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Organizational Architecture (organizational + architecture)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	100%

Selected Abstracts

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE, ETHICS, AND ORGANIZATIONAL ARCHITECTURE

JOURNAL OF APPLIED CORPORATE FINANCE, Issue 3 2003
James A. Brickley
Effective corporate leadership involves more than developing a good strategic plan and setting high ethical standards. It also means coming up with an organizational design that encourages the company's managers and employees to carry out its business plan and maintain its ethical standards. In this article, the authors use the term organizational architecture to refer to three key elements of a company's design: ,the assignment of decision-making authority,who gets to make what decisions; ,performance evaluation,the key measures of performance for evaluating business units and individual employees; and ,compensation structure,how employees are rewarded for meeting performance goals. In well-designed companies, each of these elements is mutually reinforcing and supportive of the company's overall business strategy. Decision-making authority is assigned to managers and employees who have the knowledge and experience needed to make the best investment and operating decisions. And to ensure that those decision makers have the incentive as well as the knowledge to make the best decisions, the corporate systems used to evaluate and reward their performance are based on measures that are linked as directly as possible to the corporate goal of creating value. Some of the most popular management techniques of the past two decades, such as reengineering, TQM, and the Balanced Scorecard, have often had disappointing results because they address only one or two elements of organizational architecture, leaving the overall structure out of balance. What's more, a flawed organizational design can lead to far worse than missed opportunities to create value. As the authors note, the recent corporate scandals involved not just improper behavior by senior executives, but corporate structures that, far from safeguarding against such behavior, in some ways encouraged it. In the case of Enron, for example, top management's near-total focus on boosting reported earnings (a questionable corporate goal to begin with) combined with decentralized decision making and loose oversight at all levels of the company to produce an enormously risky high-leverage strategy that ended up bringing down the firm. [source]

Bank Mergers and Small Firm Finance: Evidence from Lender Liability

FINANCIAL MARKETS, INSTITUTIONS & INSTRUMENTS, Issue 2 2008
James E. McNulty
As a merger approaches, the value of repeat business for the target bank can drop sharply, so loan relationships between this bank and small businesses are often disrupted. Small firms sometimes experience serious value destruction as a consequence of this sudden lack of credit. This paper shows that lender liability may result from bank mergers and bankers involved in mergers often engage in aggressive, scorched-earth defense tactics to discourage further litigation. I summarize six lender liability cases to illustrate these points. Bank mergers have been shown to reduce credit availability in a number of studies. Since small firms depend on credit for their daily existence, owners of small firms do have a reason to fear a merger of their bank with a larger institution. Analyzing merger effects with survey data of firms obtained after a bank merger, an empirical strategy used in a number of studies, raises problems since the only firms considered are the ones that survived the bank merger. Suggesting that the problem will cure itself in the long run, an argument advanced in other studies, ignores small firms' daily dependence on credit. In the long run we are all dead. Bank examiners need to evaluate an institution's litigation experience and measure a bank's organizational architecture , its ethical climate. Banks which are repeatedly involved in lender liability lawsuits should be denied future mergers until there is a change in organizational architecture. To assist in evaluating organizational architecture, banks should be required to report their litigation expense on their call reports. Furthermore, regulators should seriously consider the recent suggestion of Carow, Kane and Narayanan (2006) that they take steps to ensure that participants in bank mergers preserve target bank relationships. Otherwise negative effects on small business lending and economic growth will continue as bank consolidation proceeds. [source]

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE, ETHICS, AND ORGANIZATIONAL ARCHITECTURE

POWER LEARNING OR PATH DEPENDENCY?

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2 2010
INVESTIGATING THE ROOTS OF THE EUROPEAN FOOD SAFETY AUTHORITY
A key motive for establishing the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was restoring public confidence in the wake of multiplying food scares and the BSE crisis. Scholars, however, have paid little attention to the actual political and institutional logics that shaped this new organization. This article explores the dynamics underpinning the making of EFSA. We examine the way in which learning and power shaped its organizational architecture. It is demonstrated that the lessons drawn from the past and other models converged on the need to delegate authority to an external agency, but diverged on its mandate, concretely whether or not EFSA should assume risk management responsibilities. In this situation of competitive learning, power and procedural politics conditioned the mandate granted to EFSA. The European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council shared a common interest in preventing the delegation of regulatory powers to an independent EU agency in food safety policy. [source]

Localization and Partnership in the ,New National Health Service': England and Scotland Compared

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2 2001
Bob Hudson
This article examines some important and interesting differences in the designs of the ,New NHS' in England and Scotland in respect of two common guiding imperatives , localization and partnership. In examining the view of key local stakeholders faced with introducing the changes, we contrast the generally more flexible and less prescriptive approach in Scotland. In England there was, initially, a raft of guidance from the centre: in Scotland, by contrast, there was virtually none. In England the prime bases for localization will be PCGs and PCTs: in Scotland they will be Local Health Care Co-operatives (LHCCs). The latter, like the English PCGs, are to be GP-led; but unlike PCGs, membership is voluntary. Underlying such redesign of the organizational architecture are some important changes in cultures and modes of governance. In particular, we note the rhetoric of a shift, at macro-level, from hierarchies and quasi-markets to networks and the perceived reality of a micro-level shift from individualism to collegiality amongst GPs. [source]

Conceptualizing Corporate Entrepreneurship Strategy

ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY AND PRACTICE, Issue 1 2009
R. Duane Ireland
Our knowledge of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) continues to expand. However, this knowledge remains quite fragmented and non-cumulative. Herein, we conceptualize CE strategy as a useful focal point for integrating and synthesizing key elements within CE's intellectual domain. The components of our CE strategy model include (1) the antecedents of CE strategy (i.e., individual entrepreneurial cognitions of the organization's members and external environmental conditions that invite entrepreneurial activity), (2) the elements of CE strategy (i.e., top management's entrepreneurial strategic vision for the firm, organizational architectures that encourage entrepreneurial processes and behavior, and the generic forms of entrepreneurial process that are reflected in entrepreneurial behavior), and (3) the outcomes of CE strategy (i.e., organizational outcomes resulting from entrepreneurial actions, including the development of competitive capability and strategic repositioning). We discuss how our model contributes to the CE literature, distinguish our model from prior models, and identify challenges future CE research should address. [source]