Richard L. Priem

• PhD
• Chair at Texas Christian University

Scholars have examined the role of customer preferences, and demand-side characteristics more generally, in varied core strategy areas like market entry and timing, diversification, positioning, resource reallocation, and firm adaptation, among many others. We review this diverse demand-side literature and develop an empirical classification that i...

Strategic rhythms concern how managers intentionally organize strategic activities by mapping them to the time continuum in hopes of improving a firm's long-term prospects. We develop a clear conceptual scope for strategic rhythms research. We take stock of the research on: rhythms of repeated strategic activity (e.g., serial acquisitions); rhythms...

This chapter revisits French Convention Theory (FCT) to inform the theory of the firm. This chapter argues that geographically or otherwise isolated scholarly communities, initially, can benefit from closure that allows them to nurture nascent theories. Subsequent confrontation with theories representing other scholarly communities is necessary, ho...

Restricted stock awards carry upside and downside risks for CEOs. We follow a socio-cognitive perspective by suggesting that awards of restricted stock are viewed as potential gains or potential losses depending on each CEO's dominant regulatory focus. Regulatory focus, therefore, helps determine how a CEO responds to restricted stock awards. We al...

Business model innovation is especially difficult for well-established firms. We develop a trait-process-outcome model showing how potential consumers can inform and energize established firms’ CEOs to better develop, analyze, and choose among new consumer value propositions that are distant from their firms’ current business models. First, we iden...

Firms strategically expand to countries that offer important location advantages. Yet, for digital firms, which can instantly release their technologies worldwide, it is unclear whether a focus on specific locations can still provide strategic advantages. The authors argue that digital firms reap critical demand-side location advantages for the int...

we examine the simultaneous effect of internal and external CSR on firm performance and the effect of CSR gap on the performance effects of firm's CSR investments. Additionally, we examine a mediated moderation model where firm visibility mediates the negative moderation effect of CSR gap on firm performance. The present study differs from prior st...

Innovation research from the demand side is bringing a new focus to the 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_391 literature; rather than examining only internal 10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_527 factors to study innovation, demand for innovation research incorporates customers’ demand as another factor driving firm innovation. We review recent developments from r...

We investigate the effects of monitoring by boards of directors and institutional shareholders on merger and acquisition (M&A) performance extremeness using a sample of M&A deals from 1997–2006. Both governance research and legal reforms generally have espoused a ‘raise all boats’ view of monitoring. We instead investigate whether monitoring may se...

Innovation research from the demand side is bringing a new focus to the innovation literature; rather than examining only internal technology strategy factors to study innovation, demand for innovation research incorporates customers’ demand as another factor driving firm innovation. We review recent developments from research on demand-side approa...

Trust plays a fundamental role in facilitating social exchange, yet recent global events have undermined trust in many of society’s institutions and organizations. This raises the pertinent question of how trust in organizations and institutions can be restored once it has been lost. The emerging literature on trust repair is largely focused at the...

Boards of directors must navigate between adopting standardized “best practices” for their CEOs’ pay plans, on the one hand, and customizing their CEOs’ pay to align their particular CEO’s goals with those of shareholders, on the other. We build theory proposing that the incentive effects of different CEO compensation types vary consistently over C...

Why do CEOs often choose strategies that achieve small, near-term payoffs for their firms instead of alternatives that would achieve much larger, but delayed, payoffs? And how might firms mitigate the likelihood of such economic short- termism by their CEOs? We take a step toward answering these questions by developing a dynamic, “dual-self” model...

Demand-side approaches to value creation represent a new research direction in the fields of technology innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management, examining such topics as innovation ecosystems and consumer benefits. To date, this area of research is at an early stage in the international business field. Building on a lively Profession...

Our ‘stakeholder synergy’ perspective identifies new value creation opportunities that are especially effective strategically because a single strategic action: (1) increases different types of value for two or more essential stakeholder groups, simultaneously, and (2) does not reduce the value already received by any other essential stakeholder gr...

At the pinnacles of organizations, comparative tests of unity of command and shared command are nearly impossible because only one individual sits atop most organizations. In organizations led by co-CEOs, however, such a test is possible because co-CEOs can truly share power. But do they? Our research pits the unity-of-command principle against the...

In this article we argue that the facilitation of customers’ consumption activities affords a value creation opportunity for firms and can provide an impetus for extending firm-level product market scope. We identify three ways how demand-side complementarities create value for customers, namely through economizing on prior knowledge and experience...

Recent scandals and business failures indicate that scholars and institutions should rethink the role of business in society. One path toward a potentially more stable capitalism could focus on overcoming the limitations linked to traditional business models that historically have been too focused on the single goal of shareholder profit maximizati...

We focus on implications of an agreed upon yet little considered conclusion from our 2001 article-that resource value is determined outside the business-level resource-based view. Starting with this premise, we argue that knowledge accumulation from strategy research-especially actionable knowledge about effective versus ineffective managerial judg...

We propose that CEO compensation and tenure moderate the relationship between multinational corporations' (MNCs) R&D intensities and their percentages of equity ownership in international joint ventures (IJVs). Transaction cost economics (TCE) suggests a positive relationship between MNC R&D intensity and IJV equity ownership, but this relationship...

Purpose – This study seeks to identify antecedents of trust among top managers representing partners in international joint ventures (IJVs) and to show how this trust influences IJV performance. Design/methodology/approach – The paper proposes that the national cultural distance of the foreign partner, the business similarity of partners' organiza...

We advance franchising research by explaining the important role, so far overlooked, of different franchising forms in developing low-cost competitive advantage. We analyze the most meaningful cost drivers for franchising systems: economies of scale, reduced transaction costs, economies of learning, reduced monitoring costs, standardization, and re...

Opportunities for financial reporting fraud arise because of information asymmetries—often labeled “lack of transparency”—between top managers and their diverse shareholders. We evaluate the relative contributions of information asymmetries arising from industry-level and firm-level complexities to the likelihood of top managers committing financia...

When and how can supply chain management (SCM) be a source of long‐term competitive advantage for the firm? We revisit and update arguments recently advanced by Hunt and Davis (2008) in this journal concerning which theoretical perspectives — the resource‐based view of strategy or resource‐advantage theory — may provide the most useful “lenses” for...

We explore the overlooked issue of how certain strategic-level, interindustry diversification options might increase consumer utility. Discussions of inter-industry diversification typically focus on producer synergies obtainable from economies of scope or from skill transfer across business units. Discussions of intra-industry product diversificat...

HHL was listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 1972. During the first twelve years, chairperson and managing director Sir Gordon Wu focused on property development in the local market. In the early 1980s, Wu saw great potential in the infrastructure development markets of the Asia-Pacific Region's developing economies. He left the highly profita...

The authors review the progress of three rapidly growing macro management literatures—in technology innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management—that have in common the use of a “demand-side” research perspective. Demand-side research looks downstream from the focal firm, toward product markets and consumers, to explain and predict those...

This study argues that first- and second-generation immigrant entrepreneurs’ endowments of economic, human, and social capital, together with their degrees of social identification with their ethnic community, affect their elemental strategic choice to pursue a venture strategy focused either on their ethnic enclave or the dominant market. The auth...

An effective bridge for spanning the macro—micro divide in management studies requires strong disciplinary foundations on each side of the chasm, along with the versatility to address a range of management issues. This will likely involve simultaneous multilevel, multiparty action—response research. The authors argue that judgment policy studies ar...

A temporary workgroup of trained British soldiers fractured and nearly lost members' lives when it encountered unexpected adversity in Low's Gully, Borneo. Although demography-oriented theories of group faultlines and diversity types offer useful cross-sectional baselines for predicting and explaining workgroup fracture, the authors examine the Low...

This paper contributes to the top management team (TMT) communication and social network literatures by arguing that environmental uncertainty affects the relationship between TMT network communication patterns and firm performance. This argument is tested with data from 404 TMT executives in 32 firms. The results indicate that as environmental unc...

We take a step beyond the resource-based view that resource characteristics (i.e., valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable) are the sole basis for isolating mechanisms. Instead, we apply Ricardo's principle of Comparative Advantage in a two-firm, two-product scenario to show how additional isolating mechanisms can result from economic ince...

Leader succession often occurs because a performance decline highlights the need for change within an organization. When this need is especially high, successors are likely to be drawn from different cognitive communities than those of the replaced incumbents. Successors representing different cognitive communities carry out more change immediately...

Top managers learn about innovative business practices in many ways; they observe other firms, maintain memberships in trade associations, discuss methods with other executives and outside board members, and read the business press. But how do illegal innovations diffuse among management elites? Illegality requires stealth and opaqueness; one canno...

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The author revisits the issue of possible unintended consequences from special issue proliferation, in light of Mowday's and McKinley's responses, and then comments on their suggestions concerning the driving forces that may have led to so many special issues. The author especially emphasizes how the effects of both consequences and antecedents mig...

Research on the consensus-performance relationship has typically used correlational data to examine the simple, bivariate relationship between top management team consensus and firm performance. the results of this research are equivocal. Recent theoretical work, however, suggests a number of ‘third variables’ that may provide additional insight in...

This research note suggests metric conjoint analysis (Louviere, 1988) as a tool for evaluating the decision policies employed by top managers in making strategic decisions. As an example of the technique, a descriptive field study is presented wherein the decision rules for stategy-structure-environment alignment used by the chief executives of 33...

I show how company strategies that focus on improving consumer benefits can create value by increasing consumer payments to an entire value system. This "consumer benefit experienced" viewpoint on value creation complements the value capture orientations of the firm positioning, transaction cost, and resource-based approaches. It helps to clarify o...

Are special issues becoming “too much of a good thing” in elite general management journals? Although a few special issues might serve to spur innovative research in important areas of management scholarship that otherwise are being overlooked, the author argues that profligate commissioning of special issues distorts the marketplace for ideas by c...

We contrast the conventional view that CEO stock options aid corporate governance by reducing moral hazard with the proposal that CEO stock options may subvert sound corporate governance. Views were tested in 65 matched pairs of public U.S. firms that either had or had not been discovered misreporting financial results. Our results support both the...

Fraud by top management is a topic that has stirred public interest, concern, and controversy. In this article, the authors analyze fraud by senior executives in terms of its nature, scope, antecedents, and consequences. They draw on the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, and criminology to identify societal-, industry, and firm-level ante...

Upper echelons research has emphasized decision making either by individual CEOs or by teams of top managers. The authors introduce the CEO-Adviser model as an intermediate model of strategic decision making. The CEO-Adviser model leads to new propositions that have not been explored through the individual CEO or top management team models concerni...

Following from research on firms' upper echelons, this article examines the previously unstudied issue of how technological dynamism moderates the relationship between a CEO's time in office and company inventive activities. We evaluate this relationship in the biopharmaceutical industry, a technology- and invention-intensive context. As would be e...

In this study, we examine the origins of minority venture strategies and performance. We propose that the entrepreneur is central to venture strategy and performance. Specifically, the forms of capital possessed by the entrepreneur (which provide resources to the venture) determine the strategy (conceptualized in terms of product market scope and g...

Perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU) is a foundational concept in organization studies. The PEU typologies used in organizational research were developed using private sector managers. But, do public sector managers perceive the same uncertainty sources? We asked public sector managers in Hong Kong to identify and group uncertainty sources fac...

Chief executives must allocate their scarce time for scanning efforts among relevant domains of their firms' external environment and their firms' internal circumstances. We argue that high-performing CEOs vary their relative scanning emphases on different domains according to the level of dynamism they perceive in their external environments. The...

The goal of this review of venture-creation literature is to answer why, when, and how different modes of action are used to exploit entrepreneurial opportunities.Extant research about the role of individuals in entrepreneurship is summarized and critiqued, and directions for future research are suggested. New ventures are the direct outcome of ind...

Firms are too often unsuccessful due to poor strategy implementation, even when they have developed a sound strategy. Executives searching for guidance on implementing strategy are faced with a dilemma: some researchers argue that explicitly articulating strategy to organization members leads to organizational inertia; others say that strategy must...

We first developed theory arguing that HR managers' and other middle managers' involvement during strategy making would have different effects on performance for firms pursuing different business-level strategies. Then, our empirical study tested the hypotheses in the context of HR managers and middle managers in the Hong Kong Special Administrativ...

This comparative field study evaluated the choices made by U.S., Portuguese, and Hong Kong Chinese evening MBA and graduating university business students when resolving business-related moral dilemmas. The authors developed hypotheses at the country level based on Hofstede’s ratings of each country’s national culture dimensions of power distance,...

When top executives gather information for making strategic decisions, they pay more attention to some sectors of the environment than others. The authors were curious about which sectors are important to CEOs pursuing different strategies. They also wondered whether CEOs change their patterns of information search if their firm's strategy changes....

We counter Barney's challenges and reaffirm the tautology of the elemental business- level resource-based "view" (RBV). We develop a mathematical representation of the RBV as a first step toward formalizing its statements. We then explore the implications of our assertion (and Barney's agreement) that resource value is indeed determined outside of...

As a potential theory, the elemental resource-based view (RBV) is not currently a theoretical structure. Moreover, RBV proponents have assumed stability in product markets and eschewed determining resources' values. As a perspective for strategic management, imprecise definitions hinder prescription and static approaches relegate causality to a "bl...

The dominant belief in Alexander Pope's time was that superior writing-seemingly natural, easily flowing, with just the right words in just the right places-meant that the writer had been visited by a muse.2 Pope believed differently. He argued that good writing comes from study and experience, which together build writing skills and sound creative...

This field study evaluated the convergence, divergence, crossvergence, and multi-crossvergence perspectives of value system evolution in industrializing regions. Value differences were identified among graduating business university students in the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, and the United States. Specific value dimensions in this study...

Critics have argued that organization theories which “work” are obvious to practitioners; that is, the theories simply confirm relationships that are already well understood by experienced managers. In our study, four types of respondents—Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) with business school education, CEOs without such education, graduating MBA stu...

Top management team (TMT) heterogeneity—performance research using demographic indicators has contributed to strategic management by showing that top managers do indeed “matter” to firm outcomes. We argue, however, that limitations inherent in demographics-based TMT studies preclude their use in specifying how top managers influence their firms. Th...

Top executives in Hong Kong were asked to make similarity judgments for sources of uncertainty they had previously identified as facing their firms. MDS determined the characteristics used by the executives in distinguishing among uncertainty sources. Cluster analysis then produced a taxonomy categorizing sources of environmental uncertainty based...

Top management team (TMT) heterogeneity—performance research using demographic indicators has contributed to strategic management by showing that top managers do indeed “matter” to firm outcomes. We argue, however, that limitations inherent in demographics-based TMT studies preclude their use in specifying how top managers influence their firms. Th...

This comparative field study evaluated the moral reasoning used by U.S. and Belizean business students in resolving business-related moral dilemmas. The Belizeans, citizens of a less-developed country with Western heritage and a values-based education system, revolved the dilemmas using higher stages of moral judgment than did the U.S. business stu...

Evaluates Wroe Alderson’s general theory of marketing as a possible platform for further developing Michael Porter’s ideas on strategic management. Alderson’s “transvection” and Porter’s “value system” are compared, and the uses of these concepts by their authors in developing approaches to achieving sustainable competitive advantage are contrasted...

This study tests competing theories of how the relationship between rationality in strategic decision processes and firm performance may be moderated by environmental dynamism. Results, based on a survey of 101 manufacturing firms, indicate a positive rationality-performance relationship for firms facing dynamic environments, but no relationship be...

Pressures for early consensus during group decision processes often lead to poor choices. However, consensus as an outcome of group decision processes is often desirable for implementing choices. We propose and test hypotheses that structured decision making techniques designed to enhance the expression of cognitive conflict will, paradoxically, (1...

Three organizational structures for business enterprises are examined for their ability to enhance profitability and competitiveness. The structures, namely: the modular, virtual, and barrier-free, are studied using value chain analysis. Results show that the three structures complement each other and enable executives to achieve seemingly unattain...

This comparative field study evaluated the moral reasoning used by U.S. and Belizean business students in resolving business-related moral dilemmas. The Belizeans, citizens of a less-developed country with Western heritage, resolved the dilemmas using higher stages of moral judgment than did the U.S. business students.

This study tests competing theories of how the relationship between rationality in strategic decision processes and firm performance may be moderated by environmental dynamism. Results, based on a survey of 101 manufacturing firms, indicate a positive rationality-performance relationship for firms facing dynamic environments, but no relationship be...

Contingency theory suggests that a match among business-level strategy, organizational structure, and the competitive environment is necessary for high performance. This research asks whether manufacturing firm chief executives judge as “good” those strategy-structure-environment matches recommended by contingency theory. Knowledge of executive jud...

Several generally untested assumptions about strategic judgment and choice exist in strategic management theories. Direct examination of these assumptions is necessary for sound theory building, and for sound prescription based on current theory. This paper presents techniques for eliciting and analyzing the strategic judgments of strategy makers,...

Theorists in the field of industrial organization economics are beginning to develop formal models that are in many ways consistent with the assumptions and concepts of Alderson’s general theory of marketing. This article evaluates Alderson’s concepts of market heterogeneity, transactions, organized behavior systems, and sorting functions as they m...

Theorists in the field of industrial organization economics are beginning to develop formal models that are in many ways consistent with the assumptions and concepts of Alderson's general theory of marketing. This article evaluates Alderson's concepts of market heterogeneity, transactions, organized behavior systems, and sorting functions as they m...

This study draws on multivariate configuration theory in exploring relationships among CEO configuration preferences, the realized firm configural outcome, and firm performance. Findings indicate that CEO use of multivariate preference decision rules consistent with normative configuration theory is positively associated with realized configural fi...

This study examined expectations of cognitive conflict, social conflict, decision confidence, and postdecision group affect in the dialectical inquiry, devil's advocacy, and consensus decision-making techniques. Expectations show some congruence with the affective, but not objective, outcomes found in prior empirical studies. Expectations were foun...