Analyzing controls

Formal control mechanisms and their enactment

Additional controls: the relevance of social mechanisms

How do self-managing, team-based organizations evolve through controls?

Discussion

Key takeaways

Conclusion

Selected bibliography

Introduction: controls in a post-bureaucratic era

Innovative firms in global markets have grown aware of the importance to keep the ideas alive and to renew their learning and innovation capabilities, while focusing on reaching high quality and low cost and responding to customers’ needs. To achieve these objectives a growing number of firms have embraced the conversion to the so-called “post-bureaucratic” organizational structures, transforming from hierarchically-based to flat organizations built around self-managed teams. So, they moved from a coercive form of organization – abrogating individual autonomy and focusing on the typical technical efficiency of bureaucracy – to a context where individuals are provided with broader information and pushed to interact creatively, master their tasks, and assess their performance against their historical standards (conceived as valuable resources for both performance optimization and identification of opportunities locally and systemically). Indeed, bureaucratic organizational forms, based on fixed boundaries and hierarchical, top-down, control and authority were not fit to face the volatility of market and the high level of environmental dynamism and uncertainty. Therefore, a “horizontal shift” has occurred, reducing the level of vertical differentiation of hierarchical forms. In order to improve the organization readiness to change, cross-functional processes were implemented, delayering, giving empowerment and delegating the decision power closer to knowledge and information. Self-managing teams, working cross-functionally, represent the basis of post-bureaucratic organizational structures, promoting authority decentralization and employee empowerment. Network relations and crosscutting links between members supposedly create favorable conditions for organizational learning, fostering innovation and flexibility. We define innovation as the adoption of any process, product or service previously foreign to the focal organization. Indeed, past research has stressed the relevance of individual, organizational, and environmentalfactors as correlates ofinnovation, while others have viewed innovation as a function of all three factors. Nonetheless, experience proves that it is more difficult than expected to uncover ideas or to make use of internal capabilities for learning and innovation purposes. Despite the wide adoption of the team-based organizational structure, there are still challenges to address to be able to lead teams towards the achievement of a good balance between learning, innovation and performance goals. For example, understanding the proper role for team executives and leaders, and the effect of organizational controls in shaping team behaviors and values. These challenges still do not find appropriate responses due the difficulty to match proper managerial interventions with specific internal team characteristics and configuration. Internal and external contextual factors can have multiple and unexpected conflicting influences on team learning capability and performance. This is the case of the focal multinational corporation in the telco industry that we analyzed. This article focuses on organizational controls acting atthe individual,team and organizational level, unexpectedly causing the decline of learning and innovation performance. We describe their combination and their effects on the achievement of organizational learning and innovation goals (Fig. 1).