Tobias M. Scholz

What Can We Learn from Game Leadership

Current Leadership faces severe problems, since the workforce is changing and it becomes more complicated to motivate employees. Therefore this paper looks into how video games are handling the topic of leadership. Gaming is part of the modern media world and as research indicates it gives insights into leadership of future organizations. In this paper leadership theory will be compared with two cases of games: On the one hand World of Warcraft and on the other hand Counter-Strike. Both games give different insights of the intuitive game leadership training of these players. After comparing these cases with the leadership theory, we see that they are mostly fitting to the leadership theory, thus their approach to these principles is different. Therefore the cases allow us to learn diverse tactics of leadership, as the cases focus on the fun and the motivation. The players enjoy the learning of new skills and align with other peoples and different abilities. In summary this paper shows, that gamer already learning several skills for leading companies and teams, however they also learn to participate in teams on their own. Companies can learn that motivation and keep raising the bar are essential for organizations in order to attract the new gamer generation. We also learn about the importance of the fun in work, which becomes more essential for the gamers.

Going Beyond Ambidexterity in the Media Industry: eSports as Pioneer of Ultradexterity

As media companies continue to struggle on the ever-changing global and digital market, they often fail to be simultaneously innovative and entrepreneurial. As though intuitively knowing that they are still not on the right track, a growing number of media companies has been observed to approach eSports companies, intending to invest in innovative capabilities they lack themselves. The trend has reached its peak in 2015. Expanding the current research on ambidexterity with its either/or duality of exploration and exploitation, the authors propose a model of ultradexterity that goes beyond either/or and follows the logic of both/and. This conceptual paper is intended to characterize ultradexterity as a specific property of being both innovative and entrepreneurial at the same time. Based on ethnographical information and data on the eSports industry, the authors will carve out the ultradextrous working style of eSports companies that nourishes the expectation of media companies that incorporating such organizations will give them the opportunity to turn their lack of ambidexterity into ultradexterity.

Complex Systems in Organizations and Their Influence on Human Resource Management

Although complex systems have been part of organizational studies for several decades, they have witnessed significant changes in recent years. This research builds on existent work on complex systems by focusing on the shift toward power-law distributions. Evidentially, HRM is highly nested in those complex systems. Due to the advancements in the theoretical understanding of complexity and influenced by these, HRM is also shifting in new directions, especially towards a dynamic approach. In consequence, a new notion of a dynamic HRM is emerging, which could be characterized as “function follows process”. Accordingly, understanding HRM as complex systems, HRM needs to observe the dynamic core of its processes as well as the outcomes of a changed governing distribution and derive from these its alternating functionality.

The Human Role Within Organizational Change: A Complex System Perspective

Although complex systems have been part of organizational studies for several decades, research have only shifted significantly in recent years. This paper is based on existent work on complex systems and particularly on the research about power-law distributions. Through this research stream, we propose that organizational change becomes more explainable. Furthermore we suggest that the human role within organizational change will have a strong influence on the change process, and therefore it is necessary to research the distribution of the human network to improve the change process. Distinguishing behavior in a human network following the power-law distribution or normal distribution will lead to different approaches towards the change process. Interestingly both distributions point to opposing actions. Based on this, understanding the human role within a complex system will be essential for observing the dynamic interactions within an organization, and thus understanding the human network within organizational change.

What Can Human Resource Management Learn from Video Games? An Ethnographical Approach to World of Warcraft

In this paper I want to research World of Warcraft (WoW) with the lens from HRM and what HRM can learn from WoW. Using the method of cognitive ethnography (Hutchins, 1995) I combine my experiences from over six years of playing the game as well as observing the devel- opment to the current date. Based on previous research (Scholz, 2010) I already depicted the following essential principles for leadership: Bring fun back, keep raising the bar, living on the edge, trial and error, motivation beyond money. However HRM is not solely about leadership and therefore research has to be expanded to other fields of HRM too. WoW is a combination of elements from the game design and from the community itself. Game developers implement el- ements that are comparable to HRM, others are established through interaction and collaboration of players to achieve goals and master the game. Following up some exemplary comparison be- tween HRM and WoW.

Strategic Renewal of Complex Systems Based on the Case of the 1. FC Kaiserslautern

In sports there are always teams and players standing in a crisis, it seems that the next crisis is always imminent. In this paper we want to analyze a current crisis of the German football and thereby compare the situation with the organizational ecocycle model. This model will describe the situation of Kaiserslautern and shows that the model can describe the complete crisis of the team. Not only is the crisis of Kaiserslautern typical for the football setting, it is also comparable to the business world. We can learn from the crisis and the renewal of Kaiserslautern, where teams and companies can struggle intensively and throughout that extend the crisis and shorten the renewal.

Different Jobs Need Different Cultures

Team performance is affected by cultural values; in this paper we propose that cultural differences have different influences in distinct job-fields. The implications are based upon a survey of software development teams in the game software industry. We focus on the game software industry as it represents an under-researched field, and the game software development teams are truly international work teams and are predestinated for cross-cultural research. Based upon cross-cultural information systems and teamwork literature, we develop a conceptual model with the constructs of cultural values, cultural intelligence, mindfulness, teamwork quality, and team performance and tested it on a sample of 179 game developers. The results show that cultural values have an influence on team performance and more important these values differ in the job- fields.

International Talent Management – Tentative Implications from Cultural Background and Cultural Intelligence

Talent management consists for potential talents, trains them and keeps them at a company, however in a globalized world the cultural factor is disregarded. Talents will be appraised on grades and experience, but not on their cultural background. By integrating the cultural background and the cultural intelligence into talent management, it should be possible to find even more fitting talents and keep them in the company with fewer incentives. Based upon the cultural background and cultural intelligence we developed a model with the constructs of cultural values, cultural intelligence, mindfulness, teamwork quality, and team performance and tested it on a sample of 179 game developers. This model gives us insights into the different cultural influences on performance depending on the job field, therefore it reveals the importance on the talent management to include the cultural background as well as the cultural intelligence. We will shortly review talent management in literature and after-wards look into the cultural diversity and its beneficial influence on team performance.