Abstract In a business environment of increasingly frequent and violent changes, small and medium-sized enterprises can quickly change to adapt themselves to the environment with their own flexibility, and large enterprises often suffer from inertia, including routine rigidity and resource rigidity, which makes them unable to make timely changes and leads to their loss of competitive advantage. Although previous researches have found that enterprises' perception of the external environment affects organizational inertia, the research on how enterprises use this perception to overcome organizational inertia is still insufficient. On the one hand, previous researches divide organizational perception into threat-perception and opportunity-perception, in accordance with the results of the enterprises' perception of the external environment. This division ignores the fact that factors used to be taken as threat factors may turn into opportunity factors with the accumulation of enterprises' resources and capacity. On the other hand, findings and conclusions from previous researches about the influence of organizational perception on organizational inertia are contradictory. In order to fill the gap of previous researches, this article takes Haier group as a research sample and uses the grounded theory method to study the path of organizational perception to overcoming organizational inertia. Through the longitudinal study of nearly 20 years of managerial innovation of Haier, this article draws the following conclusions. First, the organizational perception of the external environment is the dual-perception which perceives both threats and opportunities. When an enterprise's ability and resources are insufficient for it to seize opportunities, 〖JP2〗its perception of threat overpowers its perception of opportunity, forming a threat-dominated dual-perception. When the enterprise's ability and resources are sufficient to seize the opportunity, the threat-perception becomes less significant than the opportunity-perception, forming an opportunity-dominated dual-perception. Second, 〖JP〗when an enterprise faces discontinuous changes in the external environment, the threat-dominated dual-perception triggers off the behavior of internal marketization, which includes establishing a flat organization, implementing internal market accounting, and adopting full-value management. 〖JP2〗Internal marketization helps the enterprise to propel process reform and overcome the routine rigidity by spreading threat-perception to every trading subject within the enterprise. The opportunity-dominated dual-perception triggers off the behavior of intrapreneurship,〖JP〗 which includes establishing an organizational platform, implementing a small and micro-enterprise autonomy, and adopting the ″Integrating Order with Personnel″ mode. Through these tactics, intrapreneurship promotes employees to explore external opportunities and encourages enterprises to put resources into emerging opportunities. In this way, enterprises can effectively overcome the resource rigidity caused by their reinvestment in securing market leadership and their dependence on the existing capital markets and customer markets. Therefore, this article argues that internal marketization and intrapreneurship are mechanisms which connect organizational perception with organizational inertia. The dual-perception of the environment can be diffused effectively to each employee in enterprises through internal marketization and intrapreneurship, which inspire employees to make changes and promote enterprises to overcome organizational inertia.
|
|
|
|
|