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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 | Strategic Management Journal | 2013

  Who Is Governing Whom? Executives, Governance, and the Structure of Generosity in Large U.S. Firms

  Christopher Marquis and Matthew Lee

  We examine how organizational structure influences strategies over which corporate leaders have significant discretion. Corporate philanthropy is our setting to study how a differentiated structural element-the corporate foundation-constrains the influence of individual senior managers and directors on corporate strategy. Our analysis of Fortune 500 firms from 1996 to 2006 shows that leader characteristics at both the senior management and director levels affect corporate philanthropic contributions. We also find that organizational structure constrains the philanthropic influence of board members but not of senior managers, a result that is contrary to what existing theory would predict. We discuss how these findings advance understanding of how organizational structure and corporate leadership interact and of how organizations can more effectively realize the strategic value of corporate social responsibility activities.

  Keywords: Organizational Structure; Corporate Strategy; Giving and Philanthropy; Leadership; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; United States;

  Citation:

  Marquis, Christopher, and Matthew Lee. "Who Is Governing Whom? Executives, Governance, and the Structure of Generosity in Large U.S. Firms." Strategic Management Journal 34, no. 4 (2013): 483–497. (Earlier version distributed as Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 11-121.)

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