Timo Vuori

Aalto University · Department of Industrial Engineering and Management

Forthcoming in Administrative Science Quarterly 2015:We conducted a qualitative study of Nokia to understand its rapid downfall over the 2005–2010 period from its position as a world-dominant and innovative technology organization. We found that top and middle managers’ shared emotions during the smartphone innovation process caused cycles of behav...

Drawing on dual-systems theory, we propose a new typology for analyzing shared cognition in work groups and teams that differentiates reflective (i.e. C-system) mental models formed through reasoning and deliberation from reflexive (i.e. X-system) representations that are more automatic, intuitive, and affective in nature. Our analysis demonstrates...

Bingham and Eisenhardt (2011) highlight the positive role of heuristics in the strategy context. They discuss four mechanisms through which heuristics have positive effects for strategy. The first mechanism – using a heuristic cue as a proxy for complex, correlated information– builds directly on Gigerenzer's research on positive heuristics. The se...

Research Summary: We conducted a real‐time field study of a post‐acquisition integration process. We identified two practices that contributed to integration failure. First, the practice of masking negative emotions caused members of both firms to perceive that the partner firm's members were satisfied with the integration process, even though they...

Strategy execution is a challenging organizational process that intertwines structural, economic, and social processes. Quy Huy’s work has increased our understanding of the social dynamics in this context. In particular, his work has described how managers in various different roles perceive organizational events differently, feel different emotio...

We conducted a qualitative study of Nokia to understand its rapid downfall over the 2005–2010 period from its position as a world-dominant and innovative technology organization. We found that top and middle managers’ shared emotions during the smartphone innovation process caused cycles of behaviors that harmed both the process and its outcome. To...

Latest research poses that our bodies influence our minds more than has traditionally been acknowledged. We were curious to find out how senior managers use their bodies in order to improve their performance at work. To find out, we interviewed 28 people from various businesses and defined five categories that characterize the physical activities m...

We studied the evolution of a top performing European bank during 2000-2011 to understand how organizations maintain strategic fit between the elements of their activity system while growing and changing radically. Though a detailed analysis of public data and private interviews, we identity that “shaping” core-elements is an essential part of the...

We conducted 50 interviews with informants in senior strategic positions to understand how managers form beliefs about organizational capabilities and how such beliefs influence strategy making. We identified four types of capability beliefs: (1) Retrospective narrative-based beliefs, (2) prospective goal-based beliefs, (3) observation-based compos...

Puzzled by the diversity of the learning paths followed by firms when trying to transfer the lessons learned from their prior acquisitions to the new ones, we studied learning processes in the five serial acquirers. We show that in addition to the existence of a sufficient pool of diverse acquisition experiences, the effectiveness of learning is mo...

We studied the rapid downfall of a once large and successful technology organization to understand processes leading to temporal myopia—excessive focus on short term innovation at the expense of developing long term innovation. Through our inductive analysis of 72 interviews and other data, we find that misaligned collective fears among top and mid...

We investigate the interplay between emotion, identity and cognition in the context of a planned organizational change. Based on an analysis of video data, we identify a specific form of influence that we call ‘emotional sensegiving’—communication that uses emotions with the goal of influencing the sensemaking of others toward a preferred def...

This paper investigates extreme biases in group sensemaking through a longitudinal field study in a martial arts community. It is observed that an incremental, self-reinforcing process can cause a group's mental model to drift away from reality. This causes significant problems when the group members interact with people who do not share the biased...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the ways workers can actively make their own work experiences more meaningful. Design/methodology/approach The data consist of 29 interviews with people from three professions. The authors analyzed the interviews by coding the statements into first‐ and second‐order categories, and...

Organizations have two main types of reasons for adopting compensation systems: internal, effectiveness-related reasons and external, legitimacy-related reasons. This study examines if external motives decouple compensation practices from human resource (HR) management and how decoupling is related to internal and external outcomes for organization...

Purpose This paper aims to increase understanding of how emotional arousal could be used to enhance the adoption of new beliefs during a sensegiving episode. Design/methodology/approach Case study about the sensegiving tactics of a successful corporate coach and the reactions of 102 sense‐receivers. Data consist of 39 interviews, 95 hours of obser...

Collective, coordinated action allows a group to achieve results that are beyond the sum of individual efforts. How do executives help people to take coordinated actions? How do they influence the sense‐making of the people to ensure that the group is able to act as a collective? To answer these questions, I carried out an in‐depth study of a CIO's...

Cognitive diversity and the related notion of shared cognition are two of the most influential concepts in research on group processes and performance. In this article, we develop a more nuanced view of cognitive diversity/sharedness that distinguishes between cognitions held at implicit and explicit levels. The central argument is that because ind...

It has been argued that scholars have forgotten what really matters in the society, that management research is faddish, and that we do not know how our research influences industry practice. To fill in this gap, we investigate the co‐evolution of the US car industry and academic writings about the industry. We find that rather than reacting to the...

It is well established that increasing the stability of demands, the clarity of work, and autonomy in individual jobs enhances motivation and well-being. However, jobs are often interconnected which makes it difficult to change one single job, without negatively influencing other jobs. Existing research has paid only scant attention to these kinds...

Managerial belief systems play a central role in organizational adaptation to environmental change. In order to understand, how belief systems change, we carried out two in-depth cognitive mapping studies in an organization that faced turbulence in its business environment. In our first study, we found several episodes that involved the collapse of...