Vlerick Repository

• Who is in charge of digital transformation? The birth and rise of the chief digital officer

  Buchwald, Arne; Lorenz, Felix (2020)

  With the increasing pressure for organizations to digitalize, many companies are complementing their top management teams (TMT) with new members, chief informational and digital officers (CIOs and CDOs). As members of top management teams, CIOs and CDOs are expected to fulfill essential roles in the digital transformation strategy and its implementation. By making decisions on digitalization, they also influence business model development, innovation, and business strategy. While research on digital transformation is growing steadily, we lack a coherent understanding of the extent and nature of these top management roles and their relationships and the specific tasks involved. Based on the literature on management, information systems, and related fields, this paper discusses the evolving CIO and CDO roles and their interrelationships. Our key contribution is to conceptualize the role split, the emergence of the CDO, the nature of organizational roles and relationships by drawing on concepts of organizational ambidexterity, transactive memory systems (TMS), and shared understanding. We find that despite the separation of roles and potentially overlapping responsibilities, a collaborative relationship can be beneficial due to the complementary nature of the roles particularly to drive the digital transformation. We conclude with a future research agenda."
• The effect of justice expectations on OCBs and its regulation by professional identification

  Sguera, Francesco; Patient, David (2020)

  In highly uncertain contexts, such as organizations undergoing major change initiatives, employees become especially attentive to procedural fairness. Although research has focused mainly on perceptions of experienced procedural justice, employees also generate expectations about the procedural fairness they will receive in the future, termed anticipatory procedural justice. In this paper, we posit that these expectations can affect employee positive behaviors that are not specifically related to the change itself, namely organizational citizenship behaviors. Further, we hypothesize that employees highly identified with their profession will be less affected by justice expectations, while employees who are less identified will rely on these expectations when deciding to engage in organizational citizenship behaviors. We test our hypotheses using a multi-method approach entailing one experiment with a heterogeneous sample of US workers (n=183), one three-wave panel survey with a sample of US workers from different organizations undergoing wage cuts and layoffs (N=101), and one field survey in a public health government agency facing a large scale organizational change (n=315). In all three studies, anticipatory procedural justice fully mediated the relationship between experienced procedural justice and organizational citizenship behaviors. In Study 3, where the majority of respondents worked in vocational roles (e.g., healthcare specialists and psychology counsellors), professional identification moderated this mediated relationship. Specifically, the organizational citizenship behaviors of employees highly identified with their profession were not affected by anticipatory procedural justice. We conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications of our findings."
• How online platforms transform the experience of work within organizations

  Rogiers, Philip; Viaene, Stijn; Leysen, Jan (2020)

  Drawing from an in-depth case study of an online labor platform within the U.S. federal government, this article introduces and defines a technology affordance model for a new work experience in organizations. Through employees’ interaction with distinct platform features, four mechanisms arise that support employees in their quest for self-actualization. Opportunity and autonomy affordances, bundled as growth affordance, allow employees to craft and seek out internal tasks or projects through which they could grow and utilize their skills and abilities in generic, multi-core areas. Reinvention and feedback affordances, bundled together as impression affordance, then allow employees to experiment with different work identities, and construct an aspirational online image of their selves at work. Besides exposing the action potential arising from human-platform interactions, this article also describes how employees become aware of and interpret this potential, as well as how organizational forces promote or constrain its enactment. It emphasizes the applicability of the model to knowledge-intensive work, wherein workers are increasingly under pressure to engage in life-long learning and upskilling, and to continuously shift and reinvent their work identities. This article suggests the framework’s wider implications and relevance for research into the future of work and organizations."
• The future of internal staffing: A vision for transformational e-HRM

  Rogiers, Philip; Viaene, Stijn; Leysen, Jan (2020)

  Through an international Delphi study, this article explores the new dynamics that are starting to characterize internal staffing, by means of transformational electronic human resource management. Our focus is on three types of information systems that are expected to evolve and be used in function of transformative change in internal staffing systems: human resource management systems, job portals, and talent marketplaces. Together, these systems challenge current knowledge on internal labor market organization, by affording market-like staffing systems that enable employees to construct personalized and self-directed pathways for growth. Further, this article identifies the key challenges for realizing this vision in governments, such as inadequate regulations and funding priorities, a lack of leadership and strategic vision, together with rigid work policies and practices and a change-resistant culture. Tied to the vision in this article, we identify several areas of future inquiry that bridge the divide between theory and practice."
• Thinking of a position outside the US? Dos and Don'ts of international business schools

  Chattopadhyay, P.; Richter, A.; Shenoy, P.; Patient, David; Cojuharenco, I.; El Nayal, O.; Hartman, S.; Caprar, D.; Rerup, C.; Grohsjean, T.; Lowe, K. (2020)

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