Browsing by Author "Vartiainen, Matti, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland"

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The Construction of the Hybrid Package: Evolution of Product Concepts and Production Concepts Through Experiments with Artefacts
(2016) Jalonen, Meri
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
This dissertation examines the innovation process of a hybrid package for food products as a bundle of practices, which engage both human and non-human actors. Despite the acknowledgement of the significance of integrated product and process development to innovation, the understanding of the interdependency between the development of products and production remains limited. To explore the intertwined trajectories of the product, production technology and production practices over time, the study draws on a practice-based approach to innovation. The study develops a relational approach to the analysis of the role of artefacts in collaboration and proposes using boundary object as an umbrella term for artefacts that mediate collaborative work. The study suggests that artefacts perform as boundary objects through mediating functions, which artefacts acquire as part of a practice. The study follows the development of the hybrid package and its production practices by analysing qualitative data that cover a period of eight years. The data originate from a research collaboration with a recently founded business unit of a paper company and they include interviews, observations and workshops. The study produces three main findings. First, boundary objects shaped the innovation process of the hybrid package in four ways. They attracted partners to join the collaboration, facilitated the development of the product's properties through collaborative and autonomous work, enabled the transfer of work tasks without direct communication between people and transformed the course of action through resistance. Second, the study identifies 11 mediating functions of boundary objects, which evolved from the mediation of communication to the mediation of experimentation practices over the course of a product development process. Third, the study demonstrates the intertwined evolution of the properties of the product and its production practices over time. The study provides new insight into the interaction between product development and production in the innovation process. The study demonstrates how engagements of humans and artefacts produced the properties of the hybrid package and created its manufacturing technology, organised the development process and resulted in the establishment of a business unit. The study bridges the innovation and the operations management literature by illustrating interdependencies of the trajectories of product concepts and production concepts. The study contributes to the literature on the roles of artefacts in collaboration demonstrating the multifunctional and transformative nature of boundary objects.
The Dynamics of Proactive Striving - Initiating and sustaining development efforts in product design and entrepreneurship
(2015) Björklund, Tua A.
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Not even brilliant ideas advance themselves. In all organizations, proactive efforts are required to translate opportunities into actual improvements. However, most research on proactivity in entrepreneurship and product design has addressed dispositional antecedents, and research in general tends to focus on goal setting, idea generation, and decision-making. But what happens after the initial decision to pursue an idea has been made? In this dissertation, a qualitative approach building on 4566 interview segments from 80 interviews in 13 organizations was used to explore how the process of proactive striving in product design and entrepreneurship is initiated and sustained. The four empirical essays included one experiment on how product design experts and students differed in their interpretations of design briefs. Proactive striving was observed already at this stage: more successful developers had more extensive, in-depth, and interconnected representations. The essays also included three naturalistic studies: idea advancement in two product design projects, attracting resources and other input in creating a new organization, and a longitudinal study of four new companies developing their first offering market-ready. In all of these studies, feedback from the environment emerged as a crucial mechanism for sustaining and even escalating proactive striving behaviors. Sometimes this required time-consuming inclusion and communication practices, creating the need for local inefficiency to produce global effectiveness. Based on the results, the generic idea development funnel can be modified into a process model of the enactment of proactive striving. In addition to recognizing the need for pruning non-action from fruitful action and progressively specifying actions in concrete iterations, the model makes two key contributions towards understanding the dynamics of initiating and sustaining proactive striving. First, it emphasizes potential discontinuities in efforts due to transitioning between three different levels of proactive effort manifestations: micro-level specific actions, intermediate-level activities, and global-level approaches. Second, it highlights the potential for positive spirals through individual-environment interaction: creating concretizing approximations of the pursued ideas in the form of boundary objects provided feedback on the feasibility of efforts, encouraged initial stakeholder input, and sustained efforts by energizing and committing developers and stakeholders alike. The model also illuminates several opportunities for enhancing development efforts with relatively minor interventions.
Living Labs as Open Innovation Networks - Networks, Roles and Innovation Outcomes
(2015) Leminen, Seppo
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
The importance and benefits of open innovation networks are widely accepted. Enterprises and other organisations are increasingly utilizing a variety of open innovation networks in different contexts. This study defines a living lab as a concept including real-life environments, a multitude of different stakeholders, and the importance of users as a part of innovation activities. Living labs are interesting because they represent a new way of organizing innovation activities by facing parallel socio-economic challenges and technological opportunities. This study aims to understand networks, user and stakeholder roles, and outcomes generated in living labs. The study has the following research questions: (1) What is a living lab, from a network perspective? (2) What roles do users and stakeholders have in living lab networks? (3) How do network structures affect outcomes in living labs? The research paradigm of this dissertation is grounded in constructivism. This study applies abductive reasoning as the research approach, where the study is grounded in literature on living labs and consists of empirical data on 26 living labs in Finland, Sweden, Spain and South Africa. The study offers many theoretical contributions and defined concepts for the living labs literature. Among the theoretical contributions, this study identifies seven new stakeholder roles (coordinator, builder, messenger, facilitator, orchestrator, integrator and informant), and four role patterns (role ambidexterity, reciprocity, temporality and multiplicity) in living labs. Next, this study highlights that collaboration and outcomes in living labs are achieved in the absence of strict objectives. This contribution is unique: many other studies on innovation propose that innovation activities should be managed and controlled. Further, this study identifies centralised, decentralised and distributed networks structures in living lab networks and uses them to analyse innovation activities in living labs. This study also reveals that network structures support the various types of innovations in living lab networks. This study offers tools and frameworks for managers and researchers to understand, identify and categorise open innovation networks and pursue innovation development in open innovation networks, particularly in living lab networks. For the future, this dissertation suggests nineteen propositions and a range of other research opportunities for open innovation networks and particularly living labs but also for contingency theory and the resource-based view.
Making Leadership - Performances, Practices, and Positions that construct Leadership
(2016) Virtaharju, Jouni
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This dissertation separates from the traditional leadership view that leadership stems from the actions of leader characters. Rather, it argues that context is the source from which leadership arises in organizational settings. In the dissertation leadership is understood as a social construction. Leadership is defined as a meaning of collective mobilisation towards a purpose: people perceive such a state as leadership. The dissertation is comprised of four individual essays. In the essays the construction of leadership is studied in two different cultural/organisational settings. Three of the essays study how organisational changes in an industrial organisation affected supervisory leadership. Contextual changes in supervisory tasks, practices and positions influenced the perceptions that organisational stakeholders had of supervisors and their leadership. The remaining essay focuses on presidential leadership. The essay analyses how ritualistic performance (an informal fishing ritual) was mythologized in media, creating a lasting interpretation of the presidential leadership. The studies adopt an interpretative research approach and apply narrative analysis as their primary research method. Overall, the dissertation shows how context partakes in the construction of leadership. It explains how leadership is not the direct result of the leader actions, but becomes constituted in an entangled web of sociomaterial elements and actors. The study shows how the leadership constituting elements have a common, mundane quality; by nature, they have no exclusive leadership character, but become infused with leadership in a meaning making process. The dissertation lays the ground for novel ways to both study leadership as contextually generated action and to develop leadership through contextual organisational interventions.
Making Strategy Work : Sense and Sensibility of Results-Oriented Pay Systems
(2016) Hulkko-Nyman, Kiisa
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
Incentive systems are here to stay. They are meant to motivate employees and boost their performance - but often their impact is not quite what was expected. It is thus essential to study how their outcomes are generated and under what conditions systems work best. This dissertation sheds light on these topics. A model is built and tested to find out how results-oriented pay (ROP) systems influence satisfaction with the ROP system, performance and co-operation as perceived by the employees. The model combines propositions from the theories of contingency, expectancy, goal setting, and procedural justice in a novel way to build a midrange theory. It proposes that ROP system outcomes are generated by four antecedents - employees' knowledge of ROP and the importance they ascribe to it, along with their perceptions of fairness of ROP procedures and fit between the ROP system and the organizational goals. Further, the study contributes to our understanding of how this happens in the contexts of three types of ROP systems identified. The data (N = 1778) were collected from informants belonging to 35 different ROP systems in 18 organizations from Finnish private and public sectors. In addition, descriptions of the ROP systems were used. The data were analyzed with hierarchical regression analyses and correspondence analysis. The results show that the systems had on average only from modest to moderate outcomes – there is room for improvements. Positive ROP outcomes emerged when the respondents experienced that the ROP systems made sense, i.e., the link between ROP and goals was clear and the employees knew the system well, and had sensibility, i.e., the employees were fairly treated. The generation of outcomes was unique for each of the three contexts, thus the study emphasizes context-sensitive approaches. Ideally, incentive systems should be built to match organizational goals, and managers should communicate this strategic link so that systems make sense. The choice between individual and group bonuses should be made by taking into account that co-operation outcomes were lowest for individual bonuses. The managers of individual bonuses should strive for fairness and the managers of group-based bonuses should invest especially in active communication of the ROP system.
The micro-to-macro problem: the generation of mobilizing frames through idea development conversations
(2013) Ruotsalainen, Riku
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Existing research has established mobilizing frames as a driver of institutional change. However, we know little about how mobilizing frames emerge. This doctoral dissertation investigates how and when conversations can produce new mobilizing frames, i.e. action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings. The empirical analysis of this dissertation is based on a longitudinal study of idea development conversations in a creative project between professionals from nine public health care organizations in Finland, 2009 - 2012. The three essays of this dissertation interpret the same empirical data through distinct theoretical 'lenses' developed in the essays. This research approach is called 'theoretical triangulation' and it is used to provide an in-depth understanding of the micro-to-macro conversational processes linking individual actors' discourse to the generation of mobilizing frames. The first essay takes an ecological perspective to investigate what characteristics of conversations are associated with the generation of influential ideas. The second essay develops a novel structuration perspective to study how conversations construct cultural structures, and how such cultural structures condition the subsequent negotiations concerning tangible changes in the organizations. The third essay studies how conversations construct conversational 'networks', and how such networks condition the selection of ideas as mobilizing frames. The findings suggest conversations are more likely to generate influential ideas when actors utilize a broad spectrum of genres, when actors shift between the genres frequently, when the population of conversed ideas is large, and when the average conversational attention per idea is low. In such temporally evolving and culturally diverse conversations, the development of nascent ideas into mobilizing frames is crucially dependent on the formation of inclusive, supportive, dense, and relatively stable conversational 'networks' where the idea advocate is centrally positioned. The findings are synthesized into a model describing the ecological relationship between the population of ideas and the conversational, cultural, and relational environment in which the ideas live and die. This novel perspective provides a theoretical answer to the important practical question of why change in the field of public health care is so slow.
PARI ASKELTA JÄLJESSÄ - tuurilla mennään - Tutkimus suomalaisten organisaatioiden ja työterveyshuollon toteuttamasta henkilöriskienhallinnasta strategisen johtamisen välineenä
(2013) Halonen, Kristiina
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
This thesis examines people risk management as a strategic management tool carried out by Finnish organizations and occupational health care. Research data based on the case study framework was collected initially in 2004-2005 with two questionnaires (n=368, n=59). The third part of material consists of information on risk management contained in the 2009 annual reports for public disclosure and financial data of the 50 largest Finnish organizations. The research methodology used in the study is the multi-method approach. This study demonstrates that Finnish organizations' holistic people risk management approach is still in its infancy. People risks are not managed as a systemic whole, but as partial optimization, which is why an overall view of the most significant people risks will not be formed. The findings also show that people risk management is not carried out as part of the organization's enterprise risk management as strategic management tool. The most common way of managing people risks in the organizations involved in this study can be characterized as "The Strategy of Chance". The findings also show that occupational health care is not perceived as as strategic partner for people risk management. The study illustrates that there is a discrepancy between what activities occupational health care focuses on, and what health and well-being related risks there are in reality in the client organizations. The people risk management carried out in cooperation by Finnish organizations and occupational health appears to represent a rational view of the world. The findings, however, demonstrate that more strategic thinking is needed in this cooperation, making it possible to identify, analyze, and manage complex multi-dimensional people risks in more depth than simply making use of superficial surveys. The theoretical contribution of this study is that it creates a knowledge base for multidisciplinary research on organization's people risk management and provides a premise for people risk management theories. The study also expands the current research on occupational health care by combining occupational heath care research and holistic people risk management in the context of the study of strategic management. The practical contribution of the study arises from the fact that it produces knowledge directly applicable to working life. The study can be utilized in Finnish organizations, occupational health care, pension insurance companies, risk management training and as learning material.
Pay Reform Justifications and Criticisms - Institutional Logics in the Legitimation and Delegitimation of a New Managerial Practice
(2017) Jämsén, Sini
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
This study concentrates on the legitimation and delegitimation of a new pay system in an organisation, and how institutional logics are present in this process. During the 1990s and 2000s, pay systems based on job evaluations and performance appraisals spread widely in both the public and private sectors of Finland. The Evangelical Lutheran Church was one of the last major public organisations in Finland to introduce the evaluation-based pay system in 2007. This thesis reports a case study of the pay reform, and the reception of the new system. The empirical data consists of 77 trade union member journal articles from the years 2005-2010, and semi-structured interviews of 66 people (32 individual and 9 group interviews). The analysis focus on how the legitimacy and illegitimacy of the new pay system are constructed by the justifications and criticism produced by various actors. Legitimacy is a central concept in organisational institutionalism, and a prerequisite of the institutionalisation of specific practices. Many researchers have argued that actors shape the legitimacy of practices by making persuasive arguments that justify and rationalise practices. In the thesis, the justifications and criticisms are studied through qualitative analysis of articles published in relevant specialist journals and interview data of key change agents and other members of local organisations. The results illustrate how the justifications of the new pay system were quite general, and very loosely connected to specific features of the Church. In comparison, the criticisms of the pay reform focused more on the specific features of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, drawing on contextualised arguments. The findings also reveal the role of various institutional logics in constructing the pay reform and its legitimation and delegitimation. The thesis examined institutional logics in the data, understood as bodies of cultural beliefs, interests, values, and assumptions that influenced the actors' perceptions of legitimacy, among other things. Institutional logics were captured through the analysis of keywords constituting institutional vocabularies. The analysis highlights three central institutional logics prevalent in the construction of legitimacy and illegitimacy: the logics of the new pay system, the Church, and labour market organisations. A central implication of the analysis is the systematically different ways in which various social groups viewed the pay reform: justifications and criticisms given of the reform differed across the various trade union journals and interviewee groups. Moreover, the analysis revealed an inconsequential number of remarks concerning the fit between the Church mission and the new pay system. In effect, the new pay system appeared to be decoupled from the core logic of the organisation. The strong position of trade unions in the pay reform is a probable reason for the decoupling in this case.
The Road to Exceptional Expertise and Success - A Study of the Collective Creativity of Five Multiple Olympic Gold Medalists
(2016) Rahkamo, Susanna
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
This qualitative study is about self-organized and distributed dynamic systems focusing on the process of building exceptional expertise, paying special attention to how creativity contributes to the process. Using grounded theory, the study reveals, which factors and processes built Finnish multi-times Olympic Champions to become unbeatable; and furthermore, provides insight into what the role of creativity is in the process. This study states that the development of exceptional expertise in sports is a cumulative cyclical spiral that has six factors linked to each other. The factors in the spiral are: 1) questioning and playing with the thought, 2) insight, 3) systemic applications, 4) faith in self, 5) inner drive and 6) persistent work. These factors have been studied separately in various studies, but how they all link together has not been presented before. In the system of building excellence, the athlete, the coach and significant other people, as well as the culture, the environment, the equipment and the surroundings are in dynamic interaction. From the effect of these interactions, new opportunities emerge as activities evolve. Little sparks of insights appear little by little through collaboration, seeing, probing and reflecting, affecting an exclusive perspective, understanding, view and allowing holistic insights to develop. Therefore, building excellence is a collective activity merging many peoples' knowing together and this requires creative agency from the athlete as well as from others. As a result of collaboration several expert growing processes often develop side by side, reinforcing each other. This study shows that creativity has an important role in forming the unique insight and this insight affects the quantum leap to exceptional expertise. In such a non-linear system, it is difficult to find any single creator or a simple explanation for success such as an athlete or coach's creativity. However, it is important to identify creative mechanisms that affect the progression to peak success. Until now, the role of creativity in becoming exceptional in sports has gained little attention in academic research. This study brings new viewpoints to building excellence in sports. Furthermore, the study sheds light on this thorny concept, providing insight for any experts, teams and organizations also in other domains searching for a winning edge and the way to become exceptional experts.
Shared Artefacts and Virtual Worlds in Computer-Mediated Creative Collaboration
(2015) Alahuhta, Pekka
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Virtual teams are becoming an increasingly common phenomenon within the globalizing surroundings of corporations. The communication between virtual team members is predominantly based on information and communication technology. The question, how different ICT collaboration environments can support different virtual team activities, has gained attention in research and practice. However, collaboration environments' role to foster creative virtual team collaboration is not entirely understood. This dissertation addresses the topic by focusing on the potential of artefacts and three-dimensional virtual worlds. Artefacts – shared visual representations – have been considered necessary for co-located creative collaboration. Though, the entire ecology of artefacts in distributed, computer-mediated creative collaboration has thus far remained unclear. While previous studies have suggested virtual worlds as beneficial for creative team collaboration, a systematic effort to characterize and describe this potential has not been undertaken. The four essays of this dissertation utilize real-life observational data of interaction between technical experts, decision-makers, and engineering designers. Either a web conferencing tool or a virtual world was employed as a collaboration environment during the observed interaction sessions. The first essay outlines virtual worlds' eight affordances towards creative team collaboration. The second essay investigates the question, how the two-dimensional web conferencing tool and virtual world differ in terms of supporting the use of shared visual artefacts. The third essay broadens the observation of the artefacts by studying their roles as boundary objects, which mediate communication within an intersection of different social worlds. Grounding on these results, the fourth essay addresses the artefacts' role in distributed teams' different collaborative activities within creative virtual world collaboration. Findings of the study demonstrate virtual worlds' potential to foster team creativity. Meanwhile the findings indicate a variety of artefacts that are utilized within creative virtual team collaboration, ranging from epistemic to technical objects. Grounding on the observed contrast between the virtual world and web conferencing tool, the results end up in suggesting an expansion of separated auditory and visual channel information to the concept of boundary objects. While the study conveys practical relevance for virtual teams that engage in creative collaboration, it also outlines potential directions to future ICT collaboration environments development path.
Shared Leadership in Global Virtual Teams: Building Conditions for its Emergence and Team Effectiveness
(2018) Nordbäck, Emma
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Along with digitalization and rapid advances in technology, organizations are increasingly relying on global virtual teams, composed of culturally diverse members who collaborate across geographical distance and technology, to perform their core work activities. These global virtual teams are riddled by complexity, and leaders are struggling with managing them towards success. Along with increased distance and cultural diversity, the ability of a single leader to exert influence on the team successfully diminishes. Therefore, shared leadership, where multiple team members participate in the leadership of the team, has been suggested as a more powerful way to lead global virtual teams. Unfortunately, we know little about the antecedent conditions for shared leadership in global virtual teams and, in fact, research points towards the unlikeliness of shared leadership in a global work environment. In addition, there are conflicting results about the relationship between shared leadership and global virtual team effectiveness. This dissertation offers a qualitative multi-case study of 16 global virtual teams to gain a deeper understanding of how members and their teams enact shared leadership over global boundaries, and how shared leadership influences global virtual team effectiveness. The interview data (N = 129 team leaders and members) was analyzed qualitatively at team and individual levels through single case and cross-case analyses. The results reveal multiple antecedent conditions for shared leadership in global virtual teams. First, a high amount of task and expertise interdependencies, evenly distributed across locations, are linked to a higher degree of shared leadership. Second, the way individual members' levels of autonomy (provided by local and global leadership sources combined) are brought together to form an autonomy profile configuration, is important for the development of shared leadership. Third, empowering supports from both interpersonal supports (leaders and members) and structural supports (technology and work process) may encourage members to take a leap of faith towards shared leadership. The results also reveal boundary conditions, such as implicit and behavioral leadership coordination, for shared leadership to lead to global virtual team effectiveness. This dissertation brings unique aspects of the global virtual team context - including team members' local and global contexts, as well as team configurational aspects - to the foreground, as a means to moving theory forward on shared leadership in global virtual teams. It also offers practical implications, including work design aspects that organizations need to pay attention to, in order to build improved conditions for shared leadership and global virtual team effectiveness.
Workplace Development Programmes as Institutional Entrepreneurs - Why They Produce Change and Why They Do Not
(2016) Alasoini, Tuomo
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This dissertation examines strengths and weaknesses of workplace development programmes, as well as the ability of such programmes to produce broad-based and long-term learning effects and how this ability can be strengthened. The idea of workplace development programmes as institutional entrepreneurs forms the general framework of this study. The study builds on literature on analyses of workplace development strategies and programmes, the diffusion of innovations, learning networks, practice-performance links, and conditions for institutional and social change. The thesis comprises a summary and six research articles. The empirical data concern workplace development programmes in ten European and East Asian countries and regions and 16 learning network projects conducted during 2004-10 as part of the Finnish Workplace Development Programme TYKES. The research data comprise an analysis of the literature, benchmarking of development activities and semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The philosophical cornerstone is pragmatic worldview, flavoured with ingredients of social constructivism. This study is conducted using qualitative strategies of inquiry and qualitative research methods. The scientific contributions relate to new knowledge that increases understanding of the nature of workplace development programmes, the context in which the programmes are conducted and their potential to act as agents of change. Using a revised version of a model developed by Naschold, the study reveals differences between the Nordic countries, other European countries and the East Asian countries and provides an explanation of their distinct patterns. In addition, the study produces a new, more realistic framework, inspired by neo-institutional theory and Geels and Schot's analysis of sociotechnical transitions, for analysing the possibility of working life change supported by workplace development programmes. Regarding policy contributions, this study constructs a framework for analysing the dynamics of development programmes, and describes the means by which a strategy utilizing learning networks can be implemented successfully. The framework, which perceives programmes as production and development systems, contributes to the understanding of critical success factors for programmes and the versatile nature of their outcomes. By making a distinction between two types of generativity, the study reveals the strengths and weaknesses of different modes of programme leadership for directing learning networks. The methodological contributions include the elaboration of the role of programme theories in cases of complex objects for intervention and the modifications made to the Naschold model.