Long Range Planning最新文献

The survival and prosperity of firms are contingent on their ability to constantly adjust to the state and dynamics of their environments by swiftly embracing the right combination of generic exploration and exploitation strategies. We propose a novel theoretical model linking the pursuit of exploration and exploitation approaches with firm failure in the medium term, stressing the role of the firm life cycle that substantively shapes the underlying relationships. The model is empirically tested using the firm-level data from a large panel dataset from 1988 to 2019 across multiple industries, revealing the moderating impact of the five stages of the firm life cycle (and the transition period between them) on the relation between exploration/exploitation strategies and the likelihood of firm failure. The findings indicate that exploration has a significant negative impact on the likelihood of firm failure during the growth, maturity, and transition stages; however, it significantly increases the likelihood of firm failure in the introduction, shakeout, and decline stages. Exploitation, on the other hand, has a significant negative impact on the likelihood of firm failure in the introduction and maturity stages yet amplifies the probability of failure in the transition phase.

This study addresses the question of how strategists use intuiting practices in the process of sensing, navigating and creating strategic opportunities. Existing literature highlights the significant role and nature of intuition in strategy from a theoretical cognitive perspective, but does not examine intuition empirically as a practice utilised by strategists. We undertook a two-year longitudinal study of seven strategists in high-technology firms as they attempted to progress new strategic opportunities. Using abductive analysis of the resulting data, we found that when navigating novel opportunities the practitioners’ intuiting practices were predominantly based on unfolding creative and social types of intuition, as opposed to a rapid expertise-based intuition, previously thought to be the dominant type. We extend existing typologies to propose a dynamic cyclic model of unfolding intuiting practice in the opportunity navigation process. This model draws on dual process theory and includes phases of intimation, investigation, validation and incubation. We found that strategists cycle through these different phases in order to navigate novel spaces, leading to continuation or abandonment of the opportunity development.

Intra-industry alliance networks provide a firm with both collaborative opportunities and competitive challenges. When forming alliance networks within a particular industry, firms need to consider to which extent they compete in the same markets with their alliance network partners, who are also their industry peers. However, previous literature has not exhaustively addressed the antecedents of a firm's competitive behavior with their alliance network peers – i.e., a phenomenon we label ego-network competitiveness. This study draws on extensive panel data from the top global pharmaceuticals to examine this question. Combining behavioral and network perspectives, we test two competing hypotheses on how ego-network competitiveness varies relative to performance feedback and whether structural prominence moderates this relationship. Our results show that performance above and below aspirations increases ego-network competitiveness through high-intensity responses (i.e., problemistic and slack search). We also find that performance above aspirations increases ego-network competitiveness for firms with high structural prominence.

This study extends the discussion on open strategizing by following the development of unlimited participation in an ex-ante city merger case where participation was not orchestrated. The findings unravel how the aggregation of emotional expressions on social media results in an escalating conflict, and initiates attempts to mitigate grounded in decision-makers’ reflexiveness of social becoming(s). We theorize three emotional mechanisms – acceleration of emotional interaction, reinforcement of hostility as a discursive norm, and emotional empowerment – and outcomes originating from uncontrolled dynamics of inclusion and transparency. As such, we theorize open strategy as emerging organically on social media, and only later becoming deliberately orchestrated by strategists. Our findings have broader implications for understandings of emergent vs. orchestrated inclusion, individual vs. collective transparency, and open and closed decision-making in open strategizing. We also provide directions for managing inclusion to achieve positive outcomes in open strategy.

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.

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.

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.