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Move fast and break things! innovation-intensive strategy, organizational permissiveness, and corporate wrongdoing
... By integrating multiple stakeholders into governance processes, this approach fosters long-term stability, ensuring that tourism policies align with economic, cultural, and environmental priorities rather than being driven by short-term gains (Khater et al., 2024). However, despite its benefits, shared governance can sometimes introduce administrative inefficiencies, requiring a balance between inclusivity and streamlined decision-making (Grieser et al., 2023). ...
... This policy exemplifies how governance structures enhance tourism quality by institutionalizing safety standards. However, while regulatory frameworks improve organization, excessive regulation may restrict flexibility, potentially discouraging community-driven innovation (Grieser et al., 2023). By fostering multi-stakeholder collaboration, shared governance ensures that tourism policies reflect diverse interests and sustainability goals. ...
Shared governance is vital for managing community-oriented tourism destinations and promoting stakeholder empowerment through collaboration, participatory decision-making, and sustainable development. However, its practical implementation is complex due to varying levels of engagement and governance challenges. This study examines the collaborative dynamics of shared governance in community-oriented tourism, focusing on factors that influence stakeholder engagement, challenges in implementation, and the impacts on sustainability and community empowerment. Conducted in Ormoc City, Philippines, the qualitative research involved in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 13 stakeholders, including representatives from the local government, tourism associations, businesses, and community groups. The thematic analysis highlighted that effective, shared governance relies on multistakeholder engagement, strong public-private partnerships, trust, accountability, and clear roles. Challenges include conflicting priorities, resource constraints, power imbalances, and bureaucratic barriers. Despite these obstacles, shared governance fosters tourism sustainability by enhancing organizational efficiency, promoting inclusive decision-making, creating livelihood opportunities, and encouraging community-led conservation. Policymakers should strengthen stakeholder coordination, develop equitable resource distribution, and address systemic challenges to improve effectiveness. These insights are valuable for local governments and tourism leaders aiming for sustainable tourism and community empowerment.
... Zhao, 2023 0 Zhang et al., 2023), regulatory and organizational rule-breaking in entrepreneurship (e.g. Grieser et al., 2023;Lucas et al., 2023) and entrepreneurial theories on morality and ethics (e.g. Pollack and Bosse, 2014;Theoharakis et al., 2021;Wood et al., 2022). ...
... Likewise, entrepreneurs are often characterized as being "rogue" (McBride et al., 2023) and are sometimes branded as rule-breakers (e.g. Grieser et al., 2023;Lucas et al., 2023). Therefore, those with strong intentions to launch new ventures are more likely to leverage their morally relativistic cognitions to break rules as they are cognitively more prone to embrace notions of relativism and accept rule-breaking actions. ...
Purpose
Drawing on covariance attribution theory, this study investigates how and when cross-cultural experience develops the entrepreneurial aptitude for rule-breaking. The authors sought to replicate findings in general psychology that morally relativistic thinking mediates these relationships. Further, extant ideas surrounding rebel-like archetypes of successful entrepreneurs were tested: that is, the more entrepreneurial a person considers themselves to be, the more likely they adopt such modes of thinking.
Design/methodology/approach
A second-stage moderated mediation model is applied using a novel between-subjects experimental priming design. Participants were recruited to reflect a generalizable sample of prospective entrepreneurs from the United States. Participants engaged in a randomly assigned priming activity to re-active their prior cultural immersion experiences. They then completed a context-adjusted experimental judgment task to assess rule-breaking.
Findings
Results show that reflection on prior cross-cultural experience is positively related to proximal scores in morally relativistic cognition. Moderating effects of entrepreneurial intention provide robust evidence that those high in entrepreneurial intention are more likely to rule-break when morally relativistic thinking is high, but that those low in entrepreneurial intention are not.
Originality/value
A growing research stream suggests cross-cultural experience can uniquely instill a range of entrepreneurial aptitudes. While psychology research has found evidence for “dark side” implications of cross-cultural experience, the authors posit that entrepreneurship scholars in this domain have been reluctant to tackle this due to the ethical grey areas between breaking rules constructively and breaking rules in more nefarious ways. This study provides evidence that morally relativistic cognition is more likely to drive people who consider themselves highly entrepreneurial to engage in rule-breaking tendencies.
... The KPSS dataset provides insights into the relationship between these events and stock market reactions, including data on abnormal returns, trading volumes, and other relevant market variables. The availability of the KPSS dataset has facilitated numerous studies in the fields of finance and innovation (Contreras and Marcet, 2021;Grieser et al., 2023). Researchers have utilized this dataset to explore various aspects, including the market's response to patent grants, the role of patents in mergers and acquisitions, the value of patent portfolios, and the relationship between patent quality and firm performance. ...
Drawing on the appropriability-appropriation framework and signaling theory, we hypothesize that post-IPO firms with higher patent quality use takeover defenses as levers to signal a willingness to allow appropriation through acquisitions. In a sample of 635 post-IPO firms with 56,605 patent approvals (1998-2014), if post-IPO firms secure approval for a high pedigree patent (cutting edge technology) or obtain a longer grant lag (tenacity), the stock market reaction is positive (negative) when anti-takeover defenses are lowered (raised) from the previous year. The findings carry implications for the appropriability-appropriation strategies of post-IPO firms and the merit of reducing takeover defenses for these firms.
... This climate would enable the organization to respond effectively to the dynamic strategic context and make timely strategic decisions. In contrast, an organization operating in a stable and regulated industry may focus on a strategic climate emphasizing efficiency, consistency, and compliance with industry standards (Grieser et al., 2023). ...
This thesis explores the role of consensing, a process of cognitive consensus-building through the mechanisms of sensing and synthesizing, in digital transformation strategy formulation within the Swedish public sector. It introduces the novel concepts of consensus surplus (a shared understanding that exceeds the requirements for action), deficit (insufficient shared understanding to support strategy implementation), and debt (the accumulation of unresolved issues due to a lack of consensus-building). The study argues that consensing plays a critical role in aligning strategic intent and shared understanding among stakeholders, leading to these varied outcomes. This process is enabled by the organizational infrastructure of dialogue, which encompasses generative, diagnostic, and integrative dialogue types that facilitate the development of shared understanding.
Drawing upon a critical realist stance and an abductive and retroductive research approach, this study offers a nuanced perspective on the cognitive dynamics of consensing based on an in-depth analysis of qualitative data from interviews, surveys, and document analysis. It challenges prevailing notions and encourages a more collaborative approach to strategy formulation. The thesis conceptualizes consensing as a mechanism for aligning strategic intent with shared understanding, a novel approach in the formulation of digital transformation strategies.
The thesis contributes to digital strategizing literature by highlighting the role of consensing in bridging the gap between intended and realized strategies. It proposes actionable strategies for fostering effective dialogue and mitigating status quo bias, thereby facilitating more dynamic and inclusive strategy formulation processes. The research also outlines potential avenues for future inquiry, such as exploring the impact of organizational culture on consensing processes and examining the role of digital platforms in facilitating consensus-building.
By presenting consensing as a vital tool for organizations navigating digital transformation, this research enriches the discourse in digital strategizing and organizational practice. It advocates for a deeper understanding and application of consensing to enhance the efficacy of strategy formulation in the public sector, with implications for both theory and practice.
Guided by an institutionally embedded resource-based view, this paper addresses two under-researched questions. First, what effects do flexible strategies for labor-cost retrenchment (e.g., wage-based and functional flexibility) have on market value as compared with rigid strategies (such as pure downsizing)? Second, what effects do flexible strategies have, compared to rigid strategies, when firm have a high level of knowledge assets? We answer these questions by focusing on firms in the research context of a stakeholder-capitalism environment. The dearth of studies on flexible strategies is surprising when one considers that firms in many advanced economies deploy them widely to reduce labor costs during times of crisis. We address this research gap with a novel data set of 220 retrenchment announcements by Japanese firms. We find that announcing the adoption of flexible strategies is significantly and positively associated with a greater likelihood of the firm’s market value increasing. Further, flexible strategies are evaluated more positively if they protect knowledge assets. We attribute these effects to flexible strategies being perceived not only as a capability but also as a signal of legitimacy – that is, as an effort to maintain capabilities in an environment characterized by long-term in-house employment and to align with the norms of a broader institutional landscape.
Digital looping effects between algorithmic technologies and users are promoted as reshaping various industries by optimizing operations, improving predictions and creating new market opportunities. Insurers are exploring these promises by collecting customer-generated data and testing its use in risk calculations and behavioural interventions. However, these novel insurance technologies have been criticized for enabling totalizing forms of surveillance, control and discrimination, potentially leading to the foreclosure of future actions. This study tests the argument that emerging insurance technologies ‘narrow the future’ by analysing Finnish life insurers’ efforts to build a digital feedback loop into their behavioural policies. It centralizes breakages in these new data practices as the locus of analysis, showing how the feedback loop dissolves at various points or is never established due to shortcomings in the new technologies, regulatory barriers and aspects inherent to insurance logic itself, thereby undermining the policies’ aims; yet, the insurers’ experimentations cannot be simply framed as failures because they produce knowledge that can inform future practices. The present study illustrates the importance of examining how versions of dominant technological visions are reworked in local, field-specific practices. It shows that instead of producing ‘guaranteed outcomes’, these novel insurance operations raise new questions and uncertainties that can have harmful effects beyond the totalizing scenarios. Focusing on breakages challenges techno-deterministic perspectives, keeping the future open while enabling a more precise critique of the harms associated with these visions and their often-imperfect implementation.
We examine the relationship between corporate misconduct and pharmaceutical firm innovation and performance. Pharmaceutical firms obtain significantly fewer new product approvals by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) following corporate regulatory violations, lawsuits, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulatory enforcement actions. We also examine the potential reasons why innovative capacity is reduced for culpable firms. Following instances of misconduct, pharmaceutical firms are 50 percent less likely to engage in business expansions, engage in significantly fewer new strategic alliances and partnerships, and are awarded fewer
government R&D grants. We attribute these results to the reputational loss associated with public knowledge of corporate misconduct. In support of this hypothesis, we find pharmaceutical firms experience negative cumulative abnormal stock returns (CARs) surrounding SEC enforcement announcements, and misconduct incidents increase the probability of analyst concerns. Overall, our results are consistent with the reputational loss associated with corporate misconduct being an important factor in future reductions in pharmaceutical firm innovative capacity.
Technology is experiencing a growing presence in counseling and mental health, attracting attention from counselors, researchers, and the general public. This growth has the potential to change counseling practice, counselor education, and how users access mental health services. In this article we provide definitions of and distinctions between three common technologies that are used in the counseling field—Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality. We also provide examples of the use of each technology, ethical implications, research support, and recommendations for future research.
In this paper we explore how the institutional environment in which technologies are embedded serves to select certain options and marginalize others. To do this, we trace the activities occurring among and between sponsors and the legitimacy assemblage – that is, the distributed set of actors, materials and methodologies that collectively confer legitimacy to a technology. Specifically, we employ an analytic narrative of the evolution of chronic kidney disease (CKD) treatment modalities to demonstrate how dialysis has become an accepted form of treatment while an effective preventative and complementary treatment, dietary protein restriction (DPR), has been marginalized. Our account highlights the emergence of a legitimacy assemblage that establishes the boundaries of what constitute an appropriate technology, the bandwagon process by which technologies accrue legitimacy, and how actors subsequently engage in legitimacy capture that can contribute to technology stagnation in a domain. In highlighting these legitimacy dynamics, we provide new insights to the literature on technology selection, develop an expanded elaboration of technology legitimacy, as well as offer insights for the medical practice and healthcare policy domains.
Studies analyzing organizational routines in post-merger integration (PMI) studies at the micro level are almost nonexistent. To fill this research gap, the author performs a longitudinal exploratory case study of an admissions routine of an art college undergoing a merger with a larger university, drawing on advances in routine dynamics literature. The study enhances understanding of PMI challenges by depicting routines’ internal dynamics, their incompatibility, and the role of broader context in shaping their performances post-merger. The findings trace resistance to PMI to routine incompatibility caused by the simultaneous presence of multiple understandings (ostensive aspects) for integration, generated by the quest for efficiency-based synergies and continuity within the university post-merger, and for preservation, inherited from the pre-merger era and the routine embeddedness within the local context. The findings shed new light on the post-merger integration–preservation dilemma by illustrating how the interplay of routine participants’ agency and routine embeddedness within the organization and broader societal context constrains PMI, in spite of an intended full consolidation plan, as routine participants enact the routine in the emerging context.
Countries around the world have suffered widespread disruption from the COVID‐19 pandemic. Tens of millions have been infected and economies have suffered severe downturns. Yet the early projections of millions of fatalities in the pandemic’s first months have proved overblown as firms and governments acted swiftly and individuals generally cooperated by altering their behaviors (Ioannidis, 2020). In the developing and newly developed economies of Asia, many firms have responded promptly to the pandemic with temporal strategies in the struggle against COVID‐19 (Baker and Koons, 2020; Shi and Prescott, 2012).
In this paper, I draw on the institutional entrepreneurship and sociotechnical imaginaries literature to develop a prospective and actor-centric approach to understanding technological transitions. Empirically, I examine the initiatives that newcomers and incumbents engaged in between 1990 and 2005 to transition the socio-technical regime associated with recorded music. My account reveals the limited ability of these actors to effectively migrate the regime despite initiating several efforts to do so – a pattern of behavior I term the fragility of institutional entrepreneurship. I identify underlying factors for why this is the case and suggest that these can contribute to a regime remaining in a state of flux for an extended period of time. I also demonstrate the emergence of provisional regimes or temporary settlements between actors that either gain traction or are themselves transformed over time. In specifying the micro-processes that unfold as part of such transitions, I provide a complementary perspective to the current theorizing around socio-technical regime migration, and contribute fresh insights to the institutional entrepreneurship and sociotechnical imaginaries literature.
Research on R&D performance measures applied in firms is still scarce. Based on the established “R&D laboratory as a system” thinking, systematically derive and identify R&D department level key performance measures. Through a mixed‐method approach, grounded in (1) literature and (2) text analysis, 154 R&D performance measures were developed. Amongst those, an (3) online expert survey, as well as (4) three independent focus group workshops with >40 industry experts from more than ten industries identified and validated ten key R&D performance measures. All industry experts involved are members of an innovation network, additionally accounting for innovation network effects. In contrast to earlier research, some of the measures like degree of anticipation of internal customer needs were perceived both by the survey respondents and the focus groups as key measures, indicating that behavioral measures should not be excluded per se. However, the importance of external validity of R&D performance or indicators to measure performance in relation to activities outside the R&D department were not confirmed. Hence, we partly confirm the relevance of the original “R&D Lab” measures, contributing a more granular level, thereby drawing implications for future research and practice.
Scholars have found consistent evidence that directors who served on boards of firms accused of misconduct face reputational penalties in the director labor market. While this is often interpreted in terms of an ex post settling-up process that penalizes directors for failing in their role as monitors of management, the fundamentally social basis of the director labor markets suggests that the ex post settling-up process may also incorporate a resource-provisioning role for directors as conferrers of legitimacy. We analyze how evolving social norms that aim to redress the longstanding underrepresentation of female and ethnic minority directors may lessen—for these sought-after directors—the penalties typically imposed by the labor market in the aftermath of corporate misconduct. Using a proprietary dataset on financial misconduct and directors’ demographic characteristics, we find strong support for our hypotheses regarding a possible “reputational immunity” effect. We also provide supplementary analyses demonstrating the specific mechanisms underlying our predictions, and establishing the robustness of our results to a variety of alternative explanations. We discuss the implications of our theoretical perspective and empirical findings for future research on corporate governance, corporate misconduct, and the possible duality of minority status as it relates to discriminatory outcomes in modern labor markets.
Despite the popularity of the term “disruptive innovation”, its applications have taken on different meanings. Clayton Christensen is a prominent author in the field but his approach has not been applied in a consistent manner. To elucidate the use of the term in business studies, this paper employs a bibliometric approach to provide a descriptive analysis of researchers and their relevant works in the network formed by the related literature, in addition to distinguishing and grouping associated authors. The results suggest a dissimilarity of objectives between two subgroups using the term “disruptive innovation”, and the discussion about Clayton Christensen’s specific meaning of the term seems to make sense to only one of them.
The concept of disruptive innovation has gained considerable currency among practitioners despite widespread misunderstanding of its core principles. Similarly, foundational research on disruption has elicited frequent citation and vibrant debate in academic circles, but subsequent empirical research has rarely engaged with its key theoretical arguments. This inconsistent reception warrants a thoughtful evaluation of research on disruptive innovation within management and strategy. We trace the theory's intellectual history, noting how its core principles have been clarified by anomaly‐seeking research. We also trace the theory's evolution from a technology‐change framework—essentially descriptive and relatively limited in scope—to a more broadly explanatory causal theory of innovation and competitive response. This assessment reveals that our understanding of the phenomenon of disruption has changed as the theory has developed. To reinvigorate academic interest in disruptive innovation, we propose several underexplored topics—response strategies, performance trajectories, and innovation metrics—to guide future research. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Reputation is not always a "good thing". Despite the established benefits of a good reputation, recent research has elucidated the burdens and liabilities it can bring about, particularly following a crisis or stakeholder disappointment. However, managers spend much of their time avoiding such extreme events rather than responding to them, and we know very little about how reputation influences managers' everyday decisions. We address this issue by offering a theoretical framework to explain how reputation shapes managers' perceptions of their discretion as they attempt to navigate stakeholder expectations. In doing so, we clarify and elaborate two forms of reputation-those rooted in a firm's behaviors and those rooted in its outcomes-as well as two forms of discretion-managers' perceived latitude of actions and objectives, thereby synthesizing and extending recent work in both the reputation and discretion literatures. The intersection of social evaluations and managerial decisions remains an exciting and fruitful avenue of research, and we aim to illustrate how the insights from the meticulous efforts of scholars in both fields would benefit from further cross-pollination.
Wrongdoing, and specifically that which is committed by top executives, has attracted scholars for decades for a number of reasons. Among them, the consequences of wrongdoing are widespread for organizations and the people in and around them. Due to the vast array of consequences, there continues to be new questions and additional scholarly attempts to uncover why it occurs. In this review, we build upon previous efforts to synthesize the body of literature regarding the antecedents of CEO wrongdoing utilizing a framework that sheds light on the status of the literature and where unanswered questions remain. We apply the Fraud Triangle, a framework drawn from the accounting literature, to derive conclusions about what we know about the pressures faced by CEOs, the opportunities afforded to CEOs to commit wrongdoing, and contributing factors to a CEO’s ability to rationalize misbehavior. We organize the literature on these conceptual antecedents of CEO wrongdoing around internal (e.g., compensation structure and organizational culture) and external (e.g., shareholder pressure and social aspirations) forces. In doing so, we integrate findings from a variety of disciplines (i.e., accounting, finance, and sociology) but remain focused on management scholarship since the last review of organizational wrongdoing to provide an updated state of the literature. This review offers a clear framework and a common language; it highlights gaps in the literature and specific directions for future research with the ultimate goal of understanding why CEOs engage in wrongdoing.
See virtual issue: Disruptive Innovation
This analysis provides novel insights into the theoretical and practical dichotomy between “disruptive” and “radical” innovation. Using a natural language processing approach, the article takes stock of extant disruption research and analyzes the full-text corpus of 1,078 journal articles published on disruption between 1975 and 2016. This allows yields a topic map composed of 84 distinct topics that present the overall topic structure of this dynamic field. Topic network analyses uncover the existence of two increasingly disconnected sub networks centered around disruptive innovation at the macro level and radical innovation at the micro level. This disconnect is consequential, as both perspectives appear to be highly interdependent, and conceptually constitute two sides of the same coin. To counteract the threat of growing fragmentation and reconnect these sub networks, three research priorities are proposed, firmly grounded in a systematic literature analysis: 1) The need to consolidate peripheral and de-coupled topics, 2) The necessity to reconcile competing terminologies and refocus the theoretical core, and 3) The imperative to strengthen the generalizable empirical evidence base. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Objectives:
To analyse how often innovations in healthcare are evaluated regarding output, especially in radiotherapy. Output was defined as either survival, toxicity, safety, service, efficiency or costeffectiveness.
Methods:
A systematic literature review was conducted, using three search strategies: 1) innovations in general healthcare; 2) radiotherapy-specific innovations, i.e. organisational innovations and general implementation of innovations; 3) innovations per tumour group/radiotherapy technique. Scientific levels were classified according to the system used in European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) guidelines. Finally, we calculated the percentage of implemented innovations in Dutch radiotherapy centres for which we found evidence regarding output in the literature review.
Results:
Only 94/1072 unique articles matched the inclusion criteria. Significant results on patient outcome, service or safety were reported in 65% of papers, which rose to 76% if confined to radiotherapy reviews. A significant technological improvement was identified in 26%, cost-effectiveness in 10% and costs/efficiency in 36% of the papers. The scientific level of organisational innovations was lower than of clinical papers. Dutch radiotherapy treatment innovations were adequately evaluated on outcome data before implementation in clinical routine in a minimum of 64-92% of cases.
Conclusions:
Only few studies report on output when considering innovations in general, but radiotherapy reviews give a reasonably good insight into innovation output effects, with a higher level of evidence. In Dutch radiotherapy centres only small improvements are possible regarding evaluation of treatment innovations before implementation. Advances in Knowledge: This study is the first of its kind measuring how innovations are evaluated in scientific literature, before implementation in clinical practice.
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. Together, organizational attention structures and historical factors generated various types of shared fear among top and middle managers. Top managers were afraid of external competitors and shareholders, while middle managers were mainly afraid of internal groups, including superiors and peers. Top managers’ externally focused fear led them to exert pressure on middle managers without fully revealing the severity of the external threats and to interpret middle managers’ communications in biased ways. Middle managers’ internally focused fear reduced their tendency to share negative information with top managers, leading top managers to develop an overly optimistic perception of their organization’s technological capabilities and neglect long-term investments in developing innovation. Our study contributes to the attention-based view of the firm by describing how distributed attention structures influence shared emotions and how such shared emotions can hinder the subsequent integration of attention, influencing innovation processes and outcomes and resulting in temporal myopia—a focus on short-term product innovation at the expense of long-term innovation development.
In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study proposed and tested a multiple-influences causal model of ethical decision-making behavior. Social learning, stage of cognitive moral development (CMD), and locus of control (LC) were hypothesized to influence ethical decision making. The mediating influence of outcome expectancies was also hypothesized. Social learning conditions (vicarious reward, vicarious punishment, and control) were manipulated with an in-basket exercise. Path analysis revealed that ethical decision making was influenced directly by CMD. LC influenced ethical decision making directly and indirectly through outcome expectancies. Vicarious reward influenced ethical decision making indirectly through outcome expectancies. No support was found for the direct effects of vicarious reward or punishment. Future research directions and theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Performance feedback research addresses how firms respond to performance that diverges from their aspirations. Whereas the majority of research in this vein involves financial performance, we apply this framework to product quality performance, arguing that when performance diverges either below or above aspirations, firms will pursue a slower subsequent product introduction rate, either to identify the cause of the underperformance or to incorporate the successful product characteristics in the case of overperformance. We also investigate whether our predictions hold when two boundary conditions are applied. Since product quality aspirations are derived from the “reputations for quality” of the firm and its peers, we argue that the stability of these reputations will amplify the delaying effects of below- and above-aspiration performance. Consistent with research on firm responses to financial performance, we also predict that greater sales revenues relative to sales aspirations will attenuate the delaying effects of aspiration-relative performance divergence. Our analysis of 1,332 video games released by 48 publishers from 2006 to 2009 is largely consistent with these predictions.
William H. Starbuck is one of the most creative, productive, and wide-ranging writers in management and organization studies. His work spans three decades and encompasses a whole variety of issues, yet it has never been collected together in one place. This book does just that - bringing together his most seminal writings, prefaced by a personal reflection on some of the themes and conclusions of that emerge from this, and the context in which they were written. What emerges from this is a picture of organizations and their strategies that emphasizes the characteristics of real-life human beings: their idiosyncratic preferences, their distrust for each other, their struggele for dominance, their personal interests which don't always coincide with the interests of the organization, and the internal politicking and contests between interest groups that take place in organizations. Some chapters review research literature, some report empirical findings, some propose conceptual reformulations, and some offer advice to managers. This book will be a unique guide to the work of an influential thinker in management and organization studies, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of management, strategy, and organization studies.
This collection is the first comprehensive selection of readings focusing on corporate bankruptcy. Its main purpose is to explore the nature and efficiency of corporate reorganisation using interdisciplinary approaches drawn from law, economics, business, and finance. Substantive areas covered include the role of credit, creditors' implicit bargains, non-bargaining features of bankruptcy, workouts of agreements, alternatives to bankruptcy, and proceedings in countries other than the United States, including the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan.
Research Summary
A firm’s stakeholder orientation toward its employees is argued to be beneficial for firm outcomes. However, this orientation may also have disparate impacts on particular behaviors and outcomes, such as local vs. distant search, which impose contradictory firm requirements. We find that while a strong firm‐employee relationship leads to increasingly higher levels of local search (exploitation), it also leads to increasingly lower levels of distant search (exploration). In additional supplementary analyses, we find similar disparate effects on the productivity of innovation and its market value, as well as a moderating effect of the firm’s relationship with other stakeholders which exacerbates both the positive and negative impacts of firm‐employee relationships. We discuss the implications of these findings for both the innovation and the instrumental stakeholder literatures.
Managerial Summary
Motivating employees towards generating new ideas and innovations is an important challenge for most firms. Establishing the firm as a trustful and good partner for employees may engender in them the commitment and willingness to invest in such activities. However, questions remain as to how “well” the firm should “treat” its employees, and the potential adverse consequences from over‐investing in such relationships. This paper examines these important practical questions and finds that establishing strong relationships with employees can be simultaneously beneficial and harmful for the firm depending on the type of new ideas it seeks. We find that such strong relationships help with motivating employees to build on and perfect existing knowledge, but is harmful with respect to bringing in new and unfamiliar knowledge.
Though organizations are increasingly active participants in the political realm, little research has investigated how an organization’s heightened focus on political ideology impacts employees. We address this gap by exploring how an individual’s political ideological misfit with an organization’s prevailing ideology impacts departure. By tracking the movements of over 40,000 investment professionals in the U.S. private equity industry over 10 years, we investigate the consequences of the ideological misfit that arises when individuals’ political ideologies diverge substantially from the prevailing ideology of their firms. We hypothesize that ideological misfit increases the likelihood of departure, though the effects vary with liberal or conservative ideological orientation. Polynomial regression analyses reveal that the fit relationship between individual and organizational political ideology deviates from the idealized congruence relationship that underlies prevailing theory. Specifically, we find that departure is more likely for employees experiencing conservative misfit (a personal ideology more conservative than the firm’s) versus liberal misfit (a personal ideology more liberal than the firm’s). Conservatives are more likely to depart than liberals regardless of fit, and departing misfits tend to join new organizations that are closer to their own ideology.
We propose a new measure of the economic importance of each innovation. Our measure uses newly collected data on patents issued to U.S. firms in the 1926 to 2010 period, combined with the stock market response to news about patents. Our patent-level estimates of private economic value are positively related to the scientific value of these patents, as measured by the number of citations the patent receives in the future. Our new measure is associated with substantial growth, reallocation, and creative destruction, consistent with the predictions of Schumpeterian growth models. Aggregating our measure suggests that technological innovation accounts for significant medium-run fluctuations in aggregate economic growth and TFP. Our measure contains additional information relative to citation-weighted patent counts; the relation between our measure and firm growth is considerably stronger. Importantly, the degree of creative destruction that is associated with our measure is higher than previous estimates, confirming that it is a useful proxy for the private valuation of patents. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Entrepreneurship can be seen as an agent of innovation and with regard to the concept of responsible innovation society should be its principal. But how should such principal-agent relationships be designed? This perspective wants to draw attention to this crucial question for the implementation of responsible innovation.
Leveraging insights gained through a burgeoning research literature over the past 28 years, this paper presents a significant revision of the model of creativity and innovation in organizations published in Research in Organizational Behavior in 1988. This update focuses primarily on the individual-level psychological processes implicated in creativity that have been illuminated by recent research, and highlights organizational work environment influences on those processes. We revisit basic assumptions underlying the 1988 model, modify certain components and causal connections, and introduce four new constructs into the model: (1) a sense of progress in creative idea development; (2) the meaningfulness of the work to those carrying it out; (3) affect; and (4) synergistic extrinsic motivation. Throughout, we propose ways in which the components underlying individual and team creativity can both influence and be influenced by organizational factors crucial to innovation.
Sustainability oriented innovation continues to garner increasing attention as the answer to how firms may improve environmental and/or social performance while simultaneously finding competitive advantage. Radically innovating new products and services to replace harmful market incumbents is central to this thesis, yet studies to date have found it to be a highly expensive process with high degrees of uncertainty and risk. Extant research however has largely neglected to examine the details of the actual product innovation process itself and has under appreciated the influence of corporate strategic context. Our paper addresses this gap in the literature through an in-depth case study of a sustainability oriented innovation process for a radical new product within a multinational life sciences company, DSM. Our findings identify five critical organizational practices through which strategic direction has enabled the innovation process: technology super-scouting throughout the value chain, search heuristics that favor radical sustainability solutions, integration of sustainability performance metrics in product development, championing the value chain to build demand for radical sustainability oriented product innovation, and harnessing the benefits of open innovation.
We develop a contingency view of process management's influence on both technological innovation and organizational adaptation. We argue that while process management activities are beneficial for organizations in stable contexts, they are fundamentally inconsistent with all but incremental innovation and change. But dynamic capabilities are rooted in both exploitative and exploratory activities. We argue that process management activities must be buffered from exploratory activities and that ambidextrous organizational forms provide the complex contexts for these inconsistent activities to coexist.
This analysis considers the impact of the top managers in an organization on the organization's outcomes, specifically strategic choices and performance levels. The focus is not on the chief executive alone, but rather on the entire top management team. Using a macro view, these organizational outcomes are perceived to be related to the values and cognitive bases of those high-power individuals in the organization. In developing the model, emphasis is on the background characteristics of the top managers as opposed to the psychological dimensions. A series of propositions that should be tested to support the upper echelons theory are presented. The topics of these propositions include age, functional track, other career experiences, education, socioeconomic roots, financial position, and group characteristics. The creation of this model is just the beginning of the work that is necessary to evaluate and understand the upper echelons theory. Further input is needed from areas such as the executive recruiting industry. Additionally, clinical and statistical studies are both necessary to fully develop this theory. (SRD)
This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.
The proposed theory extends research on cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy, reputation, and status by advancing an evaluator's perspective on these concepts as forms of social judgment, each addressing a different evaluator's question about the organization. I describe how evaluators make their social judgments under conditions of bounded rationality and how cognitive and social factors influence this process. The proposed process model of social judgment formation highlights the complex and nondeterministic nature of this process.
This paper examines the longevity of foreign entries. Hypotheses are developed on the mode (start-ups vs. acquisitions) and ownership structure (wholly owned vs. joint ventures) in relation to cultural distance. The hypotheses are tested within a framework of organizational learning, using data on 225 entries that 13 Dutch firms carried out from 1966 onwards. Results show that the presence of cultural barriers punctuates an organization's learning. Cultural distance is a prominent factor in foreign entry whenever this involves another firm, requiring the firm to engage in 'double layered acculturation.' We also identify locational 'paths of learning.' The longevity of acquisitions is positively influenced by prior entries of the firm in the same country. Similarly, the longevity of foreign entries, in which the firm has a majority stake, improves whenever the expanding firm engaged in prior entries in the same country and in other countries in the same cultural block.
In this paper we review the academic evidence on earnings management and its implications for accounting standard setters and regulators. We structure our review around questions likely to be of interest to standard setters. In particular, we review the empirical evidence on which specific accruals are used to manage earnings, the magnitude and frequency of any earnings management, and whether earnings management affects resource allocation in the economy. Our review also identifies a number of opportunities for future research on earnings management.
Research summary : We propose a theory that explains why the relentless pursuit of perfect implementation of strategy may be useful even in a world in which the strategies being implemented are far from optimal. We formulate a computational model in which an organization's strategy adapts based on performance feedback. However, the distinctive feature of our approach is that we abandon the “organization as a unitary actor” assumption, and model a separation of beliefs and actions. The central insight is that, given this separation, precise implementation has benefits beyond the well‐known effect of enabling exploitation of good strategies. It enables the discovery of better strategies by allowing more effective learning from feedback on the value of current strategies .
Managerial summary : Given the reality that the strategies coming from the C ‐suite are seldom perfect, is it sensible for managers to place such a heavy emphasis on implementing them precisely? In this paper we develop a theory that explains why the answer may be “yes”. In most organizations, the formulators and implementors of strategy are distinct. Imprecise implementation makes it difficult for the formulators to learn the value of their strategies, as neither success nor failure necessarily indicates something about the value of the strategy itself, when implementation is imprecise . Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
We posit that a firm's resource configuration constitutes a critical context for various corporate governance mechanisms. Although innovative knowledge assets are generally a key determinant of a firm's economic performance, they also lead to greater information asymmetry among managers and owners and to the need to grant managers more discretion in making resource deployment decisions. This weakens the role of monitoring but increases the effectiveness of incentive mechanisms. Therefore, we hypothesize asymmetric moderating effects of monitoring- and incentive-based governance mechanisms on the relationship between innovative knowledge assets and economic performance. Our empirical analyses provide support for the key arguments.
Despite a growing sense that speed is critical to organizational success, how an emphasis on speed affects organizational processes remains unclear. We explored the connection between speed and decision making in a 19-month ethnographic study of an Internet start-up. Distilling our data using causal loop diagrams, we identified a potential pathology for organizations attempting to make fast decisions the "speed, trap." A need for fast action, traditionally conceptualized, as an exogenous feature of the surrounding context, can also be a product of an organization's own past emphasis. on speed. We explore the implications for research on-decision making and temporary pacing.
Organizational scandals have become all too commonplace; from investment firms' financial improprieties to sexual abuse cover-ups, rule-breaking has become a "normal" feature of organizational life. Although there is considerable scholarly work on rule-breaking, efforts to explain it remain theoretically fragmented. Here we identify two fundamental dimensions of bureaucratic rule-breaking and develop a coherent theoretical conception of it as a structurally patterned and interactionally mediated sociological fact. First, rule-breaking may be permitted or contested by those charged with rule enforcement. Manifestations of rule-breaking take on a routine character only where it is unofficially allowed; where it is not, conflict ensues. Second, the hierarchical structure of bureaucracy is mirrored by an organizational hierarchy of rule-breaking. Rule-breaking can be undertaken by individuals acting alone, it can be coordinated by workgroups, or it can be organized by top management as a matter of unofficial policy. Considering how these two dimensions of rule-breaking interact provides insight into how such actions vary with respect to the full range of organizational cross-pressures. Finally, the framework we develop offers an important corrective to the overreliance on the formal aspects of Weber's theorizing about bureaucracy and has considerable utility for generating hypotheses across an array of institutional arenas.
This study is an analysis of case studies in product development. Some typical innovation patterns are identified, and explanations of the differences are offered. The influence of characteristics of organizational subsystems--the task system, the cognitive system, and the political system--on phases and types of innovations is considered.
While many sociologists have noted that organizational legitimacy is important for organizational survival, legitimacy has been infrequently empirically examined. This paper presents a conceptual framework in which organizational legitimacy is defined as the congruence between the values associated with the organization and the values of its environment. Challenges to organizational legitimacy and responses to these challenges are illustrated in a discussion of the American Institute for Foreign Study. Corporate philanthropic contributions, the composition and size of boards of directors, and the content of annual reports and other organizational communications are presented as efforts on the part of organizations to achieve legitimacy. The focus on processes of organizational legitimation can be used in analyzing a variety of organizational behaviors that are components of organization-environment interaction.