|
?:abstract
|
-
"The article deals with employee driven innovation in regular teams from a
critical, pragmatic action research perspective, referring to theories on innovation,
dialogue, workplace learning, and organizational communication.
It is based on an action research project “Innovation and involvement
through strengthening dialogue in team based organizations” funded by
the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. 18 teams
from one public and two private organizations participated in the project.
The article defines the concept of employee driven innovation (EDI) in relation
to theories on innovation, workplace learning and action research,
and presents EDI as a fairly new field of research. EDI is conceptualized
as a participatory endeavour differing from a mainstream understanding of
innovation as surplus value for the organization. The article focuses on incremental,
organizational process innovations co-created across conflicting
workplace interests in and between teams.
The article argues that it is meaningful to assert that every employee has
an innovative potential, no matter of what educational background or sector
and that sometimes, this innovative potential might be facilitated
through Dialogic Helicopter Team Meetings (DHTM) with a dissensus
approach.
During the action research process, it became important to organize a special
kind of DHTMs as a supplement to ordinary team action meetings
close to day-to-day operations, but separated in time and space. They focus
on how to improve existing organizational routines and work practice
in order to produce value for the organization, better work flow, and improved
work life quality. These meetings are discussed in relation to similar
organizational constructs within Scandinavian action research. The action research process made it clear that it is not enough to set up
DHTMs if they are going to facilitate EDIT. They must be characterized
by a dissensus approach, combining dissensus organizing and dissensus
sensibility. Dissensus organizing means that team conversations must be
organized in ways where silent or unspoken, critical voices speak up. This
can be done by using, e.g., pro and con groups or a bystander. This demands,
too, that team members, managers, and action researchers develop
dissensus sensibility to open up for more voices, for indirect criticism, and
for more democracy in the decision process trying to balance dialogues in
multidimensional tensions between consensus and dissensus.
The article grounds the complexities of this process in thick presentations
of DHTMs in Team Product Support, Danfoss Solar Inverters and Team
Children, Citizen Service, the Municipality of Silkeborg, Denmark. It
demonstrates how these meetings created different organizational process
innovations, and how theoretical concepts like DHTM, dissensus organizing
and dissensus sensibility were developed from practice." (author's abstract)
(xsd:string)
|
![[This page as RDF]](https://data.gesis.org/gesiskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}