Matthias Georg Will

Successful organizational change through win-win

Purpose – This paper aims to show new ways of overcoming resistance during organizational change by applying insights from New Institutional Economics. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual paper that adapts findings from New Institutional Economics. Findings – The paper highlights the relevance of interactions between managers and employees for value creation processes: interactions can generate either win–win or lose–lose situations. By altering the restrictions on managers’ and employees’ behavior, change managers can create mutual benefits for the staff and the firm. The paper thus explicitly considers the individual interests of employees and managers and highlights an approach to link individual interests with the collective interests of the firm by means of appropriate interactions. Additionally, the paper elaborates the relevant factors that determine the success of classical change management measures, like communication or participation, to overcome resistance during organizational ...

Schadet oder nützt die Finanzspekulation mit Agrarrohstoffen? — Ein Literaturüberblick zum aktuellen Stand der empirischen Forschung

ZusammenfassungDieser Literaturüberblick wertet 35 Forschungsarbeiten aus, die zwischen 2010 und 2012 veröffentlicht wurden und den Einfluss der Finanzspekulation auf die Agrarrohstoffmärkte empirisch untersuchen: Gemäß aktuellem Erkenntnisstand spricht wenig für die Auffassung, dass die Zunahme der Finanzspekulation in den letzten Jahren (a) das Niveau bzw. (b) die Volatilität der Preise für Agrarrohstoffe hat ansteigen lassen. Hierfür waren vielmehr realwirtschaftliche Faktoren verantwortlich. Deshalb sind die wissenschaftlichen Studien mehrheitlich nicht dafür, sondern dagegen, (c) regulatorische Marktzutrittsbarrieren zu errichten. Insofern ist der zivilgesellschaftliche Alarm zur Finanzspekulation als Fehl-Alarm einzustufen: Wer den Hunger in der Welt wirksam bekämpfen will, muss realwirtschaftlich dafür Sorge tragen, dass das Angebot an Nahrungsmitteln mit der auf absehbare Zeit steigenden Nachfrage Schritt halten kann.AbstractThis literature survey comprises 35 empirical studies, published between 2010 and 2012, which analyze the influence of financial speculation on the markets for agricultural commodities: According to this current state of research, there is little evidence for the point of view that the recent increase in financial speculation has caused (a) the price level or (b) the price volatility in agricultural markets to rise. Rather, fundamental factors are made responsible for this. Therefore, most papers are not in favour but against (c) erecting market barriers by regulation. Against this background, the public alarm, claiming that financial speculation has detrimental effects and should be forbidden, seems to be a false alarm: People who are interested in fighting global hunger should take care of fundamental factors and take appropriate measures in order to keep supply in step with the demand, which is likely to rise in the near future.

From nonprofit diversity to organizational multifunctionality: a systems-theoretical proposal

The remarkable feature of the nonprofit sector is its astonishing diversity. This feature gets short shrift in the traditional market or governmental failure theories of the nonprofit sector. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s concept of functional differentiation, we demonstrate that these theories are implicitly economy- and politics-biased. In seeking to overcome these biases, we show that nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are better understood as those varieties of organizations whose primary focus is on function systems other than the economy and politics. We summarize this argument in the concept of organizational multifunctionality, which turns out to be likewise applicable to the for-profit sector.

Sensemaking and sensegiving

Change management projects typically fail because they meet employee resistance created by emotional sensemaking processes. This paper aims to present an in-depth explanation for these failures and how change managers could avoid them.,This study presents an argument in the following three steps: it begins with an empirically well-established fact that attempts at change management often trigger negative emotional responses; the moral foundations theory is then used to identify the typical categories of emotional responses that may result in resistance to organizational change; and the ordonomic approach to business ethics is built upon to substantiate the diagnosis that, in many cases, emotional responses cause employees to behave in a way that is collectively self-damaging.,The core idea of the current study’s contribution is that emotionally driven processes of sensemaking can easily become dysfunctional, especially in situations that require extensive change. Consequently, it should be top priority for managers to engage in sensegiving, which comprises: narratives that explain what is going on against the background of relevant alternatives and appropriate discourses that guide how employees form their expectations. In a nutshell, sensegiving attempts to reframe sensemaking processes.,Even if a win–win potential already exists, it can still be misperceived. If employees are used to thinking within a trade-off framework, this might trigger trade-off intuitions and negative emotions, in effect leading to a situation that makes everyone worse off. Such mental models might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To counter such a tendency, sensegiving aims at a professional management of sensemaking processes. The task of successful change management, properly understood, is to create and communicate win–win potentials, ensuring that all parties involved understand that they are not asked to sacrifice their self-interest, instead they are invited to participate in a process of mutual betterment.,The literature on sensemaking draws attention to the empirical fact that resistance to change is typically driven by emotions. The moral foundations theory helps in exactly identifying which emotional dimensions are relevant in times of organizational change. The ordonomic approach to business ethics points out that – owing to their emotional nature – processes of sensemaking might fail, that they may mislead employees into behavioral patterns that are collectively self-damaging. Therefore, a top priority for management is to engage in sensegiving, that is, in (re-)framing sensemaking processes.

Next concepts for successful organizational change

We hope that these contributions might be a stimuli for new theories, empirical validation and ideas for practical challenges. There are many challenges in our field but we believe that well-developed theories would be highly productive for its advancement. With this in mind, we also encourage our readers to challenge theoretically and/ or empirically this special issue’s papers. This is exactly how we as scholars can generate social progress and prevent research on change management ending up like alchemy or astrology.

Stakeholder Theory: A Luhmannian Perspective

We explore the cross-fertilization potential between stakeholder theory and Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. Social systems, such as corporations or nonprofits, are defined by complexity reduction and operational closure, which may render them insensitive to their environment and undermine their sustainability. This vision resonates with stakeholder theory’s arguments on the importance of the corporate responsiveness to stakeholder interests. The suggested common ground between the theories yields novel insights into key concepts of stakeholder theory such as the contrast between the jointness of stakeholder interests and trade-off thinking, the normativity of the stakeholder idea, and the meaning of corporate social responsibility.

Discourse and Regulation Failures: The Ambivalent Influence of NGOs on Political Organizations

In the last decades, NGOs have become an important participant in the work of political organizations (e.g., national authorities, the EU or the UN). This development brings many opportunities and also some challenges, including discourse failure which is one of the topics discussed in this paper. We present a case study that illustrates the interdependence of discourse failure and regulations failure. We conclude that discourse failure is frequently not merely an accidental by-product, but rather, a non-intended consequence of deliberate NGOs’ campaigns. We make particular note of probable discourse failure when campaigns attempt to deal with complex issues in an environment rife with wide-spread prejudices and where the NGO’s work is transparent. In this situation, regulation failure may be consequent upon discourse failure. We present collectively binding commitments for NGOs and binding services enforced by political organizations to prevent discourse failure. In conclusion, we argue that the field of political economy can benefit from this challenging environment if it systematically researches the interdependencies between discourses and regulations.

Speculation on Agricultural Commodities: A Brief Overview

This short essay on financial speculation with agricultural commodities offers (1) a survey of the real economy factors that caused recent hunger crises, (2) an overview of academic research on the impact of index-based financial speculation on agricultural futures markets, and (3) a discussion of political measures that are appropriate for im-proving global food security. The arguments are supported by numerous graphs.

Coase-Theorem und Organ-Transplantation: Was spricht für die Widerspruchslösung?

In Deutschland klaffen Angebot und Nachfrage von Spendeorganen weit auseinander. Das Spendenaufkommen hangt wesentlich vom institutionellen Regime ab, innerhalb dessen Transaktionskosten die Allokation masgeblich bestimmen. Mit dem Coase-Argument ist dies ersichtlich, nicht aber mit dem Coase-Theorem.

A New Empirical Approach to Explain the Stock Market Yield: A Combination of Dynamic Panel Estimation and Factor Analysis

This paper presents an empirical approach that combines competing paradigms of modeling in empirical capital market research. The approach simultaneously estimates the explanatory power of fundamentals, expectations, and historic yield patterns, making it possible to test the extent to which the efficient market hypothesis, fundamental data analysis, and behavioral finance contribute to explaining stock market yield. The core of the approach is a dynamic panel model (Arellano-Bond estimator with an MA restriction of the residuals), complemented with an upstream factor analysis to reduce multicollinearity. Due to the complexity of the data set, a great many parameters that influence the yield can be determined. Highly significant parameter estimates are possible even though the information in the data set is interdependent. For the German stock market (the 160 companies listed in DAX, MDAX, SDAX, and TecDAX), the quarterly yield is analyzed for the period between 2004 and 2009. The model has high explanatory power for the entire observation period, even in light of the fact that the period includes the financial crisis of 2008.