The expanding universe of social organizations

Citation

Magala, S.J. (2018), "The expanding universe of social organizations", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 250-251. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-01-2018-0034

The second issue of JOCM in 2018 comes after the first, guest edited special issue, and provides readers with a fair overview of a daily fare of organizational research community. Our studies of changes, transformations, shifts and twists and turns of organizations reach out to the other disciplines and our metaphors become bold and daring. Singularities and multiple realities become a commonplace. This year, we begin with the question about the gravitational, electromagnetic and other force fields shaping the universe, in which organizations and their constellations, alliances and networks expand and cluster as if they were stars, planets, meteorites and other crystallizations of random circumstances emerging between the black holes of antimatter and white dwarfs of obsolete matter. Three Chinese Authors, Jianhua Xiao, Liu Cao and Lufang Zhang consider the relative influence of organizational intelligence and organizational emotional chemistry upon processes, changes and performance. What matters more? Intelligence might be more influential in determining choices, but emotions might be much more critical in eliciting creative contributions. Zahid Yusaf and Abdul Maiid focus on the influence of organizational networks upon the strategic business performance of organizations, which enter such networks. Does their performance depend more on the organizational flexibility, entrepreneurial orientation (and other connected internal resources) or – which would mean that external positioning in networks matters more – on the ability to position organization in an influential network? David Rosenbaum, Elizabeth More and Peter Steane return to the newly relevant questions in the world of corporate take-overs and renegotiated clustering, namely to the question how planned a planned organizational change actually is. Two next papers make us aware that the most dynamically growing sub-stream of mainstream organizational research is devoted to the new Holy Grail of organizational change research community, namely to creativity, which is sometimes smuggled under the penname of innovativeness. Fu-sheng Tsai writes about knowledge heterogeneity, social capital and organizational innovation (please keep in mind, while reading his contribution, that social capital is increasingly criticized as an illegitimate extending of an economic concept into the sphere of relations, status and inequalities). Ashkan Khalili writes about creativity and innovation through LMX and personal initiative. Two next papers can be termed area studies and they take us to German males and Arab females. Ronald Busse and Ufuk Doganer tell us about the role of compliance in sustaining or hampering organizational change and back their arguments with qualitative evidence from German small- and middle-sized companies. Fauzia Jabeen, Heather Friesen and Kilani Ghoudi ask about the quality of work life of Emirate women – when their lack of job satisfaction prompts them to leave their companies? The empirical evidence comes from the United Arab Emirates.

The next four studies illustrate mainstream organizational research. First, from a methodological angle, Meng-Hsiu Lee and Ming-Chu Yu present a multi-level moderation analysis of change perception and try to determine whether they can predict change commitment. Javaraman Rajagopalan and Praveen Srivastava introduce a new “project health index” toolbox to measure and guide ICT implementation projects. The next two are about service quality and organizational commitment in institutions of higher education in Indonesia (a paper by Sumardi Unhas and Adji Fernandes) and about the resistance to change (and its roots in previous organizational experiences). This paper had been submitted by Vasiliki Amarantou, Stergiani Kazakopoulou, Dimitrios Chatzoudes and Prodromos Chatzoglou.

Last not least we can read report by Sanjay Singh about managing organizational change in emerging markets and a paper by Sajeet Pradhan and Lalatendu Jena on workplace belongingness scale (important from the point of view of a quality of working life and from the point of emotional well-being of organizational members).

We have come the full circle. Starting with a question about minds and hearts of organization’s members, we finish with hearts and self-identification with an organization (if belongingness scale captures this dimension).

Business as usual? To a certain extent. But nothing is actually as usual. Not anymore. Emotions can rock the boat of organizational performance and survival, but so can networked alliances. To be continued.