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Business process improvement is vital for organizations as business environments are becoming ever more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Process improvement methods help organizations sustain competitiveness. Many existing methods, however, do not fit emerging business environments as they entail initiatives with long implementation times, high investments and limited involvement of process participants. What is needed are agile process improvement approaches. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of digital nudging – a concept offering tools that lead individuals to better decisions – to improve business processes.

Using process deviance as theoretical lens, an online experiment with 473 participants is conducted. Within the experiment, business processes and digital nudges are implemented to examine whether digital nudging can mitigate the weaknesses of existing process improvement methods.

Digital nudging can influence the decisions of process participants and entail positive process deviance that leads to process improvement opportunities. Further, the research gives a first hint on the effectiveness of different digital nudges and lays the foundation for future research.

Since exploring a completely new field of research and conducting the experiment in a synthetic environment, the paper serves as a first step toward the combination of digital nudging, business process improvements and positive process deviance.

The major achievement reported in this paper is the exploration of a new field of research. Thus, digital nudging shapes up as a promising foundation for agile process improvement, a discovery calling for future research at the intersection of digital nudging and business process management.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the implementation of digital interfaces into service encounters is transforming demands toward frontline service employees. In addition to having the potential to enhance employee–customer interactions, changes related to new technologies can be perceived as stressful by employees and might foster deviation from prescribed processes.

Using the transactional theory of stress and coping as a theoretical framework, this paper aims to develop and test a research model to investigate the influence of technology-induced role ambiguity on constructive and destructive process deviance. Data were collected via an online survey of 123 frontline service employees in restaurants that have online reservation systems in use.

The results confirm that employee resistance to change fosters role ambiguity, while self-efficacy reduces the latter. Technology-induced role ambiguity leads to both constructive and destructive process deviance.

By revealing the above relationships, this study contributes to research in services marketing by examining two types of employees’ deviance from customer-facing processes.

The purpose of this paper is to manifest a method that exploits process analytics to discover critical knowledge for a business process. This knowledge eventually answers to the question if process behavior can suggest which activities should be outsourced to get the performance improved.

The author linked waste sources to process behavioral patterns, and adopted the positive deviance paradigm to highlight compelling behaviors. Various analytic tools (generalized regression, clustering, etc.) were used to provide recommendations.

By outsourcing small parts of the process, significant process improvement is expected. Evidence-based process analytics can effectively support the relevant decisions.

The author had no access to the relevant policy makers (process owners).

The author proposed an operationalization of concepts that connects process behavior to waste sources. The author presented the use of positive deviance as a guide for waste elimination projects.

Writing in his seminal work Crime Control as Industry, Nils Christie (1993) outlines his vision of how western societies were facing increased unrest due to unequal wealth distribution and lack of access to properly paid work. After a sustained period of neo-liberalism and rationalisation throughout the western world, Christie's prediction of rising crime rates in relatively wealthy states has come to pass. However, the responses to this increase in crime have been varied from nation to nation. In Christie's case, the rise of the ‘crime control industry’ is a response that combines social control with a growth industry based on processing members of certain sections of society through a course of action that includes arrest, remand, trial and imprisonment at a time when the emphasis on rehabilitation appears to have diminished.

Current research suggests culture as a driving force of successful digital innovation (DI) that may not only built an organization's capability to digitally innovate but also reduce impeding factors within the organization. Only few empirical accounts support this hypothesis so far. Details of how culture supports DI are yet under-researched. This article aims to investigate the relationship between culture, organizational DI capabilities and DI barriers.

The authors address this issue by using survey data from German municipalities (n = 668), build a structural equation model (SEM) and analyze data using partial least squares SEM.

Results indicate that the business process management (BPM) culture dimensions continuous improvement and process innovation support DI capabilities. Barriers exist that partially mediate the impact of culture on capabilities.

The results of this study show that BPM culture is not a uniform construct and that its dimensions have both positive and negative impact on the building of organizational digitalization capabilities.

Drawing on the social information processing theory, this study aims to adopt a moderated mediation model to investigate the mediation role of cognitive crafting and the moderation role of regulatory focus in the relationship between perceived deviance tolerance and employee innovative behavior.

A questionnaire study with 181 employees from a state-owned communications technology company in China was conducted through a two-wave survey, with a one-month lagged design. The model is tested through confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis and PROCESS bootstrapping program in SPSS24.0 and AMOS22.0 software.

This study confirms that perceived deviance tolerance is positively related to innovative behavior, while cognitive crafting mediates the relationship between perceived deviance tolerance and innovative behavior. Furthermore, the promotion focus positively moderates the relationship between perceived deviance tolerance and cognitive crafting, and higher promotion focus enhances the mediating effect of cognitive crafting on the relationship between perceived deviance tolerance and innovative behavior. The prevention focus negatively moderates the relationship between perceived deviance tolerance and cognitive crafting, and higher prevention focus weakens the mediating effect of cognitive crafting on the relationship between perceived deviance tolerance and innovative behavior.

Organizations need to establish a tolerant and inclusive management system and create a harmonious working atmosphere to provide a platform basis to inspire the innovative behavior of employees. Also, regulatory focus variables are suggested to be considered in organizational human resource management processes (e.g. recruitment and training) to improve organizational person–job fit.

The primary contribution of this study is to confirm that perceived deviance tolerance has a positive impact on innovation behavior and thereby providing a new perspective to understand the impact effect of perceived deviance tolerance. Another contribution the study explores the mechanisms and boundary conditions of perceived deviance tolerance on innovative behavior fills the theoretical gap of perceived deviance tolerance.

This study aims to ascertain the impact of perceived knowledge sharing systems on destructive and constructive deviance through employee engagement. Also, this study explores the moderating role of perceived organizational support (POS).

Data were collected from 403 entry-level IT employees. Structural equation modeling and PROCESS macro by Preacher and Hayes were used to examine the proposed hypotheses.

Results specified a significant impact of perceived knowledge sharing systems on employee engagement, which in turn, exhibited a negative relationship with a destructive and positive relationship with constructive deviance, respectively. Results revealed that employee engagement significantly mediated the relationship between perceived knowledge sharing systems and destructive and constructive deviance. Concerning moderating role of POS, it was found that at a high level of POS, the effect of knowledge sharing systems on employee engagement was significant in a positive direction and reached its highest level. Finally, for moderated mediation, results only supported the indirect effects of knowledge sharing systems on destructive deviance through employee engagement at different levels of POS.

This study infers that IT organizations must implement measures to enhance employee engagement and POS by investing in embedded knowledge sharing systems. This will not only cater to the customized needs of employees but will also reduce destructive deviance and stimulate constructive deviance.

Given a few studies integrating workplace deviance, this is the first study that proposes an integrated process model to overcome destructive and stimulate constructive deviance among IT employees by assessing the role of knowledge sharing systems as an antecedent, employee engagement as a mediator and POS as a moderating variable.

A common charge against qualitative researchers in general and interactionist researchers in particular is that they produce descriptive, a-theoretical accounts of group life. We consider the problem of “analytic interruptus” in contemporary symbolic interactionism – that is, a failure to move beyond analyses of individual cases – and offer a potential to a solution via the pursuit of a generic social process (GSP) research agenda. A GSP approach involves developing, assessing, and revising concepts from the close scrutiny of empirical instances across diverse contexts. By considering criticisms of GSPs from feminist and postmodernist scholars, a more informed, qualified, and better-situated approach to the framework becomes possible. We argue that GSPs remain a quintessential analytical tool to explore subcultural realities and build formal theories of the social world.

The paper aims to explore an affirmative, discursive perspective for its potential to expand the current understanding of processes of institutional transformation.

First the notion of institutional transformation is discussed and the “discursive model of institutionalization” as developed by Phillips et al. is described. Then the concept of “positive textual deviance” is introduced and defined. The discursive model is read to explore possibilities for institutional transformation through instances of positive textual deviance.

The insertion of the concept of positive textual deviance into the discursive model of institutionalization reveals openings for transformation which are captured in propositions that address the agency of texts and their authors in the creation of desired change.

The paper is unique in its synthesis of three distinct theoretical perspectives – institutional, discursive, and affirmative – in the definition and application of positive textual deviance. Its affirmative, constructionist stance goes beyond a critical deconstruction of taken for granted practice by proposing a hopeful, emancipatory approach that enables institutional actors to become agents of change.

Intentional negative behaviors, under their various conceptualizations, have developed into a major area of study in the literature. Previous research has provided many interesting and valuable examinations of this phenomenon, examining a variety of factors such as individual differences, exogenous influences and affective and cognitive reactions to experienced events. Most of these approaches, however, have been limited by relatively static conceptualizations of intentional negative behaviors and their antecedents. After reviewing the previous literature, we offer an alternative, dynamic view of discrete episodes of said behaviors, and outline the ways in which this approach could help advance the field and address some of the limitations of previous research.