A Study on the Mechanism of Organizational Identity Change in the Context of Strategic Change of Hidden Champion Enterprises:Analysis of Discourse-Historical Approach Based on Micro Level
The hidden champions refer to minor and medium-sized enterprises that are not large in scale,have long been ahead of niche markets but are not well-known to the public,playing an im-portant role in promoting high-quality economic development in China.In the VUCA(Volatile,Uncertain,Complex,Ambiguous)era,the hidden champions can gain a competitive advantage by highly focusing on a specific product's niche market,but they may also face challenges such as niche market saturation,technological innovation bottlenecks and other difficult problems,leading to a crisis of sustainable development.Therefore,the hidden champion companies face an urgent need for strategic change,which has also become a hot topic in the academic community.For the question,existing literature mainly explores explicit"change content"such as technology driven,scenario-based demand,customer relations,and institutional environment.However,considering the complexity of strategic changes in hidden champion enterprises,the success of strategic change is not only determined by the transformation in explicit elements of the enterprise,but also influenced by implicit elements,especially organizational identity.In the process of stra-tegic change,organizations must adaptively undergo organizational identity changes to help members and their external stakeholders rediscover and understand the organization,otherwise strategic change will be difficult to achieve expectations or even fail.Es-pecially,hidden champions,with their unique advantages in niche markets,have formed certain stereotypes in the consumers,partner companies,and their internal members.Thus,hidden champions face inherent difficulties in reshaping their organizational identity in the process of strategic change.Thus it is particularly necessary to interpret the strategic change of hidden champion from the per-spective of organizational identity change.This study introduces the lens of organizational discourse to in-vestigate the issue of organizational identity change during the strategic change process of hidden champions.In organizational management,organizational discourse has always been closely linked to the construction of organizational identity.In the research on the dynamic change of organizational identity through organi-zational discourse,although previous studies have been discussing the impact of organizational discourse on the definition,formation,and dynamic change of organizational identity,the dynamism of identity change is often overlooked,and there is a lack of in-depth exploration of the relationship between organizational discourse and its macro level management practices and organizational contexts,making it difficult to reveal how organizational discourse plays a dynamic role in reshaping organizational identity.Therefore,for the hidden champions with stereotypes,the breaking and reshaping of their organizational identity under the context of strategic change is more dynamic and complex.In this process,how to rebuild the or-ganizational identity with the help of organizational discourse is the key issue that is difficult to respond to in the existing research.This paper selects the practice of a strategic change of Soton Co.,Ltd.as the research object,and applies the Discourse-Historical Ap-proach(DHA)to conduct a longitudinal single case study,involving two parts of content.On the one hand,we focus on analyzing micro level discourse strategies and the discourse themes constructed from them.On the other hand,we aim at uncovering the stages of identity change behind different discourse constructions,exploring the unique role and dynamic mechanism of organizational discourse in the process of organizational identity change,and examining the strategic change contexts in which organizational identity change takes effect.The findings reveal that:(1)The dominant discourse strategy has evolved through three stages,focusing on the leader's identity and promoting innovation of the core business;enhancing collective identity and driving organizational management change;emphasizing employee's identity and fostering entrepreneurial initiatives.(2)At different stages,organizational identity has expe-rienced the transformation of loosening the identification label of leader,supplementing the meaning of collective identity and re-shaping the role of employee identity.Among them,organizational discourse plays a role in protecting,supporting and motivating the change of organizational identity respectively.(3)The organizational identity change of the hidden champion enterprise serves the situa-tion of a strategic change of strategic alertness,strategic exploration and strategic transformation successively.This paper has made the following theoretical contributions:Firstly,we have expanded study on the strategic change of hidden cham-pions.This paper introduces the theory of organizational identity,break through the existing research focuses on the"doing"of strategic change,the hidden champions'strategic change research focus extended to the"being"of organizational identity,to explore how organizational identity change to serve strategic change for hidden champions.Thus,this study extends the study of the stra-tegic change of existing hidden champions from the perspective of organizational identity,and provides a new theoretical explanation for the strategic change of hidden champions.Secondly,this study develops research in the field of organizational identity change.Previous studies have paid little attention to the heterogeneous roles played by different levels of power subjects in the dynamic process of organizational identity change.Little is known about which level of subject plays a leading role and how it plays a role in different stages of organizational identity change in enterprises.This study found that although the leaders play an indispensable role in orga-nizational identity change at the beginning of the change,as the change progresses,different levels of power subjects play differenti-ated and dominant roles to cope with the complexity and dynamics of strategic changes at different stages.This emphasizes that the process of organizational identity change also requires important contributions from lower level members of the enterprise.Thirdly,this study also provides theoretical insights for management re-search based on the perspective of organizational discourse.This article discusses the strategic change and organizational identity change of hidden champions,not only revealing the role of dy-namic construction of organizational discourse in organizational identity change,analyzing the cross-level relationship between organizational discourse,identity,and strategy,but also providing methodological insights for the application of DHA.Combined with the uniqueness of hidden champions and the complexity of organi-zational identity change in the context of strategic change,the new discourse strategy is refined,which provides important inspiration for future discourse analysis,especially the application of DHA in the construction of management theory.In addition,this study also provides important practical insights for hidden champions on how to use organizational discourse to achieve strategic change and or-ganizational identity change,and promote the sustainable develop-ment.
万方数据
