S. Ghoshal et Ca. Bartlett, LINKING ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT AND MANAGERIAL ACTION - THE DIMENSIONSOF QUALITY OF MANAGEMENT, Strategic management journal, 15, 1994, pp. 91-112
Organizational context is created and renewed through tangible and con
crete management actions. The context, in turn, influences the actions
of all those within the company. In this article, we elaborate this t
heme of an interactive development of context and action that, we argu
e, lies at the core of a company's management process and is a key inf
luencer of its performance. Based on a longitudinal field-study in one
company, we identify discipline, stretch, trust and support as the pr
imary 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 conte
xt, 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.