Revisiting organizational self-assessment: towards a dynamic conceptualization

Organizations frequently seek for methods and tools to monitor activities and respond to changes in their business environment, which can be supported through organizational self-assessment (OSA). OSA has been conceived as a comprehensive analysis of an organization’s activities to discern its strengths and areas of improvements. We argue that most existing studies on OSA rely on a static view of organizations and have given little consideration to the underlying interactions between OSA and organizations. OSA have so far been treated as an analytic tool for establishing long-range goals and action plans for an organization. However, it is reasonable to assume that OSA formulation and implementation is more problematic than most theoreticians present it. Strategizing and organizing are neither linear nor sequential activities treating change as a single, momentary disturbance that must be stabilized and controlled. For these reasons, we suggest revisiting the premises of OSA with the aim of offering an alternative view to its current conceptualization. To do so, we challenge five main assumptions of traditional research on OSA: what is OSA?; what does the “self” entail?; what is the tangibility of the processed information?; what does the deployment strategy consists in?; and how are organizational impacts foreseen? After addressing these assumptions, we redefine OSA as a political and interpretative process in the course of which a multiplicity of organizational members uses and produces socially constructed information. The expected outcomes of this research consist in depicting a catalyst for organizational improvement, which largely rely upon individuals’ enactment, appropriation and development of the process itself.