Reference
Bildstein, I., & Güldenberg, S. (2013). How Court Jester Attributes in the Knowledge Worker Collective Facilitate Effective Shared Leadership and Truly Dynamic Capabilities in Outlier Organizations. Paper presented at the Strategic Management Society - Lake Geneva Special Conference: Strategizing Practices from the Outliers: Enabling “Big Bang” Innovations, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Publication type
Paper in Conference Proceedings
Abstract
Capabilities can become maladaptive, when organizational action off the beaten track is needed. They then morph into rigidities, which reliably replicate anachronisms. Separating practicing a routine from reflecting on it is the first side of the jester coin, because the resulting perpetual self-reflection resolves the capability-rigidity-paradox on the micro-level. The other side of this jester coin is about facilitating effective communication and feed-forward within the firm, to solve this tension by better communication quality on the macro-level. Effective shared leadership is the bridging theoretical construct to overcome both areas of tension, since it prevents both individual behavior and knowledge-based organizations' capabilities from becoming too rigid. We propose in our conceptual contribution, how court-jester-like virtues in the knowledge worker collective introduce dynamic renewal into per se static organizational capabilities. Our paper ends with discussing, how our theoretical considerations on overcoming these two dark sides of capabilities should be scrutinized in future research; specific implications for strategic management are also derived.
Research
- How to Attract Experts to and how to Make Them Productive in Knowledge-based Organizations?
- PhD-Thesis, October 2008 until October 2013 (finished)
Management in the industrial economy focused on increasing the productivity of single manual workers, because it was easy to determine individual contributions to tangible outputs. Hence ... more ...
Persons
Organizational Units
- Institute for Entrepreneurship
- Chair in International Management