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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013 (Revised from original 2013 version)

  OrganJet and GuardianWings

  Julie Battilana and James Weber

  Citation:

  Battilana, Julie, and James Weber. "OrganJet and GuardianWings." Harvard Business School Case 413-068, April 2013. (Revised from original February 2013 version.)

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• Article | Management Science | April, 2013

  Overcoming Resistance to Organizational Change: Strong Ties and Affective Cooptation

  Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro

  We propose a relational theory of how change agents in organizations use the strength of ties in their network to overcome resistance to change. We argue that strong ties to potentially influential organization members who are ambivalent about a change (fence-sitters) provide the change agent with an affective basis to coopt them. This cooptation increases the probability that the organization will adopt the change. By contrast, strong ties to potentially influential organization members who disapprove of a change outright (resistors) are an effective means of affective cooptation only when a change diverges little from institutionalized practices. With more divergent changes, the advantages of strong ties to resistors accruing to the change agent are weaker, and may turn into liabilities that reduce the likelihood of change adoption. Analyses of longitudinal data from 68 multi-method case studies of organizational change initiatives conducted at the National Health Service in the United Kingdom support these predictions and advance a relational view of organizational change in which social networks operate as tools of political influence through affective mechanisms.

  Citation:

  Battilana, Julie, and Tiziana Casciaro. "Overcoming Resistance to Organizational Change: Strong Ties and Affective Cooptation." Management Science 59, no. 4 (April, 2013): 819–836.

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• Article | Administrative Science Quarterly | March 2013

  Punctuated Generosity: How Mega-events and Natural Disasters Affect Corporate Philanthropy in U.S. Communities

  Andras Tilcsik and Christopher Marquis

  Geographic communities have been shown to affect organizations through their enduring features, but less attention has been given to communities as sites of human-made and natural events that occasionally disrupt the lives of organizations. We develop a social-normative perspective to unpack how and why major events within communities affect organizations. To test this framework, we examine how different types of mega-events (the Olympics, the Super Bowl, political conventions) and natural disasters (such as floods and hurricanes) affected the philanthropic spending of locally headquartered Fortune 1000 firms between 1980 and 2006. Results show that philanthropic spending fluctuated dramatically as mega-events generally led to a punctuated increase in otherwise relatively stable patterns of giving by local corporations. The impact of natural disasters depended on the severity of damage: while major disasters had a negative effect, smaller-scale disasters had a positive impact. Firms' philanthropic history and communities' inter-corporate network cohesion moderated some of these effects. This study extends institutional and community literatures by illuminating the geographic distribution of punctuating events as a central mechanism for community influences on organizations; sheds new light on the temporal dynamics of both endogenous and exogenous punctuating events; and provides more nuanced understanding of corporate-community relations.

  Keywords: geographic communities; punctuated equilibrium; corporate social responsibility; institutional theory;

  Citation:

  Tilcsik, Andras, and Christopher Marquis. "Punctuated Generosity: How Mega-events and Natural Disasters Affect Corporate Philanthropy in U.S. Communities." Administrative Science Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 2013): 111–148.

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