Guowei Jian

Unpacking Unintended Consequences in Planned Organizational Change: A Process Model

The author develops a process model of the unintended consequences in planned organizational change that draws on the structuration, organizational change, and organizational tension literatures. The model depicts the communicative actions of both senior management and employees and reveals the dynamic through which unintended consequences unfold. The model extends theoretical understandings of planned organizational change and discusses how future research can build a dialectic and dialogic model of planned change focused on employee participation. The author illustrates the model with a case study of organizational change and its unintended consequences. The article concludes with insights on change management for practitioners and with directions for future research.The author develops a process model of the unintended consequences in planned organizational change that draws on the structuration, organizational change, and organizational tension literatures. The model depicts the communicative actions of both senior management and employees and reveals the dynamic through which unintended consequences unfold. The model extends theoretical understandings of planned organizational change and discusses how future research can build a dialectic and dialogic model of planned change focused on employee participation. The author illustrates the model with a case study of organizational change and its unintended consequences. The article concludes with insights on change management for practitioners and with directions for future research.

Articulating circumstance, identity and practice : toward a discursive framework of organizational changing

The literature on organizational change abounds with models that map the trajectory of change with ordered stages or episodes. However, limited progress has been made in understanding the dynamic process of changing or becoming from one stage or episode to another. To enhance our knowledge of changing, this study intends to offer a discursive framework grounded in a process-oriented perspective of organization. The framework highlights key discursive dynamics of changing by integrating recent developments in several streams of research. It conceptualizes changing as discursive struggles over articulating multiple layers of meaning. These layers comprise the articulation of organizational circumstance, organizational and individual identities and organizational practice.To illustrate the utility of this framework, the author undertook a discourse analysis of real-time communication among members in a large US insurance corporation. The interpretation was grounded in data from a four-month ethnographic study. The analysis effectively demonstrates how organizational changing takes place in interrelated layers of discursive action. It also offers critique on potential discursive effects of stage models when applied by practitioners in managing organizational change programs.The literature on organizational change abounds with models that map the trajectory of change with ordered stages or episodes. However, limited progress has been made in understanding the dynamic process of changing or becoming from one stage or episode to another. To enhance our knowledge of changing, this study intends to offer a discursive framework grounded in a process-oriented perspective of organization. The framework highlights key discursive dynamics of changing by integrating recent developments in several streams of research. It conceptualizes changing as discursive struggles over articulating multiple layers of meaning. These layers comprise the articulation of organizational circumstance, organizational and individual identities and organizational practice.To illustrate the utility of this framework, the author undertook a discourse analysis of real-time communication among members in a large US insurance corporation. The interpretation was grounded in data from a four-month ethnographic stud...

“Omega is a Four-Letter Word”: Toward a Tension-Centered Model of Resistance to Information and Communication Technologies

The adoption of enterprise-wide information and communication technologies (ICTs) has become a growing trend in a wide range of industries. Resistance has been identified as one of the most common reasons for unsuccessful implementations. Assuming technologies as fixed objects, many existing theories tend to reduce resistance to psychological mechanisms or structural misalignment. The purpose of this study is to retheorize resistance to ICTs by integrating a social constructionist perspective of technology and a framework of organizational tensions. By employing qualitative methods, a case study examined the adoption, implementation and use of an enterprise-wide software system in a technology service organization. The in-depth case analysis revealed a tension-centered process model, which shows that resistance to ICTs is constituted in a dynamic, reflexive interplay between the ongoing construction of ICTs and organizational tensions. In this process, an ICT adoption brings into play various organizational tensions, which then shape the interpretations of the ICT in oppositional terms, and reactions to these tensions and oppositional interpretations result in various forms of resistance behaviors. This tension-centered process model offers a useful alternative to existing research on resistance to ICTs in the workplace.

Does Culture Matter? An Examination of the Association of Immigrants' Acculturation With Workplace Relationship Quality

In spite of immigrants’ growing role in the workforce of the United States and other developed countries, organizational communication research about the experience of immigrant employees in the host culture is still very limited. Drawing on the bidimensional acculturation theory, the purpose of this study was to investigate the association of acculturation of immigrant employees with three types of workplace relationships: leader–member exchange (LMX), coworker, and mentoring relationship. Based on a survey of immigrant employees in a U.S. Midwestern city, the study reveals that the two dimensions of acculturation, adjustment to one’s host culture and retention of one’s original culture, are differentially related to the three types of workplace relationships. Both theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the study.

Spanning the Boundaries of Work: Workplace Participation, Political Efficacy, and Political Involvement

Based on the political spillover theory, this study examines the boundary-spanning aspect of workplace participation—the association between participation at work and in politics. A telephone survey was conducted using a regional probability sample. Results indicate that decision involvement at work is positively associated with political voting while work community participation is positively associated with involvement in local communities and political party and campaign activities. The study reveals that internal political efficacy mediates the relationship between job autonomy and political participation.

Conceptualizing Communication Capital for a Changing Environment

With rapidly evolving technologies, boundaries between traditional modes of communication have blurred, creating an environment that scholars still describe from viewpoints as researchers in interpersonal, organizational or mass communication. This manuscript looks at the social capital literature and argues for conceptualizing “communication capital” to help understand the impact of communication phenomena in a changing environment. The literature has treated interpersonal communication variables as components of social capital and mass communication variables as factors affecting social capital, but scholars long ago recognized their reinforcing nature, leading us to develop a concept of communication capital merging symbolic activity across domains in its potential for impacting civic engagement, defined as persistent communication patterns that facilitate social problem solving in the community. Analysis of survey data shows that 4 dimensions of communication capital explain variance in civic engagement beyond that accounted for by traditional measures of social capital, media use, neighborhood communication, and efficacy.

Leader–Member Conversational Quality Scale Development and Validation Through Three Studies

The continuing development of leadership research calls for measurement instruments that can tap into the communication process between leaders and members. The purpose of this present research is to develop and validate a Leader–Member Conversational Quality (LMCQ) scale—an instrument that measures the quality of conversations between leaders and members in the workplace. A series of three studies were conducted. Study I involved item generation and content validity assessment. Study II undertook the task of scale construction and reliability assessment. Study III tested the convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the scale. These studies resulted in a nine-item instrument with sufficient psychometric properties. The ability of the instrument to assess conversational practices quantitatively will help generate greater insights into leader–member communication dynamics and their consequences.

Revisiting the Association of LMX Quality With Perceived Role Stressors: Evidence for Inverted U Relationships Among Immigrant Employees

Although earlier research on leader-member exchange (LMX) theory supported a negative linear relationship between LMX quality and role stressors, recent studies suggest that a more complex, nonlinear relationship may exist between LMX quality and variables traditionally associated with it. Based on communication research of LMX and social exchange theory, the aim of this article is to revisit the relationship between LMX quality and role stressors by reconceptualizing their associations and testing the hypotheses of an inverted U relationship. A survey study among immigrant employees revealed differential effects of LMX quality on role stressors. In particular, with role conflict and role overload LMX quality was found to have an inverted U relationship, but a negative linear relationship with role ambiguity. These findings challenge the prevailing assumptions and carry significant theoretical and practical implications.

Conversation at Work The Effects of Leader-Member Conversational Quality

Although research has made significant gains in understanding the constitutive nature of conversation in the process of organizing, its predictive effects on organizational outcomes are still uncertain. To contribute in this direction, based on social exchange theory and leader-member exchange (LMX) research, this study examined the predictive effects of leader-member conversational quality (LMCQ) on employee organizational commitment (OC), and the potential interaction effects of LMCQ with LMX quality. Using data from an online survey, this study found that above and beyond communication frequency and other control variables, LMCQ is significantly associated with employee OC. More interestingly, the effects of LMCQ vary based on the level of LMX quality. These findings have significant implications at both theoretical and practical levels.

Structural Pluralism and the Community Context: How and When Does the Environment Matter?

Several long-standing theories intersect in discussing the impact of community characteristics and of the mass media. The structural pluralism model popularized by Tichenor and his colleagues says that social structure influences how mass media operate in communities because they respond to how power is distributed in the social system, whereas the linear model says that the increasing size of a communitys population leads to more social differentiation and diversity and corresponding increases in subcultures with their own beliefs, customs, and behaviors. Recently, there has been a concern about how changes in society have led to a decline in organizational activity and the network of relationships and trust that constitute “social capital.” This article examines the impact of population and diversity (using census data) on individuals’ media use, interpersonal discussion and civic engagement (measured in a national survey), and the relationship among these variables. Analysis of a structural model provides evidence that the “linear hypothesis” can be combined with structural pluralism, with size—measured by population—impacting diversity, which influences the relationships that people have with their community. Concurrently, social categories influence peoples communication patterns and community relationships, and communication impacts civic engagement.