This article applies the convergent insights of institutional and resource dependence perspectives to the prediction of strategic responses to institutional processes. The article offers a typology of strategic responses that vary in active organizational resistance from passive conformity to proactive manipulation. Ten institutional factors are hypothesized to predict the occurrence of the alternative proposed strategies and the degree of organizational conformity or resistance to institutional pressures.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258610.pdf

Strategic responses to institutional processes

The External Control of Organizations.

Complex organizations exhibit surprising, nonlinear behavior. Although organization scientists have studied complex organizations for many years, a developing set of conceptual and computational tools makes possible new approaches to modeling nonlinear interactions within and between organizations. Complex adaptive system models represent a genuinely new way of simplifying the complex. They are characterized by four key elements: agents with schemata, self-organizing networks sustained by importing energy, coevolution to the edge of chaos, and system evolution based on recombination. New types of models that incorporate these elements will push organization science forward by merging empirical observation with computational agent-based simulation. Applying complex adaptive systems models to strategic management leads to an emphasis on building systems that can rapidly evolve effective adaptive solutions. Strategic direction of complex organizations consists of establishing and modifying environments within which effective, improvised, self-organized solutions can evolve. Managers influence strategic behavior by altering the fitness landscape for local agents and reconfiguring the organizational architecture within which agents adapt.

Complexity Theory and Organization Science

This paper argues that current, global conceptions of organizational commitment may be deficient in several respects. A review of macro approaches to the nature of organization, as well as research on reference groups and role theory, indicates that a multiple commitments approach may be more precise and meaningful. It is suggested here that employees experience several different commitments to the goals and values of multiple groups. Some implications of this perspective are presented.

A Review and Reconceptualization of Organizational Commitment

Previous research has consistently shown little relationship between job satisfaction, job attitudes, and performance for individuals, but little work has investigated these relationships at the organizational level of analysis. This study investigated the relationship between employee satisfaction, other job-related attitudes (commitment, adjustment, and psychological stress), and organizational performance. Organizational performance data were collected for 298 schools; employee satisfaction and attitude data were collected from 13,808 teachers within these schools. Correlation and regression analyses supported the expected relationships between employee satisfaction/attitudes and organizational performance

The relationship between satisfaction, attitudes, and performance: An organizational level analysis.

If it is to become effective in terms of survival and growth, an organization must fulfill (or satisfice) the needs and demands of its employees, its owners, and the relevant members of the society with which it transacts (its community, its governments, its customers, its suppliers, and its creditors). In this study, ninety-seven small-business organizations and their relevant societal components were surveyed in order to explore the extent to which the organization fulfilled the needs of these components. Data indicate relatively few significant relationships among various types of employee fulfillment, owner fulfillment, and societal fulfillment, and these few relationships are of a rather low magnitude. The feasibility of an organization concurrently fulfilling the variety of demands made upon it is discussed. The organization is viewed as an open system of interdependent components, with energy transfer within the organization as well as between the organization and the societal components. Frank Friedlander is associate professor of organizational behavior, school of management, at Case Western Reserve University, and Hal Pickle is associate professor in the department of business administration, Southwest Texas State College.

Hal Pickle

Papers

Components of Effectiveness in Small Organizations

Seven societal criteria of organizational success