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This paper uses a complex adaptive systems view to examine two different organizational responses to turbulent, complex environments. We examined the internal make‐up of eight organizations that saw their environment the same way – as rapidly changing, complex and requiring aggressive change strategies. Half of these organizations chose a complexity absorption response to environmental turbulence, and half chose a complexity reduction response to environmental turbulence and complexity. The organizations pursuing a complexity absorption response outperformed those organizations with complexity reduction responses.

To describe the fraudulent activity of investment manager Kirk S. Wright and to discuss its implications for investors and professional associations.

Describes how Mr Wright established and built his fund business, how he solicited investors, how he falsified financial reporting to investors, how investors discovered his fraud and filed lawsuits, how the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took disciplinary action, and how National Football League (NFL) players unsuccessfully sued the NFL and its players’ union for recommending Mr Wright’s firm. Draws lessons from the story for investors and associations.

Since hedge funds are not as strictly regulated as other investment vehicles, investors need to take extra steps to not fall prey to unscrupulous fund managers.

Detailed, informative case study.

This paper aims to hypothesize that modern health systems are transforming towards what has been called a health ecosystem in complexity‐based health care literature. It has been argued that complexity arises from the interconnectedness, which in this paper is equated with knowledge flows between actors. The paper seeks to discuss the possible implications of a health ecosystem approach to health system management.

The paper is conceptual in nature but the transition towards a health ecosystem is illustrated with an example of a regional health care system in Finland. The case description and related analysis presented are based on qualitative data gathered by interviewing leading office‐holders, by process modeling and by observing management group meetings.

Conceptually, a health ecosystem seems to have potential for the system‐level analysis of the health care system. The discussion concludes that management of knowledge flows should be a strategic management function for individual health organizations as well as for the wider health system.

This study focuses on a Finnish health care system. The operations and structures of health care services and systems vary in different areas and countries.

The practical illustration of the health ecosystem provides a reminder that health care systems are dynamic and largely based on interaction between different actors. The approach provides new strategic insights for the development of health care systems by concentrating on interrelationships and knowledge flows.

The literature has suggested that the ecosystem metaphor offers useful insights for the development of health care systems. Nevertheless, this approach has not been thoroughly studied so far. This paper makes a contribution by presenting a practical illustration of the framework and in light of this discusses the possible implications for health care management.

The aim is to investigate the state of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory in the organizational theory literature and to provide a map for future studies of CAS theory.

Abstracts were searched via electronic database and a range of recently published (1996‐2004) books and articles were identified that contained a relatively concise description of CAS. Content analysis is used to deconstruct the CAS descriptions into “component concepts.” Those concepts are analyzed from multiple viewpoints.

There is no single, shared, sense of CAS theory. Differing understandings of CAS theory are identified based on “expert version” and “most popularly identified concepts.” Also, differences and similarities are identified between an “academic” version of CAS and a version developed by those who are influenced by both academic learning and practical experience.

Study is limited to concise definitions of CAS, so could be improved by including more lengthy conversations. Additionally, study is limited to organizational theory, so may be less applicable in other disciplines.

When working within a CAS framework, academics should specify their CAS perspective to improve clarity of their work. When using a CAS framework to study organizations, researchers should include a comprehensive suite of concepts. Though not described in depth, no effective application of CAS for organizational change were found.

For those who study CAS theory and theory of theory, this paper provides an important benchmark by identifying a bifurcation in the evolution of CAS theory.

Despite increasing interest in team performance, particularly in team-based work environment, the literature is underdeveloped in explaining the mechanisms that lead to team performance. The purpose of this paper, a team-level research, is to advance the understanding of one of the mechanisms that explains how participative climate relates to team performance by studying the roles of team job crafting and leader job crafting in the process.

A moderated mediation model of team performance is tested through causal mediation analysis of the R mediation package using multi-sourced data collected from 250 team members working in 58 teams in the software development industry (about participative climate and team job crafting) and from their respective 58 team leaders (about leader job crafting and team performance) through online survey questionnaires.

The results indicate that teams with the perception of a higher level of participative climate are more likely to engage in team job crafting, which, in turn, leads to team performance. However, the data do not support the hypothesized moderating effect of the leader's job crafting.

The findings offer implications for practitioners in designing policies that improve team job performance by better understanding one of the mechanisms through which team performance is improved. The study would potentially guide practitioners on the importance of developing a participating climate in job crafting and team performance.

This study not only contributes to the job crafting literature by introducing participative climate as one of the important antecedents to team job crafting, but also enriches the literature on team effectiveness by explaining and empirically demonstrating the role of team job crafting in the link between participative climate and team performance. To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first one to conceptualize the role of leaders' job crafting in participative climate, team job crafting, and team performance relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the problem of reconfiguring epistemic boundaries and the authority relationships that these boundaries represent in corporate R&D. The authors focus the analysis on the mediation of this reconfiguration by project management tools, specifically the development plan and its subsidiary roadmaps and timelines.

The authors analyze discourse data from an ethnographic study to show in situ the communication about and through project management tools in collaborative project development. The concepts of organizational map and mapping from the perspective of the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) frame the close-up analysis of this communication.

The analysis reveals how the plan and its subsidiary texts participate in the negotiation and legitimation of epistemic ownership and authority for a collaborative strategy to be implemented. The authors illustrate the material agency of these texts in the objectification and prioritization of strategic choices in this implementation.

To conclude, the authors discuss the significance of exploring the mapping function of supposedly mundane representational tools used in project management.

The originality of this study comes from applying the organizational map concept to demonstrate the politically charged materiality of project management tools in the discursive establishment of authority and accomplishment of corporate strategy.

This study aims to explore how leadership, management practices and organisational cultures have changed in low and high-performing mental health (MH) providers between 2015 and 2020 in the English National Health Service.

The authors used a qualitative case study design comprising a purposeful sample of two low-performing and two high-performing MH providers, based on semi-structured interviews with 60 key informants (mostly internal to the organisation with some external informants from local Clinical Commissioning Groups).

The authors found major differences regarding leadership, management and organisational culture between low and high performing MH providers in 2015/2016, and that the differences had diminished considerably by 2019/20. In 2015/16, low performing providers were characterised by a “top-down” style of leadership, centralised decision-making and “blame cultures”. In contrast, the high performing providers were characterised as having more distributed, collaborative and inclusive styles of leadership/management, with open and supportive cultures. As the low performing providers changed and adapted their styles of leadership and management and organisational culture over the five-year period, they more closely resembled those of the high performing trusts.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the relationship between changing organisational factors and the performance of MH care providers. It provides evidence that it is possible for radical changes in leadership, management and organisational culture to be enacted over a relatively short period of time and that such changes may help low performing providers to turnaround their underperformance.

The purpose of the paper was to outline a generic framework for the business model and illuminate its linkages to managerial cognition.

The paper reviewed the focal literature focusing on the actions and evolution of a firm and built a synthesis that describes the different components of a business model.

The main finding was that a business model is essentially both a cognitive phenomenon as well as being built on the material aspects of a firm.

The paper proposes that the business model can be scrutinized in future studies, especially from the viewpoints of cognition, thus creating new avenues for intra‐firm evolutionary studies.

The paper found several implications for practising managers. First, the concept itself creates possibilities for self‐analysis and scenario building. Second, the understanding that a business model is systemic helps managers to evaluate their actions vis‐à‐vis the evolutionary path of the business model. Third, the outlined business model is useful in executive education as it creates a cognitive map of the various aspects of business activities.

The paper offers new insights into the functions and evolution of firms and will be of interest to both researchers and practising managers.