Abstract
Since the 1990s, profit and gain sharing systems are part of the reality of Brazilian workers. The aim of the present study was to investigate how an organization responds to conflicting institutional demands throughout the period: from adoption to the decline of a practice. A twenty-years longitudinal case study was carried out in industrial company in São Paulo which implemented a profit and gain sharing system. This paper sheds light on how an organization response can change over time. Acquiescence was the initial response, followed by decoupling and dilution. This response dynamics sequence was observed during of transition, which represented a movement in the direction of the replacing of a dominant logic by another one. At the beginning of the period, the profit and gain sharing system was little known in Brazil, and there was a powerful appeal to implement it, consistent with the logic of increasing productivity improvement. Over time, however, the logic of social protection of workers became the prevailing logic in the field. Even so, its internal representation was postponed, due to external jolts, and due to the influence and co-optation strategies employed by the most powerful group. While literature has depicted that such a group imposes its views in the presence of multiple internal representations of conflicting logics, findings in this study suggest that the use of influence and co-optation can also happen in cases of a single internal representation. The study contributes to the treatment of the internal representation of the logics as a dynamic process, subject to the interference of actors and environmental jolts.
Keywords:
Profit and gain sharing; Institutional logics; Organizational practices; Strategic responses; Institutional complexity