Long Range Planning最新文献

Even though scholars have widely asserted that ambidextrous organizations need ambidextrous managers, we still know relatively little about the emergence of ambidextrous behaviours among top management team (TMT) members. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding about how TMT networks and middle management involvement in decision-making collectively shape the ability of TMT members to deal successfully with the exploration–exploitation paradox. Through in-depth interviews and a multilevel analysis of internal networks of 123 TMT members in 20 public hospitals, results suggest that leaders' centrality and the density of TMT networks shape the ability of TMT members to behave ambidextrously. The framework of this paper also incorporates the role of middle management, critical in linking the strategic apex and the operating core, and thereby supporting TMT members’ ambidextrous behaviour. Various theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

I apply an institutional lens to explore how strategists in a pharmaceuticals firm successfully include managers in the formulation and implementation of corporate political activity (CPA). I depict these strategists as institutional carriers who face mindset-, skills-, and commitment-related barriers when importing new industry norms favoring inclusive CPA processes into an organizational setting where exclusive strategic practices prevail. They reduce barriers resulting from this confrontation of institutional logics by enacting specific instances of institutional work. Strategists' ability to perform cultural and technical work aimed at shifting managers’ perceptions about CPA and empowering them to design and conduct new forms of political action is facilitated by their expertise and social capital. In the absence of hierarchical authority, they draw on personality traits – chiefly, their perseverance – to enact more challenging political work aimed at reconfiguring organizational rules and increasing commitment to CPA. I stretch understandings of open strategy by exploring the inclusion of managers in a complex and uncertain strategic activity previously overlooked, and providing new insights into how strategists manage individual-level constraints to open strategizing. I build on CPA literature by opening up the black box of corporate political strategizing and exposing political strategists as internal lobbyists who drive strategic change in firms.

We draw on behavioral strategy, terror management, and post traumatic growth theories to examine how a sudden director death may affect firm risk-taking. Two opposing predictions are developed. One is that a director death can trigger anxiety, prompting a CEO to become less committed to his or her job and decreasing a firm's risk-taking tendency. Alternatively, the passing of a director may evoke death reflection, inducing a CEO to pursue higher-order goals and initiate more projects with substantial uncertainties. Results based on a sample of publicly traded firms in the United States suggest that while a director death may diminish firm long-term investment, this event could fuel strategic nonconformity. Our findings suggest that the impact of director death on firm strategies could be more nuanced than the existing literature has suggested.

The origins of SWOT analysis have been enigmatic, until now. With archival research, interviews with experts and a review of the available literature, this paper reconstructs the original SOFT/SWOT approach, and draws potential implications. During a firm's planning process, all managers are asked to write down 8 to 10 key planning issues faced by their units. Each manager grades, with evidence, these issues as either safeguarding the Satisfactory; opening Opportunities; fixing Faults; or thwarting Threats: hence SOFT (which is later merely relabeled to Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, or SWOT). Subgroups of managers have several dialogues about these issues with the instruction to include the needs and expectations of all the firm's stakeholders. Their developed resolutions or proposals become input for the executive planning committee to articulate corporate purpose(s) and strategies. SWOT's originator, Robert Franklin Stewart, emphasized the crucial role that creativity plays in the planning process. The SOFT/SWOT approach curbs mere top-down strategy making to the benefit of strategy alignment and implementation; Introducing digital means to parts of SWOT's original participative, long-range planning process, as suggested herein, could boost the effectiveness of organizational strategizing, communication and learning. Archival research into the deployment of SOFT/SWOT in practice is needed.

Scholars studying corporate political activity (CPA) have developed a market theory that has been widely accepted. This theory's ability to predict performance, however, has been equivocal. We argue that the predictability of the market theory for CPA could improve by accounting for three kinds of constraints that limit the possible actions of the politicians, the businesses, and other interested parties as they engage in CPA. These three constraints are the politician's ideology, the nature of his or her financial contributions, and the political trends among his or her constituents. All actors are limited by these constraints, but they also could impact them. We test our hypotheses upon a unique dataset and find support for our hypotheses. We argue that using this approach to understand the pressures facing the actors involved in CPA could help scholars find a more predictable link between CPA and firm performance.

With the revelation of questionably ethical practices at the world's most innovative firms, scholars and practitioners have begun to question whether a link might exist between innovation and wrongdoing. We introduce the concept of organizational permissiveness—i.e., tolerance of employees' norm-challenging behavior—to begin unpacking the relationships between cognitive norm-breaking, radical innovation, and corporate wrongdoing. We argue that organizational permissiveness partially mediates the effects of innovation-intensive strategy on innovation outcomes and multiple types of corporate wrongdoing. We analyze a sample of publicly held U.S. firms to demonstrate that the norm-breaking necessary for radical innovation also can produce corporate wrongdoing. Moreover, organizational permissiveness is a mechanism leading to both outcomes. We then use a smaller-sample quasi-experiment examining how merger and acquisition events affect individual scientists' patenting behavior. This provides further support for our hypothesized causal assertions.

Companies are increasingly pursuing competitive advantage through innovative use of advanced information technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Management education must prepare students with the skills and knowledge needed to function effectively and ethically in this increasingly digitalized business environment. Yet, we have no consensus on what constitutes digital strategy, let alone how the topic ought to be taught. To advance the emerging subdiscipline of digital strategy, this article takes stock of the teaching in this nascent domain. We conducted an inductive analysis of twelve postgraduate modules and fifteen massive open online courses (MOOCs) to provide an empirically grounded framework. Our analysis categorizes digital strategy-related module content into four domains, constituted by thirteen topic areas. We further identify five distinct course profiles that digital strategy modules typically follow. This article contributes to the strategic management discipline by providing an exploration of digital strategy teaching and offering concrete guidelines for teaching digital strategy in business schools and universities, either as a module on its own right or as part of an existing strategy module.

Entrepreneurs present their ideas in a favorable light through compelling communications that may shape the investors' impressions about the value of the startup's technology and its potential to disrupt. Assessing such communications, venture capital (VC) investors get an impression of the startup's technology and shape their willingness to commit resources to it. Since diverse kinds of VC investors pursue alternative investment objectives, they may develop different impressions of the startup's technology and accordingly make different resource commitment decisions. This paper aims to investigate the resource commitment decisions of VC investors when financing startups communicating disruptiveness by distinguishing between independent venture capitalists (IVC) and corporate venture capitalists (CVC). Analyzing data about 664 medical device and biotech startups in a 10-year period, we found that communicating disruptiveness decreases the amount of funding committed by IVC, while it has a curvilinear effect on the amount of funding provided by CVC. Our findings contribute to the literature and provide important implications for managers of startups aiming to secure funding from different VC investors.

We draw on the Upper Echelons theory to investigate the effect of CEO liberalism—as reflected by core beliefs on the liberal-conservative spectrum—on firm engagement in corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). We argue that CEO liberalism is related to an asymmetric treatment of shareholders and other non-shareholding stakeholders. Specifically, we distinguish CSI behavior toward shareholders from CSI behavior toward non-shareholding stakeholders and predict that while CEO liberalism reduces CSI behavior toward non-shareholding stakeholders, it also increases CSI behavior toward shareholders. We further identify governance contingency factors, such as institutional ownership, board composition, and compensation mechanisms, that moderate the predicted main relationships. We test our predictions with a sample of S&P 500 firms between 2000 and 2009 and find support for most of our hypotheses.

In this paper, we claim that ownership is a key determinant of the firms' divestment-reinvestment sequence in a foreign country. Building on the notion of ‘relational vs. transactional ownership’, we distinguish between relational-type firms (namely, family-owned and state-owned firms), and transactional-type firms (privately non-family-owned firms). We argue that relational-type firms are less likely to both divest from, and reinvest in, a given foreign country. In fact, relational owners set a lower performance threshold of intervention than transactional ones; additionally, in order to turn the tide, the former often increase resource injection when subsidiary performance falls below the threshold. Such an escalation of commitment increases sunk costs and further decreases the likelihood of divesting the subsidiary. Moreover, when a divestment occurs, the memory of high sunk costs incurred reduces the propensity to reinvest in the same host country. We test our conceptual framework on a large sample of investments, divestments and subsequent re-entries undertaken in the period 2000–2015 by 602 Italian firms. Our econometric findings corroborate our hypotheses, thus contributing to the literature on the interdependencies between divestment and reinvestment choices, and their relationships with corporate ownership.