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This innovative volume provides a comprehensive overview of improvisation as a pervasive organizational process, essential in ever-changing business environments.Exploring theories of organizational action as well as contemporary challenges, it highlights improvisation's rich potential in theory building and practice. The value and relevance of improvisational capabilities and processes in organizations are more apparent than ever: the global pandemic has forced organizations to reinvent themselves and to adapt to dramatic change on a massive scale. This surge in improvised activity starkly illustrates how the capability to improvise is key to organizational resilience: organizations that are able to improvise effectively are better prepared to bounce back and even thrive.From the latest thinking on improvisation in organizations to future avenues for research, this volume demonstrates the rich potential for both theory building and practice and provides a valuable resource for researchers and advanced students in organizational strategy, entrepreneurship, product development, information systems, disaster management, and HRM.

The ideal business is productive, collaborative and innovative. But how can you bring these qualities into your organization? The solution is to build a resilient culture.This is a groundbreaking guide to lasting success through practical and original frameworks for building resilience at work. It draws upon the authors'experiences of working with leading organizations such as HSBC, Ikea and a leading F1 team to demonstrate the impact of resilient cultures.Featuring insights on resilient habits, team dynamics and workplace wellbeing, The Resilient Culture draws upon decades of corporate and academic expertise to offer the insights you need to reach new heights of business performance.

This international and thought-provoking volume addresses both theoretical and conceptual issues of resilience in modern organizations, looking at areas of concern and providing suggestions for future preventative measures.In recent years, organizations across the world have been subjected to major upheavals as several crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Economic Crisis, and the Migratory Crisis, have contributed to the changing landscape of work. Individuals, organizations, and societies have been forced to re-think, re-adjust, and re-align in the face of adversity. The “survivors” of such upheavals are those who come to grips with the new realities of our times and encompass resilience in its entirety. This timely collection assesses resilience on critically important variables, such as socio-economic status, occupational type, and gender differences, and highlights preventative measures that organizations and individuals should take to maximise wellbeing and adjustment in these everchanging and challenging times.Essential reading for students, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers, this volume sheds light on the multi-faceted ways to enhance the resilience paradigm and offers insights into implications for future research in the area.

If you've had enough of the constant turbulence that defines corporate life today, you're not alone. Learn why change is bad for people and for business, and discover how to create the stability that we all need to thrive. For decades, “disruption” and “change” have been seen as essential to business growth and success. In this provocative and incisive book, leadership expert Ashley Goodall argues that what has become a sacred dogma is both wrong and harmful. Whether it's a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is what Goodall calls “life in the blender”—a perpetual cycle of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease. The problem with change, Goodall argues, is that a culture where everything from people to processes to strategic priorities are constantly in flux exerts a psychological toll that undermines motivation, productivity, and performance. And yet so accustomed are we to constant churn that we have become numb to its very real consequences. Drawing on two decades spent leading HR organizations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall reveals why change is not the same as improvement, and how, by prioritizing team cohesion (instead of reshuffling teams at will), by using real words (rather than corporate-speak), by sharing secrets (not mission statements), by fixing only the things that are truly broken (instead of moving fast and breaking everything in sight, and more, leaders at every level can create the stability that people need to thrive.

Through the unique combination of evolutionary biology and management theory applied to business cases, and keeping in mind that organisations are fundamentally human systems, Goh and Mundra propose organisational evolvability as a new frame to guide enterprise transformation and change.Some of the topics covered in the book include: Understanding the differences between Complicated and Complex; Moving from Planned Change to Emergent Change; Applying principles of evolution to enterprise evolvability, and how to operationalise it using a Sense-Adapt-respond loop; Identifying and addressing Sensemaking gaps; including different approaches to scaling and repaying organisational debt; Measuring outcomes under conditions of complexity. This book proposes that transformation is not a one-and- done event but a continuous process of adapting to a dynamic and unpredictable environment. The goal of transformation should be to enhance organisational evolvability – the capacity of a system for adaptive evolution. This book encourages leaders and practitioners to view organisations as open and complex adaptive systems and provides frameworks that help them to manage transformations with adaptive grace.A perfect volume for managers, executives and leaders at companies of all sizes. It will also be of interest to instructors in executive education, as well as scholars in organisational studies and business management. This book is for anyone seeking to create a culture of adaptability and change.

Although ‘VUCA'is not a new term, the features of the world it describes, a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment, have never been more valid. The VUCA world has become the new reality for business, specifically for hospitality and tourism organizations that are more vulnerable than any other sector due to the historically-recognized turbulent environment in which they operate. In this book, the authors present unique factors that make hospitality and tourism organizations resilient in the VUCA world. With contacts at the center of their hospitality and tourism organizational resilience model, the organizational and psychological perspectives are also incorporated. This innovative volume tests the model of organizational resilience in hospitality and tourism organizations. The study identifies and validates organizational and individual factors that create a resilient organization in the hospitality and tourism sector. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and advanced students in the fields of organizational studies, strategic management, hospitality, and tourism management.

The book presents a new type of leadership focused on sustainable human development and organizational sustainability, which is based on the self-realization of the person of the leader, which means the satisfaction of their needs, according to the scale of Abraham Maslow, through integral human development in all aspects of life. Because the term'leader'appears to refer to anyone with the authority to confer a position with subordinates, the reality within organizations has shown that a leader must go further and demonstrate commitment, awareness, and concern for the common good. Which person has these characteristics? People who have had more opportunity to develop in different areas of their being, resulting in them being conceived as more educated. The qualities in a person are the basis of leadership. Education and practice are much more important than all hereditary and genetic codes. This volume explores the various ways of making explicit the dimensions of social, economic, and environmental sustainability through knowledge management that addresses the identification, collection, processing, circulation, use, exchange, and preservation of knowledge within operating systems and the context of organizations, considering issues that contribute to sustainability – human and organizational – where the leader is the main actor and the means is knowledge management.

An essential guide for managers and leaders on building resilient teams in turbulent times. As a result of global economic changes, new technologies, and increased competition, business environments are becoming increasingly turbulent and unpredictable, requiring new forms of resilient work teams. Due in part to the increasing complexity of business environments, more and more organizations worldwide are using teams of employees to respond to adversity. Whether it be new product development teams; business crisis response teams in companies; front line response teams such as fire, emergency medical technicians, or emergency room teams; research and development teams; or pharmaceutical development teams, employees can no longer rely on their own knowledge, skills, and abilities to get their work done. Rather, employees have to work collaboratively with one another and combine their expertise to achieve the synergy and breakthrough thinking that is necessary to be successful at completing complex tasks in today's dynamic environments. Today more than ever before, work teams must demonstrate resilience. In the face of volatile, complex, and ambiguous business environments, all teams inevitably suffer setbacks. Bradley L. Kirkman and Adam C. Stoverink provide in their new book the hands-on practical tips for building and leading resilient teams equipped to bounce back from those challenges. They highlight four team resources that are essential to any resilient team, including: team confidence, teamwork roadmaps, capacity to improvise, and psychological safety. These four resources are brought to life through compelling stories of teams that performed well in the face of adversity—and a few that didn't. They also provide leaders with step-by-step guidance for how to grow these resources in their own teams, whether they're in-person, remote, or hybrid. This book delivers all the tools necessary to build and lead resilient teams that are virtually unbreakable.

Across organisations and communities there are leaders who manage to get things done through their ability to understand how a network of individuals connect, who to talk to and how to bring people together in the right constellation of effort. These are'network leaders'.Network Leadership enables readers to identify and make the most of informal social and organisational networks in order to challenge the status quo effectively and facilitate greater engagement and productivity. Not only will the research in these chapters help you become a better leader and manager of your own team or department, it will also help make you a better network leader, effecting positive change across teams, and departmental and organisational boundaries. Leaders who facilitate action do so through four key practices: they understand the social systems in which they work; they have convening power, uncovering and connecting underlying movements and giving voice to something that is worth listening to; they lead beyond their formal authority; and they possess the power of restless persuasion and a capacity to thrive in complexity and crises.This book is invaluable reading for those who have mastered the basics of leadership but wish to take the next steps. It is particularly relevant to organisations and managers dealing with the geographic separation of business units, change, innovation, matrix management, project or portfolio management and other cross-departmental projects.

A capacity for learning, adapting, and changing is an important facet of organizational resilience. What is involved in generative organizational change? Is it an event, a process, or constantly ongoing? What makes organizational change'good'for the organization? Who has the power to decide what is'good'for the organization and its members? How is it decided? What if there is strong disagreement or conflict? How is that handled? What is the role of organizational members and leaders in these discussions? As these questions demonstrate, the triad of change, power and conflict are intimately linked. The purpose of this book is to explore the topics of change, power and conflict as they relate to the experiences of everyday organizational life. It will provide readers the opportunity to reflect critically on their own local experience and involvement in organizations and to glean actionable wisdom for meaningful engagement and impactful contributions to their organization(s) in the present and future.Conflict, Power, and Organizational Change will be of interest to students, researchers, academics and professional colleagues interested in the fields of business and organizational studies, especially those wanting to get acquainted with the concepts of change, power and conflict in contemporary organizational settings.

As technology continues to be a ubiquitous force that propels businesses to success, it is imperative that updated studies are continuously undertaken to ensure that the most efficient tools and techniques are being utilized. In the current business environment, organizations that can improve their agility and business intelligence are able to become much more resilient and viable competitors in the global economy. Achieving Organizational Agility, Intelligence, and Resilience Through Information Systems is a critical reference book that provides the latest empirical studies, conceptual research, and methodologies that enable organizations to enhance and improve their agility, competitiveness, and sustainability in order to position them for paramount success in today's economy. Covering topics that include knowledge management, human development, and sustainable development, this book is ideal for managers, executives, entrepreneurs, IT specialists and consultants, academicians, researchers, and students.

With organizational environments becoming increasingly unstable, uncertain and equivocal, the concept of resilience has become increasingly significant for management studies and practice. Resilience connotes organizational, team and individual capacities to absorb external shocks and to learn from them, while simultaneously preparing for and responding to external jolts. This book pinpoints the essential aspects of managerial and organizational resilience and offers insights that stimulate critical thinking. As the concept of resilience is essentially made up of contrasting forces, the volume presents some innovative synthetic interpretation that allows a deeper comprehension of the phenomenon and provides managers and policy makers with a solid basis for taking their decisions.This book provides an accessible yet rigorous systematization of individual resilience, team resilience and organizational resilience. Rich with real-life concept illustrations and containing practice-oriented tools, reflection questions and exercises, it shows how resilience can be cultivated across levels of organizational aggregation: individuals, teams, organizations and communities. The authors distinguish individual and collective resilience from related constructs and shed light on the boundaries of resilience and its potential implications for management practice. Elgar Introduction to Theories of Organizational Resilience will serve as a key resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students as well as academics and practitioners who are interested in deepening their understanding of resilience.

Increasingly, scholars view reliability—the ability to plan for and withstand disaster—as a social construction. However, there is a tendency to evoke this concept only in the face of catastrophes, such as the British Petroleum oil spill or the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. This book frames reliability as a fundamental issue in the study of organizations—one that can also improve day-to-day operations. Bringing together a diverse cast of contributors, it considers how we can account for the ability of some organizations to maintain high reliability and what we can learn from them. The chapters distinguish reliability from related lines of inquiry; take stock of relevant research from different disciplinary perspectives; highlight implications for practice; and identify directions, questions, and priorities for future research. The first of its kind in over twenty years, this volume delivers a dynamic base of shared knowledge and an integrative research agenda at a time when organizational reliability has never been so important.

The End of Assembly Line ManagementWe're in the midst of a revolution. Quantum leaps in technology are enabling organizations to observe and measure people's behavior in real time, communicate internally at extraordinary speed, and innovate continuously. These new, software-driven technologies are transforming the way companies interact with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders.This is no mere tech issue. The transformation requires a complete rethinking of the way we organize and manage work. And, as software becomes ever more integrated into every product and service, making this big shift is quickly becoming the key operational challenge for businesses of all kinds. We need a management model that doesn't merely account for, but actually embraces, continuous change. Yet the truth is, most organizations continue to rely on outmoded, industrial-era operational models. They structure their teams, manage their people, and evolve their organizational cultures the way they always have.Now, organizations are emerging, and thriving, based on their capacity to sense and respond instantly to customer and employee behaviors. In Sense and Respond, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, leading tech experts and founders of the global Lean UX movement, vividly show how these companies operate, highlighting the new mindset and skills needed to lead and manage them—and to continuously innovate within them.In illuminating and instructive business examples, you'll see organizations with distinctively new operating principles: shifting from managing outputs to what the authors call “outcome-focused management”; forming self-guided teams that can read and react to a fast-changing environment; creating a learning-all-the-time culture that can understand and respond to new customer behaviors and the data they generate; and finally, developing in everyone at the company the new universal skills of customer listening, assessment, and response.This engaging and practical book provides the crucial new operational and management model to help you and your organization win in a world of continuous change.

This book identifies and addresses the seven transformation journeys that are reshaping corporations today. It integrates and builds on the collective experience and learning of IMD's professors, who work directly with many organizations around the world and observe their transformation struggles at close range. By taking a holistic and interdisciplinary view of how organizations are transforming themselves, IMD's faculty accompany global executives - as individuals and as leaders of global corporations - on their transformation journeys. As a top-ranked business school, IMD is the expert in developing global leaders through high-impact executive education. The key to its success lies in its 100% focus on real-world executive development, Swiss excellence with a global perspective, and a flexible, customized and effective approach.