The Evolution Mechanism And Effectiveness Of Organizational Routines

Organizational routine is considered a central feature of all types of human being organizations. From the perspective of continuous change, this paper believes organizational change should be regarded as evolving learning process of organizational routines. On the basis of reviewing the research literatures of organizational change , organizational routines and organizational learning ,performs the following studies:The first study is to develop the construct of organizational routine, which collects data by semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews, chose a total of 19 (group) enterprises' senior managers, middle managers and employees to interview, which includes 4 focus group interviews. Focus on capturing changes on patterns of behavior, organizational "game" rules, as well as the collective consensus of staff on the process of organizational change, in order to hold the key elements of organizational change and organizational routine. On this basis, and analyses the interview materials through the grounded theory approach, founds the conception of organization routine should include 3 dimensions: the interactive consensus, action logic and potential regality.The second study is to develop measuring scales of organization routines. On the basis of literature reviews and grounded analysis results, through items selection and preliminary test, 24 items retained for the official pre-test. The pre-test retrieves 201 questionnaires, and through exploratory factor analysis retain 12 items (which includes 3 dimensions) finally to formal research. In addition, the formal research collects a group of 333 valid questionnaires in 111 companies (three person for each firm), and verifies stability of the internal structure of organizational routine which includes three-dimensional by confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, tests the differences of organizational routine in the level of organizations and individual through variance analysis.The third study is a case study on evolution mechanism of organizational routines, which demonstrates existence of the inherent evolution mechanism of routines. That is, with evolution of the routine in individual, group and organizational level, through the four stages of intuition, interpretation, integration and institutionalization, the old routines weret broken up, and the new organizational routines can be established, the organizational change and development in the enterprise so will be to promote. At the same time, the mechanism of evolution that will be triggered by external factors. The inherent evolution mechanism of organizational routines establishes a dynamic perspective for studying organization routines and organizational change.The fourth study is to test the impact factors and effectiveness mechanism of organizational routine, which tests the elements which impact on the organizational routines and the effectiveness process of organizational routines impact on organizational change capabilities through 116 group valid questionnaires. The main approach includes correlation analysis, regression analysis, structural equation modeling, as well as the mediated effect test. The results show that the interdependence and complexity of the tasks have a significant impact on organizational routines; and the flexibility of human resources and knowledge exchange and integration in the organization have the partial mediated effects between the relationship of organizational routines and organizational change capabilities.Finally, this paper summarizes the main conclusions, theory advances and practical significances of all above studies, and then points out the shortcomings as well as the future research direction of organizational routines research.