Corporate-Level Communities at Ericsson: Parallel Organizational Structure for Fostering Alignment for Autonomy

Abstract

Organizational management traditionally has taken care of all the important strategy, structure, and work-design decisions, as well as most of the ongoing decisions about work procedures. In large-scale corporations with many geographically distributed sites and high divisional detachment, such strategies are yet doomed to result in implementing irrelevant work methods and procedures that conflict with the local interests. As Tayloristic habits are disappearing, organizations willingly or unwillingly change their decision-making approaches to enable more participation and influence from the performers. These trends are associated with the rise of participation-based parallel structures, such as quality circles, task forces or communities of practice. In this paper, we present our findings from studying corporate-level communities by the means of a multicase study at Ericsson. We found that the main hindrances are related to the limited decision-making authority of parallel structure, member selection and achieving representation across the organizational units. Our results suggest that parallel structures highly depend on the authority of the members within their local communities, and their ability to not only channel the dialog between the units they represent and the community, but also enable the active engagement of the unit in the community studies. As such, we believe that special attention shall be put on the ambassador role of the community members.

Using Guilds to Foster Internal Startups in Large Organizations: A Case Study

“…However, the application of ready-available guidelines are not sufficient alone to drive internal startups to excellence. One possible solution is to engage in Communities of practice [16] or other parallel structures that improve organizational problem-solving [11,13]. To answer our research question -How does a large organization use CoP to support internal startups in software product innovation?…”

“…Parallel organizational structures, such as Communities of Practice (CoP), are commonly applied within software-intensive companies to support employees as problem-solving knowledge workers [13]. A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis [18].…”

“…One way is to establish a parallel organizational structure -like an Innovation Guild -to support employees innovating. Parallel structures perform functions that the regular organization does not or is ill-suited to perform well [13]. Some examples of parallel structures include quality circles [8] and Communities of Practices (CoP) [18].…”