Maintaining Leadership Legitimacy in the Transition to New Organizational Forms

Bala Chakravarthy and Martin Gargiulo

Journal of Management Studies, 1998, vol. 35, issue 4, 437-456

Abstract: Numerous new organizational forms have been proposed for ensuring the continuous strategic renewal of a firm. In essence, these forms are distinguished by: (1) their emphasis on bottom‐up entrepreneurship, and (2) their reliance on a co‐operative network that allows these entrepreneurial units to share their competencies with one another. One of the key behaviours required for the success of such an organization is employee empowerment. We argue in this paper that the legitimacy of corporate leadership during the restructuring of a traditional bureaucratic organization is crucial to its eventual transformation to one of the new organizational forms. The current wisdom of a two‐stage transformation process, where an authoritarian restructuring precedes the more participative revitalization, is thus challenged. The transformation may get stalled after the restructuring stage because of top management’s inability to empower the firm’s employees at will, having lost their trust during restructuring

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00104

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jomstd:v:35:y:1998:i:4:p:437-456

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... s.asp?ref=00022-2380

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Management Studies is currently edited by Timothy Clark, Steven W. Floyd and Mike Wright

More articles in Journal of Management Studies from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().