Organizational life cycle models: a design perspective

Designing for Resilience: How Dutch Maternity Care Collaborations Anticipate, Adapt, and Thrive during a Pandemic

The success factors and challenges of interorganizational collaboration have been widely studied from different disciplinary perspectives. However, the role of design in making such collaborations resilient has received little attention, although deliberately designing for resilience is likely to be vital to the success of any interorganizational collaboration. This study explores the resilience of interorganizational collaboration by means of a comparative case study of Dutch maternity care providers, which have been facing major challenges due to financial cutbacks, government-enforced collaborative structures, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings make two contributions to the literature. First, we further develop the construct of interorganizational resilience. Second, we shed light on how well-designed distributed decision-making enhances resilience, thereby making a first attempt at meeting the challenge of designing for interorganizational resilience.

A Paradox of Ethics: Why People in Good Organizations do Bad Things

This article takes a novel approach to explaining the causes of unethical behavior in organizations. Instead of explaining the unethical behavior of employees in terms of their bad organization, this article examines how a good organization can lead to employees' unethical behavior. The main idea is that the more ethical an organization becomes, the higher, in some respects, is the likelihood of unethical behavior. This is due to four threatening forces that become stronger when an organization becomes more ethical. These forces are the upward, downward, backward, and forward forces. Each of these forces is illustrated with two effects and each effect is explained by a specific theory. The effects are the effects of the gold digger, high-jump bar, retreating-cat, forbidden-fruit, cheese slicer, moving-spotlight, repeat-prescription, and keeping-up appearances. This paradox of ethics, when goodness breeds badness, opens new research directions.

Characterizing Organizational Lifecycle through Strategic and Structural Flexibility: Insights from MSMEs in Mexico

Today's lifespan of companies tends to be low in the so-called micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). Organizational life cycle (OLC) theory indicates that organizational aging is related, but not determined, by the firm chronological age or its size. Therefore, a firm's aging should be analyzed by other factors such as flexibility. The literature considers flexibility as an essential capability, a source of competitive advantage, and an enabler of long-term growth for MSMEs. However, little attention in emerging economies has been paid to examine the nuances of this concept in relation to the OLC in this type of companies. Additionally, studies tend to analyze flexibility as a general term, ignoring that it is a polymorphic concept. That is why there is a need to research the different categories of flexibility. Drawing on a quantitative approach conducting a factor analysis, a two-step cluster, and decision tree analysis to interrogate data from 257 MSMEs in Mexico, this study provides evidence of different dimensions of strategic and structural flexibility that help to characterize and predict the growth, maturity, and declining stages of MSMEs. Our results show that mature firms present more strategic and structural flexible characteristics than those involved in growth or decline stages. The flexible factors that help classify and predict an MSME in the maturity stage include open communication, decentralized decision making, and formalization. We provide a model with these results to illuminate unaddressed issues regarding the broad term of flexibility and its relationship to OLC.

Influence of organizational life cycle on performance management design in the software industry

Purpose

This work investigates the influence of the organizational life cycle (OLC) on the performance management system (PMS) design and the performance of projects in Brazilian industries of software development.

Design/methodology/approach

The study employed descriptive statistics and structural equations modeling on the data and information obtained from 115 Brazilian industries of software development with maturity in project management. Data collection was carried out through a survey applied to managers of the organizations mapped and certified by management maturity models Brazilian software process improvement (MPS-BR) or capability maturity model integration (CMMI).

Findings

Results revealed that OLC influences the PMS design dimensions (scope, aggregation and opportunity) and project performance. Regarding effects observed on the performance of projects, only the scope dimension's influence was validated by the analyses, and the other dimensions were not significant considering the investigated sample.

Originality/value

The paper shows evidence of how OLC can influence PMS design and project performance. The analyses can help managers to improve their actions in the PMS design, increasing confidence and generating more robust and sustainable results in the business model.