Autonomy or control? organizational architecture and corporate attention to stakeholders

• Autores: Donal Crilly, Pamela Sloan
• Localización: Organization Science, ISSN-e 1526-5455, Vol. 25, Nº. 2, 2014, págs. 339-355
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Existing explanations of corporate attention to stakeholders overlook how organizations distribute the attention of their members. Combining interview and survey data at two levels of analysis, we show that executives� assumptions about how best to configure their organizations have important implications for how their firms attend to stakeholders. We identify two types of organizational architecture: guided autonomy and cascaded control. The former enables specialized attention at the level of the individual manager and facilitates simultaneous attention to a large number of stakeholders; the latter restricts the autonomy of individual managers and leads to redundancy in attention. Our contribution is a framework that takes account of top manager frames and organizational architecture to articulate the relationship between individual- and organizational-level attention and to explain why some firms can address the concerns of multiple stakeholders simultaneously.