Long Range Planning最新文献

Whether firms can survive a major crisis is an important question for both researchers and practitioners. Ambidexterity is frequently proposed as a sound strategy to achieve best performance when firms exist in turbulent environments; however, it is unclear whether this effect is sustained in a crisis, especially an internal one. Applying configuration and dynamic capability theories, this study extends the literature and examines this question by investigating how exploitation, exploration, and ambidexterity affect firms’ survival rates after major crises. This study is based on collected annual reports of and financial data on 367 firms that encountered a major crisis over a 21-year period (2000–2020) to provide empirical evidence. We employed a decision-tree analysis method based on text mining. The results show that during a crisis, firms adopting an exploitation strategy have a higher likelihood of survival than those adopting exploration and ambidexterity. Meanwhile, in the high-tech industry, adopting an ambidexterity or an exploitation strategy is better than adopting an exploration strategy. Theoretical and practical implications are provided.

A fundamental endeavor for a gig platform organization is the governance of its user network, on which value creation and capture critically depend. Despite the global emergence of gig platform organizations, there is little understanding of the local context in which governance decisions are made. To address this, we explore the role of institutional voids in on-demand platform governance in developing countries. By studying ride-hailing platform organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, we conceptualize enabling and coercive governance modes and uncover distinct patterns within to address institutional voids. We discuss the theoretical implications for platform governance research in developing countries.

When faced with a sudden economic crisis, top managers come under pressure to persist and recover, but such an ability to be resilient depends on the collective response of the top management team (TMT). In particular, we argue that attention towards the future, or future focus, within the TMT influences the organization's resilience in times of crisis. Drawing on a sample of insurance companies during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), we mined earnings call transcripts to capture future focus for executives and aggregate this variable to the team level. Our results indicate that companies with TMTs high on average future focus, and companies with TMTs low on heterogeneity of future focus are more resilient - experiencing more moderate performance losses during the crisis and a swifter recovery after the crisis. With heightened attention on long-term effects of economic crises, we contribute to scholarship and practice by demonstrating that future focus within executive teams impacts their organization's resilience.

This paper seeks to explain how location affects the likelihood of partner acquisition. We develop a novel framework that (i) emphasizes the decoupling between a firm's headquarters and its alliance-making division and their roles regarding alliance management and partner acquisition decisions and (ii) highlights that these decisions are contingent on location-related factors that shape the structural configuration of alliances. Findings from a comprehensive study of 20,165 alliances and 1838 subsequent majority acquisition events reveal that the acquisition likelihood tends to be higher in cross-border alliances than in domestic ones. We further find that increasing national cultural distance between the headquarters of the two partnering organizations attenuates this effect. In contrast, the co-location of the focal firm's alliance-making division and its headquarters further increases the likelihood of acquiring a cross-border partner. We provide a distinct explanation of partner acquisition, placing the interface of location and alliance structure centerstage to explain which alliance partners become acquisition targets. More generally, our findings inform research on strategic decision-making in areas where location is key, such as firm boundary configuration.

We investigate how digitalization influences the effectiveness of retrenchment and strategic actions on firms’ turnaround outcomes after a situation of firm decline. To ensure turnaround actions are effective, declining firms must possess relevant knowledge about how to implement such action. We argue that through digitalization, firms can form a close relationship with key stakeholders in their business ecosystem, which can provide important knowledge to guiding their response actions. More specifically, we argue that different types of digitalization linking firms to different groups of stakeholders allows firms to access knowledge about different types of response actions. Based on a sample of publicly listed small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China from 2012 to 2019, we find that the internal digitalization has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between asset and cost retrenchments and turnaround performance, and that the external digitalization has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between new product introduction and turnaround performance.

The sustainability of business models is commonly determined by their value creation for a wide range of stakeholders. This value is primarily conceptualised through the aggregated macro-level Triple Bottom Line (TBL) dimensions of social, ecological and economic value. However, few business model studies provide an explanation as to why and how stakeholders see such value in a business model. A problematising review reveals a conflation of the TBL macro-level and stakeholder micro-level of analysis, causing ambiguity regarding contents and recipients of value. This paper adopts a perceived value concept based on micro-level insights from recipient-centric (strategic) management to reform the construct of ecological, social and economic value. The relationships between value perceptions, need fulfilment and need satisfiers are analysed based on the characteristics of subjectivity and heterogeneity, one-sidedness and non-linearity, situation-specificity and transience, spill-over, relationality and experientiality, idiosyncrasy, incommensurability, and interdependence. The analysis underscores a value creation theory based on stakeholder perceptions of need fulfilment. It suggests stakeholder value creation can only be understood through the stakeholders whose needs are being satisfied. The suggested distinction between needs and satisfiers remedies their conflation in previous research and enables a discussion of conditions for sustainable stakeholder value creation.

Digitalization is challenging traditional international business theories, shifting emphasis from the flows of goods and services to the flows of data, information, and knowledge, changing the distribution of international activity. From the internalization theory lens, we suggest that digitalization is reducing market imperfections, but this effect varies across industries, positing a linkage between industry digital intensity and internationalization. Digitalization effects can also influence the location-bound constraints of FSAs. Examining one non location-bound FSA, innovation, and one location-bound FSA, brand, we argue that it is the moderating effects, or interaction, of these FSAs and industry digital intensity that drive internationalization. Furthermore, we highlight that these interaction effects change over time, as digital innovations have diffused. We test these arguments on a sample of 2370 U.S. firms over an 18-year period. The findings support our arguments that the conditions under which MNEs increase internationalization is dependent upon the combination of industry digital intensity and innovation and brand. In addition, these interaction effects appear to change over time as digitalization has evolved and become more widespread. Our findings indicate a more nuanced set of relationships within internalization theory in a digital world.

Studies on corporate social performance advocate that interrelated yet conflicting goals, such as sustainability and profitability, give rise to specific dynamics and inherent tensions, and call for more research to investigate how the duality of goals is managed by specific individuals in organizations. Through a micro-foundational view of ambidexterity for corporate social performance, and by relying on a qualitative data analysis of 41 interviews with sustainability managers and their immediate stakeholders, both internal and external to their organization boundaries, we developed a multilevel model of sustainability managers' responses to conflicting goals. We discovered how sustainability managers enacted internal and external, long term and short term brokering behaviors, enabled by their individual values, multidisciplinary knowledge, and relational abilities and skills, although constrained by their organizational and institutional contexts. By taking into account simultaneously contextual forces and individual cognitive characteristics, we thus advance our understanding of sustainability managers’ behaviors towards ambidexterity for corporate social responsibility and of microfoundations for ambidexterity.

We study how firms can benefit from external knowledge resources contingent on absorptive capacity. We separate the three components of absorptive capacity – acquiring, assimilating, and exploiting external knowledge – and posit that the benefits of a firm's knowledge expansion through diversification into related and unrelated business domains differ by the firm's relative emphasis on the three components. We test our predictions on a panel of 153 large US-traded ICT firms. Our analysis broadly supports our hypotheses, highlighting the unique contribution of individual absorptive capacity components to organizational learning through diversification strategy.

Industrial organizations need to take a cultural leap in order to integrate social systems with rapidly evolving digital technologies. Subsequently, aspiration for digital transformation enabled by organizational culture is ubiquitous; however, guidance in the literature on how to refresh the culture in pursuit of digital transformation strategy is underdeveloped. We conducted a diagnostic multi-case study on the organization culture in three globally renowned industrial organizations undergoing digital transformation strategy implementation. Through thematic analysis of qualitative data, we identified cultural artefacts, values in action, and assumptions that industrial organizations should refresh to enable digital transformation. It was found that forerunner industrial organizations’ approach to culture is strategically proactive and thoughtful. Furthermore, their leaders employed culture as a social control system for digital technology adoption. The research findings are summarized as an exploratory framework for the strategic design of culture for the purpose, governance, ecosystem, and organization of sociotechnical systems.