Managing Knowledge in Organizations by W. David Holford

Author:W. David Holford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030411565
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

At the organizational level, we are reminded of Weick’s (1979: 243) words: “managers construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many ‘objective’ features of their surroundings. When people act they unrandomize variables, insert vestiges of orderliness, and literally create their own constraints”. In other words, across the process of determining what is important in a situation we define and create our environment so as to produce our own set of opportunities and constraints. For example, Edwards et al. (2002) describes a case of how organizational decline can be enacted through self-fulfilling prophecies of decline—brought about unintentionally by the negative predictions of a manager. In a more general sense, the Golem effect within organizations is often explained in terms of management’s negative expectations producing behaviors that impair the performance of employees while employees, in turn, produce negative behaviors. On the other hand, the Pygmalion effect in organizations can be viewed as a positive reversal of the same phenomena—for example, to foster more creativity, productivity, employee engagement, and so on across management’s positive expectations and reinforcement (Livingston 2003).

To summarize, “enactment drives everything else in an organization. How enactment is done is what an organization will know” (Weick 2001: 187). Said otherwise, “a pattern of enactment establishes the foundation of organizational reality, and in turn has effects in shaping future enactments” (Smircich and Stubbard 1985: 724).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.