Meta-Organizations and Upper Echelons: Exploring Strategic and Organizational Change in Employer Associations

This paper explores how strategic and organizational change takes shape within metaorganizations(MOs), i.e. organizations that have other organizations rather than individuals asmembers. By combining insights from meta-organizations and upper echelon theories, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding the change process in non-traditional organizational settings. Longitudinal case studies methodology is adopted to analyze the choices, reasoning and action of Italy’s major territorial employer association. Results suggests that strategic and organizational transformation processes in such contexts is characterized by factors common to traditional organizations and factors specific to employer associations (as metaorganizations). Among the latter, we find that a key driver for change was the mutual interdependence of (a) an increasing membership heterogeneity, (b) the external environment, specifically the industry context (in our case EAs environment) and the geo-economic territory, and (c) the emergence of a new, strong leadership coalition able to overcome the existing ‘dominant logic’ that determines that important strategic choices get made, and that they get implemented in consistent and coherent ways.