Breaking Identity Barriers:Organizational Identity Change in High-end Strategic Change
Under the background of the era of accelerated evolution of the unprecedented changes in the century,the keyword for the develop-ment of Chinese enterprises is no longer a follower struggling to survive in the low-end market,but rather to turn to the high-end market through the high-end strategic changes.In this way,Chinese enterprises are able to compete in the high-end market,face the siege of the international enterprises to seize the dominant position in China and even the global high-end market,and become the industry leader.In this process,break-ing the existing identity constraints,constructing a new organizational identity as a high-end enterprise to realize the fundamental leap of organizational identity is the essential requirement.But the unknown of what kind of organizational identity should be constructed as well as the process of identity change makes many enterprises confused.From a theoretical perspective,existing research has not yet provided a comprehensive understanding of organizational identity change in the context of high-end strategic change.On the one hand,research on high-end strategic change focuses on the change mechanism from the explicit perspectives such as resource,ability,but neglects the change of the im-plicit elements,especially the issue of organizational identity.However,the essence of the strategic change of the company to upscale lies in the renewal of the organizational identity.On the other hand,the concept of high-end organizational identity is still unclear,and the process logic and deep mechanism of organizational identity change in the context of high-end strategic change are still unknown,and previous studies are limited to a single internal or external perspective.There is therefore a need for more systematic research of this issue.In order to respond to the above practical and theoretical demands,the purpose of this paper is to answer the two questions below:What is the organizational identity of the high-end organization formed by the high-end strategic change?What kind of change process did it go through?We take Feihe as our research sample.Feihe experienced a serious identity crisis because of the melamine incident,and then successfully transformed itself into the new leader in the infant milk powder industry with a new concept that is more suitable for Chinese babies.Subsequent-ly,we use exploratory single-case studies to distill the qualitative man-ifestations of high-end organizational identity and analyze the process logic and internal mechanism of it.The study found that,first,high-end organizational identity has three major qualities:high-end identity purpose based on different identity means,strong internal preference,and strong external recognition.Second,organizational identity change in the context of high-end strategic change follows the basic process logic of breaking,establishing and innovating,forming a new high-end identity by anchoring the direction of identity change,determining the foundation of identity change and carrying out identity change practices.Third,the identity change process mechanism manifests itself as a high-end reshaping of the ends/means structure of the horizontal dimension,underpinned by the temporal structure of identity in the vertical di-mension.Fourth,identity change relies on the synergistic evolution of internal organizational strengths and external market forces,through the dynamic matching of the two to achieve the organizational identity from vague and difficult to perceive the difference to the high-end and distinctive differences in the leap.This paper makes the following contributions.First of all,by systemat-ically exploring the process and mechanism of organizational identity change in the context of high-end strategic change,this paper leads the theoretical research in the field of high-end strategic change from the ex-plicit level to the deeper and more implicit level of organizational identi-ty.Secondly,this paper proposes the concept of high-end organizational identity and refines its conceptual connotation and structural qualities based on the grounded theory of organizational identity,so as to enrich the conceptual research on organizational identity and have a revelatory value for the structural connotation of organizational identity in similar contexts.Thirdly,this paper analyzes that organizational identity change in the context of high-end strategic change follows the basic process log-ic of breaking,establishing,and innovating,and that the change process involves the supportive role of the vertical structure of the organization-al identity and the high-end remodeling of the horizontal structure,so as to make up for the insufficiency of the existing studies that have not yet fully understood the process of organizational identity change,and at the same time,to effectively add to the research on the process mecha-nism in the field of identity change.Finally,this paper considers internal members,external consumers and supply chain subjects,as well as internal organizational strengths and external market forces,in order to construct a model of the organizational identity change process and to explore the essence of the process,thus making up for the shortcomings of the existing studies that tend to use a single perspective to explore identity change.This paper also provides some management insights.We remind man-agers of the need to change the traditional thinking of focusing only on the obvious elements in the high-end strategic change process,and to go deeper into the essence of the high-end strategic change and shape the high-end organizational identity in the process.We also encourage managers to pay attention to the dynamic match between internal under-standing and external perception of organizational identity,and to pay continuous attention to the audience's identity perception during and after the identity change process,so as to maintain the long-term stabil-ity of the internal preferences and external identification.The study ex-plores identity change in terms of ends/means structures.Whereas there are other ways of dividing identity structures,differences in structural insight perspectives may produce different understandings of the iden-tity change process.Given the complexity of identity change,future re-search could be conducted accordingly.Future studies may also choose to test or enrich the findings presented in this paper with research meth-ods based on larger sample sizes.
High-end Strategic ChangeOrganizational Identity ChangeHigh-end Organizational IdentitySingle Case Study
万方数据
维普
