HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the Swedish Media Industry on Innovation: A Study of News Media Leaders’ Attitudes towards Innovation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/jomi.6503Keywords:
media management, leadership, innovation, skill development, leadership roles, changeAbstract
Decades of change in the media landscape and technological innovation have brought several uncertainties to media leadership. In this study, we build on the upper echelons theory to discuss the possible isomorphic behaviour of media leaders. Based on a survey of 372 Swedish media leaders, our results indicate that while innovation is considered to be a strength at media companies, innovation work may still stand in contrast to the institutional perspective. We found that Swedish media leaders perceive innovation as highly important and something they are good at. The perceived ability to work with innovation inside the organizations (rather than introducing knowledge from outside expertise) is undermined by the fact that, during the average work week, the majority of leaders set aside very little time for developing their own competences, individual talks with their employees, and time to reflect on their own work. Thus, in line with upper echelons theory, we find a paradox of trust in in-house innovative strength and, at the same time, media leaders fall back on their own experiences, limiting the inflow of new ideas into their strategic work.References
Andersson, U., & Wiik, J. (2013). Journalism meets management: Changing leadership in Swedish news organizations. Journalism Practice, 7(6), 705-719.
Andersson, U., & Wiik, J. (2014). New demands on editorial leadership: Perceived changes in Swedish newspaper management. Observatorio (OBS*), 8(2), 1-16.
Brundin, E., & Melin, L. (2005). Strategic leadership and media portfolio development: Leaders and impression management. In
R. G. Picard (Ed.), Media product portfolios: Issues in management of multiple products and services (64-93). New York, NY: Routledge.
Cho, T. S., & Hambrick, D. C. (2006). Attention as the mediator between top management team characteristics and strategic change: The case of airline deregulation. Organization Science, 17(4), 453-469.
Deuze, M. (2011). Managing media work. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Gade, P. J., Dastgeer, S., DeWalt, C. C., Nduka, E. L., Kim, S., Hill, D., & Curran, K. (2018). Management of journalism transparency: Journalists’ perceptions of organizational leaders’ management of an emerging professional norm. International Journal on Media Management, DOI: 10.1080/14241277.2018.1488257.
Hambrick, D. C., & Mason, P. A. (1984). Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers. Academy of management review, 9(2), 193-206.
Kohavi, R., Henne, R. M., & Sommerfield, D. (2007). Practical guide to controlled experiments on the web: Listen to your customers not to the HiPPO. In proceedings of The 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (pp. 959-967). ACM.
Küng, L. (2011). Managing strategy and maximizing innovation in media organizations. Managing media work, 43-56.
Küng, L. (2017). Reflections on the ascendancy of technology in the media and its implications for organisations and their leaders. The Journal of Media Innovations, 4(1), 77-81.
Loebbecke, C., & Picot, A. (2015). Reflections on societal and business model transformation arising from digitization and big data analytics: A research agenda. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 24(3), 149-157.
Lowrey, W. (2011). Institutionalism, news organizations and innovation. Journalism Studies, 12(1), 64-79.
Lowrey, W. (2017). The emergence and development of news fact-checking sites: Institutional logics and population ecology. Journalism Studies, 18(3), 376-394.
Lowrey, W. (2018). Journalism as Institution. In T. P. Vos (Ed.), Journalism (Vol. 19). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
McAfee, A., Brynjolfsson, E., Davenport, T. H., Patil, D. J., & Barton, D. (2012). Big data: The management revolution. Harvard Business Review, 90(10), 60-68.
Mierzejewska, B. I. (2011). Media management in theory and practice. In M. Deuze (Ed.), Managing media work (pp. 13-30). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Montani, F., Courcy, F., & Vandenberghe, C. (2017). Innovating under stress: The role of commitment and leader-member exchange. Journal of Business Research, 77, 1-13.
Nygren, G. (2014). Multiskilling in the newsroom—de-skilling or re-skilling of journalistic work? The Journal of Media Innovations, 1(2), 75-96.
Painter-Morland, M. & Deslandes, G. (2017). Authentic leading as relational accountability: Facing up to the conflicting expectations of media leaders. Leadership, 13(4), 424-444.
Picard, R. G. (Ed.). (2014). Media product portfolios: Issues in management of multiple products and services. New York, NY: Routledge.
Porter, M. E. (1980). Competitive strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors (Vol. 267). New York, NY: Free Press.
Rogers, E.M., (2003) The Diffusion of Innovations, 5th edition. Free Press, New York.
Shaw, J. B. (1990). A cognitive categorization model for the study of intercultural management. Academy of Management Review, 15(4), 626-645.
Schumpeter, J. A. Change and the Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949.
Storsul, T., & Krumsvik, A. H. (2013). Media Innovation. A Multidisciplinary Study of Change. Göteborg: Nordicom
Waldenström, A., Wiik, J., & Andersson, U. (2018). Conditional autonomy: Journalistic practice in the tension field between professionalism and managerialism. Journalism Practice, DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2018.1485510.
Van de Ven, A. H., Polley, D. G., Garud, R., & Venkataraman, S. 2008. The innovation journey. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Virta, S., & Malmelin, N. (2017). Ambidextrous tensions: Dynamics of creative work in the media innovation process. Journal of Media Innovations, 4(1), 44-59.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution BY 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).