Special Issue: "Flexibility Bottom Up"
Special issue call for papers from Journal of Organizational Change Management
Employees of contemporary companies are forced to live in a turbulent environment; markets and technologies are changing fast, while information and communication ask for increasing spans of attention. At the same time, hierarchical bureaucracies are questioned by individuals and groups articulating new social values, for instance in ecological or gender terms.
If a company is to survive, its employees have to develop a potential capacity to prevent, behave in a pro-active way, to respond quickly to changing conditions, to remain competitive. Strategic flexibility is of particular importance for the company, because it allows to develop adaptive capacity and to survive in “hypercompetitive” environments. Strategic flexibility is frequently associated with leadership potential of top management teams, but there is an increasing tendency to trace it in rank-and-file behaviour and committment. Top management teams (TMT), with capacity to change, are becoming heavily dependent on new knowledge of their bottom-liners – everybody has to contribute to a bottom-up transformation if it is to remain sustainable and difficult to imitate. Servant leaders listen to whispers close to the ground.
There has been a growing literature on the transformational leadership and organizational change. Not much, however, has been written on those who are – formally speaking “led”, but in reality ‘lead” their leaders.” Hence a special issue is proposed to examine the “bottom-liners” of a professional organization and their role in guiding the “top’. Ironically, it means the reversal of roles in the new “cultural revolution” – managerial elite does not write the scripts to wage inner circle power struggles, but allows the managed masses to speak up..
Papers can be of a theoretical or empirical nature, or investigate practical concerns. They can be drawn from any research tradition; contributions of both a quantitative and a qualitative nature are invited. Topics could include but are not restricted to:
- Professional background, leadership potential & organizational change
- Talking back to the boss, innovating & organizational change
- Leadership and “followship” styles & organizational change
Abstracts (500 words maximum) should be sent to the Guest Editor at the address below. Abstracts should arrive by 1 March 2010. If accepted, completed articles of below 38 pages should be submitted by 30 June 2010 at the latest (for double blind peer review). The issue will be published at the beginning of 2011. By submitting any manuscript, the author certifies that the manuscript is not copyrighted and is not currently under review for any journal or conference proceedings. If the manuscript (or any part of it) has appeared, or will appear in another publication of any kind, all details must be provided to the editor-in-chief at the time of submission.
Guest Editors
Prof. Youmin Xi, School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China. 710049
Prof. Qiaozhuan Liang, School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China. 710049
Email: sibell@mail.xjtu.edu.cn