Location
Expo Center
Session Number
3
Keywords
innovation, organizational culture, organizational identity, organizational learning, workplace
Description
Who or what an organization thinks it is—its sense of identity—greatly informs the choices it makes. Yet an organization’s identity, which provides coherence and stability, may constrain or enable an organization’s capacity for innovation, which at its core is about doing new or different things. This paper explores the dynamics of organizational identity and innovation through a qualitative study involving leaders from eleven U.S. and Canadian academic research libraries—organizations and a profession that are experiencing an abundance of change and identity threats. A major finding of this research is that the very process of scoping and defining innovation can enable libraries to clarify and reckon with organizational identity dissonance: the gap between a library’s espoused identity and its identity in use. How—and to what degree—a library decides to address such gaps can further or diminish its capacity for innovation, as well as sustain or evolve aspects of its identity, over time. This research extends previous research on organizational identity and organizational learning by demonstrating that the nexus of organizational identity and innovation management constitutes a unique and robust site for organizational learning. Practical applications for research and practice in the field of academic librarianship are presented.
Included in
Reckoning with Organizational Identity and Innovation in Research Libraries
Expo Center
Who or what an organization thinks it is—its sense of identity—greatly informs the choices it makes. Yet an organization’s identity, which provides coherence and stability, may constrain or enable an organization’s capacity for innovation, which at its core is about doing new or different things. This paper explores the dynamics of organizational identity and innovation through a qualitative study involving leaders from eleven U.S. and Canadian academic research libraries—organizations and a profession that are experiencing an abundance of change and identity threats. A major finding of this research is that the very process of scoping and defining innovation can enable libraries to clarify and reckon with organizational identity dissonance: the gap between a library’s espoused identity and its identity in use. How—and to what degree—a library decides to address such gaps can further or diminish its capacity for innovation, as well as sustain or evolve aspects of its identity, over time. This research extends previous research on organizational identity and organizational learning by demonstrating that the nexus of organizational identity and innovation management constitutes a unique and robust site for organizational learning. Practical applications for research and practice in the field of academic librarianship are presented.