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• Article | Research in Organizational Behavior | 2017

  Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the Limits of Less-Hierarchical Organizing

  Michael Y. Lee and Amy C. Edmondson

  Fascination with organizations that eschew the conventional managerial hierarchy and instead radically decentralize authority has been longstanding, albeit at the margins of scholarly and practitioner attention. Recently, however, organizational experiments in radical decentralization have gained mainstream consideration, giving rise to a need for new theory and new research. This paper reviews the literature on less hierarchical organizing and identifies three categories of research: post-bureaucratic organizations, humanistic management, and organizational democracy. Despite this extensive prior work, scholarly understanding of radical decentralization remains limited. Using the term self-managing organizations to capture efforts that radically decentralize authority in a formal and systematic way throughout the organization, we set forth a research agenda to better understand less-hierarchical organizing at its limits.

  Keywords: Self-Managed Organizations; Self-Managed Teams; self-organizing systems; self-managing organizations; Flat Organization; Decentralization; organization design; non-hierarchical organizations; less-hierarchical organizing; Organizational Structure; Organizational Design; Research;

  Citation:

  Lee, Michael Y., and Amy C. Edmondson. "Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the Limits of Less-Hierarchical Organizing." Research in Organizational Behavior 37 (2017): 35–58.  View Details

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• Book | 2017

  Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership

  Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey

  Today's global enterprises increasingly involve collaborative work by teams of experts operating across different professions, organizations, and industries. Extreme Teaming provides new insights into the world of complex, cross-industry projects and the ways they must be managed. The authors analyze contemporary cases that expose the complex demands of cross-boundary collaboration on management and inform our understanding of teams. Containing powerful insights and practical guidelines that allow managers to bridge professional divides and organizational boundaries in order to work together effectively, this is a new exploration of the challenges involved in today's global enterprises. The authors demonstrate that the work done in the modern organization is less and less about looking inward and creating strong teams inside the company and more about teaming across boundaries—that often are in flux. Extreme Teaming is a must-read book for all courses related to leading open innovation, teamwork and collaboration, project management, and cross-boundary work.

  Keywords: Groups and Teams; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Leadership; Complexity;

  Citation:

  Edmondson, Amy C., and Jean-François Harvey. Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership. Emerald Group Publishing, 2017.  View Details

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• Article | Academy of Management Discoveries | September 2017

  The Advocacy Trap: When Legitimacy Building Inhibits Organizational Learning

  Tiona Zuzul and Amy C. Edmondson

  This paper describes a relationship between legitimacy building and learning for a new firm in a nascent industry. Through a longitudinal study of a new firm in the nascent smart city industry, we found that the firm failed to make progress on important internal initiatives, despite notable external successes, including prestigious employees, well-known partner companies, and extensive positive media attention. Exploring these concurrent developments, we discovered a surprising relationship between the firm's external successes and its internal failures. We propose that the legitimacy building that helped the new firm establish external success gave rise to cognitive and emotional internal dynamics that inhibited organizational learning. We call this dynamic the advocacy trap. By suggesting a downside to legitimacy building and identifying a novel barrier to organizational learning—rooted in cognition and emotion, and especially salient in new firms and nascent industries—our discovery opens several new avenues for research in entrepreneurship and organizational learning.

  Keywords: organizational learning; advocacy; Organizations; Learning; Problems and Challenges;

  Citation:

  Zuzul, Tiona, and Amy C. Edmondson. "The Advocacy Trap: When Legitimacy Building Inhibits Organizational Learning." Academy of Management Discoveries 3, no. 3 (September 2017): 302–321.  View Details

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