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B325 FINAL EXAM

Chapter 8: definition of power and politics and sources of power ambivalence.
o Definition of power: power is defined as the potential ability to influence behavior,
to change the course of events, to overcome resistance, and to get people to do things
that they would not otherwise do.
o Definition of politics: organizational politics are seen as the exercise or use of power,
with power being defined as a potential force. Politics and influence are the processes,
the actions, the behaviors through which this potential power is utilized and realized.
o Sources of Ambivalence: THREE SOURCES = types of power ambivalence are: -

‫ﻣﺤ‬
 The issue of ends and means: we are ambivalent about ends and means
because the same strategies and processes that may produce outcomes we
desire can also be used to produce results that we consider undesirable.
 Some fundamental lessons we learn in school really hinder our appreciation
of power and influence.

‫ﻤﺪ‬
 The perspective from which we judge organizational decisions often does not
do justice to the realities of the social world.
1- The issue of ends and means:
o There is no doubt that power and influence can be acquired and exercised for evil
purposes.
o Example: most medicines can kill if taken in the wrong amount, thousands die each
year in automobile accidents, and nuclear power can either provide energy or mass
destruction. We do not abandon chemicals, cars, or even atomic power because of
the dangers associated with them; instead, we consider danger an incentive to get
training and information that will help us to use these forces productively.
‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﺍ‬

o YET, few people are willing to approach the potential risks and advantages of power
with the same practicality. People prefer to avoid discussions of power, apparently on
‫ﺮﻣ‬

the assumption that, “If we don’t think about it, it won’t exist.” The end may not
always justify the means, but neither should it automatically be used to discredit the
means.
‫ﻀ‬

o Power and political processes in organizations can be used to accomplish great things.
They are not always used in this fashion, but that does not mean we should reject
them. It is interesting that when we use power ourselves, we see it as a good force
and wish we had more. When others use it against us, particularly when it is used to
‫ﺎﻥ‬

stop our goals or ambitions, we see it as evil.

o A more sophisticated and realistic view would see it for what it is – an important social
process that is often required to get things accomplished in interdependent systems.

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2- Lessons learned at school, lessons to be unlearned: we notice two types of lessons that need
to be unlearned:
a. The first lesson: school life versus organizational life:
o In school, if you have mastered the details of cost accounting, calculus, or electrical
engineering, and the people sitting on either side of you haven’t, their failure will not
affect your performance – unless, that you had intended to copy from their papers.
o In the classroom setting, interdependence is minimized. It is you versus the material,
and as long as you have mastered the material, you have achieved what is expected.
Cooperation may even be considered cheating.
o Such is not the case in organizations. If you know your organization’s strategy but your

‫ﻣﺤ‬
colleagues do not, you will have difficulty accomplishing anything. The private
knowledge and skill that are so useful in the classroom are insufficient in
organizations. Individual success in organizations is quite frequently a matter of
working with and through other people, and organizational success is often a function
of how successfully individuals can coordinate their activities.

‫ﻤﺪ‬
o In achieving success in organizations, “power transforms individual interests into
coordinated activities that accomplish valuable ends”.
b. The second lesson: types of answers:
o Which is more difficult to unlearn, is that there are right and wrong answers.
o We are taught how to solve problems, and for each problem, that there is a right
answer which is given or said by the instructor.
o In the world in which we all live, things are rarely clear cut or obvious.
o The problems we face often have multiple dimensions which yield multiple methods
of evaluation.
‫ﺍ‬

o The consequences of our decisions are often known only long after the fact, and even
‫ﻟ‬

then with some ambiguity.

‫ﺮﻣ‬
‫ﻀ‬
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3- Perspective from which we judge organizational decisions:

o There are three important things to remember about decisions:
 A decision by itself changes nothing. You can decide to launch a new product,
hire a job candidate, build a new plant, change your performance evaluation
system, etc. but the decision will not put itself into effect. Hence, in addition
to knowledge of how to make decisions, we need to know how to implement
decisions.
 At the moment a decision is made, we cannot possibly know whether it is
good or bad. Decision quality can only be known after the decision is
implemented and its consequences become clear.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
 We always spend more time living with the consequences of our decisions
than we do in making them.
o Rather than spending excessive amounts of time and effort in the decision-making
process, it would seem useful to spend time implementing decisions and dealing with
their consequences.

‫ﻤﺪ‬
o Good managers are not only good analytic decision makers. But the more important
is that, they are skilled in managing the consequences of their decisions.
o We conclude that, decisions in the world of organizations are not like decisions made
in school. Therefore, once you have written down an answer and turned in the test,
the game is over. This is not the case in organizational life. The important actions may
not be the original choices, but rather what happens subsequently, and what actions
are taken to make things work out.
- Chapter 9: definition of trust and sustaining the trust building loop.
 Definition of trust: is about the expectations that partners have about their collaboration and
about their partners’ future behaviors in relation to meeting those expectations. The
‫ﺍ‬

anticipation that something will be forthcoming in return for the efforts that are put into the
‫ﻟ‬

collaboration.
‫ﺮﻣ‬

 Sustaining the trust building loop: the three aspects:

o Managing dynamics:
 To sustain the loop, participants need to work together and become more
‫ﻀ‬

ambitious about their joint venture.

 However, an important feature of collaborations – dynamics often lead to
discontinuities in the virtuous circle.
‫ﺎﻥ‬

 Maintaining stability over time in the membership is rarely possible.

 Maintaining stability can only happen if partners have a history of working
together or they can handle collaborative situations.
 Sustaining the trust building loop requires a continuous attention to the
dynamics of collaboration and the implications on trust from changes in
individuals representing the collaborating organizations.

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o Managing power imbalances:

 Larger organizations are more powerful than smaller ones. Such imbalance in
power gets in the way of trust building. The maintenance of trust requires a
resolution of unequal power.
 The process of collaboration will inevitably render some partners more
central to the collaboration than others despite the dependence of one over
the other. Such power imbalance is viewed as “principal” versus “subsidiary”
partners.
 Sustaining the trust building loop long enough to achieve collaborative
advantage, requires finding ways of ensuring that shared power is maximized.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
These ways might include:
 Appreciation of the inevitability of power imbalances.
 Understanding the way in which balances of power tend to change
during the life of the collaboration.

‫ﻤﺪ‬
o Nurturing the collaborative relationship:
 It refers to the need to manage all issues related to collaboration such as
identification of partners, complexity and multiplicity of aims, risk and
vulnerability, complexity and dynamics of collaborative structures, power
imbalance.
 Failing to manage all these issues will cause the trust loop to break and hinder
the achievement of collaborative advantage.
 Even when trust is present, continuous effort is needed to sustain sufficient
level of trust.
 Explicit consideration of management structure, power imbalance, level of
‫ﺍ‬

commitment, and conflicting views of aims needs to be done in addition to

‫ﻟ‬

the continuous nurture process.

‫ﺮﻣ‬

- Chapter 10: the three types of power and power at the macro level.
1- Power Over: -
o It’s an own gain perspective. It is concerned with control of the relationship and power
‫ﻀ‬

over others.
o Such mechanism is mainly used when trust fails.
o Notion of bargaining power relates to this form of power.
‫ﺎﻥ‬

o It is not always clearly recognized, and it can be made to look harmless as a positive
move towards trust building.
o This type of power is known as discursive power. It is a logical type of power which
means that power is attributed to people because of the way we, collectively, talk
about them.

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2- Power To: -
o It is used for mutual gain of relationship.
o Power is exercised by one party in the interests of the collaboration as a whole.
o It can be used as well by one party over another as a way of maintaining stability in
relationships. This perspective lies between power over and power to.
o Power drawn from others is also borderline depending whether the power is drawn
jointly by the partners or by one from the other. To influence decision making process,
organizations need to draw from each other. Such attitude will permit to take away
the negative connotations of power, emphasizing its definition as “the ability to do”
and suggesting that collaboration can unite and extend individual power.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
3- Power For: -
o It is concerned with using collaboration to transfer power to another party or parties.
o The notion of shared power sits on the border between power for and power to
perspectives.

‫ﻤﺪ‬
o It is a mutual gain perspective given the “shared transformed capacity”.
o It refers to “user involvement”, implicating that power is being given away by the
provider of goods and services.
o Such process is summarized in the concept of collaboration empowerment.
o Collaboration empowerment is defined as the capacity to set priorities and control
resources.
o Capacity building is very much emphasized here for both weak and strong parties.
Power at the Macro-level:
‫ﺍ‬

o Various sources of power:

‫ﻟ‬

 Bargaining power: it derives from having some type of resource that another
‫ﺮﻣ‬

party needs. The resource is often in the form of skills, knowledge or

information as well as more tangible forms. The strength of bargaining
position can change over time, especially if one organization acquires a
resource that was scarce.
‫ﻀ‬

 Mismatches in the importance of the collaboration aims of partners: if it is

relevant to one organization than the other, the former is in a poor position
to bargain. The availability of alternative ways to tackle the issue, of
alternative partners, put an organization in a strong bargaining position.
‫ﺎﻥ‬

 Structural relationship between partners: those with acknowledged

authority clearly have a source of power. In addition, those that have
relationships with many other organizations are in a strong position to
influence others in the network.

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o The way that power changes over time:

 The balance of power changes over time in several respects. It may shift from
one partner to another as the collaboration develops.
 This is obvious in situations where knowledge is transferred between partner
organizations, agenda is approved, and new activities come to the front.
 The power may shift as well between individuals within organizations.
 If the collaborative process is working effectively, power can be shared as
partners learn how to trust each other.
- Chapter 11: definition of level, and three levels of culture.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
o The term level refers to the degree to which the cultural phenomenon is visible to the
observer. These levels range from the very tangible overt manifestations that one can
see and feel to the deeply embedded, unconscious, basic assumptions.
The three levels of culture:

‫ﻤﺪ‬
1- Artifacts:
o At the surface is the level of artifacts, which includes all the phenomena that one sees,
hears, and feels when one encounters a new group with an unfamiliar culture.
o Artifacts include the visible products of the group, such as the architecture of its
physical environment; its language; its technology and products; its artistic creations;
its style, as embodied in clothing, manners of address, emotional displays, myths and
stories told about the organization; its published lists of values; its observable rituals
and ceremonies; and so on.
o Artifacts also include, the organizational processes by which such behavior is made
routine, and structural elements such as charters, formal descriptions of how the
organization works, and organization charts.
‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﺍ‬

o The most important point to be made about this level of the culture is that it is both
easy to observe and very difficult to decipher.
‫ﺮﻣ‬

o If the observer lives in the group long enough, the meanings of artifacts gradually
become clear. If, however, one wants to achieve this level of understanding more
quickly, one can attempt to analyze the espoused values, norms, and rules that
‫ﻀ‬

provide the day-to-day operating principles by which the members of the group guide
their behavior (next level of culture).
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2- Espoused beliefs and values:

o When a group is first created or when it faces a new task, issue, or problem, the first
solution proposed to deal with it reflects some individual’s own assumptions about
what is right or wrong, what will work or not work. An examples of this level of culture
are religion and philosophies.
o Those individuals who prevail, who can influence the group to adopt a certain
approach to the problem, and later will be identified as leaders or founders, but the
group does not yet have any shared knowledge as a group because it has not yet taken
a common action in reference to whatever it is supposed to do. Whatever proposed
will only be perceived as what the leader wants.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
o Until the group has taken some joint action and together observed the outcome of
that action, there is not as yet a shared basis for determining whether what the leader
wants will turn out to be valid.
o A set of beliefs and values that become embodied in an ideology or organizational
philosophy can serve as a guide of dealing with the uncertainty of uncontrollable or

‫ﻤﺪ‬
difficult events.
o But if those beliefs and values are not based on prior learning, they may also reflect
“espoused theories”, which predict what people will say in a variety of situations but
may be out of line with what they will actually do in situations in which those beliefs
and values should be operating. Thus, a company may say that it values people and
that it has high quality standards for its products, but its record in that regard may
contradict what it says.
3- Basic underlying assumptions:
o When a solution to a problem works repeatedly, it comes to be taken for granted.
When a perspective, supported only a value or beliefs, gradually comes to be treated
‫ﺍ‬
as a reality. For example, a manager may decide to increase advertisements just
because it has been taken for granted that advertisement will lead to increased sales.
‫ﻟ‬
‫ﺮﻣ‬

o Basic assumptions, like theories-in-use, tend to be non-comfortable and non-

debatable, and hence are extremely difficult to change. Consequently, to learn
something requires us to resurrect, re-examine, and possibly change some of the most
stable portions of our cognitive structure – a process that is called “double-loop
learning”, or “frame breaking”.
‫ﻀ‬

o Culture as a set of basic assumptions defines for us what to pay attention to, what
things mean, how to react emotionally to what is going on, and what actions to take
in various kinds of situations.
‫ﺎﻥ‬

o Once we have developed an integrated set of such assumptions – a “thought world”

or “mental map” – we will be comfortable with others who share the same set of
assumptions and uncomfortable and vulnerable in situations where different
assumptions operate. This is because either we will not understand what is going on,
or, worse, we will misperceive and misinterpret the actions of others.
o The human mind needs cognitive stability; therefore, any challenge or questioning of
a basic assumption will release anxiety and defensiveness. In this sense, the shared
basic assumptions that make up the culture of a group can be thought of at both the
individual and the group level as psychological cognitive defense mechanisms that
permit the group to continue to function.

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- Chapter 12: the inter-relation between the 3 media and the three-leadership media.
o The inter-relation between the 3 media: the formation and implementation of
collaborative agendas is led by three media structure, processes, and participants.
Structure influences process designs and what participants can do. Processes
influence the structures that emerge and who can influence the agenda. Participants
influence the design of both structure and process.
The three-leadership media:
1- Leadership through structure: -
o Structure is seen as a “complex medium of control which is continually produced and recreated
in interaction and yet shapes that interaction”.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
o Leadership and structure are similar concepts, with much of the influence of a leader being
depend upon the way that organization structure affects the potential for relational
leadership.
o Structure affects the way people act but does not prevent deliberate action. The development
of structures normally emerges out of the practical reality of the tasks that they tackle.
o Given that collaborative structures play an important role in shaping and implementing the

‫ﻤﺪ‬
direction of the partnership. It is significant that they are often not within the control of
members of the collaboration (they are imposed structures by policy makers, funders, etc.).
2- Leadership through process: -
o The processes are integral to a collaboration. They play significant role in shaping and
implementing a partnership’s agenda.
o Several processes refer to formal and informal instruments such as:
 Committees, Workshops, Seminars, Telephone, fax, email, etc.
o Through these processes the collaboration’s communication takes place.
o The way and the frequency by which members communicate are the obvious
‫ﺍ‬
components of processes.
‫ﻟ‬

o Some processes encourage members to share information and develop common

‫ﺮﻣ‬

understanding of issues, whereas others hinder active communication. Processes may

empower (or not) potential members to have access to debate concerning the
partnership’s agenda.
3- Leadership through participants: -
‫ﻀ‬

o Participants play powerful leadership role in influencing the agenda.

o Participants include individuals, groups, and organizations.
o Any participant who has the power and know-how to influence the partnership
‫ﺎﻥ‬

agenda may take the lead.

o The notion of a leader with a hierarchical power over the followers does apply in
collaborations the potential for exercising “decisive control” by virtue of formal
position is reduced. There are participants who are acknowledged by others to have
an authority to lead reference their position in the partnership structure (positional
leaders).

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o Many types of positional leaders may be identified as follows:

 A “lead organization” that can be the organization that convened the
collaboration in the first place, or a “host organization” which houses the
collaboration physically and administratively. Individuals within the “lead
organization” enact leadership and gain greater authority to do so through
working “on behalf of the lead” organization.
 A management committee, board or steering group comprising individuals
representing organizations associated with the collaboration. Many
collaborations appoint a member of one of the participating organizations to
the individual positional leader role of the committee, board or group. This
position affects the facility for other group members to enact their leadership

‫ﻣﺤ‬
roles. A dominant “leader” has the positional power to influence strongly
their decisions, whereas a weak one may leave them directionless.
 Researchers, facilitators or consultants they may be commissioned as well to
help members of the collaboration to manage their collective working

‫ﻤﺪ‬
processes or provide other support. Their role is regarded as being explicitly
neutral to the collaborative agenda., yet any intervention is likely to have an
effect on the direction of the collaboration.
- Chapter 13 (managing multicultural teams): the 4 challenges and the 4 strategies.
The 4 challenges:
1- Direct versus Indirect Communication: -
o Communication in Western cultures is typically direct and explicit. The meaning is on
the surface, and a listener doesn’t have to know much about the context or the
speaker to interpret it (direct communication).
o This is not true in many other cultures, where meaning is embedded in the way the
‫ﺍ‬

message is presented (indirect communication).

‫ﻟ‬

o In cross-cultural negotiations, the non-Westerner can understand the direct

‫ﺮﻣ‬

communications of the Westerner, but the Westerner has difficulty understanding

the indirect communications of the non-Westerner.
o The differences between direct and indirect communication can cause serious
damage to relationships when team projects run into problems.
‫ﻀ‬

o Communication challenges create barriers to effective teamwork by reducing

information sharing, creating interpersonal conflict, or both.
2- Trouble with accents and fluency: -
‫ﺎﻥ‬

o Although the language of international business is English, misunderstandings or deep

frustration may occur because of non-native speakers’ accents, lack of fluency, or
problems with translation or usage. These may also influence perceptions of status or
competence.
o Non-fluent team members may be the most expert on the team, but their difficulty in
communicating knowledge makes it hard for the team to recognize and utilize their
expertise. If teammates become frustrated or impatient with a lack of fluency,
interpersonal conflicts can arise.
o Nonnative speakers may become less motivated to contribute, or anxious about their
performance evaluations and future career prospects. The organization as a whole
will pay the greater price because Its investment in a multicultural team will fail to pay
off.

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3- Differing attitudes towards hierarchy and authority: -

o A challenge inherent in multicultural teamwork is that, by design, teams have a rather
flat structure. But team members from some cultures, in which people are treated
differently according to their status in an organization, are uncomfortable on flat
teams.
o If they defer to higher status team members, their behavior will be seen as
appropriate when most of the team comes from a hierarchical culture. But they may
damage their stature and credibility – and even face humiliation – if most of the team
comes from an egalitarian culture.
o As a result of differing cultural norms, if team members believe they have been

‫ﻣﺤ‬
treated disrespectfully, the whole project can blow up.
4- Conflicting norms for decision making: -
o Cultures differ enormously when it comes to decision making – particularly, how
quickly decisions should be made and how much analysis is required beforehand. For
example, U.S. managers like to make decisions very quickly and with relatively little

‫ﻤﺪ‬
analysis by comparison with managers from other countries).
o Managers from other cultures may, for example, decline to share information until
they understand the full scope of a project. What to do? The best solution seems to
be to make minor concessions on process – to learn to adjust to and even respect
another approach to decision making.
The 4 strategies:
1- Adaptation (acknowledging cultural gaps openly and working around them):
o Some teams find ways to work with or around the challenges they face, adapting
practices or attitudes without making changes to the group’s membership or
assignments.
‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﺍ‬

o Adaptation works when team members are willing to acknowledge and name their
cultural differences and to assume responsibility for figuring out how to live with
‫ﺮﻣ‬

them.
o It’s often the best possible approach to a problem, because it typically involves less
managerial time than other strategies; and because team members participate in
‫ﻀ‬

solving the problem themselves, so they learn from the process.

o When team members have this mind-set, they can be creative about protecting their
own substantive differences while acceding to the processes of others.
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2- Structural intervention (changing the shape of the team):

o A structural intervention is a deliberate reorganization or reassignment designed to
reduce interpersonal friction or to remove a source of conflict from one or more
groups.
o This approach can be extremely effective when obvious subgroups demarcate the
team (for example, headquarters versus national subsidiaries) or if team members are
proud, defensive, threatened, or clinging to negative stereotypes of one another.
o Another structural intervention might be to create smaller working groups of mixed
cultures or mixed corporate identities in order to get information that is not
forthcoming from the team as a whole.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
o The sub grouping technique involves risks. However, it buffers people who are not
working well together or not participating in the larger group for any reason. Sooner
or later the team will have to assemble the pieces that the subgroups have come up
with. So this approach relies on another structural intervention. Someone must
become a mediator in order to see that the various pieces fit together.

‫ﻤﺪ‬
3- Managerial intervention (setting norms early or bringing in a higher-level manager):
o When a manager behaves like an arbitrator or a judge, making a final decision without
team involvement, neither the manager nor the team gains much insight into why the
team has disagreed. But it is possible for team members to use managerial
intervention effectively to sort out problems.
o Managerial intervention to set norms early in a team’s life can really help the team
start out with effective processes.
4- Exit (removing a team member when other options have failed):
o Leaving the team is not a rare strategy for managing challenges.
‫ﺍ‬

o In short-term situations, unhappy team members often wait until the project end.
‫ﻟ‬

When teams were permanent (long term job), the exit of one or more members was
a strategy of last resort, but it was used – either voluntarily or after a formal request
‫ﺮﻣ‬

from management.
o Exit is likely when emotions are running high and too much face had been lost on both
sides to salvage the situation.
‫ﻀ‬

- Chapter 14: two types of leadership and comparison.

1- “Romantic” style:
o It starts with the assumption that it is necessary to involve people. The direction and
‫ﺎﻥ‬

content of change will emerge from the involvement process.

o Managers work along with workers. There is an open-minded start with less clarity
on what are the key issues. There is a perception of uncertainty about the outcomes.
o The focus in on support, development and role enlargement.
o In general, there is a personal element to the relationship in this style. Managers and
workers know about each other as people and are concerned with other’s hobbies,
family life, etc.

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2- “Heroic” style:
o It starts with the assumption that expert knowledge can be applied to a problem to
derive solution. This should be “sold” to those who will undertake implementation.
o Managers are involved in a catalytic intervention. The manager will assess a problem,
issue a vision of a solution or a challenge, and then judge what other produce as the
detail to implement. There is a clear vision on the role between leader and followers.
Leader set the vision, prioritize areas for action and judging the effectiveness of
action. Followers undertake the action. There is a perception of certainty about the
outcomes.
o The focus is on action and moving from problem definition to action to outcome.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
 Comparison between them: -
o Both styles have the aim of successfully engendering change, accomplishing tasks.
o The tension is about different ways of doing things. The feature that creates tension
is that it is a choice between two proposals of good management, and not between

‫ﻤﺪ‬
one good and one bad.
o One way to resolve tension is to implement the “heroic” style on some issues and
allow involvement in others. As such, leaders should involve followers when they have
the appropriate level of “maturity”.
- Chapter 15: the six propositions. Hamel (1990) SIX core propositions.
1- Competitive collaboration:
o Some partners may regard internalization of scarce skills as a primary benefit of
international collaboration.
o Where learning is the goal, the termination of an agreement cannot be seen as failure,
nor can its longevity and stability be seen as evidence of success.
‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﺍ‬

o Asymmetries in learning within the alliance may result in a shift in relative competitive
position and advantage between the partners outside the alliance. Thus, some
‫ﺮﻣ‬

partners may regard each other as competitors as well as collaborators.

2- Learning and bargaining power:
o Asymmetries in learning change relative bargaining power within the alliance.
‫ﻀ‬

Successful learning at each stage effectively minimized the existing ‘bargain,’ , which,
lead to a pattern of unilateral, rather than bilateral, dependence.
o The legal and governance structure may exert only a minor influence over the pattern
‫ﺎﻥ‬

of inter-partner learning and bargaining power.

o A partner that understands the link between inter-partner learning, bargaining power,
and competitiveness will tend to view the alliance as a race to learn. [If our partner
learns what we know before we learn what they know, we become unneeded. We’ve
got to try to learn faster than they do].

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3- Intent as a determinant of learning:

o The objectives of alliance partners, with respect to inter-partner learning and
competence acquisition, may be usefully characterized as internalization, resource
concentration, or substitution.
o An internalization intent will be strongest in firms which conceive of competitiveness
as competence-based, rather than as product-based, and which seek to close skill
gaps rather than to compensate for skills failure.
o A substitution intent pre-ordains asymmetric learning; for systematic learning to take
place, operators must possess internalization intent.
4- Transparency as a determinant of learning:

‫ﻣﺤ‬
o Asymmetry in transparency pre-ordains asymmetric learning: some firms and some
skills may be inherently more transparent than others.
o Transparency can be influenced through the design of organizational interfaces, the
structure of joint tasks, and the ‘protectiveness’ of individuals.

‫ﻤﺪ‬
5- Receptivity as a determinant of learning:
o Asymmetry in receptivity pre-ordains asymmetric learning: some firms may be
inherently more receptive than others.
o Receptivity is a function of the skills and absorptiveness of receptors, or exposure
position, and of parallelism in facilities.
6- The determinants of sustainable learning:
o Whether learning becomes self-sustaining – that is, whether the firm eventually
becomes able, without further inputs from its partner, to improve its skills at the same
rate as its partner – will depend on the depth of learning that has taken place, whether
the firm possesses the scale and volume to allow, in future, amortization of the
‫ﺍ‬

investment needed to break free of dependence on the partner, and whether the firm
‫ﻟ‬

possesses the disciplines of continuous improvement.

‫ﺮﻣ‬

- Chapter 20: types of accountability and three approaches.

Types of accountability:
1- Market accountability: is about those who buy from, choose to use or fund the organization.
‫ﻀ‬

In this view the organization's managers and trustees are accountable to the customer.
2- Managerial accountability: is concerned with rules and regulations that specify criteria
against which the organization's (and individuals within it) performance is measured.
‫ﺎﻥ‬

3- Political accountability: is concerned with wider concepts of civic and democratic obligation
and implies notions of reciprocity of rights and responsibilities.
4- Required accountability: that flows from the organizational environment: the legal, political
and economic context in which the organization operates. Those who demand this kind of
accountability generally have strong powers of remedy for failure to comply with their
demands (for example: disqualify people who fall below standards).
5- Proactive or voluntary accountability: that flows from organizational values: the belief that
the organization should in its actions and working methods consciously seek to align itself with
certain groups and interests. This is also called offered accountability. Here the organization
chooses to be accountable because it is deemed appropriate. Such accountability is offered
to beneficiaries and the wider public for example through meetings or via a website.

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The three approaches: approaches to organizational problems:

o Mode 2 approach:
 Mode 2 approach refers to having valid information, informed choice and
responsibility to monitor the implementation of that choice.
 Mode 2 approach leads to action strategies where problems or issues are
proposed and inquiry into and confirmation of those strategies is sought, and
that face-saving is minimized.
 The task is to change the mind-set of the actors in the organization by people
learning to be more reflective.

‫ﻣﺤ‬
o Another approach is the “educative strategy”:
 It allows to develop ways of talking that give organizational members better
ways of discussing the competing commitments that prevent their espoused
commitments becoming reality.
 This means moving from positions of negative critical thinking and taking

‫ﻤﺪ‬
responsibility for problems within the organization rather than seeing the
problems lying with others.
 By developing these different ways of talking, leaders, managers and front-
line staff will also be able to change the way in which they approach their
work.
o A third approach is the “conversation for accountability”:
 It has the effect of shifting the emphasis away from what was done wrong to
what has been done well.
 However, we should note that all these approaches do not consider the
external pressures on organizations that maintain the status quo.
‫ﻟ‬ ‫ﺍ‬
‫ﺮﻣ‬
‫ﻀ‬
‫ﺎﻥ‬

‫ﻣﺤﻤﺪ ﺍﻟﺮﻣﻀﺎﻥ‬