Abstract

Organizational context is created and renewed through tangible and concrete management actions. The context, in turn, influences the actions of all those within the company. In this article, we elaborate this theme of an interactive development of context and action that, we argue, lies at the core of a company's management process and is a key influencer of its performance. Based on a longitudinal field-study in one company, we identify discipline, stretch, trust and support as the primary dimensions of organizational context and we describe how each of these dimensions can be developed and how these dimensions, in turn, influence the levels of individual initiative, mutual cooperation and collective learning within companies. Shaping the organizational context, we suggest, is the central task of general managers and we propose our model of context as a way to assess an organization's quality of management.

Keywords

Context (archaeology)Action (physics)Process (computing)Knowledge managementQuality (philosophy)Task (project management)BusinessTheme (computing)Organizational learningPublic relationsProcess managementManagementComputer sciencePolitical scienceEpistemologyEconomics

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Publication Info

Year
2007
Type
article
Volume
15
Issue
S2
Pages
91-112
Citations
623
Access
Closed

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Sumantra Ghoshal, Christopher A. Bartlett (2007). Linking organizational context and managerial action: The dimensions of quality of management. Strategic Management Journal , 15 (S2) , 91-112. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250151007

Identifiers

DOI
10.1002/smj.4250151007