Eric Arne Lofquist

Doomed to Fail: A Case Study of Change Implementation Collapse In the Norwegian Civil Aviation Industry

Managerial choices for change implementation methods have a direct impact on strategic change outcomes. In a three-year longitudinal case study of the Norwegian airport management and air navigation services provider – Avinor – a fundamental mismatch between organizational culture type and change implementation method contributed to the premature collapse of a deliberate strategic change initiative. The major contribution of this article is to expand our knowledge about identifying and avoiding potential pitfalls resulting from a fundamental mismatch between organizational culture in place and change implementation methods during deliberate organizational change. The findings from this case study will show how managerial choices and actions, such as: consensus building, communication and use of participation during deliberate change processes, can positively influence attitudes towards change. However, it will also show that a sudden reversal from a participatory process to purely top-down implementation can lead to a breakdown in consensus and trust, leading to internal and external resistance, and the premature collapse of a change process.

The Influence of Predeployment Training on Coordination in Multinational Headquarters:The Moderating Role of Organizational Obstacles to Information Sharing.

Coordination is critical to the success of multinational military operations and may be fostered by predeployment training. We argue that whether such training is related to a high degree of perceived coordination at the individual level is likely to depend on whether individuals experience a low degree of organizational obstacles to information sharing. We examined this using data from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Kosovo Force headquarters (survey: n = 131). We controlled for whether it was the participants’ first deployment, the participants’ background (military or civilian), the amount of time spent in the headquarters by participants, whether differences pertaining to culture and opinions were valued by the organization, the quality of supervisor/subordinate relationships, and the degree of national cultural obstacles to information sharing. The results showed no significant direct effects on coordination from 3 different training configurations: national training, multinational training, and a combination of national and multinational training. However, we found a negative direct effect from organizational obstacles to information sharing on coordination, and support for organizational obstacles to information sharing as negatively moderating the multinational predeployment training and coordination relationship. Qualitative interviews (n = 14) indicated that informal information sharing, and the problems exchanging information from tactical to operational levels could hinder coordination. Interventions to foster coordination could benefit from a focus on multinational training and lowering organizational obstacles to information sharing. Our findings contribute to more precisely pinpointing the types of training that are useful in multinational operations, as well as the factors upon which training transfer is contingent.

Something Fishy: Exploring Change, Job Engagement and Work Environment in the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries

ABSTRACT It is widely accepted by researchers and HR practitioners alike that engaged workers produce better results. But there is a general lack of agreement as to the meaning of employee engagement. Whether referred to as employee engagement, work engagement, or job engagement, ‘engagement is a desirable condition, has an organizational purpose, and connotes involvement, commitment, passion, enthusiasm, focused effort, and energy, so it has both attitudinal and behavioral components’ [Macey, W. H., & Schneider, B. (2008). The meaning of employee engagement. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 1, 3–30]. Yet, there have been few empirical studies that explore the linkage between work environment and job engagement. It is this linkage between the attitudinal and behavioural components of engagement, and the work environment in the context of organizational change, that is explored in this paper using a combination of psychometric and qualitative tools, and how these interact to affect behavioural outcomes leading to a change in the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries. The findings indicate that different levels of engagement are clearly related to how individual employees both perceive their work environment and how they approach their job.

Viking leadership: How Norwegian transformational leadership style effects creativity and change through organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)

This article examines the distinct “Viking” leadership style of top leaders in the Norwegian industry that has evolved from a harsh and violent history. Earlier studies have reported that Norwegian leaders at the middle manager level rate high in transformational leadership traits due to a strong feminine culture and a low power distance society, yet Norwegians are also highly individualistic which differs significantly from other national cultures with feminine traits and collective societies. This unique cultural combination is becoming a cross-cultural issue as the Norwegian society is becoming more heterogeneous, particularly in work settings. Understanding how this leadership style differs from other cultures, even in Scandinavia, is important to help leaders better understand the effects of their leadership style on performance. In this study, we explored four of the original Hofstede national cultural dimensions, specifically, power distance, femininity–masculinity, individualism–collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance and examined how these are reflected at the top leadership level within the Norwegian industry using a national leadership study of Norwegian top leaders (N = 917). We also examined how these self-reported leadership styles affected perceived organizational results in the form of innovation and change through organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Our findings suggest that Norwegian top leaders do exhibit transformational leadership traits, and that these traits have a positive influence on OCB, which further had a positive relationship to organizational performance in the form of innovation and change results. We also found that power distance and a collectivistic orientation predicted OCB, while only power distance predicted innovation and change among the Hofstede cultural dimensions. Of the four Hofstede dimensions, only one moderating effect was found for predicting OCB, the link between transformational leadership and power distance, suggesting that leaders with low power distance and high transformational leadership orientation are most connected with OCB.

Better Late than Never? Communication Media and Adaptive Team Performance

Research results on the relation among communication media, performance processes and outcomes have been mixed. This paper reports an initial exploratory study examining these factors by looking at...

Cleared for takeoff? A snap-shot of climate for change in a civil aviation context

High risk industries are facing increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environments requiring continual innovation and change. And this is particularly true within the civil...

Keeping Promises: A Process Study of Escalating Commitment Leading to Organizational Change Collapse

In the present research, we employ a theoretical lens—the one of escalation of commitment to a failing course of action that so far is not sufficiently reflected in the academic literature for analyzing large-scale organizational change processes. In doing so, we highlight aspects of complex change processes that are less visible than other theoretical perspectives that use “snapshots” of change. Using 3-year longitudinal process data, we present an in-depth empirical study of the failed attempt at strategic reorientation known as corporatization of the Norwegian Air Traffic Control organization—Avinor. Underway, we identified an important new variable that emerged as a significant determinant for persistence and escalating commitment that eventually led to the total collapse of the strategic change project known as Take-Off 05.