Linking organizational context and managerial action: The dimensions of quality of management

Organizational context is created and renewed through tangible and concrete management actions. The context, in turn, influences the actions of all those within the company. In this article, we elaborate this theme of an interactive development of context and action that, we argue, lies at the core of a company's management process and is a key influencer of its performance. Based on a longitudinal field-study in one company, we identify discipline, stretch, trust and support as the primary dimensions of organizational context and we describe how each of these dimensions can be developed and how these dimensions, in turn, influence the levels of individual initiative, mutual cooperation and collective learning within companies. Shaping the organizational context, we suggest, is the central task of general managers and we propose our model of context as a way to assess an organization's quality of management.