maria carmela Annosi

• Senior Assistant professor of Organization Behaviour and Innovation Management, Wageningen University & Research
• Professor (Assistant) at Wageningen University & Research

Resource allocation decisions are pivotal in shaping the strategic direction of organisations, particularly in micro-firms that operate with limited resources and dispersed information. This research delves into the intricate interplay between managerial and organisational factors related to information collection, processing and resource allocatio...

Purpose Recent reports show that knowledge-based sectors contribute significantly to the global economy and underscore the importance of innovation. Innovation in both products and processes is vital to maintaining competitiveness. Self-managing teams, emphasizing autonomy and limiting the role of management, have been viewed as a solution to encou...

The development and diffusion of digital technologies are transforming industries, including the agrifood sector, which is experiencing significant changes driven by the "Digital Agriculture" era. This paper explores the intersection of digital transformation and sustainability in agribusiness, examining how digital technologies impact organization...

This study delves into the strategic decision-making process (SDMP) within the context of new product development (NPD), exploring the nuanced interplay between intuition and rationality as key drivers in product innovation. It investigates how top and middle managers in multinational corporations' subsidiaries in the Netherlands navigate the tensi...

Failure and innovation have always been inextricably linked. What matters in today's complex environment, however, is how companies deal with failure from innovation. Although recent research indicates that they are often likely to fail, failure still overall assumes a negative connotation and is thus perceived as something to avoid. By combining p...

This study offers a phenomenological account of the institutional context's role in Agile teams' knowledge work. Drawing from 44 semi-structured interviews and naturalistic observations of Agile teams in the Telco sector, the study emphasizes sensemaking activities through which team members navigate daily situations, revealing internal mechanisms...

Studies on corporate social performance advocate that interrelated yet conflicting goals, such as sustainability and profitability, give rise to specific dynamics and inherent tensions, and call for more research to investigate how the duality of goals is managed by specific individuals in organizations. Through a micro-foundational view of ambidex...

The consequences of digital transformation are becoming more visible and pervasive. Despite extensive research on the technological side of the transformation, emphasizing its discontinuous nature, little is known about how managers reframe their cognitive models, reshape routines, and exploit novel organizational structures to implement digital tr...

The rise of digital technologies poses new organizational challenges, redesigning organizational structures, paving the way for new opportunities. Despite the growing body of research on digital transformation, there has been relatively little research on the microfoundational mechanisms that contribute to the successful digital transformation of w...

Some major future global challenges are linked to more efficient use of water for irrigation to respond to the growing water scarcity coupled with the increasing food demand. Although irrigation advisory services (IASs) are considered effective instruments to increase water use efficiency in agriculture, their diffusion remains limited. This is due...

The purpose of this study is to examine the reported architectural approaches and governance mechanisms for digital business ecosystems (DBEs). A systematic literature review is employed, in which 92 relevant articles are selected for analysis. This study provides an overview of articles, reports the formal modeling notations, modeling viewpoints,...

The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of the roles of individuals and the importance of their social contexts in shaping the dynamics of technological diffusion in the agricultural sector. When justifying the different rates of innovation adoption, existing literature reviews overemphasize either the drivers of technological changes...

Major future global challenges are linked with agricultural systems sustainability, which encompasses a more efficient use of water resources for irrigation. As a matter of fact, climate change is expected to reduce water security by negatively affecting precipitation and increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts in many areas of the world...

The use of Agile practices is typically associated to a wide array of benefits for organizations. This paper extends growing research on the ‘dark’ side of Agile by investigating the depletion of innovation in a large telco company following the large-scale implementation of Agile in R&D units. Our qualitative study reveals a shift in the organizat...

Purpose This study aims to analyze what promotes the adoption of open innovation (OI) in the foodservice sector. Specifically, it seeks to shed light on the bottom-up mechanisms (the microfoundations) that allow a foodservice firm to organize for OI. Design/methodology/approach The research design is an in-depth exploratory case study with 18 semi...

Purpose The aim of the paper is to analyze how actors in foodservice companies organize for inbound open innovation (OI). Design/methodology/approach This paper conducted a case analysis of a large and successful foodservice company operating in the Dutch market. Furthermore, drawing on 18 interviews and archive data, we identified the main organi...

The increasing complexity of business contexts, alongside the need for organizations to improve their capabilities and remain competitive on the market, make understanding strategic decision-making processes cornerstone for contemporary organizations. By gaining insights from top- and middle-level managers working in MNCs’ subsidiaries operating in...

Increasingly, organizations have been employing self‐managing teams to circumvent bureaucratic controls and stimulate innovation. However, this goal is not easily achieved; in many situations, informal controls replace formal controls. This study develops a multi‐level perspective of control. We explicitly analyze control mechanisms at different le...

Growing migration between countries and the sustained trend of globalization are changing business dynamics and creating conditions for increased workforce birthplace diversity within firms. However, few studies investigate the relationships between workforce birthplace diversity and firm performance. We address this, and also study how the impact...

Purpose. Drawing from the knowledge-based view of the firm, the work explores the knowledge management practices that the acquirer uses (1) to exploit its knowledge creating conditions for the exploitation of the target’s knowledge and (2) to explore its knowledge by realizing routines for the integration of new knowledge within the target. Design/...

Food supply chains increasingly rely on big-data management solutions to foster collaboration across the food supply chain and improve business performance. However, little is known about collaboration practices that actors on the digital food supply chain adopt to solve problems such as food waste, or about the drivers and barriers related to the...

Various approaches – for and not-for-profit – have been offered as a means of addressing the endemic nature of rural poverty and undernutrition. EKutir, a social enterprise, has sought to address rural poverty through a team of microentrepreneurs that leverage information and communication technologies (ICT) to connect farmers more efficiently with...

The strategy and innovation literatures argue that organizational competitiveness is contingent upon firms simultaneously pursuing both process and product innovations. A firm's control system plays a fundamental role in this regard by managing, motivating, and coordinating employees' behaviors for the development of its innovative capabilities. Re...

Purpose The present study aims to describe the micro-dynamics of decision-making that refer to knowledge translation pursued by organizational actors to see how they affect the travel of new ideas within the managerial practice of Project Portfolio Management (PPM). The study focuses on how the alignment of actors' meanings is reached at the organi...

Purpose Digitalization is becoming the subject of considerable interest in the literature. This is in view of its relevance in addressing social problems and contributing to the development of communities and societies. In the agri-food-industry, digitalization is also expected to contribute significantly to solve several challenges the sector is f...

This article explains the main mechanisms influencing the knowledge collaboration dynamics occurring across an online business community. Prior research study had conceived firms as autonomous entities competing against each other to reach the competitive advantage. Nonetheless, online business social networks (BSNs) can be seen as networks of orga...

Originally developed for software development, Agile approaches are increasingly adopted by organizations that seek flexibility in the face of rapid change. However, little attention has been paid to potential negative consequences of the implementation of Agile in large-scale settings. We undertook a multi-site study of a multinational telecom com...

Social enterprise is a model of hybrid organization driven by the need to generate positive externalities by reinvesting their surplus for social and environmental objectives. One of the biggest problems arising from joining financial goals with social goals is the presence of increasing tensions between the members and stakeholders involved. Never...

Previous research has shown the importance of individual learning goal orientation for both job and task performance and consequently organizational performance. Despite its importance, knowledge on the antecedents of learning goal orientation remains scarce, especially in the context of self‐managing team‐based organizations. In fact, most of the...

In the face of increasing competition, an organization’s capacity to acquire knowledge from the outside has become fundamental for new product development. Pertinent extant literature has stressed how an organization should practice social product development, allowing for the inclusion of all types of stakeholders in idea generation, selection, va...

Smart Agriculture and 4.0 Technologies have brought several benefits to agricultural small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Nonetheless, the penetration of such digital technologies is still poor and slow. This study addresses the issue and provides some insights on the reasons related to the still limited adoption of 4.0 technologies within agricult...

In an increasingly competitive environment which facilitates rapid changes in consumers' preferences and needs, an organization's ability to acquire and exploit knowledge is of vital. Hence, through continuous interaction with both users and external stakeholders, an organization should be able to simultaneously utilise the knowledge obtained throu...

Recognizing a serious lack of research on routinized individual actions and organizational adaptation in the stability-change paradox, we intend to provide an in-depth explanation of the way in which agile methods affect organizational learning in self-managed, team-based organizations, taking a multi-level evolutionary approach. We explore learnin...

While the interplay between practices and logics is a central tenant of the institutional logics perspective, we still know little about how institutional logics are affected and modified by the introduction of new practices. Our work investigates how the introduction of new practices meant to foster innovation leads to the emergence and stabilizat...

New organization designs emerge continuously in highly dynamic innovation context to improve readiness to change. The adoption of self-managing teams operating cross-functionally on a bulk of products, together with the reduction of vertical layers in the organization, seems to be a common strategy for many organizations aiming to achieve higher le...

In the closing chapter, editors synthesize elements theorized across the volume and suggest further avenues for research both for theory and empirics based on the proposal arising from the contributors and form their own reading of each chapter.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the concepts of hybrid and new organizations. Its intent is also to make clear the type of contribution the book is intended to bring to the literature on hybrid organizations. The structure of the book and how to navigate it, together with a short summary of contributions, are presented.

In a turbulent environment, increased flexibility and efficiency are essential for most firms to survive. Many organizations have responded to the need for greater efficiency and productivity by building more Agile structures and shifting to the implementation of Agile software (SW) methodologies. Although the adoption of Agile methodologies is bec...

Substantial further research is yet needed on how to design and manage organizations that can respond to the uncertainties and demands of new business. Organizational control—broadly defined as any process by which organizational members direct attention, motivate, and encourage others to act in ways desirable for achieving organizational objective...

Reflecting the emergence of new organizational forms and hybrid organizations, this edited collection explores the processes of exchange, collaboration and technological management that have changed organizational structures. By investigating the impact that inter-organizational collaboration can have on the production and implementation of ideas w...

Institutional constraints and the web of social relations influence key organizational dimensions and hinder their decisional capacities, even determining a move away from any pre-established rational goal. This chapter focuses on the relationship between institutions and organizations within the external environment. We begin by defining the exter...

Institutions enable and constrain, “directly determining what arrows a firm has in its quiver as it struggles to formulate and implement strategy, and to create a competitive advantage” (Ingram and Silverman, The new institutionalism in strategic management, Elsevier, 2002, p. 20). Institution result from social action and pressures exerted on the...

Control systems interact with the social contexts in which an organization’s activities are developed, and pressure is placed on the managers putting in place these systems to be able to coordinate and control organizational units, in terms of both behavior and performance. This chapter discusses the determinants of the internal institutional envir...

In order to win in today’s competitive environment, companies need to be very good at managing organizational learning activities. On the basis of the empirical observations presented in this work, a set of managerial and organizational controls that are required for this purpose is proposed in this chapter. These controls include actions aimed at...

This chapter provides an overview of the research studies used as a basis for the empirical analysis that will be presented in Chapter 8. We start by clarifying the epistemological and ontological positions. We then provide information on the nature and the quality of data collected, and provide a description of the data analysis performed along wi...

In this chapter, the reader, relying on an in-depth description of contemporary forms of production and work organization, will become familiar with the key concepts tied to new organizational forms. More specifically, this chapter focuses on (1) how and why new forms of organizations have come to replace traditional and hierarchical organizational...

This chapter offers a thorough overview of the literature on organizational controls and links that literature to organizational learning. This ensures survival of the organization, which becomes able to (1) detect problems inside the organization or in its fit with the external environment, and (2) correct problems, finding solutions and reacting...

Few research studies have been attentive to how control is exercised in the new organizational context relying on new forms of governances and social structures. This chapter presents the results of a four-year research project. It begins by focusing on the team and individual factors involved in the system of self-regulation of team learning activ...

This chapter aims to explore Management Control Systems (MCS) resulting from the implementation of agile development methods, relying on an established MCS taxonomy. An abductive approach was adopted, considering the shortage of research evaluating the post-adoption effects of agile methods. Four organizations from an international telecommunicatio...

Team identity has received little research attention even though an increasing number of firms are moving to team-based organizations and there is evidence that teams form identities. We explore the extent to which team identity can be institutionalized as a central organizing principle of team-based firms. We argue that managerial and stakeholder...

This book highlights the growing number of ‘post-bureaucratic’ firms that are abandoning hierarchical organizational forms in favor of self-managing teams. Addressing the need to outperform, these new organization types foresee the benefits of an organic structure with new and more indirect forms of control, and aim to coordinate the activities of...

Despite the number of research studies in the domain of organizational ambidexterity has grown during recent years, this topic remains still unfocused and limited due to a lack of more encompassing conceptual efforts. Drawing on our advanced understanding of the nature and micro-foundation of self-managing team-based organizations’ learning capabil...

New organizational structures and forms are established in highly dynamic innovation context, to improve organizations’ readiness to change. The adoption of self-managing teams operating cross-functionally on a bulk of products and the reduction of vertical layers in the organization seem to be the general and common strategy that many organization...

Organizations are increasingly becoming Open Source Software (OSS) adopters, either as a result of a strategic decision or just as a consequence of technological choices. The strategy followed to adopt OSS shapes organizations’ businesses; therefore methods to assess such impact are needed. In this paper, we propose OSSAP, a method for defining OSS...

To survive in global markets, answering to actual customers’ requests, high quality and low cost have become the main objectives in new product development environment. To achieve these objectives more and more firms embraced the conversion to a post-bureaucratic structure, transforming them from a hierarchically based organization to a flatter org...

Agile methodologies have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their responsiveness. However, few studies have empirically analysed the effect of Agile on long-term organizational goals such as learning and innovation. Using an abductive approach, this study examines the relationships between self-regulated teams’ social...

Nowadays, the adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) by organizations is becoming a strategic need in a wide variety of application areas. Organizations adopt OSS in very diverse ways. The way in which they adopt OSS affects and shapes their businesses. Therefore, knowing the impact of different OSS adoption strategies in the context of an organiza...

Increasing adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) requires a change in the organizational culture and reshaping IT decision-makers mindset. Adopting OSS software components introduces some risks that can affect the adopter organization’s business goals, therefore they need to be considered. To assess these risks, it is required to understand the so...

Open Source Software (OSS) has become a strategic asset for a number of reasons, such as short time-to-market software delivery, reduced development and maintenance costs, and its customization capabilities. Therefore, organizations are increasingly becoming OSS adopters, either as a result of a strategic decision or because it is almost unavoidabl...

Managing risks related to OSS adoption is a must for organizations that need to smoothly integrate OSS-related practices in their development processes. Adequate tool support may pave the road to effective risk management and ensure the sustainability of such activity. In this paper, we present the RISCOSS platform for managing risks in OSS adoptio...

In this study we investigate organizational control systems as the underpinnings of large organizations’ ability to perform after transition to a flattened and decentralized structure. We consider control mechanisms on team level (structure and peer control) and on organization level (interactive and diagnostic management control systems), and exam...

By 2016 an estimated 95% of all commercial software packages will include Open Source Software (OSS). This extended adoption is yet not avoiding failure rates in OSS projects to be as high as 50%. Inadequate risk management has been identified among the top mistakes to avoid when implementing OSS-based solutions. Understanding, managing and mitiga...

This paper describes the experience, carried out by Ericsson Telecomunicazioni S.p.A (Italy), in managing the migration of their legacy products towards a product line approach and, specifically, how the update of third-party software products is handled in such product lines. The paper describes the Ericsson application scenario in the development...

Software processes have an important role to play in realizing organizational strategies. When a software organization is about to decide on the adoption of a new process, it should have a clear understanding of its own strategic objectives, as well as the potentials of the new method in supporting or hindering its strategic plan. From this perspec...

Despite high expectations, agile methods have not always produced the desired results. The suitability of various agile practices depends on many situational factors, such as team size, project complexity, individuals competence, etc. As agile practices have become increasingly widespread, there is a growing body of literature that reports on empir...

Modeling notations have been introduced to help understand the why behind software processes. We ask how are these techniques be- ing used in industrial practices? The first part of this paper reports on the experiences at an industrial software organization, Ericsson Marconi SpA, in applying i* modeling to analyze knowledge transfer effective- nes...

The continuous alignment of organizational processes with an organizations' business strategy is a key factor to its success. This paper reports on the application of the i* framework to support the continuous alignment of corrective software maintenance processes with the strategic goals of a Software Design Maintenance Organization at Ericsson Ma...