Routine Regulation: Balancing Conflicting Goals in Organizational Routines *

Abstract

To examine how organizational routines serve as a source for balancing conflicting organizational goals, we use an inductive study of Alessi, an Italian design company, to trace how organizational members simultaneously achieved the conflicting organizational goals of design and efficiency in the new product development routine. Our analysis identified three types of regulatory actions (splicing, activating, and repressing) that participants took to flexibly enact these conflicting organizational goals through the same routine. We observed that the three regulatory actions facilitated new connections between new product development participants, allowing them to create a dynamic truce and accomplish the two conflicting goals in a new product’s origination, evaluation, and development phases. Routine regulation shifts our focus away from the routine as a stable truce to the truce as process, highlighting the role of actions performed by individuals throughout the organizational hierarchy, and moves the conversation away from eliminating goal conflict to elaborating the ongoing actions that people take to manage conflicting organizational goals. Our findings and theoretical insights produce a deeper conceptualization of routines as generative systems by demonstrating how action taken to enact a routine also has the capacity to regulate conflicting organizational goals.