Jonatan Jelen

A Postmodern Resolution to Leadership Conceptual Ambiguities

The authors’ meta-analysis identified salient characteristics found in the selected leadership research, allowing for a disambiguation of the transformational and charismatic leadership operational traits tied to the scientific management theories first espoused by Frederick Taylor (1911). The meta-analysis comprised selected research studies from 1999 to 2008, and revealed 10 distinctive intrapersonal and interpersonal referents that map the heuristic tools leading to emergent leader and follower behaviors. We propose a postmodern evaluation matrix that reveals structural systematic biases and eliminates modernist conceptual ambiguities tied to the leader-worker dyadic in varying organizational contexts. The findings suggest that leadership researchers should consider complex behavioral decision-making processes that result in emergent group performances instead of focusing on a leader’s ephemeral behavioral traits. A postmodern approach also helps researchers identify a group’s performance on a continuum that would demonstrate their willingness to act in a way that tests individual limits, stretches group boundaries, and exceeds company goals, what the authors term a Star Trek Affective State.

A New Role for Design and Design Managers in the ‘Organizational Design’ of High Social Value-Creative Business Models

Sustainability at the global and local level constantly requires a contextual understanding of the premise of organizational behavior. We unravel that in fact that currently there is no veritable role for design, designers, or design methodology associated with ‘organizational design’. Rather, already practiced organizational designs are analyzed retrospectively through trial and error, for possible change, adaptation, optimization, mutation - in short ‘evolution’ - while the original creation of the system blueprint or architecture is not questioned. The application of such a system to produce sustainability requires reexamination. The design of an organization is a byproduct of tactics and management bureaucracy in postindustrial organizational entities. The role of design is subordinate and residual at best. In this admittedly abstractive albeit critical and empirically supported paper we want to demonstrate that (a) an entrepreneurial perspective on design in the premise of sustainable change is challenged by the paradigmatic and transformational effects of information and information technology in their most recent incarnations (especially with the advent of complex information technology-intensive firms); and (b) that the apparent problematic absence of a design theory and the existence of the firm can be reconciled via the involvement of design managers with their presumed design-methodological grounding. We advocate a tripartite system for designing, producing, and the adaptation of sustainable change: design managers design the firm, managers operate it, and strategists lead and govern it. Thus, in the pursuit of a sustainable world – but contrary to our energy dependent convictions for it - we propose to substitute the anachronistic evolutionary speciation of organizational design with a perspective based on ‘intelligent design’.