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The author analyzes why the transformation of customers from passive consumers to their new role as, in effect, the determining partners in corporate strategy has produced the need for a fundamental rethinking of how a corporation must be led and managed.”

The author links the modern day preeminence of the customer to the rise of globalization, the failures of hierarchical management, the omnipresence of the Internet, Agile methodology, continuous focused innovation and the advent of the ecosystem platform.

The author sees the emergence of the customer as the lodestar for guiding corporate value-chain decisions as a transformational feature of the 21st Century business landscape.”

By having an ecosystem platform, rather than an individual or coach seeing to the needs of the customer, Apple is able to achieve massive scale, with hundreds of thousands of developers devising every conceivable App to meet the infinitely variable needs of hundreds of millions of customers.”

The author’s insight is that this shift from vertical to horizontal management is a truly new core idea. It’s not just a new process or methodology, but a different ideology – a different way of viewing and acting in the world. And management will likely never be the same.

This paper illuminates the distinction between individual and organizational actors in business-to-business markets as well as the coexistence of formal and informal mechanisms of coordination in multinational corporations. The main questions addressed include the following. (1) What factors influence the occurrence of personal contacts of foreign subsidiary managers in industrial multinational corporations? (2) How such personal contacts enable coordination in industrial markets and within multinational firms? The theoretical context of the paper is based on: (1) the interaction approach to industrial markets, (2) the network approach to industrial markets, and (3) the process approach to multinational management. The unit of analysis is the foreign subsidiary manager as the focal actor of a contact network. The paper is empirically focused on Portuguese sales subsidiaries of Finnish multinational corporations, which are managed by either a parent country national (Finnish), a host country national (Portuguese) or a third country national. The paper suggests eight scenarios of individual dependence and uncertainty, which are determined by individual, organizational, and/or market factors. Such scenarios are, in turn, thought to require personal contacts with specific functions. The paper suggests eight interpersonal roles of foreign subsidiary managers, by which the functions of their personal contacts enable inter-firm coordination in industrial markets. In addition, the paper suggests eight propositions on how the functions of their personal contacts enable centralization, formalization, socialization and horizontal communication in multinational corporations.

Within hierarchical relationships, subordinates are expected to obey the existing order and to function well. Their deviance or organisational misbehaviour is usually regarded negatively and as a threat to the system. However, there seems to be a paradox: Subordinates' deviance and (occasional) misbehaviour does not threaten organisational hierarchy but often re-establishes or even strengthens hierarchical order even though it challenges it. In itself, this phenomenon is quite self-evident. What is less clear is when exactly subordinates' deviance might contribute to the (further) stabilisation, continuation and persistence of the hierarchical social order and when it might be indeed system threatening. For interrogating the specific conditions and consequences of subordinates' deviance within organisational settings, the concept of crossing of boundaries will be introduced and differentiated into weak, medium and strong crossings. The concept will then be applied to subordinates' deviance in the realms of social action, interests, identity and norms and values.

This study aims to investigate the impact of women’s representation at one hierarchical level on women’s representation above or below that level. No past research investigated these effects in the hospitality and tourism industries. The mixed results of research in other industries and across industries demand tests of curvilinearity and moderators.

Using annual equality reports, a panel data set for 2010–2019 was created for the hospitality and tourism industries. The sample of 581 organizations had up to 5,810 observations over the 10 years.

The analyses show the following effects of women’s representation: an inverted U-shape from management to non-management, a U-shape from non-management to management and a U-shape from management to the executive team, with more pronounced effect in small organizations.

To increase the number of female employees, organizations should invest their resources in hiring and retaining female managers until a gender balance is reached while managing any backlash from men. The results suggest that organizations with more than 40% of women non-management employees and 50% of women managers start `experiencing positive bottom-up dynamics. Thus, efforts need to be made to attract and retain a women’s pipeline at the non-management and management levels.

This study delivers pioneering evidence of the top-down and bottom-up phenomena in hospitality and tourism. It refines evidence of such effects found in past research conducted in other industries and across industries.

This chapter describes the change efforts and action research projects at a Dutch multinational which, over a period of 25 years, produced in one of its businesses a zigzag path toward collaborative leadership dynamics at the horizontal and vertical interfaces. The chapter also identifies the learning mechanisms that helped achieve this transformation. Changing the patterns at the vertical interfaces proved to be a most tricky, complex, and confusing operation. The data show that organizations need hierarchical interfaces between levels, but are hindered by the hierarchical leadership dynamics at these interfaces. The data furthermore show that competitive performance requires more than redesigning horizontal interfaces. A business can only respond with speed and flexibility to threats and opportunities in the external environment when the leadership dynamics at agility-critical vertical interfaces are also changed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore sensemaking of incidents by health care professionals through an analysis of the role of professional identity in narratives of incidents. Using insights from social identity theory, the authors argue that incidents may create a threat of professional identity, and that professionals make use of identity management strategies in response to this identity threat.

The paper draws on a qualitative analysis of incident narratives in 14 semi-structured interviews with physicians, nurses, and residents at a Dutch specialist hospital. The authors used an existing framework of identity management strategies to categorize the narratives.

The analysis yielded two main results. First, nurses and residents employed multiple types of identity management strategies simultaneously, which points to the possible benefit of combining different strategies. Second, physicians used the strategy of patronization of other professional groups, a specific form of downward comparison.

The authors discuss the implications of the findings in terms of the impact of identity management strategies on the perpetuation of hierarchical differences in health care.

The authors argue that efforts to manage incident handling may profit from considering social identity processes in sensemaking of incidents.

This is the first study that systematically explores how health care professionals use identity management strategies to maintain a positive professional identity in the face of incidents. This study contributes to research on interdisciplinary cooperation in health care.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how subsidiary managers gain attention from top executives at headquarters for their desired issue in order to initiate a bottom-up change. Specifically, it focuses on relationships among a change issue’s characteristics, environmental threats and top executives’ attention.

An empirical test of hypotheses by a hierarchical regression approach has been applied to analyse the data collected through a survey of 81 headquarters-subsidiary dyads in China.

There are three main findings, including first, the headquarters’ attention is positively related to the organizational benefits of an issue; second, there exist inverted U-shaped curves between an issue’s legitimacy or novelty and the headquarters’ attention; and third, the headquarters’ attention to an issue is also moderated by environmental threats.

The present study has noted that the headquarters’ attention to the issue varies not only according to the issue’s distinctive characteristics but also to their perception of environmental threats. It contributes to the advancement of organizational change theory by focusing on the empirical examination of an issue-selling process which is a key component part in a bottom-up change.

Ting‐Toomey's (1988) face‐negotiation theory of conflict predicts that choice of conflict style is closely associated with face‐negotiation needs, which vary across cultures. This study investigated this prediction in a workplace setting involving status and face‐concern with a sample of 163 Anglo‐Australian and 133 Chinese university students who were working full or part‐time. The association of type of communication (direct or cautious) according to type of face‐threat (self or other) and work status (subordinate, co‐worker or superior) with preferences for three conflict management styles (control, solution‐oriented, non‐confrontational) was examined for the two cultural groups. The results showed that: (1) as predicted by the individualist‐collectivist dimension, Anglo respondents rated assertive conflict styles higher and the non‐confrontational style lower than their Chinese counterparts; (2) overall, both Anglo and Chinese respondents preferred more direct communication strategies when self‐face was threatened compared with other‐face threat; (3) status moderated responses to self and other‐face threat for both Anglos and Chinese; (4) face‐threat was related to assertive and diplomatic conflict styles for Anglos and passive and solution‐oriented styles for Chinese. Support was shown for Ting‐Toomey's theory; however the results indicated that, in applied settings, simple predictions based on only cultural dichotomies might have reduced power due to workplace role perceptions having some influence. The findings were discussed in relation to areas of convergence and the two cultural groups; widening the definition of “face”; and providing a more flexible model of conflict management incorporating both Eastern and Western perspectives.