cartesian ontology used in this article offer valuable insights and a critical approach to comprehend post-dualistic forms of chiasmic organizing in relation to paradoxes. This understanding can help in tapping into the energizing and creative potential of paradoxes. The paper also highlights the significance of the “in(ter)-between” as a reversible principle in chiasmic organizing and proposes some implications.

Limitations and implications of this study are identified and discussed.

The paper offers practical implications for organizations in processing paradoxes.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a conceptual critique and proposing a novel understanding of chiasmic organizing as an intertwining structure and mediating processes by employing a process-oriented phenomenology and post-Cartesian ontology. It also offers innovative ways to approach paradoxes and tap into their creative potentials, which can bring about change in organizations.

Human resources analytics (HRA) can potentially create value and provide a competitive advantage; however, whether and how HRA creates this value has been sparsely explored in scholarly literature. Hence, the purpose of this study is to provide a process-oriented framework for value creation from HRA use by exploring the underlying mechanisms, complementary resources and outcomes.

The study used a qualitative research design as the research question was exploratory. A total of 26 in-depth expert interviews with different organizations were conducted. These interviews were transcribed and coded for emerging themes, which were placed in a temporal sequence of occurrence to derive a process understanding of value creation from HRA. Additionally, validation tests were conducted.

The thematic analysis using NVivo provided qualitative evidence of the value-creating potential of HRA. Further, it unraveled the process of value creation from HRA in the form of problem construction, insight generation, the buy-in of stakeholders and solution implementation. This process resulted in various human resource management (HRM) and organizational outcomes. The analysis also highlighted the significance of three complementary resources, namely data quality, analytical competency and business knowledge.

This study offers guidance for HR executives and business managers to assess the conditions under which HRA can add business value to organizations.

The paper is novel as this is among the first studies to provide evidence of value creation from HRA and identify the underlying mechanism, which has been highlighted as a gap in the literature. Based on resource-based theory and its complementarities perspective, the study makes a valuable contribution to the nascent HRA literature.

Emergent leadership is a relatively new phenomenon, suggesting that leaders emerge from within teams without having a formal leadership assigned role. While emergent leadership has much relevance in today's organizations transitioning from vertical to horizontal leadership, there is a paucity of research about the process of emergent leadership that enables team members to become influential within teams.

Using purposive sampling, we interview 40 individuals in nine agile teams working in five Information Technology firms.

We identify various traits, experiences, behaviors, skills, and abilities of emergent leaders. Broadly, we conclude that an emergent leader serves as a “detail-oriented structure” or a “big picture coordinator.” Based on the findings, we propose a leadership emergence process that details how team members gain status and emerge as leaders, as well as the factors that can cause them to lose that status and return to becoming a regular team member. Furthermore, we introduce a model that demonstrates how technical expertise and personality traits interact, influencing team dynamics and facilitating the emergence of leaders within a team.

We contribute to the literature on emergent leadership by conceptualizing lateral influence and a leadership emergence process. We also extend the agile leadership literature and address some calls for empirical studies to understand the leadership dynamics in agile teams. We also show some limitations of the existing approaches and offer some useful insights.

Challenged by the effects of organisational flexibility and high corporate real estate (CRE) costs, organisations increasingly seek flexibility and operational efficiency in their physical office layouts. This paper examines and compares how the existing organisational culture of organisations changed with the introduction of activity-based working (ABW) from the perspectives of organisations and their employees.

The research focused on large organisations that had introduced ABW during the period of 2012–2019 and their employees. Two surveys were implemented with the management of organisations and employees. In-depth interviews with the management were also undertaken. The research focused on three different industry sectors in Australia – financial, IT and public. The competing value framework was used to measure the dimensions of organisational culture.

Findings identify major finance, internal business, learning and growth and staff and client-oriented motives affecting organisations’ decisions to introduce ABW. Findings illustrate that the nature of workplace design has a considerable impact on organisations’ culture and can be used to leverage and change it. However, a noticeable discrepancy between the perceptions of the organisation and employees in the public and private sectors was identified, where public sector employees felt that standardised procedures still governed their actions even in ABW.

This research highlights that workplace designs directly influence the culture of organisations. It emphasises the importance of an in-depth examination of the behavioural and attitudinal characteristics of organisations and their employees to obtain a better understanding of how they perceive and interact in ABW layouts.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the dimensions and formation mechanisms of brand value on social media platforms within the prosumption logic based on the theory of value co-creation. By adopting a process-oriented mindset, this study deconstructs and applies the prosumption theory and the theory of value co-creation in the field of social media, thereby addressing the insufficiencies of previous research that focused primarily on the subject mindset. It offers reference ideas for social media brand managers to attract prosumers to engage in value co-creation.

The crawler technology and grounded theoretical method were adopted in this research paper.

Based on the logic of prosumption and the theory of value co-creation, the research finds that the brand value of social media platforms is composed of seven dimensions. The dimensions include brand recognition, brand perception quality, brand experience, brand value-in-use, brand relationship quality, brand loyalty and brand co-creation behavior. From the perspective of prosumption logic, the formation of brand value on social media platforms is a gradual accumulation process. This process involves prosumers participating in prosumption activities, progressing through several stages. Initially, it starts with “prosumption conditions”, which include brand recognition, brand perception quality and brand experience. It then moves to “prosumption processes,” characterized by brand value-in-use and brand relationship quality. Finally, it culminates in “prosumption outcomes,” represented by brand loyalty and brand co-creation behavior. From the perspective of value creation, the formation of brand value on social media platforms is a closed-loop process that includes “brand value identification and empowerment—brand value acquisition and transformation—brand value co-creation and relationship upgradation—brand value co-creation and stability—brand value feedback and iteration.”

The findings contribute to expanding prosumption and co-creation theory and enriching the prosumption logic frame. Meanwhile, it is conducive to encouraging prosumers to participate in the platform’s prosumption activities and jointly creating the brand value of the social media platform. This paper interprets prosumption through the lens of the value co-creation process.