Gianluca Carnabuci

European School of Management and Technology | ESMT

Existing research has found a positive relationship between intrinsic motivational orientation and employee innovative performance. Whereas prior studies have emphasized psychological explanations for this relationship, we draw from social network theory and posit an indirect, network-structural mechanism. We hypothesize that employees with an intr...

Taking on a substantial new role without a change in title or authority is hard, but there are ways to manage this transition.

Research Summary Whereas prior innovation and strategy literature studied how attentional and search dynamics influence the creation of inventions, we examine how these same processes affect the impact of inventions after their creation. We theorize that inventions classified in “high‐contrast” technological categories garner more attention by pote...

Prior research assumes that high-status actors have greater organizational influence than lower-status ones, that is, it is easier for the former to get their ideas and initiatives adopted by the organization than it is for the latter. Drawing from the literature on ideology, we posit that the status–influence link is contingent on actors’ ideologi...

Research has shown that hiring R&D scientists from competitors fosters organizational learning. We examine whether hiring scientists who have many collaborative ties with the hiring firm prior to the mobility event produces different learning outcomes than hiring scientists who have few or no such ties. We theorize that prior ties reduce explorativ...

In contrast to theories of 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_391, which assume creative ideas to be generated ex nihilo, a growing stream of literature argues that all innovations ultimately stem from knowledge brokering: ideas that are well established in one domain diffuse to domains where they are not yet known. Knowledge brokering has been recognized a...

This paper advances novel theory and evidence on the emergence of informal leadership networks in groups that feature no formally designated leaders or authority hierarchies. We integrate insights from relational schema and network theory to develop and empirically test a three-step process model. The model’s first hypothesis is that people use a “...

This paper advances novel theory and evidence on the emergence of informal leadership networks in groups that feature no formally designated leaders or authority hierarchies. We integrate insights from relational schema and network theory to develop and empirically test a three-step process model. The model’s first hypothesis is that people use a “...

Theories of innovation and technical change posit that inventions that combine knowledge across technology domains have greater impact than inventions drawn from a single domain. The evidence for this claim comes mostly from research on patented inventions and ignores failed patent applications. We draw on insights from research into institutional...

Organizational network research has demonstrated that multiple benefits accrue to people occupying brokerage positions. However, the extant literature offers scant evidence of the process postulated to drive such benefits –information brokerage– and therefore leaves unaddressed the question of how brokers broker. We address this gap by examining th...

Theories of innovation and technical change posit that inventions thatcombine knowledge across technology domains have greater impact thaninventions drawn from a single domain. The evidence for this claim comesmostly from research on patented inventions and ignores failed patentapplications. We draw on insights from research into institutionalgatek...

In contrast to theories of innovation, which assume creative ideas to be generated ex nihilo, a growing stream of literature argues that all innovations ultimately stem from knowledge brokering: ideas that are well established in one domain diffuse to domains where they are not yet known. Knowledge brokering has been recognized as the root cause of...

Extant organizational literature argues that straddling institutionalized categories begets an illegitimacy discount, leading organizations to reproduce established categorical boundaries. If gaining legitimacy requires compliance with this " categorical imperative, " why do we frequently observe categorical straddling even in uncontested and fully...

Integrating insights from cognitive psychology into current network theory on the social capital of brokering and closed networks, we argue that cognitive style is a critical contingency explaining the relation between social network position and innovative performance. Based on a “complementary fit” argument, we posit that a social network rich in...

Extant organizational literature argues that straddling institutionalized categories begets an illegitimacy discount, leading organizations to reproduce established categorical boundaries. If gaining legitimacy requires compliance with this " categorical imperative, " why do we frequently observe categorical straddling even in uncontested and fully...

Complementing received research on the role of collaboration networks in fostering interorganizational learning and innovation, the authors focus on the importance of learning from other firms’ public knowledge. To this end they introduce the concept of spillover network—the network of “source” firms whose public knowledge a “recipient” firm is abl...

A firm's innovativeness is driven by its ability to recombine existing technologies. Elaborating on this argument, we contend that there exist two distinct types of recombinant capabilities. First, firms may innovate through recombinant creation, i.e., by creating technological combinations new to the firm. Second, they may innovate through recombi...

The size distribution of the domains of US-patented technological knowledge obeys an exponential law, revealing a disproportionable concentration of progress among larger domains. Our analyses suggest that this phenomenon is explained by a combination of two factors. First, domains’ trajectories of growth have inherently different potentials. Secon...

We examined the role of social embeddedness in creating positive perceptions of organizational support among managerial and staff employees (n = 72) of a large manufacturing firm. We operationalized social embeddedness as the size, density, and quality of employees' networks of multiplex, reciprocated exchange relationships with colleagues. After c...

We propose that brokers repetitively occupy short-lived structural holes rather than keep unconnected alters apart in the long term. We investigate this claim by using a relational event model in order to examine patterns of e-mail communications between employees in a medium- sized organization. We find empirical support for our argument.

This paper investigates the conditions facilitating career transitions across dissimilar cultural contexts. Particular attention is devoted to two critical obstacles faced by transitioners during cross-cultural role reorientations. First, transitioners must make sense of the unspoken demands and requirements ascribed to their work role in the new c...

In this paper, we set out to analyse the evolving structure of the technological landscape on which our knowledge-based economies thrive. To this end, we develop a network-analytic model, which we use to characterise and study the evolving pattern of citations among all patents granted in the USA from 1975 to 1999. We find that (i) the structure of...

Distancing itself from the traditional focus of leadership research on the behaviors and traits characteristic of “leaders,” the paper argues that leaders emerge out of a process of social construction. Drawing from relational schema theory, it is argued that group members form leadership perceptions that conform to a limited set of shared “hierarc...

Extant research suggests that firms' innovativeness depends on their ability to recombine existing technological components. Extending this approach, we distinguish between two types of recombinant capabilities: the ability to innovate by recombinant creation (by forming new combinations between previously unrelated components) and by recombinant r...

We show that the progress of technological knowledge is an inherently ecological process, wherein the growth rate of each technology domain depends on dynamics occurring in other technology domains. We identify two sources of ecological interdependence among technology domains. First, there are symbiotic interdependencies, implying that the rate of...

Why do certain domains of knowledge grow fast while others grow slowly or stagnate? Two distinct theoretical arguments hold that knowledge growth is enhanced by knowledge specialization and knowledge brokerage. Based on the notion of recombinant knowledge growth, we show that specialization and brokerage are opposing modes of knowledge generation,...

This paper deepens our understanding of the inventive process within organizational fields by exploring the link between inter-organizational knowledge diffusion and organization-level knowledge absorption and generation. A set of novel hypotheses is formulated, tested, and corroborated using data describing the worldwide semiconductor field betwee...

Diffuse competition due to niche overlap between actors without (direct) ties with each other, constrains their structural autonomy. This is not dealt with in Burt’s mathematical model of his well-known structural holes theory. We fix his model by introducing a network measure of niche overlap.