Long Range Planning最新文献

Choosing the right company name is challenging and may have major consequences for firm prospects. Drawing on the strategic conformity literature, we investigate the implications of “nonconforming” company names, i.e. foreign sounding and family-unrelated, for family firms’ performance. Consistent with the idea that such names endow the business with greater visibility and recognition, we find that nonconforming names are positively associated with financial performance. This association is stronger when the firm operates in an industry with a low share of nonconforming peers and a high share of eponymous peers, in a crowded product class, and is smaller than industry peers. Collectively, our analysis provides new evidence on the strategic implications of company names.

Event studies, which have significantly advanced mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research, obtain excess returns based on a theory linking a firm's shareholder returns to those of the market. For outcomes lacking such a theory, we propose an empirical approach using a synthetic control method with machine learning to link outcomes for the acquirer or target to those for a group of comparison firms. We discuss the method's assumptions, its close parallel to event studies, and its difference in weighting comparison firms (based on data versus derived from theory). We provide an illustration of Dollar Tree's acquisition of Family Dollar, by analyzing shareholder returns (to demonstrate consistent results with an event study), realized cost and sales synergies, and customer sentiment (derived from more than 52 million Twitter messages). We highlight this method's potential—for M&A and other areas of strategy research—to open up new lines of inquiry.

Building on recent international business research that embraces insights from economic geography, we hypothesise that MNEs locating a high share of the total number of their subsidiaries in global cities (which we conceptualize as global city location intensity) exhibit higher financial performance. We further argue that knowledge-intensive firms benefit more from global city location intensity than less knowledge-intensive firms. We also posit that multinationality (international geographic dispersion) negatively moderates the relationship between global city location intensity and financial performance. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 497 MNEs and find strong support for our predictions. We contribute to the literature by introducing the notion of intensity into the relationship between global city locations and financial performance and call for considering scale effects when examining locational decisions and their consequences.

When setting a new strategy for their firm, managers engage in a range of sensegiving activities designed to introduce the new direction and explain the reasons for the change. These communication events commonly involve the use of strategic management terms and concepts to explain and justify the prescribed strategy. Literature thus far assumes that audiences understand and agree that these terms and underlying concepts are appropriate and relevant. Yet such views fail to explain strategy sensegiving in contexts where audiences of strategy presentations are ignorant or skeptical towards strategy concepts and ideas. We examine sensegiving under such conditions by analyzing a manager introducing a new strategy in a creative agency which expressed skepticism towards the concepts and practice of strategizing. Using data from video recordings of a sequence of internal strategy presentations, we identify three strategies designed to overcome prejudice towards strategic thinking while at the same time encouraging its use: winning the right to lead, finding resonance, and enrolling the audience into the strategy. We further find how these three sensegiving strategies are supported by carefully crafted visuals to either emphasize or de-emphasize aspects of the strategy and its supporting rationale. Our findings extend the literature on the practice of strategy by illustrating how the visual supports sensegiving efforts to guide a firm's interpretation of a proposed new strategic direction.

We investigate the differential effect of time in terms of generation in control of the firm's management on family firm performance to address the call in the literature for a more nuanced treatment of family firms and their performance differences. By drawing on the mixed-gamble logic of the behavioral agency model, our work suggests that the family's socio-emotional wealth (SEW) varies across generations, resulting in complex performance relationships. We theorize and empirically find that earlier-generation family firms protect current SEW and perform increasingly worse while later-generation firms maximize prospective financial wealth and perform increasingly better. Additionally, we argue that high family control dispersion mitigates the negative effect on performance of earlier generations in control and increases the positive effect of later generations in control. Important theoretical and practical contributions emerge from this study.

We examine the linkages between firms' M&A activity and the information exchange between executives and analysts during quarterly earnings calls. Prior M&A research has mostly focused on the considerations presented by information asymmetry between buyers and sellers themselves in M&A. However, these concerns also exist between the buying firm's executives and capital markets. We examine whether firms' M&A activity results in an information exchange between executives and analysts that highlights corporate strategy as a discussion topic. Thus, we test whether there is consistency between firms' corporate growth agendas and the information released to the public by these firms. This question is relevant, as disclosure is central to firms' ability to raise capital and compete. We also investigate the degree to which these information exchanges affect analysts' earnings forecast errors.

Deciding which new product concepts to develop is an important strategic management decision. One part of it is to decide whether to develop “premium” products, priced above the average product on the market, or “economy” products, priced lower than the average product on the market. We hypothesize that, ceteris paribus, firms and individual decision makers prefer premium over economy innovation projects. Building on implicit attitude and status discrimination theories, we argue that the origin of the bias lies in the implicit decision-making system of the mind, such that decision-makers inherently prefer premium innovations and that this implicit high-end bias affects their explicit preferences. We use the results from one longitudinal set of archival sales data covering 2312 new product introductions and three experimental studies with decision makers, including practicing managers, to provide evidence for the high-end bias. With these findings, we extend status theory as well as discrimination theory from well researched personnel decisions to managerial decisions about inanimate objects such as product concepts. We further augment literature on low-end innovation by identifying an important constraint for managers and researchers who work on inclusive innovation, frugal innovation, social responsibility, and Base of the Pyramid innovation.

When top managers task middle managers with implementing strategies, those strategies are often executed in a deviated form, which leads to the creation of unintended strategies. Despite much research on middle managers and their role and behaviors in strategy implementation, there is still only a limited understanding of the implementation activities that result in intended and unintended strategies. Using a strategy-as-practice perspective and interviews with 40 middle managers about 122 strategy implementations, we investigate strategy implementation activities and develop a model of middle manager activities in strategy implementation. We find that seven of the ten activities differ in frequency between intended and unintended strategies. This study extends the strategy implementation literature by conceptualizing a critical link in how different strategy implementation outcomes come about. We also broaden the middle management perspective in strategy by extending the range of activities that explain middle managers’ engagement with strategy and differentiating them across two strategy implementation outcomes.

Seismic shifts in industries brought about by radical technological innovations usually lead to a misalignment between the capabilities of many incumbent firms, the requisites of their new environment, and eventually, organizational decline. The current turnaround literature, while emphasizing operating and strategic responses to organizational decline that focus on efficiency and fine tuning product/market strategy respectively, ignores such organizational decline that requires fundamental reengineering of the whole firm and its value chain. This paper introduces the concept of digital reorientation as a long term turnaround strategy to respond to situations in which a firm's environment has been fundamentally restructured. Digital reorientation is a technology-enabled, simultaneous and multilevel change that transforms the organization's core architecture and the way it serves its customers. We develop a framework to understand this turnaround strategy relative to traditional operational and strategic options and formulate propositions on internal and external contingencies that will likely influence the effectiveness of its implementation. Finally, using the newspaper publishing industry as an example of an environment that has undergone such disruptive change driven by digital technological innovations, we examine how the use of digital reorientation could help declining firms in that industry successfully turnaround their performance.

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.