Inherent conflicts between process management and exploration--论文代写范文

在提高制造业上进行流程管理，相邻的流程选择和发展技术创新。随着效率为导向的流程管理,越来越多的阻碍组织的动态能力。我们已经探索技术和组织环境如何适应。这篇essay代写范文进行论述。

Abstract
  More than 30 years ago, Abernathy (1978) suggested that a firm’s focus on productivity gains inhibited its flexibility and ability to innovate. Abernathy observed that in the automobile industry, a firm’s economic decline was directly related to its efficiency and productivity efforts. He suggested that a firm’s ability to compete over time was rooted not only in increasing efficiency, but also in its ability to be simultaneously innovative (Abernathy, 1978, p. 173). The necessity of balancing efficiency and exploitation with innovation and exploration has not lessened since Abernathy’s initial observations (Gupta et al., 2006). 

  Exploring how organizations might strike this balance has been a consistent theme across research in organizational adaptation (e.g., Brown and Eisenhardt, 1998; Burgelman, 1994; March, 1991). Finding the right balance is complicated by a wave of managerial activity and institutional pressures focusing on process management and control (e.g., Cole, 1998; Winter, 1994). Process management’s success in improving manufacturing effi- ciency has led to its migration beyond operations to other parts of organizations, for instance, to adjacent processes for selecting and developing technological innovations (Brown and Duguid, 2000; Scott-Young and Samson, 2008). 

  As the efficiency oriented focus of process management spreads to centers of innovation, it increasingly stunts an organization’s dynamic capabilities (Cole and Matsumiya, 2007). We have explored how both technological and organizational contexts moderate the relations between process-focused activities and organizational adaptation (Benner and Tushman, 2002, 2003). We argue that process management techniques stabilize and rationalize organizational routines, while establishing a focus on relatively easily available efficiency and customer satisfaction measures. While increased efficiency results from these dynamics in the short run, they also trigger internal biases for certainty and predictable results. The diffusion of process management techniques favors exploitative innovation at the expense of exploratory innovation. We argue that while exploitation and inertia may be functional for organizations within a given technological trajectory or for existing customers, these variance reducing dynamics stunt exploratory innovation (see also Christensen, 1997). 

  In a 20-year longitudinal study of patenting activity and ISO 9000 quality program certifications in the paint and photography industries, we found that increased routinization associated with process management activities increases the salience of short term measures and triggers selection effects that lead to increases in exploitative technological innovation, at the expense of exploratory innovation. In both industries, the extensiveness of process management activities in a firm was associated with an increase in exploitative innovations that built on existing firm knowledge, as well as an increase in exploitation’s share of total innovations. Our results suggest that exploitation crowds out exploration. 

  Indeed, in the photography industry, increases in process management activities were associated with a decrease in exploratory innovation. We suggest that these widely adopted organizational practices shift the balance of exploitation and exploration by focusing on efficiency at the expense of long-term adaptation. What are the underlying mechanisms by which exploitation drives out exploration? O’Reilly and Tushman (2008) suggest that the inertia associated with variationreducing activities is rooted in the increasingly tight coupling between a firm’s structure, rewards, culture, competences, and identity, as well as in the demography of the senior team. Tightly interrelated activity systems actively impede anything but internally consistent change (e.g., Siggelkow, 2001; Sroufe and Curkovic, 2008). 

  Dynamic conservatism comes from the system itself. It is not that inertial systems are stable. Rather, they act to dampen deviations from the status quo. Worse, there is evidence that exploitation-oriented problem solving practices diminish an individual’s ability to explore. In a natural experiment where industrial engineers were randomly assigned to ISO 9000 training, Tilcsik (2008) found that ISO 9000 training was associated with increases in the engineers’ efficiency at the expense of their creativity. These individual performance effects were accentuated for more uncertain tasks and the effects were stable over three years. Tilcsik (2008) suggests that these effects are rooted in diminished intrinsic motivation and stunted cognitive models associated with TQM training.

 Structural ambidexterity as a dynamic capability 
  Abernathy (1978) highlighted the inconsistencies between activities focused on productivity improvements and cost reductions and those focused on innovation and flexibility. He questioned whether it was possible for organizations to pursue both types of activities simultaneously (p. 173). It may be possible to achieve high levels of productivity as well as innovation and flexibility. If so, the unit of analysis must shift from Abernathy’s productive unit as the level of analysis to the business unit (though Adler et al., 1999, work is indeed at the factory floor). Ambidextrous organizational forms are organizational architectures that build in internally contradictory subunits simultaneously (Tushman and O’Reilly, 1997; Bradach, 1997). Structural ambidextrous designs are composed of multiple subunits that are internally tightly coupled, but loosely coupled to each other. For example, at USAToday, the incumbent newspaper business was only connected to the exploratory dot com business through weekly cross-unit editorial meetings. Such targeted linking mechanisms permitted highly decentralized action that still took advantage of USAToday’s core editorial content. 

  Within subunits, the tasks, culture, individuals and organization arrangements are consistent, but across subunits, tasks and cultures are inconsistent and loosely coupled. Exploratory units succeed by experimenting, by creating small wins and losses frequently. In contrast, exploitation units succeed by reducing variability and maximizing efficiency. These contrasting, inconsistent units are physically and culturally separated from each other, have different measurement and incentives, and have distinct managerial teams (Raisch and Birkinshaw, 2008). These highly differentiated but loosely coupled subsystems must be strategically integrated by the senior team. Such strategic linkage is anchored by a common aspiration and a senior team that is rewarded based on common fates measures, and a senior team that provides slack to the experimental subunits and holds the differentiated units to fundamentally different selection and search constraints (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2008). （essay代写)

  To be effective, ambidextrous senior teams develop their own processes such that they can establish new forward-looking cognitive models for exploration units, while allowing backward-looking experiential learning to rapidly unfold for exploitation units (Smith and Tushman, 2005). In sharp contrast to contextual ambidexterity, where the locus of exploitation and exploration is throughout the firm (Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004), structural ambidexterity separates out exploratory from exploitative activities. Strategic options are created in multiple small exploratory units that are buffered from exploitative units. The top management team selects out from the multiple experiments a variant from which they then move towards greater exploitation. Thus organizations evolve through continuous incremental change in exploitative units and through punctuated change driven by results of the exploratory units as the business moves toward greater scale. Such highly differentiated units in the context of activist senior management teams permit the firm to simultaneously explore even as it exploits. O’Reilly and Tushman (2008) and Harreld et al. (2007) provide examples of structural ambidextrous designs at the business unit and corporate levels of analysis.（essay代写)

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