Elina Riivari

The ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness.Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative empirical analysis was conducted on the basis of a survey of 147 respondents within the public sector in Finland. A multivariate linear regression analysis was done to examine how the ethical culture of organisations is related to organisational innovativeness.Findings – A positive link was found in the ethical culture of an organisation and organisational innovativeness: ethical culture was important to behavioural, strategic and process innovativeness. Within the ethical culture of an organisation, the dimension of the congruency of management in particular had an important role in organisational innovativeness.Research limitations/implications – The data were collected from the public sector, and therefore, future studies from the private sector organisations are needed. The results lend support to previous researc...

Professional Agency and Creativity in Information Technology Work

The meaning of professional agency in the context of professional learning, as well as in the development of working practices and work organisations, is pivotal. The role of creativity is also crucial for long-term economic growth in the current global environment, which is characterised by rapid changes in both technology and economy. Hence, it is important to study the relationship between professional agency and creativity. In this chapter, we explore professional agency and creativity within two Finnish information technology organisations. This study’s data include interviews with staff members and open-ended questionnaire responses to the question ‘What is creativity in your work?’. We conducted a qualitative data-driven thematic analysis and a theory-driven analysis. Based on the data, creativity was divided into five themes, with particular choices and decisions (i.e. manifestations of professional agency) being found to be linked to each of those themes. Based on the findings, it appears that creativity and agency are strongly related, although their manifestations depend on both the definition of creativity and the space and environment where the phenomena occur. On the one hand, agency manifests as a prerequisite for creativity, while on the other hand, it is an outcome of creativity. In addition, creativity and professional agency can also be seen as synonymous.

Company stakeholder responsibility : an empirical investigation of top managers’ attitudinal change

Purpose Company stakeholder responsibility considers stakeholder engagement and management as key to long-term firm success. The purpose of this paper is to examine how top managers’ stakeholder responsibility attitudes change and how they balance stakeholder responsibilities and economic interests. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted empirical research using the company stakeholder responsibility framework by conducting a repeated cross-sectional survey in Finland in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. Findings The study shows how development in the business context influences managers’ attitudes towards stakeholder responsibility. Simultaneously with the expansion of free competition in 1990s Finland, managerial commitment to company stakeholder responsibility strengthened in Finnish industry. Research limitations/implications The target group consisting of industrial managers both in a single-country context and the social desirability bias present in survey research may limit the generalisability of the results. Originality/value The study contributes to the discussion of the role of situational factors in the development of corporate responsibility by showing that while economic changes have some influence on managerial attitudes, the expansion of free markets, together with increased regulation in certain areas, appears to influence managers’ stakeholder responsibility attitudes to an even greater degree.

Ethics in Everyday Organizational Life: Conforming to the Norms and Breaking the Rules

In this study, we examine ethics in an organizational context by approaching ethics from the ethics as practice viewpoint, as a discursively constructed phenomenon. Many organizations emphasize the importance of ethics, but acting ethically is not always a simple matter. This perspective allows us to consider the fragmented and contested nature of organizational ethics. We focus empirically on two specialist organizations that do not have a formalized code of ethics. We use discourse analysis to examine instances of everyday organizational life where ethical issues surface. More specifically, we examine how ethical rules are constructed in everyday situations and how following or breaching these rules is made meaningful. The findings suggest that ethicality in the specialist organizations crystalizes in following or obeying different rules existing in the organization, even if the specialist organizations did not have an official ethical code. This study contributes to the understanding of ethics as pract...