Utilising Innovation to Discourage Unhelpful Behaviours and Practices in the Organisation - Literature review Example

Utilising innovation to discourage unhelpful behaviours and practices in the organisation BY YOU YOUR SCHOOL INFO HERE HERE Utilising innovationto discourage unhelpful behaviours and practices in the organisation Introduction Organisations are defined as being social associations which establish collective objectives to achieve goals that are harmonious with adapting to external market situations and the needs of stakeholders with a vested interest in the success of the organisational entity. Whilst there are different types of organisations, including having a mission of providing a particular good for a society or creating a product that improves the lifestyles of buyers, organisations establish a specific strategic initiative and works to align the organisation to meet these strategies (Scott 2008). Furthermore, Buchanan and Huczynski (2010) assert that in order to sustain the long-term competitiveness or longevity of an organisation, it must regularly adapt a flexible mindset and develop contingency plans to meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. This would tend to suggest the rigidity or sustaining the status quo is not a productive strategy for ensuring that an organisation achieves its long-term goals and objectives and remains relevant in its market or industry. Whilst in a best case scenario the idealised organisation maintains an attitude that promotes adaptability and flexibility, many organisations inadvertently encourage undesirable and unhelpful behaviours and practices. However, it has been said that innovation can serve as a foundation for overcoming these detrimental factors. This assessment explores the dynamics of innovation as a potential cure-all for obstructive practices and behaviours, linked with theories of leadership, organisational culture and change resistance to determine the extent to which innovation, legitimately, can make an organisation more adaptable an flexible to better meet its short- and long-term objectives and goals. What is innovation? Innovation is often referred to as an organisational activity that promotes development of pioneering or ground-breaking products and services that are wholly-unique as compared to other competing organisations. Displacement of an existing market, in a competitive organisation, through the development and exploitation of a radically-unique concept underpins the traditional view of organisational innovation (Frankelius 2009). However, innovation is much more than simply an activity associated with a new product. Innovation, in the organisation, may involve coming up with new policies and practices to enhance productivity, enhance quality of outputs, or generally improve an organisation’s market competitiveness. Drucker (2002) asserts that innovation is a type of organisational entrepreneurship whereby an organisation better exploits its existing resources in a fashion that gives an organisation a specific type of edge. Innovation, under this perspective, is identifying an opportunity for improvement built on functional inspirations that defy traditional practices in favour of more resourceful or ingenious procedures. The encumbered organisation and potential solutions through innovation Whilst the literature asserts that flexibility and creativity underpin advantageous innovation, achieving true innovation in the organisation is often impeded by several factors. First and foremost, organisations require a structure that is relevant for promoting creativity and ingenuity in order to provide it with some type of competitive or economic advantage. In the non-profit organisation, as one example, it is commonplace to maintain an autocratic structure, where decision-making occurs at the highest levels of management and there is little consultation with employees to come up with business solutions and minimal emphasis on team-working (Goodnight 2004). This type of organisational structure emphasises many managerial controls and focuses on employee compliance. The problem in the autocratic-type of organisational structure is that managers tend to dominate group members and utilise unilateral decision-making to achieve a particular organisational goal (McNamara 2003). Organisations structured in this fashion often exhibit the phenomenon of patterning, whereby managers in the organisation become accustomed to a centralised, autocratic ideology that they lose all perspectives on flexibility and experimentation with creative and new practices. When patterning occurs, attitudes and behaviours are significantly-difficult to change as managers spend the majority of their careers nurturing such ideologies (Hurson 2008). Employees in such a structure have little opportunities to be creative and might constantly experience managerial rejection of their innovative ideas which de-motivates employees and reduces their organisational commitment. Their hierarchy-driven model chokes productive communications and limits the production of innovative ideas (Dess, Lumpkin and McKee 1999). Herein lays the issue with an autocratic design in which managers exhibited patterned behaviours of control and unilateral decision-making ideology: managers become highly resistant to change when they perceive a threat to their authority that might occur by empowering employees to become more instrumental in decision-making and implementing creative solutions (Yang and Pandey 2008; Skarlicki and Folger 1997). In fact, Stover (2004) iterates that in order for an organisation to achieve legitimate innovative solutions, interaction and collaboration with others is absolutely critical. Therefore, there is a type of theoretical disconnect between the need for cooperative behaviours and manager willingness to promote such an environment more conducive to innovation production. Hence, at the managerial level of an organisation, it is the autocratic structure (bureaucracy) that promotes more managerial behaviours of politically-motivated employee oppression or failure to develop cross-functional teams so necessary to improve an organisation’s human capital advantages. A historically-autocratic organisation requiring innovation as a critical dynamic to achieving economic, productivity-based or competitive advantages inadvertently establishes the very foundation of practices and behaviours which stifle creativity and originality. Managers who criticise the new ideas presented by employees as a result of their own political objectives and desire to retain strict control and authority is referred to by Proctor (2014) as a value block that impedes creativity and reinforces a sense of managerial rigidity. True innovation means changing attitudes, practices and patterned behaviours in order for an organisation to reap the benefits of flexibility and evolution. Hence, innovation as a concept of decentralisation could change unhelpful behaviours and practices in an established, autocratic or bureaucratic type of organisation. King (2007) suggests that a rigid organisation suffers from a phenomenon known as causal ambiguity in which managers to not fully consider the inter-dependent relationships been all business inputs and how these are critical to effective and profitable outputs. Hence, for the autocratic organisation, executive mandates and compliance regulations directed to managers to ensure they are embracing collaboration, team development and more horizontal communications could potentially end the promotion of behaviours not desirable to an organisation seeking advantages. For the bureaucratic organisation, innovation would encompass building cross-functional teams, brainstorming ideas with employees, removing long-standing layers of power distance, or even establishing feedback systems that reward employees for presenting and implementing new and ingenious ideas. Innovations as an organisational change, characterised by evolution, will, over time, punctuate reorientation of managerial attitudes and ideologies (Tushman and Romanelli 1985). Furthermore, over time, new managers enter the organisation and are mandated to engage in more collaborative working environments and providing feedback. Hence, over time, by introducing decentralisation and team-orientation into an autocratic model, managers with patterned ideologies of control will be phased out by more liberal and collaborative-minded managers. Beacham (2006) strengthens the definition of innovation as being the triumphant exploitation of new business ideas. By having managers and employees become, longitudinally, accustomed to working cooperatively and having forums by which to express creative ideas, it will theoretically establish a culture of commitment and shared decision-making that serves as a new type of patterned thinking that teamwork and partnership is the ideal norm driving organisational success. From a different perspective, some organisations have, over time, built a culture of risk aversion which inhibits innovation and flexibility as potentially successful ideologies that could better transform an organisation to be more competitive and productive. Because organisations, today, are open to very high levels of public enquiry and scrutiny, top managers develop practices and policies that emphasise risk avoidance as a primary objective of the organisation (Rainey 2009). One such organisation sharing these characteristics is the Japanese-based Sony Corporation, founded on long-standing cultural characteristics that underpin risk avoidance as an engrained set of cultural ideologies. The organisation with a norm of risk avoidance makes painfully-slow decisions founded on a plethora of feasibility reports and quantitative metrics to justify even small-scale decisions (Hofstede Centre 2014). Hence, over time, this becomes a patterned set of managerial beliefs that dominate how the business conducts its operations and attitudes which underpin organisational protectionism. Sony, reported economic losses of 67 billion Yen in 2012 and 199.8 billion Yen in 2011 as a result of being consistently outperformed by competitor innovation (Hirai 2012). Sony, a highly risk-avoidance organisation that promotes this same ideology in its senior managers, is an interesting case study for examining how innovation can change unhelpful and detrimental behaviour promotion. After years of massive financial losses, Sony hired its first Western Chief Executive Officer in the hopes of a radical transformational overhaul of the organisation in order to better compete with more innovative competitors. This new CEO brought with him an ideology of establishing a shared vision, opening lines of communications, and facilitating a more entrepreneurial management team. This Western ideology of being more risk-accepting and using employees as resources to provide shared ideas and creative solutions was a radical innovation to a hierarchical organisation operating under a risk-avoidance corporate norm for decades. The new Western CEO first worked to unfreeze long-standing behaviours by establishing methodologies to ensure that senior managers became accustomed to collaborating with employees and reshaping how managers considered risk to be a detriment rather than a potential opportunity. Today, these sweeping changes related to collaboration and entrepreneurship as innovative material ideologies have made Sony more prone to undertake risky joint ventures, divest uncertain business divisions, and develop better R&D activities to develop creative technologies. When risk-tasking is wound into the proverbial fabric of the organisation, it facilitates employees and managers to generate more creative ideas (Yeboah 2014). Hence, innovation as a function of risk-taking and problem-solving from a more horizontal (rather than top-down ideology) has made Sony more competitive and accustomed managers with very long-standing principles about risk-avoidance more accepting of a more liberal and entrepreneurial decision-making philosophy. Taking the organisation from a bureaucratic structure to a decentralised structure promoted more helpful and productive behaviours in a competitive environment where innovation is a key success factor in its respective industry. To further examine how the organisation, itself, encourages detrimental behaviours, one can view organisations operating in the public sector. Research indicates that a flatter hierarchy with less reporting layers facilitates more innovation (King and Anderson 2002). However, the nature of public sector organisations often discourages this type of hierarchy. One such organisation is Amey Plc in the United Kingdom, an organisation offering consultancy services in the engineering and infrastructure sectors and delivery of services in railway transportation industries as well as waste collection and highway maintenance. In this industry, contracts with customers and partners are long-term, sometimes spanning decades. Offered the Head of Talent at Amey, “Promoting or encouraging new days of doing things faster, better and cheaper is difficult in this culture as the end point is so far away” (NESTA 2009, p.22). In the aforementioned type of organisation, such as Amey, business practices and contractual obligations of the organisation work under standardised models of servicing established industries that do not, as a cultural norm, promote innovative solutions. In this organisation, Amey does not have policies and practices that reward employees for their innovative behaviours, citing that any innovation is deemed as simply being part of the job (NESTA, p.23). However, other organisations in the public sector have established new policies that reward innovation handsomely as a means of promoting and incentivising more creative innovative output by its employees. The HR Director of the organisation, Saint-Gobain British Gypsum, has established what is called a suggestion scheme which gives employees the distinction of being either Bronze, Silver or Gold in relation to the volume and quality of innovative suggestions provided to senior management (NESTA). This has created a culture in which it is an established norm that innovation will be extrinsically rewarded and serves as the underpinning for industry success. Amey, a company with a more bureaucratic structure that does not facilitate incentives for innovation, would theoretically build behaviours that encourage employees to oppress their creative talents. Amabile (1993) asserts that extrinsic rewards, when provided by an organisation, enhance one’s inherent working motivation which encourages more creative thinking. Amey, as a less flexible and adaptable organisation, believes that work incentives should be intrinsic and, thus, rejects incentivising employees to be more involved in coming up with ingenious solutions to bring the organisation more competitive advantage. Saint-Gobain British Gypsum, after introducing a suggestion scheme, changed mindsets of employees and managers to embrace innovation production as a new cultural norm. Work, according to leadership at this public sector organisation, became more exciting and memorable and promoted a flatter organisational structure that facilitated more opportunities for team-working (NESTA). Managers at Saint-Gobain British Gypsum were given mandates to comply with a new appraisal system called the Agreement for Growth to identify innovative thinkers and contributors to the organisation. At first, this mandate was resisted by managerial executives who felt that this new practice was unrealistic and that promoting creativity was not leading to rapid pay-offs (NESTA). The Innovation Technical Director at the business had to consistently reinforce to resistant executives that innovation takes time and that every day innovations should be applauded rather than focusing on revolutionary and highly radical creative outputs (NESTA). Through this effort, by changing managerial compliance directives to be more interactive and forthright about evaluating employee performance, the organisation has achieved more productive skills training and employee development systems and gained more executive commitment to change. Hence, the case study of Saint-Gobain British Petroleum illustrates that if a centralised and bureaucratic organisation maintains this structure with little extrinsic reward schemes that promote creative thinking, the organisation (itself) promotes the very undesirable behaviours which limit an organisation from achieving economic or competitive advantages. Innovation, as previously suggested by Stover (2004), can only be produced through collaborative interventions between all organisational members. Hence, any policies, mandates or programs that facilitate more cooperative behaviours and team-working ideologies to make an organisation more creative and flexible underpin how innovation can curb these behaviours and practices over the long-term. Innovation changes not only patterned ways of thinking, but makes managers and employees in the organisation more accustomed to evolution in how the business operates and how job roles are handled. By design, innovation appears to be a catalyst for embracing flexibility and adaptation, something desirable for an organisation seeking to achieve competitive or other economic advantages. Kotter and Cohen (2002) provide a case study of a large organisation sustaining a slow-to-change culture that had experienced economic success following an age-old model of bureaucracy and maintaining the status quo that had, historically, driven organisational success. However, without warning, the company posted such a massive amount of financial losses for failing to be more competitive that shareholders on Wall Street began demanding change or leadership and practice. This inspired an immediate deficit-based change system that included development of customer satisfaction surveys that would recognise and evaluate what was driving such a negative consumer sentiment. Furthermore, the CEO of this company launched an internal marketing campaign designed to make it appear that keeping the status quo was significantly more dangerous than exploring endeavours into the unknown (Kotter and Cohen). As a result of pressures from external stakeholders, the start of frank and realistic discussion about corporate deficiencies, and a new metrics system that would underpin new knowledge about how to evolve practices, attitudes started to change which brought the organisation new innovative problem-solving solutions that evolved the organisation to better meet all stakeholder needs and position the organisation effectively in its competitive market. The case study of the organisation described by Kotter and Cohen (2002) serves to re-iterate the notion of patterned behaviours being a detriment to giving an organisation economic or competitive advantage. It was not until Wall Street shareholders began demanding a change in management ideology and customers boycotting the organisation’s products that the business began to change its mindset that corporate bureaucracy and rigidity were acceptable modern organisational practices and values. Circumstances forced innovation onto this organisation as a matter of ensuring the economic survival of this struggling bureaucracy, however, over time, managers began realising that innovation was effective for ensuring that the organisation is equipped to maintain its longevity and relevancy as it pertains to its consumer markets. This same type of rigidity and patterned thinking can also be witnessed with the famous case of Enron in which the majority of its management team promoted behaviours that were ultimately detrimental to the organisation. Failure to innovate to improve auditing systems and employee involvement led to ultimate organisational failure and inability to identify and report on the corruption that was so deeply engrained and rewarded in Enron’s centralised hierarchy. The primary lessons of innovation as a potential remedy for adverse behaviours This research endeavour indicated that policy-driven organisations, with mandates of employee control and compliance, foster the very behaviours that ultimately contribute to diminished organisational advantages. Whether management ideology is arbitrary toward being more empathetic toward employee needs or generally oppressive in terms of facilitating a more collaborative, team-oriented environment, this structure limits organisational flexibility so necessary for achieving a superior competitive or economic position for the organisation. Innovation, when rewarded or simply introduced as a new objective for an organisation, can theoretically, in the long-term, begin changing attitudes which is critical to ending an inefficient or non-productive status quo within the enterprise. It is clear that there could potentially be managerial resistance to policy changes that mandate more collaboration and shared decision-making as a means of fostering more productive innovation, however it seems that over time these attitudes become replaced with more practical and cooperative behaviours which provides the foundation for more creative problem solutions and approaches to handling organisational practices. Even if these attitudes are not changed by those managers that have nurtured a patterned way of thinking which is promoting of negating employee involvement, over time new stakeholders (managers) in the organisation will begin adopting this approach of using innovation as a tool for success whilst phasing out those who might attempt to oppress innovative thinking and suggestions. This research also identified that innovation changes culture within an organisation in a fashion that is more conducive to using creativity and ingenuity (in product, policies and practices) effectively to give an organisation important advantages. Culture, in most businesses, underpins managerial ideologies, employee commitment, and what constitutes the norm of professional and social relationships. In a culture such as that of Sony which was mentioned previously as being a risk-averse organisation with a slow-to-change culture, injecting Western-style organisational ideologies that defied traditionalism in favour of a decentralised structure, made Sony much more competitive and capable of ensuring market longevity against a group of highly competitive industry players. Without forcing new compliances for supporting innovation, it is likely that Sony would have sustained its ineffective, non-productive ideologies of power distance and bureaucracy. Conclusion It does appear, however, that in some instances (such as Sony), it is first necessary to impose collaboration, shared decision-making and team-working in an effort to innovate, forcing managers to comply with new decentralisation mandates. In certain organisations that are policy-driven and where managers whole-heartedly embrace holding legitimate authority at the highest layers of management in the organisation, changing attitudes may very well be a futile effort since changing long-standing behaviours is so difficult at the socio-psychological level. In the case studies provided by this research effort of the autocratic organisational structure, circumstances mandated a change which was compulsory for managers to comply with new policy changes before a focus on innovation made productive changes to the organisation and ultimately (finally) changed mindsets and beliefs. Despite the challenges of implementing new practices and policies that encourage innovation, it is clear that creativity and ingenuity (especially when rewarded) contributes to building a culture that embraces the pursuit of innovation and limits change resistance. Organisations that unwittingly foster unhelpful behaviours seem not to make changes to their status quo until events and circumstances force an attitudinal change as a method of survival for an organisation damaged by the very behaviours that had once been promoted and encouraged by a less flexible and more rigid organisational hierarchy. This would seem to suggest that if organisations want to remain relevant and profitable, leaders in the enterprise must be more proactive in benchmarking other organisational practices and policies that have achieved growth or more effective advantages by introducing systems and practices that promote innovation-seeking. This research effort concludes, based on evidence, that innovation removes value blocks that impede both creativity production and collaboration within an organisational context. Furthermore, true innovation is produced through partnership and team-working and for an organisation to find advantages through innovation, these foundational ideologies and practices must be implemented within the organisational model. Hence, innovation-seeking is a valuable tool for flattening a hierarchy, better distributing power throughout the organisational model, and coercing attitudinal changes which will ultimately become part of the organisational norm if managers imposing these new practices and expectations are patient and accept that true change and evolution occurs longitudinally. References Amabile, T.M. (1993). Motivational synergy: toward new conceptualizations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the workplace, Human Resource Management Review, 3, pp.185-201. Beacham, J. (2006). 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