Performance and Productivity
Expediency in Paperwork: Organizational Morality and the Promise of the Future
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Syeda Asia
This paper explores the role of the paperwork in decision-making processes for organizational collaborations. It looks at business proposals, agreements, concept notes, and profiles as narratives that embark upon a promise of the future. Organizational morality is understood in the amalgamation of what is "eminently practical" and "exceptionally personal." The paperwork enables frames for rules of engagement between parties. It allows negotiators to weave narratives based on fragmented parts of their personal and organizational stories. This study attempts to unravel the processes that consultants use to mediate tensions, disagreements, conflicts, possibilities, and opportunities in generating paperwork. What goes missing? Are there details that are deliberately made discreet? How do we understand the promise of the future based on current practices, projections, and valuations? This study builds on insights from extensive fieldwork in education and healthcare organizations. It brings out key processes over engagement in paperwork in landmark deals. It explores how this engagement with paperwork enables different choices made during adversity, growth, successes, and failures within organizations. The research considers the importance and neglect of paperwork in decisions that reveal vision, approaches, values, and focus of organizational leaders. It questions the "reasonableness" of such decisions that rely upon a taken-for-granted grasp of the professional activity. It seeks to problematize the idea of "expediency" and lays out territories that represent personal narratives in organizational working.
Conscious Culture: Raising Consciousness within Organisations and Other Ecosystems as the Pathway for Outstanding Performance
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter Leong, Mark Vandeneijnde, Annelieke Verkerk, Sujith Ravindran
Culture is now acknowledged as a key strategic business driver. But there is a lack of systematic ways to address the deep experience and multiple dimensions of people and yet this is at the heart of impactful culture transformation initiatives. Higher impact culture transformation must acknowledge the whole (i.e. all three levels) of the "culture structure" (reference - Edgar Schein’s work). In this paper, we outline how the Human Potential (HP) assessment tool and methodology can be a conduit to address and access all levels of the culture structure, and particularly the “invisible” bottom (or deepest) level where the source of deep human values, action logics and maturity in consciousness lies. It is our contention that only by raising the individual and collective consciousness can we create that "space" where sustained breakthroughs in human performance and results can truly take place. Consciousness is (we say) is the new change lever for profound culture transformation. The HP assessment tool provides robust and compelling data and analytics on human dimensions that give culture change leaders and practitioners confidence and greater visibility to back up the impact of culture change. We then provide a six step “road map” or pathway that gives culture change leaders a practical way to make sense of how to tap into the deeper parts of culture that really matters for impactful culture change investments. Conscious culture transformation advances and elevates human performance beyond current limits of value creation to new levels towards the greater and higher good of all.
Qualitative Synthesis of Indoctrination and Socialization within Occupational Cultures: Implications for an Organization’s Performance Improvement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Catherine M. Cole
Existent research supports a link between occupational culture and member behavior, cognitions, perceptions, and performance. Research suggests occupational culture may have a greater influence on behavior and performance than organizational culture. Research further acknowledges the importance of socialization within occupational cultures. However, research is without substantive exploration of occupational culture indoctrination and socialization methods and occurrences. This paper discusses the preliminary results of a study aimed to integrate qualitative occupational culture research findings to explore and conceptualize member indoctrination and socialization within occupational cultures. Within the interpretive framework of pragmatism, the study applies qualitative metasummary and metasynthesis techniques to meet the following objectives: Describe occupational culture indoctrination methods; Describe occupational culture socialization methods; Explore the occurrences of member indoctrination and socialization into occupational cultures; and Explore the environment of member indoctrination and socialization within occupational cultures. The study’s practice contributions include performance improvement practitioners gaining a greater understanding of occupational culture influences on performance and the potential for proactive interventions in advance of or counter to occupational culture indoctrination and socialization. Furthermore, the study’s qualitative synthesis methodologies expand occupational culture to include practical applications of the results within evidence-based practice disciplines oriented towards organizational performance improvement.
Developing a Vigilant Global Project Team: Striking the Balance between Focus and Periphery
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Chiaki Yamada
In multinational organizations, multicultural teams operating in globally dispersed online environment has become prevalent. Factors such as advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), globalization of markets and global sourcing has led multinational corporations to adopt project management globally. With the potential size and complexity of a Global Project Team (GPT), it can be assumed that numerous interactions and communications take place among team members that require teamwork. When some form of teamwork takes place in a GPT, sharing of tacit or explicit knowledge occurs among team members, by interacting around a common goal. This teamwork is comprised of some shared cognition, which may lead to cognitive convergence. This cognitive convergence is indispensable for increased team performance and effective communication. Teamwork in global project environment has been studied in various literature, however, little attention seems to have been paid to the difference in the cognition mechanism of the team members in a GPT, even though the relationship between cognition and teamwork in general has been thoroughly investigated in the areas such as team cognition and mental model. Given the above situation, the presentation reviews the literature for conducting the above-titled research, consisting of three parts: a discussion on the definition of GPT, the six concepts that are associated with focus and periphery of cognition, and the research methods used in the major literature, to investigate how the difference of the cognition mechanism among team members can affect the performance of a GPT and provide guidance for better performance.
