Michael A Hitt

Texas A&M University | TAMU · Department of Management

To survive and thrive, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have had to adapt to dramatic changes and increasing complexity in the global competitive landscape over the past 50 years. MNEs’ international strategies and the academic research on the various attributes and outcomes of these strategies have evolved accordingly. This work reviews the evolut...

We explore the potential effects of managers’ greed and altruism on their behaviors and firm outcomes. Greed represents extreme self-interest whereas altruism reflects concern for others. We argue that managerial greed leads to a focus on short term decisions and short-term firm performance. Alternatively, managerial altruism normally produces a fo...

Research findings have established a relationship between organizational size and a substantial set of organizational outcomes, resulting in size’s distinction as "perhaps the most powerful explanatory organizational covariate in strategic analysis." We draw on the theory of the firm to provide a theory-driven definition of firm size and as a frame...

Research on subnational institutions is largely motivated by the observation that formal and informal institutions within countries are unevenly configured over geographical space. Although diverse, this relatively nascent body of work has yet to explicate firm activity across subnational locales that exhibit institutional dissimilarity and isomorp...

This Special Issue aims to connect entrepreneurship literature with marketing research while advancing entrepreneurship studies and reaching a broad, globally diverse authorship and readership. Therefore, we aim to be broad enough to attract a sizable number of high-quality submissions, while also being focused enough to have a clear research theme...

In this work we review and analyze recent research in the international business field, with the purpose of clarifying, consolidating, and extending the constructs related to dynamic capabilities. We begin with an overview of dynamic capabilities research in the international context, noting unclear terminology, and unanswered questions concerning...

How orchestrating external, supplier‐provided resources affects product innovation is an important question. While product innovation is essential to achieve a competitive advantage, it is costly as it requires significant investments. It thus puts a severe strain on firm resources, which is particularly critical for resource‐scarce small–medium en...

How orchestrating external, supplier-provided resources affects product innovation is an important question. While product innovation is essential to achieve a competitive advantage, it is costly as it requires significant investments. It thus puts a severe strain on firm resources, which is particularly critical for resource-scarce small–medium en...

This chapter focuses on the capabilities and strategies involved in the development and use of organizational agility. Organizational agility is necessary to respond effectively to disruptive events, development of new technologies, institutional changes, and other environmental changes. These factors require firms to continuously change allowing t...

Technological acquisitions have taken a prominent role in firm innovation strategies though research suggests that target inventors suffer productivity declines post-acquisition. This especially concerns acquirers that seek to integrate the target’s capabilities with their own because it requires building a collaborative relationship between the ta...

This paper explores how Guanxi shapes different levels of entrepreneurial behaviour of family businesses in China. Extant research draws on network theory, suggesting that firms focusing on less intimate social relationships are more entrepreneurial than those focusing on intimate social networks. However, this notion of networks neglects Guanxi’s...

Boards of directors play a central role in governing corporate strategic change. We systematically review corporate governance research on strategic change published over the past 40 years, differentiating between strategic change types and board characteristics. We identify three developments: a focus on specific strategic change types, board comp...

Resource dependence theory (RDT) has been widely applied in the context of international business (IB) over the past four decades. This study reviews and synthesizes the insights of RDT in IB literature accumulated over the past 40 years and derives an integrative addendum for future research. We highlight three critical dependence dimensions (i.e....

Research Summary Resource dependence theory (RDT) has been widely applied in the context of international business (IB) over the past four decades. This study reviews and synthesizes the insights of RDT in IB literature accumulated over the past 40 years and derives an integrative addendum for future research. We highlight three critical dependence...

Organizational autonomy is a fundamental organizational design choice that holds a central position in management theories and practice. To date, this construct has suffered from definitional vagueness and conceptual fragmentation in its academic study across different management subfields. Drawing from a review of 87 articles appearing in top acad...

Despite the belief that strategy implementation begins at the very top of a firm, there remains an inadequate understanding about top management teams’ (TMTs) involvement in the strategy implementation process. Building upon and extending strategic leadership theory, we develop and empirically test a theoretical model of the interactive effects of...

This special issue was developed to extend the boundaries of strategic leadership research, to help bridge the micro-macro divide regarding theories of strategic leadership, and to bring together theories that have emerged independently. In this introductory editorial, we provide an overview of the research on strategic leadership and emphasize the...

The alignment among multiple stakeholder benefits is a valuable performance indicator for the benefits generated by a firm for various stakeholders. Our research seeks to augment stakeholder-agency theory with an institutional perspective to analyze how national institutions affect stakeholder benefit alignment. We suggest that the current developm...

Research Summary This special issue advances the global strategy and entrepreneurship fields by providing a better understanding of the linkage between institutions and entrepreneurship. We provide an overview of existing literature in three key research areas: (a) the impact of institutions (types and complexity) on entrepreneurship, (b) the effec...

Leveraging resources to develop innovation is central to exploiting market opportunities yet doing so is complex and fraught with challenges. This study explores some of this complexity by theoretically detailing and empirically examining the critical role that synchronization plays in the process of leveraging resources to create innovation. Speci...

This contributed volume provides the knowledge portfolio for the Strategic Management field. Strategic Management has experienced significant growth as a research discipline and builds on strong theoretical and empirical research to provide valuable knowledge for managerial practice. The book is designed to capture the rich breadth and depth of kno...

We review extant experimental work in strategic management and argue that experiments constitute an underused methodology that has significant potential. We examine and categorize 179 experiments from 119 published articles over a 20-year period, delineating the contributions of these experiments to the strategic management literature. In doing so,...

Management theories developed in the United States and Europe have dominated management and organizational studies. As a result, scholars often overlook subtle cultural and ideological differences in other settings as they treat the theories from the United States and Europe as universal. All too often, as they attempt to apply these theories, scho...

Bricolage and effectuation have emerged as new theoretical perspectives describing entrepreneurial behavior (EB). Bricolage emphasizes the creative use of available resources, while effectuation uses available means as a starting point and encourages firms to engage in affordable loss, pre‐commitment, flexibility, and experimentation as independent...

With primary and secondary data on 658 firms from 17 countries across three continents, we examine the combined influence of country-level institutions on industry attributes and in turn their effects on the choice of a defensive advantage-based strategy and an entrepreneurial strategy. We find that strong and efficient institutions constrain both...

we identify six major categories of international strategies and implementation approaches: market entry and internationalization, political strategies, multinational technology and innovation , multinational corporate social responsibility, multinational headquarters and subsidiary relationships, and international human resources management. A par...

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a significant environmental jolt that has altered the trajectories of economies and institutions and the strategies of MNEs. We examine the pandemic effects on countries’ political and regulatory institutions, the interplay between their formal and informal institutions and the resulting environmental uncertainty. The...

Supply chain partnership is viewed as an important contributor to superior competitiveness, yet the knowledge of ex-ante factors contributing to the deployment of supply chain partnership is nascent. This paper examines the influence of the current supplier selection routines, supplier evaluation routines, and managerial attitude towards relational...

The top executive personality literature has grown significantly in recent years. We review this literature, consider its contributions to leadership research and practice, and discuss how future research on top executive personality should draw more heavily on the broader leadership literature. The paper first describes the top executive context a...

Supply chain partnership is viewed as an important contributor to superior competitiveness, yet the knowledge of ex-ante factors contributing to the deployment of supply chain partnership is nascent. This paper examines the influence of the current supplier selection routines, supplier evaluation routines, and managerial attitude towards relational...

The increasing integration of international operations has changed the formulation and implementation of international strategies over the past few decades. Due to the increased interdependency among countries and multinational enterprises (MNEs), the impact of institutions has been intensified. We reviewed a broad range of studies examining the ef...

The post-pandemic non-ergodic New Normal likely will continue to create significant complexity and uncertainty for managers. It may reveal boundary conditions for RBT, agency theory, and perhaps other theories (e.g., those emanating from industrial organization economics; Porter, 1980) that help us understand and explain firm behaviors and performa...

Management and Organization Review Special Issue on ‘Responsible Leadership in China and Beyond: A Responsible Research Approach’ - Volume 16 Special Issue - Workshop Organizers and Guest Editors, Xu Huang, Xiao-Ping Chen, Michael Hitt, Runtian Jing, Arie Y. Lewin, Anne S. Tsui, Lori Yue, Jianjun Zhang

Management and Organization Review Special Issue on ‘Responsible Leadership in China and Beyond: A Responsible Research Approach’ - Volume 16 Issue 2 - Xu Huang, Xiao-Ping Chen, Michael Hitt, Runtian Jing, Arie Y. Lewin, Anne S. Tsui, Lori Yue, Jianjun Zhang

The prudential use of external financial capital and the desire to maintain internal slack reflect unique characteristics of family firms that focus on preserving socioemotional wealth. This study extends previous findings by demonstrating that external capital availability and internal slack can either provide the financial support for family firm...

A New Normal environment for business has emerged in the years after the 2008 financial crisis based on changes in economic, technological, demographic and sociopolitical factors. This combination of changes has created a New Normal environment for firms around the world with major implications for managers, strategists, and entrepreneurs alike. It...

Management and Organization Review Special Issue on ‘Responsible Leadership in China and Beyond: A Responsible Research Approach’ - Volume 16 Issue 1 - Xu Huang, Xiao-Ping Chen, Michael Hitt, Runtian Jing, Arie Y. Lewin, Anne S. Tsui, Lori Yue, Jianjun Zhang

Drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm, we shed light on an extant debate about whether family firms are more or less likely to diversify internationally. In an analysis of firm-level data from 93 countries over 2011-2018, we find that family-dominant firms—with their established preference for low breadth-high depth international diversifica...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to disentangle individual-level gender differences and norm-based gender roles and stereotypes to provide a finer-grained understanding of why female and male entrepreneurs experience different growth returns from their social networks across different national cultures. Design/methodology/approach This researc...

Within the boundary of scientific knowledge for management, we discuss the divergence between practical demand for knowledge integration to solve complex problems and scientific fragmentation of academic knowledge for simplicity. We suggest the current incentives underlying elite scientific journals in management cause unintended knowledge fragment...

Extending our understanding of family firms and international business research with respect to entry mode decisions, this study explains how entry mode choice is the product of a sequential decision-making process, with an important ownership structure contingency. We propose that firms with a dominant family owner (family-dominant firms) prefer l...

Capital market investors have limited information about the motives, exchange terms, and expected outcomes of corporate divestitures. Thus, when a firm announces a divestiture, capital markets may have difficulty distinguishing divestitures that are likely to be beneficial and investment worthy from those that signify hidden problems. Drawing on sc...

Building new space for institutional theory, we propose how the severity of formal and informal institutional voids shapes the productivity of entrepreneurial activities within society. Our theory makes the key assumptions that voids can exist in both formal and informal institutions and that they are capable of hindering entrepreneurial behavior t...

Entrepreneurial activity is important in a county's economic development and growth. It is also often critical for firms to compete effectively in the global economy. As such, to understand how institutions affect entrepreneurial activity is important. Herein, we examine different types of institutions and how they influence the development of new...

Hennart, Majocchi and Forlani propose and validate a new explanation of family firms’ internationalization heterogeneity shedding light on the role of a family firm’s global niche business model. This type of family firm can avoid the dominant internationalization problems usually depicted in the literature on family firms’ internationalization. St...

Public entrepreneurship is much like its private sector counterpart; however, public entrepreneurs face additional challenges due to weaker competitive forces in the public than in the private sector with objectives that are often poorly defined and performance that is difficult to measure. Despite the impact on public good, how to successfully ena...

Human capital complementarities in an organization are strongly influenced by the social relations among employees. We argue the nature of these relations, both value enhancing and prohibiting, are essential elements for the emergence of human capital resources. Yet, scholarship to date has supported a prevailing assumption of social relations that...

A key role of board directors is to govern corporate strategy. Whereas prior research has provided insights into board roles and activities regarding board governance, the underlying capabilities required to govern effectively remain understudied. This article explores and explicates a capability-based view of board actions in which the specific ca...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) use the regional aggregation and integration of their foreign direct investments as an important part of their internationalization. Internationalization decisions are integrated at the region level; however, little work has focused on explaining the extent of this regional integration. We develop theoretical argume...

Strategic management courses today are criticized for being repositories of multiple frameworks that are not tightly integrated and are aging rapidly while some have voiced concerns about the lack of effectiveness of strategic management education. Mintzberg (2004) argues that MBA faculty have too readily reduced strategic management to a kit bag o...

While established firms can efficiently manage their resource portfolio, new ventures must construct resource boundaries by assembling resources. In doing so, new ventures are often pushed to utilize resources that are owned by other actors. These inter-organizational relationship strategies do not expand organizational boundaries, but rather creat...

Strategic management research has developed significantly in the last 30 years but especially so since the turn of the century. Some relatively new journals have expanded the outlets for strategic management research as the field continues to mature. First, we summarize the strategic management research in the past 2–3 years in management journals....

After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University, Dan Schendel joined the faculty at Purdue University, where he helped found one of the earliest Ph.D. programs in strategic management. As a leader in the field, he founded the Strategic Management Society and the 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_565, which became the pre-eminent scholarly journal in the...

Purpose Based on the findings of Aguinis et al. (2017) that only a few executives are properly compensated, we examine potential causes and consequences of CEO overpayment and underpayment. Ineffective compensation of the CEO represents a governance failure by the board of directors. Better understanding the reasons for such failures may help board...

A new competitive landscape developed in the 1990s. Filled with threats to existing patterns of successful competition as well as opportunities to form competitive advantages through innovations that create new industries and markets, this landscape was characterized by substantial and often frame‐breaking change, a series of temporary, rather than...

The most striking features of business life at the turn of the millennium are volatility, turbulence, and unpredictability. New winners emerge quickly and unexpectedly; established leaders decline or disappear. Foster and Kaplan, for example, found that turnover in the S&P 90 increased from about 1.5 percent per year during the 1920s and 1930s to n...

In this retrospective article, we outline the rationale for starting the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. We provide evidence on the percentage of published papers in SEJ in each of ten key themes in strategic entrepreneurship identified when the journal was founded. Evidence on progress towards goal achievement in terms of trends in submissions...

Although formulation has received the lion’s share of attention in strategic management research, implementation is widely considered to provide the greatest challenges for top executives. Observers have cited the need for more research on implementation and thought leaders have called for the use of interdisciplinary approaches. Thus, we explor...

Little systematic research has been done on strategy implementation, yet there is a body of work providing guidance for implementation efforts. The authors examine three basic collections of work on resources and governance, managing human capital, and accounting-based control systems, explaining how these issues have implications for strategy impl...

Most of the research and writing in strategic management focuses on the formulation of the most appropriate strategies. Selecting the best strategy for firms to follow is very important to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage. However, many strategies fail not because they are improperly formulated, but because they are poorly implemented....

Divestitures are typically determined internally and external parties usually have limited information when estimating how the action will affect the divesting firm’s performance. Drawing from signaling theory, we argue that one group of outsiders -- investors – will use the shareholdings of existing blockholder owners as a signal for sorting throu...

Despite its importance, there is no clear understanding of the uniqueness of family firms' internationalization. This article sheds new light on this issue with a meta-analysis of 76 studies covering 41 countries. We show that the considerable study and cross-country differences in the relationship between family firm and internationalization are e...

After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University, Dan Schendel joined the faculty at Purdue University, where he helped found one of the earliest Ph.D. programs in strategic management. As a leader in the field, he founded the Strategic Management Society and the Strategic Management Journal, which became the pre-eminent scholarly journal in the...

Strategic management research has developed significantly in the last 30 years but especially so since the turn of the century. Some relatively new journals have expanded the outlets for strategic management research as the field continues to mature. First, we summarize the strategic management research in the past 2–3 years in management journals....

Integrating the theoretical perspectives of resource orchestration and relational capital, this research examines how the managerial capability involved in resource bundling approaches (i.e., stabilizing, enriching, and pioneering) affect the speed of strategic change, and how managerial ties (i.e., government ties, customer ties and supplier ties)...

International business research is only beginning to develop theory and evidence highlighting the importance of supranational regional institutions to explain firm internationalization. In this context, we offer new theory and evidence regarding the effect of a region’s “institutional complexity” on foreign direct investment decisions by multinatio...

Purpose – Country institutions have become of heightened importance for firms’ international strategies in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to review the reasons for the growing importance of institutional environments and examine how they influence the international strategies of multinational enterprises (MNEs). There have been signific...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research has principally focused on attributes of the acquiring firm and post-acquisition outcomes. To extend our knowledge, we focus on external factors, in particular rival responses, and explore when and how rivals respond to their competitor’s acquisitions. Leveraging the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) fram...

We propose that the mixed findings of research on the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship reflect its failure to adequately consider the moderating role of firms’ home country formal and informal institutions. This general hypothesis is supported in a meta-analysis of the firm-, industry-, home country–, and host country–level facto...

In their commentary, Bromiley and Rau criticized resource-based theory (RBT) generally, and challenged the appropriateness of its application in operations management (OM). But, Michael Hitt, Christina Matz Carnes and Kai Xu present their view on the subject. The authors believe that the definition of OM presented in Bromiley and Rau tends to be na...

Integrating the theoretical perspectives of resource orchestration and relational capital, this research examines how the managerial capability involved in resource bundling approaches (i.e., stabilizing, enriching, and pioneering) affect the speed of strategic change, and how managerial ties (i.e., government ties, customer ties and supplier ties)...

This handbook contributes to our understanding of strategy implementation and identifies considerable opportunities for future research on this important process, with a focus on resources, governance, human capital, and accounting-based control systems.

Resource based theory (RBT) has become increasingly popular in operations management research. The development and current application of RBT to the study and understanding of operations management problems and phenomena are reviewed and articles in the recent six plus years across nine journals are evaluated. Based on this review and evaluation, w...

To survive and thrive, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have had to adapt to dramatic changes and increasing complexity in the global competitive landscape over the past 50 years. MNEs’ international strategies and the academic research on the various attributes and outcomes of these strategies have evolved accordingly. This work reviews the evolut...

This study examines factors affecting MNCs’ establishment of R&D centers in China (i.e., China R&D centers). We argue that China offers not only location advantages (e.g., economic growth) that encourage MNCs to establish R&D centers there, but also location disadvantages (e.g., weak intellectual property protection) that discourage MNCs from doing...