City Research Online

Abstract

Recent management literature suggests that attention to groupwork in organisations is steadily increasing. Of particular interest are small management workgroups (SMWGs) that are responsible for the management of the organisation. Although guidelines exist for achieving effective groupwork, most seem to be based on questionable assumptions that may account for the frequent failure of such guidelines in practice.

The contribution of the present work is in two parts. First, in terms of understanding how a SMWG’s performance is related to both the balance of competition and co-operation communicated in the group and to the group’s organisational culture. Second, in terms of using such understanding to develop a model of the role of co-opetition in the management of SMWGs and how it can be used as a tool for diagnosing, predicting and advising on the SMWG’s performance.
Co-operation and competition communicated in groups is often discussed in literature under group dynamics and under social interdependence. Literature in business strategy has shown that the particular blend of competition and co-operation between businesses in the same industry, referred to as ‘co-opetition’, influences the performance of both the businesses involved and the industry as a whole. The present research makes an analogy between the businesses in the same industry and the members in the same group, to examine how co-opetition in a SMWG (between the members) influences the performance of the group as a whole.

Given that the main task of SMWGs is making decisions that will ultimately determine organisational performance, a SMWG’s decision effectiveness is used to assess the group’s performance. Using a combination of questionnaires, short-term observation, interviews and archives, data from several cases of SMWGs (management groups of star-hotels in Crete, Greece) are collected and processed to explore the role of communicated co-opetition in the management of a SMWG and in the control of the group’s decision effectiveness, within the group’s social context.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Bayes Business School Doctoral Theses Bayes Business School > Management Doctoral Theses

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