Long Range Planning最新文献

This paper examines how private firms can align financial and social goals by including disenfranchised populations as beneficiaries. Using a quasi-experimental study in a Brazilian private for-profit school, we explore whether enfranchised (non-vulnerable) and disenfranchised (income-constrained) students benefit from interacting in more diverse settings. First, we find that diversity improves the educational outcomes of enfranchised students. Second, as a socially desirable ripple effect, we observe an increase in the willingness of their families to support social inclusion through donations. Our results demonstrate that private firms can connect disenfranchised and enfranchised groups, fostering mutual value creation and aligning social and commercial objectives. We conclude by discussing the conditions that facilitate these mechanisms in various organizational settings.

This study examines the relationships between an important market strategy (international diversification) and corporate environmental responsibility disclosure (CERD), a nonmarket strategy. We rely on institutional theory and the stakeholder perspective and hypothesize a positive relationship between international diversification and CERD. We also hypothesize a direct effect of performance-based cultural practices (PBC) and socially supportive cultural practices (SSC), derived from the GLOBE culture database on CERD and its moderating effect on the international diversification – CERD link. The sample includes 335 large Multinational enterprises (MNEs) from 31 countries then distributed among three corporate social responsibility (CSR) regimes: European, Anglo-Saxon, and Asian and emerging markets. The results show support for the hypothesized relationships between international diversification strategies and CERD and that the direction of the relationship varies by region of the world. We find significant support for the moderating role of national cultural practices on the international diversification-environmental disclosure links.

The prevalence of platform-based multinational corporations (PMNCs) has been increasing, and these businesses are encountering several growing challenges. These challenges include the dynamics and diversification of the global Regulatory context (R), the evolution of platform Ecosystems as innovative organization forms (E), the emergence of Artificial intelligence technologies as a new capability (A), and the introduction of Data as a novel resource (D). A ‘READ’ framework is proposed to guide the research of PMNCs based on four dimensions. This framework aims to enhance comprehension of the challenges faced by PMNCs within the global context and to offer direction for future research endeavors.

The general assumption is that multipartner alliances are increasingly favored by firms as means of creating larger pools of shared resources and capabilities. Yet, extant literature has hardly moved beyond anecdotal evidence to systematically address the mechanisms driving their configuration and performance. This study is a step toward clarifying important unknowns about multipartner alliances by proposing and testing a model of multipartner alliance performance that involves two key mediating mechanisms, i.e., alliance scale and scope, that may explain how higher performance is achieved in these increasingly popular forms of organizing interorganizational efforts. The empirical context of the study is the motion picture industry where multipartner alliances have become exceedingly popular in recent decades. Empirical results partially support our proposed theory by demonstrating that alliance scale but not alliance scope mediates the relationship between the number of partners and alliance performance. Our results hold important implications for the growing literature on multipartner alliances.

After decades of unregulated growth, the world's largest technology companies have now attracted the attention of regulators in both Europe and the US. Regulating “Big Tech”, however, has proven to be challenging, partly because of their size, but also because of their strategic importance in maintaining a competitive advantage between western nation-states and rising economies in Asia. The paradox is that regulators hope to create a regulatory regime that constrains the oligopoly power of Big Tech without quashing their capacity to innovate. Traditional regulatory theories are not equipped to address this paradox. Drawing from neo-institutional theory, we propose a “layered governance” model of regulation to address this problem. Layered governance is an emerging regulatory regime that distributes power across multiple government and non-government organizations while providing the regulated organizations with a degree of flexibility and choice by the organizations themselves as to the mode of regulation. We elaborate how layered governance is consistent with current understandings of regulation as derived from neo-institutional theory, elaborate how it differs from traditional approaches to regulation, and discuss how a layered governance approach to regulating Big Tech may evolve in the future.

This study investigates the impact of reciprocal information exchanges within partnerships on organizational performance, with a focus on the mediating role of organizational creativity. We conducted a quantitative investigation using a survey of 401 micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Brazil, and analyzed the data using multivariate regression analysis. Our primary contribution to the strategy field lies in the adoption of a knowledge-based view (KBV) to demonstrate how reciprocal information exchanges within partnerships can stimulate organizational creativity and positively impact performance, particularly in resource-scarce environments. A key managerial insight from our study is that reciprocal information exchanges serve as a dual-edged sword, enhancing both organizational creativity and performance. This is particularly relevant for firms in competitive ecosystems where the bidirectional flow of information can be critical to gaining competitive advantage.

This study examines the relationship between rookie independent directors (RIDs) and corporate cash holdings, using a sample of Chinese A-share firms listed on the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges from 2006 to 2020. We further investigate the moderating effect of economic policy uncertainty on this association. Our results reveal that the presence of rookie independent directors is positively and significantly related to corporate cash holdings, and that economic policy uncertainty amplifies this relationship. Importantly, we also demonstrate that firms with rookie independent directors exhibit improved operating performance when making cash holding decisions in the Chinese context. The study also finds that firms with greater growth opportunities tend to prefer RIDs, who bring new perspectives essential for leveraging these opportunities, leading to enhanced cash holdings. To ensure the robustness of our findings, we employ a variety of advanced econometric techniques, including alternative proxies, tests for reverse causality, two-stage least squares, propensity score matching, and entropy balancing. Based on our results, we recommend that shareholders in China carefully consider the role of RIDs in their governance structure, as they effectively monitor firm management and contribute to the protection of shareholder interests.

The demographic composition of a firm's Board of Directors (BoD) and Top Management Team (TMT) has important consequences for organizational processes and outcomes. However, researchers have focused on the independent effects of diversity in these strategic leadership groups (SLGs), foregoing how it affects their interactions. We adopt a strategic leadership system perspective to account for tasks that a firm's BoD and TMT perform independently, as well as shared tasks performed at their interface. Focusing on the innovation process as a context for strategic decision-making and implementation, we hypothesize inverted u-shaped associations for independent effects of BoD and TMT gender compositions on innovation inputs and TMT gender composition on outcomes. To account for interactions at their interface, we also propose moderating effects between BoD and TMT gender compositions on their relationships with innovation input and outcomes. We find support for our hypotheses within a panel of highly innovative U.S. firms between 2005 and 2018. These findings have important implications for strategic leadership and diversity researchers and may provide guidance on balancing the gender composition of SLGs at firms that pursue innovation.

Short-termism in investment decisions often results in poor firm performance, though excessively long investments can also harm performance by reducing internal flexibility. This study investigated a quadratic, inverted U-shaped relationship between investment horizon and performance. Building on agency theory and resource-constraint arguments, we proposed that organizational slack moderates the relationship between investment horizon and firm performance. For short investment horizons, slack represented unused resources that could have been invested, thus leading to lower performance. For long investment horizons, slack helped cover unanticipated expenses and increased firm performance. We found empirical support for our theory in a large sample of privately held European firms in the utilities and retail trade industries.

The academic, consulting, and practitioner-oriented literatures present many examples of companies that have failed to adapt their strategy in the face of a changing competitive arena, even when their top managers and executives acknowledged the need for change—and had a reasonable idea of what ought to be done. By means of an in-depth study of two polar cases of large companies from the fast-moving consumer goods sector, this study sheds light on the complex intertwined causes that lead some companies into strategic inertia, while others engage in strategic renewal. Our theoretical framing of possible causes of inertia encompasses cognitive schema, power and politics, emotions, and communication. Our findings provide credible evidence that strategic inertia (or renewal) is the outcome of conjunctural causation, so that a similar initial cause may result in different outcomes depending on the processual interaction with other contributing factors at the organizational, group, and individual levels. The conjunction of various causes can lead a company's managers to adhere rigidly to their sources of past success or, alternatively, embrace novel pathways despite short-term uncertainty and anxiety.