Dear colleagues,
This month we are highlighting the second part of our Research Primer in the Journal of Org Design. These articles introduce readers to particular research streams/literatures and articulate implications for organization design.
A primer is an introduction to a research stream, akin to tutorials, not a review of it. Accordingly, its structure resembles a (text)book chapter rather than a review article, giving a brief history of evolution of the relevant literature, its core mechanisms, theoretical predictions and empirical findings. It also summarizes any major debates or divergent perspectives, its positioning in the broader field, and link/s to other theories/literatures. The Research Primers provide an overall assessment of the literature, explore its relevance to organization design and lay out potential future directions.
Initially conceived as a security technology, blockchain technology has since gained global interest by spawning decentralized, participatory and trusted network systems. The authors discuss the various organizational and technological elements of governance of ten selected cryptocurrency blockchain systems, focusing on whether their operation and adaptation are (de)centralized. Their analysis shows that the selected cryptocurrency systems are mostly decentralized on the technological aspects. In the consensus process, however, some algorithms utilize information distributed throughout the entire network, giving the system a centralized nature. Interestingly, the organizational aspects of their governance are largely centralized. When unforeseen problems occur, problem-solving coordination is usually based on centralized, top-down control and monitoring. The authors conclude with a discussion on the origins and implications of the dual nature of the governance of cryptocurrency blockchain systems.
Some organizations allow their employees to respond to external emergencies by engaging in response actions for a limited time, like in the case of emergency response teams. These teams consist of employees that act as emergency response officers who can respond to floods, train crashes, or other emergencies. Emergency response teams constitute an example of so-called latent organizing in the preparation for and response to any future emergency. While latent organizing is ubiquitous in a societal and professional sense, it has hardly been studied in the organization design literature. The authors develop a research agenda for studying latent organizing which serves to prepare for and respond to emergencies, but otherwise remains largely dormant and inactive. Finally, they develop the construct of latency to explore how effective latent organizing can be designed and facilitated.
Post-merger integration covers the trade-off between the economic benefits and costs that arise when organizations merge under a new organizational structure and reconfigure their businesses and resources. To reconfiguration scholars, post-merger integration is a crucial tool for firms to reconfigure resources, product lines, and business units to adjust to internal and external environment needs. Other scholars focus on organization design, shedding light on structural integration following an acquisition and exploring key trade-offs of this process. The authors integrate reconfiguration and organization design aspects on choices of what and how to integrate after mergers and acquisitions, questions that have often been treated separately. The authors point to studying the micro-foundations of post-merger integration or taking a temporal perspective to studying the process across multiple acquisitions among other opportunities for future research in this space.
Evolutionary psychology assumes that human nature reflects adaptations to an ancestral environment that was intensely social, but differed profoundly from modern organizations in scale and complexity. Further, organizational structures and cultures co-evolved with human nature to deal with the different environmental challenges early humans faced. In this article, the author presents a concise review of the theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology and conveys how evolutionary psychology hypotheses about organizational design, culture, and leadership in organizations can be developed and tested.
Divestitures by Emillie Feldman & Patia J. McGrath [2016, open access] Divestitures are defined as the removal of one or more of a company's lines of business via selloff or spinoff. The article outlines how research on divestitures has evolved in the finance and strategy literatures, how to design and conduct empirical research studies on this topic, and the implications of divestitures for organization design. The authors point to expanding the geographic breadth of divestiture research, and to how internal and external stakeholders influence the drivers, execution, and ultimate performance of divestitures, among other opportunities for future research in this space.
We welcome your submissions for this format. For guidance on formatting and structure of these articles, please refer to our Instructions for Authors (pdf) or reach out to one of us. We hope you found inspiration and new insights in these different Research Primers!
Brian, Marlo, and Oliver
Co-Editors in Chief
The Journal of Organization Design is the intellectual home of organization design thinking. It is a small journal which gives us the opportunity to push boundaries and publish topics that are not yet mainstream enough for the big ones.
We offer a unique set of formats – research articles, primers, translationals, point of view articles, commentaries, and organizational zoo – and all articles are peer-reviewed. We are listed in Clarivates Emerging Sources Citation Index (and discoverable in its Web of Science) with a 2022 impact factor of 1.8 (Five-year 3.9); our 2022 Scopus CiteScore is 3.6; our median submission-to-first-decision time is 21 days, and we aim to make decisions in one round.