From Policy-Practice to Means-Ends Decoupling in Organisations

What is it about?

------------------------ Research Focus ------------------------ Means-ends decoupling refers to the puzzle of why many organisations fail to achieve their intended goals despite investing substantial resources and compliance inducements. We address in this review paper the relevance of the means-ends decoupling construct, which derives from its capacity to identify lower-level mechanisms in corporate practice. ------------------------------------------------------ Contribution to Academic Scholarship ------------------------------------------------------- We address in this review paper the phenomenon of means-ends decoupling. Means-ends decoupling refers to the puzzle of why many organisations fail to achieve their intended goals despite investing substantial resources and compliance inducements. The relevance of the means-ends decoupling construct derives from its capacity to identify lower-level mechanisms. Our research question addresses a critical paradox in the management literature: Even when organisations seriously attempt to satisfy the pressures of external stakeholders by implementing new policies, they risk failing to attain the goals set by these new policies. We still do not know when such a gap between means and ends may emerge and how organisations can reduce this gap. Providing insights into this puzzle contributes to understanding how stakeholders can induce organisations to meet their broader social expectations. Interestingly, means-ends decoupling even occurs when actors do their best to fulfil to implement agreed-upon action at the organisational level. Even when an organisation truthfully implements the adopted R&D policy, it may still fail to achieve its intended goals. The level of pressures organisations face has increased over the last decades, motivating studies that describe this significant change in the business context as 'audit culture' or 'audit society. The growing focus on accountability, assessment, and monitoring in contemporary societies has driven organisations to conform to adopted policies and align the latter with internal practices and daily activities. These organisations act as 'corporate citizens' to display proper behaviours, primarily corporate social responsibility. The intended ends might be significantly different from or even contradictory to the core goals of these organisations Given the significant impact of this phenomenon on strategic implementations in organisations, we employ a systematic review to examine the specific compliance barriers and compliance inducements influencing means-ends decoupling. Our paper provides a framework that delineates means-ends decoupling from policy-practice decoupling and identifies the underlying mechanisms that explain when and how means-ends decoupling may occur within an organisation's activities. Our resultant framework shows how means-ends decoupling is understood in various ways in managerial thinking and practice. The framework guides managers to better understand and recognise means-ends decoupling as an alternative explanation for the frequent failure of organisations to achieve the intended goals of their adopted policies. Our systematic review advances the traditional perspective on decoupling by pursuing why means-ends decoupling occurs. We highlight and provide insights for this critical question relevant to organisations' frequent failure to attain the envisaged goals for adopted policies in opaque fields. Specifically, our review results help managers identify a set of compliance barriers and compliance inducements that lead to the manifestation of means-ends decoupling. This way, we raise managerial awareness and provide further detail to the growing recognition of the importance of lower-level mechanisms in decoupling phenomena.

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Photo by saeed karimi on Unsplash

Photo by saeed karimi on Unsplash

Why is it important?

------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Management Practice ------------------------------------------------------- Our study broadens the managerial recognition for the importance of means-ends decoupling by relating to contexts beyond sustainability and socio-environmental standards. We have focused on cooperative R&D projects as an alternative technological setting for studying means-ends decoupling. Our study shows that cooperative R&D projects represent an opaque field defined by early institutional work. We show precisely how this institutional field is characterised by a set of compliance barriers, which, in turn, are attenuated by a set of inducements that ensure substantive compliance and maximise goal achievement for adopting organisations. Field opacity in the context of cooperative R&D projects renders goal attainment challenging to assess and to link to the deployed means causally. Our study also shows that cooperative R&D projects' designers act as institutional entrepreneurs offering compliance inducements to ensure compliant behaviour and goal achievement among partnering organisations. Finally, we delineate the conditions under which deployed means and envisaged ends maintain distinct trajectories. Identifying the means-ends discrepancies in cooperative R&D projects help explain one of the persisting questions faced by R&D funding schemes in industrialised economies. For example, in policymaking, the research directorate of the European Commission struggles to understand why many funded R&D projects fall short of attaining their intended outcomes, despite the significant project funding means deployed by the Commission. Another example of implications in the entrepreneurship field is to help early-stage startups comply with ethical standards and norms in their respective industry. Press articles have recently raised the issue of startups not complying with country laws on work conditions for new graduates (excessive working hours is one). Even when there is a genuine intention to comply with the laws, the engaging nature of working for a fast-growing startup and the usual lack of resources may prevent truly committed startup founders from complying. Thus, industry unions and policy-makers may reflect on inducement measures that specifically address this type of organisation. Our findings offer helpful directions on mitigating compliance barriers through engaging in inducements.

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