Dennis A. Gioia

Seeking Qualitative Rigor in Inductive Research: Notes on the Gioia Methodology

For all its richness and potential for discovery, qualitative research has been critiqued as too often lacking in scholarly rigor. The authors summarize a systematic approach to new concept development and grounded theory articulation that is designed to bring “qualitative rigor” to the conduct and presentation of inductive research.

Forging an Identity: An Insider-outsider Study of Processes Involved in the Formation of Organizational Identity

We investigated the processes involved in forming an organizational identity, which we studied during the founding of a distinctive new college by using an interpretive, insider-outsider research approach. The emergent grounded theory model suggests that organizational identity formed via the interplay of eight notable processes, four of which occurred in more-or-less sequential, stage-like fashion —(1) articulating a vision, (2) experiencing a meanings void, (3) engaging in experiential contrasts, and (4) converging on a consensual identity—plus four recurrent processes that were associated with two or more of the sequential stages: (5) negotiating identity claims, (6) attaining optimal distinctiveness, (7) performing liminal actions, and (8) assimilating legitimizing feedback. The findings show that internal and external, as well as micro and macro influences affected the forging of an organizational identity. In addition, we found that both social construction and social actor views of identity-related processes were not only germane to the formation of organizational identity but that these processes were also mutually constitutive in creating a workable identity.

Factors Influencing Creativity in the Domain of Managerial Decision Making

This study examines factors that influence the creativity of managers’ decisions. A domain-based, evolutionary model that describes the influence of context on creative action is combined with a teleological model of creative managerial decision making derived from the strategy formulation and organizational decision process literatures. Results show that two key dimensions of managerial creativity, the novelty and the value of choices, were affected by markedly different factors. Surprisingly, influences on the novelty of managers’ choices were essentially independent of influences on the value of those choices. Overall, this study represents an initial attempt to describe and empirically examine processes that affect the creativity of executives’ choices.

Pinto Fires and Personal Ethics: A Script Analysis of Missed Opportunities

This article details the personal involvement of the author in the early stages of the infamous Pinto fire case. The paper first presents an insider account of the context and decision environment within which he failed to initiate an early recall of defective vehicles. A cognitive script analysis of the personal experience is then offered as an explanation of factors that led to a decision that now is commonly seen as a definitive study in unethical corporate behavior. The main analytical thesis is that script schemas that were guiding cognition and action at the time precluded consideration of issues in ethical terms because the scripts did not include ethical dimensions.

Transitional Identity as a Facilitator of Organizational Identity Change during a Merger

We adopted an interpretive, grounded theory approach to study the processes by which organizational identities changed during the initial phases of a merger between two formerly rival healthcare organizations. Our investigation of two top management teams attempting to instigate this major change effort and lead their organizations toward completion of the merger revealed that the emergence of a transitional identity—an interim sense held by members about what their organizations were becoming—was critical to moving the change process forward. The transitional identity allowed executives in the two organizations to suspend their preexisting organizational identities and work toward creating a shared, new identity. The transitional identity appears to have been effective because it was ambiguous enough to allow multiple interpretations of what the merged organization would become to eventually coalesce into a common understanding, but not so ambiguous as to be threateningly unfamiliar. Overall, we present a process model of organizational identity change during a major change event that spanned two organizations, with the concept of transitional identity as its centerpiece.

Organizational Identity Formation and Change

Theory and research concerning organizational identity (“who we are as an organization”) is a burgeoning domain within organization study. A great deal of conceptual and empirical work has been accomplished within the last three decades—especially concerning the phenomenon of organizational identity change. More recently, work has been devoted to studying the processes and content associated with identity formation. Given the amount of scholarly work done to date, it is an appropriate time to reflect on the perspectives, controversies and outcomes of this body of work. Because organizational identity change has received the preponderance of attention, we first review that extensive literature. We consider the conceptual and empirical work concerning the three putative “pillars” of identity (i.e. that which is ostensibly central, enduring, and distinctive). We devote particular attention to the most controversial of these pillars—the debate pitting a view that sees identity as stable over time (a position ...

Revising the past (while thinking in the future perfect tense)

Accounting for organizational history is essential to any change process. We argue, however, that the intentional revision of that history also can be important. We treat history as malleable, because events and actions from the past are susceptible to reinterpretation as organizations try to align with the way they see themselves in the present and want to see themselves in the future. Because change is a prospective, future‐oriented process, whereas sensemaking is a retrospective, past‐oriented process, making sense of the future requires an ability to envision the future as having already occurred, i.e. to think in the future perfect tense. We offer an initial conceptual exploration of organizational change from a revisionist history perspective that turns on future perfect thinking, a view that enlarges our conceptualization of the ways in which history affects organizational adaptation and change.

Making things click: Distributive leadership in an online division of an offline organization

The business model that looks likely to dominate the future in the wake of the convergence between Internet and traditional economies is the “bricks and clicks” organization. We conducted an in-depth study of the top executives of a prototypical Fortune 500 companys online division. We tracked and interviewed the president and other top management team (TMT) members over the first 22 months of the launch of the e-business venture. Our findings show that two contextual features, the extraordinary speed and the unsettling complexity/ambiguity of the online business environment, profoundly affected not only leadership requirements but also other key managerial processes, including communication, decision making, and vision. Within this disorienting context, two substantive themes emerged: (1) coping with organizational identity/image tensions with the offline parent organization and (2) becoming a holographic learning organization. We draw upon and extend some of the emerging literature on shared/relational and dispersed leadership to explain how dotcom leaders can adapt to the challenging contextual and substantive features of the e-business environment through the practice of distributive leadership, which we distinguish from prior related articulations of the concept.

On Weick: An Appreciation

When I first read Weick in 1977, I had no idea what to make of him. The style of writing and thinking was unusual, even weird to me. It struck me initially as cryptic and arcane, and also as rooted in ideas that seemed obscure and esoteric. Furthermore, he demonstrated these ideas — supposedly about life in organizations — with examples that did not appear to focus very much at all on organizations. What to make of this mysterious persona and his puzzling ideas? He seemed to use the same tools — ideas and words — that I and others in my newly adopted field used to play the scholarship game, but he used them in ways that other writers didn’t, to fashion a different way of understanding the game itself. I was reminded of the great golfer Bobby Jones’s comment on Jack Nicklaus: ‘Mr. Nicklaus plays a game with which I am not familiar.’ Well, as a budding young scholar, Mr Weick seemed to be playing a game with which I was not familiar, and playing it very well. Over time, Jones’s marvelously phrased compliment has only become more apt. Although many of us play the game, none of us plays it quite the way Weick plays it. When I was first introduced to Weick the writer, I had just come from the business world (Ford Motor Company), where I had become accustomed to straightforward thinking, straightforward speaking, and straightforward action in a notably complex and dynamic world. The world I had inhabited at Ford was extraordinarily intriguing to me, not just on a ‘Get-it-done-now! Think-aboutit-later!’ level, but also on some deeper or higher conceptual plane. I was so fascinated with my whole organizational experience that I decided I wanted to learn about organizations in a more studied fashion. The big issue I kept stumbling over was trying to figure out how it was actually possible to organize 240,000 people into some sort of global enterprise that acted like it was coherent and (surprisingly) seemed to work reasonably well. Because of my frequent marveling — and frequent exasperation — at the workings of Ford, it was clear to me that the way people organized and the way they understood organizing was the golden key to grasping the whole whirling lot. I really thought it would be interesting to explore the issues involved with ‘understanding how people understand in organizations — and how they organize to create workable organizations’ (an essential question that remains with me to this day). You can imagine, then, my new-found scholarly pleasure — rather early on in my doctoral program — in finding an author who purported to address my

On Celebrating the Organizational Identity Metaphor: A Rejoinder to Cornelissen

We disagree strongly with Cornelissen’s critique of the organizational identity metaphor on grounds that he: seriously underplays the generative strength of metaphor in the study of organizations; inappropriately applies the standards of assessment from one paradigm to the approaches of another; and raises false concerns about issues of self reference, reification and multilevel transference of concepts, among others.