PROBLEMÁTICA DE SU AUTONOMÍA: DISTINTAS POSICIONES CONSECUENCIAS PRÁCTICAS.

Research from the generative-systems perspective on routines seeks to explain how routine participants generate endogenous routine change or stability (Pentland and Rueter, 1994; Feldman, 2003; Lazaric and Denis, 2005; Zbaracki and Bergen, 2010). Such research emphasizes the agency of routine participants and frequently downplays the impact that the external and internal organizational context has on routine participants (Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011; Salvato and Rerup, 2011). My review on endogenous stability and change of rou- tines has demonstrated that organizational context represents an important ante- cedent of endogenous routine processes and their economic outcomes: Some or- ganizational contexts foster stability and continuity in organizational routines that are prone to variation and endogenous change, such as treatment routines in a hospital (Bohmer, 2010), to ensure short-term efficiency in routine performances (Katkalo et al., 2010). Other organizational contexts exhibit managerially super- vised processes to achieve highly controlled endogenous change in stable organi- zational routines, such as suggestion systems implemented in the operating rou-

3 _{Earlier versions of the third chapter were presented at the 73}rd _{Annual Meeting of the Academy of Man-}

tines of an industrial enterprise (Adler et al., 1999; Arthur and Aiman-Smith, 2001), to allow for incremental adaptation (Farjoun, 2010). Neglecting organiza- tional context as an antecedent of processes and outcomes of routine change will yield a partial and incomplete understanding and explanation of endogenous rou- tine change (Johns, 2006; Levinthal and Rerup, 2006). The subsequent chapters present empirical inquiries into settings where the organizational context fosters stability in situations where endogenous routine change is common (chapter 4) and where the organizational context fosters change in situations where endoge- nous stability is common (chapter 5). In doing so, these chapters contribute to our understanding of how the embeddedness of routine participants in a wider exter- nal and internal organizational context influences the dynamics of organizational routines.

In the fourth chapter (co-authored by Jessica Chromik)4, we explore configura- tions of external and internal organizational contexts as antecedents of stability in organizational routines. More specifically, we seek to explain when and why written organizational rules—as a mechanism to foster stability in organizational routines—are persistently enacted within organizational routines that otherwise exhibit high levels of variation and endogenous change. Persistent rule enactment is critical for organizations to function, as failure of persistent rule enactment may lead to poor performance, organizational delegitimization, and even the death of employees or customers (cf. Weick, 1990; Inoue and Koizumi, 2004; Bruns, 2009). While current research demonstrates that organizational routines and written rules frequently drift apart (Anand et al., 2012), routine research has largely ignored contextual conditions that operate on multiple levels above (e.g., institutional pressures) and below (e.g., task complexity) the routine but never- theless affect the enactment of written rules (cf. Parmigiani and Howard- Grenville, 2011; Salvato and Rerup, 2011). Our exploratory study is based on a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 19 medical-treatment routines performed in 10 internal-medicine departments of university hospitals. We iden- tify three multilevel configurations where written rules persisted in an empirical setting characterized by high levels of improvisation and little managerial over- sight: When institutional pressure is high, written rules will persist in routines addressing tasks of high complexity (“reducing risk”) or when highly experi- enced routine participants execute tasks at high frequency (“securing status”). When institutional pressure is low, written rules will persist in routines where routine participants have low levels of experience in the face of high task vol- umes of little complexity (“surviving stress”). Our study contributes a multilevel

4 _{Earlier versions of the fourth chapter were presented at the 73}rd _{Annual Meeting of the Academy of}

framework that incorporates external and internal organizational context into rou- tine research. We conclude that written rules persist when they function as a re- source to routine participants and provide them with confirming experience when enacting the written rule. Therefore, theories of organizational routines need to be broadened to include external and internal organizational contexts as anteced- ents of persistent rule enactment in organizational routines.

In the fifth chapter (co-authored by Andreas Richter and Thorsten Semrau)5, we focus on employee creativity in suggestion systems. Suggestion systems repre- sent a formal process through which many organizations channel and control rou- tine participants’ impetus for endogenous routine change, in particular in con- texts where routines have to be performed at high levels of efficiency (Coriat and Dosi, 1998; Adler et al., 1999; Coriat, 2000). Organizations employ such systems to collect, evaluate, and compensate routine participants’ ideas for changing work routines (Robinson and Stern, 1998; Frese, Teng and Wijnen, 1999). The devel- opment and submission of suggestions on how to improve work routines repre- sents an example of creative performance behavior (Adler et al., 1999; Coriat, 2000; Montag, Maertz and Baer, 2012). Such behavior, however, does not neces- sarily lead to creative outcomes that are novel and useful to the organization (Montag et al., 2012). As Nelson and Winter (1982: 116) argue, individual rou- tine participants that try “to do a better job” frequently fail to improve the rou- tine’s economic impact because they lack a comprehensive understanding of the whole organizational routine and its interdependent entities. More generally, be- cause of the risky and uncertain nature of creativity (Weick, 1995a; Simonton, 1999; Fleming, 2001; Kelley and Littman, 2001; Sutton, 2001; March, 2010), creative failure is common and relevant for employees attempting to endogenous- ly change organizational routines.

This chapter examines how the internal organizational context moderates how failed employee creativity predicts subsequent employee creativity in a sugges- tion system. Employee creativity encompasses creative performance behavior as well as the creative outcomes produced by that behavior. Because individual em- ployee creativity is often enacted in teams (Shalley, Zhou and Oldham, 2004; Hirst, Van Knippenberg and Zhou, 2009), we argue that the team social context in particular influences whether prior creative failure triggers or stifles subse- quent creative activity. Specifically, we posit that if employees with failure expe- riences work in teams that are psychologically safe (i.e., teams that are safe for interpersonal risk taking; Edmondson, 1999), they receive the encouragement

5 _{Earlier versions of the fifth chapter were presented at the WK TIE Workshop 2013, St. Gallen and the}

and support they need to attenuate threat-rigidity reactions and boost self-efficacy beliefs, resulting in sustained creative effort. Beyond socio-emotional support, teams that provide a safe environment for interpersonal risk-taking may also en- courage employees with failure experiences to seek out advice and information from, and confide in, their team colleagues. Provided that teams share a well- developed transactive memory system (Wegner, 1987), this environment may further fuel their idea-development process (Richter et al., 2012). We tested our hypothesis using archival and survey data from 218 employees working in 42 teams and found that creative failure positively predicted creative performance behavior and creative outcomes if employees worked in teams with medium-to- high levels of psychological safety. Under these conditions, employee creativity also benefited from well-developed team transactive memory systems. Given that we know little about how employees overcome creative failure for sustained cre- ativity, this chapter goes beyond the boundaries of current routine research (Barreto, 2010; Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011; Salvato and Rerup, 2011) and focuses on employee creativity as a micro-foundation for endogenous routine change (Farjoun, 2010; Hirst et al., 2011; Rerup and Feldman, 2011). By examining the role of the team context in which employee creativity is enacted, we provide answers to the question of how employees can overcome prior crea- tive failure for sustained creative activity.