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Organizing for Innovation, Summary
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Organizing for Innovation – Summary of the Research Papers andpre-recorded lectures
Brenda Giethoorn
06-09-2021
Week 1: Introduction
“Organizations are systems of coordinated actions among individuals and groups whose preferences,
information, interests or knowledge differ”. Organizations can be designed by adjusting design
elements, and the design influences performance and how well organizations function. How does the
design influences innovation outcomes? The answer depends on three factors:
- The innovation outcomes. Where do we care about?
- Types of innovation. What kind of innovation is it?
- Other contingencies. For instance in what kind of environment does the innovation occur.
Key choices managers have to make
when organizing for innovation are
listed in the figure →
An organizations size, structure, and
culture all influence the way it innovates.
Managers have to make design choices
when organizing for innovation. The key
dimensions of structure are (Schilling,
2019):
- Size
- Centralization
- Formalization
- Standardization
- Mechanistic vs. Organic
- Tightly or Loosely Coupled
Tips for fostering an innovative culture:
1. Give people from all levels voice in the creative process.
2. Eliminate norms that require consensus.
3. Give people time to work on projects on their own.
4. Lower the price of failure
5. Cultivate a grand ambition for the organization.
Crossan, M. M., & Apaydin, M. 2010. A Multi-Dimensional Framework of Organizational
Innovation: A Systematic Review of the Literature. Journal of Management Studies, 47(6): 1154–
1191.
Innovation is widely regarded as a critical source of competitive advantage in an increasingly changing
environment. According to management scholars, innovation capability is the most important
determinant of firm performance.
We composed a comprehensive definition of innovation, which corresponds to the broad scope of our
research objective. Innovation is: production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value-
added novelty in economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement of products, services, and
markets; development of new methods of production; and establishment of new management systems. It
is both a process and an outcome.
,This definition captures several important aspects of innovation: it includes both internally conceived
and externally adopted innovation (‘production or adoption’); it highlights innovation as more than a
creative process, by including application (‘exploitation’); it emphasizes intended benefits (‘value-
added’) at one or more levels of analysis.
We then synthesized the revealed categories into a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework of
organizational innovation, consisting of the three sequential components:
- Innovation leadership.
- Innovation as a process, dimensions pertaining to innovation as a process should answer the
question ‘how’. Driver and source dimensions deal specifically with this question and both can be
either internal or external.
- Innovation as an outcome, dimensions pertaining to innovation as a outcome should answer the
question ‘what.
The dimensions are shown in
the multi-dimensional
framework of organizational
innovation →
The research was able to
provide descriptive
classification along only the
two most frequently used
dimensions: the level of
analysis and the type of
innovation.
Innovation Leadership is a
meta-construct consolidating
individual and group level
variables. We consolidate
leaders’ ability and motivation
to innovate into two groups of
factors: individual (CEO) and group (Top Management Team and Board Governance). The Innovation
Leadership construct is linked with organizational and contextual factors through Managerial Levers
that play direct and indirect roles in enabling innovation. Leaders implement deductive innovation
strategies through direct levers such as decisions and actions taken by leaders to deliver innovation.
Senior executives exercise indirect leadership to guide innovation champions at the middle management
level in their implementation of Business Processes that support innovation.
So far, the empirical studies have used either outcomes or performance as a dependent variable.
Including both of them in a model would reveal the role of outcomes as a mediator between innovation
determinants and firm performance.
A promising way of combining micro and macro levels of theorizing might be an application of a
recently emerged practice-based view (PBV), which could combine the individual, firm, contextual,
and process variables prevalent in the literature.
Based on Whittington (2006) theory of practice, three elements of innovation can be isolated:
- Practice, represents the ‘espoused theories’ that guide this activity, such as shared routines of
behaviour, norms, and procedures that can be altered according to the activity in which they are
used.
- Praxis, refers to actual activities or, ‘theories-in-use’ that constitute the fabric of innovation.
- Practitioners, be they leaders, middle managers, or outside agents such as consultants or customers
– are those who actually perform praxis, and what they actually do affects a company’s innovation.
,Week 2: Organizing Innovation in Teams
Diversity is usually divided in two categories:
- Visible differences, demographic differences in gender, ethnicity, nationality.
- Non visible, underlying differences. Informational differences, value differences, cohort
differences, and psychological differences.
Two main perspectives explain the effects of diversity:
- Social Categorization. Negative perspective with a focus on relationship aspects. Differences
between group members lead to categorizing and this decreases trust. Communication between the
in- and out-group can be aversely effected.
- Information Processing. Positive perspective with a focus on task aspects. Based on the notion that
difference helps with gaining different perspectives and opinions. This leads to more creative and
innovative group performance because it improves information sharing.
The relationship-conflict is a destructive form of conflict that harms team members in their ability to
come up with innovation and is associated with interpersonal tensions. It limits information processing
and cognitive functioning. This happens most with the Social Categorization perspective.
The disagreements about ideas and how work should be accomplished is called task-conflict. It is
associated with three beneficial outcomes: decision quality improves, increases group satisfaction
with decision, and enhanced information elaboration and it increases the variety of information
considered. This happens most with the Information Processing perspective.
General outcomes of diversity:
Positive effects → Cognitive consequences;
Negative effects → Affective consequences.
The first contingency is faultlines. Faultlines
divide members of a group along one or more
attributes, for example gender or ethnicity. The
second one is diversity climate. Diversity
climate is when employee behaviours and attitudes that are grounded in perceptions of the
organizational context related to women and minorities. The last contingency is crisis.
Chua, R., & Jin, M. (2020). Across the Great Divides: Gender Dynamics Influence How Intercultural
Conflict Helps or Hurts Creative Collaboration. Academy of Management Journal, 63(3), 903-934.
In this research, we examine how the gender of collaborating dyads influences the link between
intercultural conflict (task and relationship) and creative collaboration effectiveness.
We found that intercultural task conflict has a negative effect on creative collaboration in men
dyads but a positive effect on creative collaboration in women dyads. Conversely, intercultural
relationship conflict has a negative impact on creative collaboration in general, but this effect is
stronger for women dyads than for men dyads. These effects can be traced to how men versus women
dyads handled intercultural conflict. There is also evidence that information elaboration mediates the
effects of dyad gender and intercultural conflict on creative collaboration. These findings extend
current understanding of when and how intercultural collaborations can result in creativity benefits from
a gender and conflict management perspective.
On the one hand, constructive disagreement arising from cultural differences can engender creative
abrasion. On the other hand, when task disagreements or personal incompatibilities are not deftly
handled, valuable ideas and perspectives are not exchanged and the creativity potential of working
across cultures is not realized or may even be hurt.
, We take an information processing perspective and propose that the task and relationship conflicts
arising from intercultural collaboration can either foster or hinder the exchange, discussion, and
integration of diverse task-relevant information— “information elaboration”. Same-gender
interaction among women promotes communal and cooperative forms of conflict management
approaches whereas same-gender interaction among men promotes agentic and competitive forms
of conflict management approaches. Consequently, in woman–woman intercultural collaborations
(hereafter, “women dyads”), both parties are able to harness task conflict arising from cultural
differences for creative benefits through enhanced information elaboration. In man–man intercultural
collaborations (i.e., “men dyads”), however, both parties’ competitive approaches toward conflict
management render them less likely than women dyads to harness such task conflict for creativity
benefits.
Dyadic collaboration, compared to teamwork, brings many benefits of collaborative work without the
downsides of having to manage multiple relationships simultaneously. Diversity scholars have theorized
that diversity confers two key properties on workgroups—variety and separation. “Variety” refers to
the non-redundancy of ideas and perspectives that a diversity source brings. As discussed, cultural
diversity has the potential to increase creativity. “Separation” here refers to the tendency for a diversity
source such as culture to generate social categorization among group members.
Consistent with this view, research has found empirical evidences that gender differences in conflict
management extend to intercultural situations, the context of interest in our current research.
Task conflict, in terms of criticisms and dissenting opinions, can potentially help collaborating dyads
more fully engage with the problem at hand by forcing them to look at issues from different angles
and perspectives. We propose that, following the emergence of task conflict, the gender of a
collaborating dyad influences the extent to which the divergent perspectives and ideas stemming from
different cultures will be shared, discussed, and integrated. Specifically, the gender of both parties
is a critical yet often neglected factor that influences this information elaboration process. Women
dyads are more likely to handle intercultural task conflict collaboratively, compared to men dyads.
When both women in a dyad adopt this cooperative approach, they are likely to engage in enhanced
idea sharing. For men dyads, however, we expect the opposite effect.
Hypothesis 1. Dyad gender moderates the relationship between intercultural task conflict and creative
collaboration effectiveness such that, in men dyads, intercultural task conflict decreases creative
collaboration effectiveness, whereas, in women dyads, intercultural task conflict increases creative
collaboration effectiveness.
Hypothesis 2. Information elaboration mediates the interactive effects between dyad gender and
intercultural task conflict on creative collaboration effectiveness.
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