Long Range Planning最新文献

Emotions play a crucial role in the strategic management of family business organizations (FBOs). Yet, they are commonly treated as a black box, and we have a limited understanding of their antecedents, and the processes and mechanisms through which they develop and unfold in FBOs, ultimately leading to strategic outcomes. This paper opens the black box and develops a framework for studying emotions in the strategic management of FBOs. In addition, it discusses how contemporary research contributes to moving the state of the field forward and proposes an agenda for future research by delineating some critical challenges and research directions.

Why does a family sell and why does a family member repurchase the business after it has been sold? We explore these questions by analysing the case of Champagne Taittinger which was sold as part of the sale of the family business by the second-generation in 2005, and the repurchase of the business by third generation, Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, in 2006. Guided by affective events theory, we use a qualitative approach to identify “turning points” of attachment and conflict and illustrate how an interplay of these affective states at the microfoundations of the Taittinger family influences the macro-level events of the sale and repurchase of Champagne Taittinger. We contribute to understanding how affective events at the microfoundations of family crucially influence business strategy.

In the family business system, the family and business subsystems overlap, thereby reciprocally and dynamically influencing each other. When a son- or daughter-in-law enters the family, the equilibrium of the family business system alters in terms of conflicts and emotions. In this study, we embrace family systems theory to conceptually devise how child-in-law entry in the family spurs strategic change in the business subsystem. Building on this speculation, we introduce a multi-level framework of the emotional and relational mechanisms that unfold at the family-business interface. Our study offers insights to family business research, family systems theory, and strategic management, as well as outlining promising directions for future research.

Digitalization allows new entrants to enter and transform industries with new technologies or business models. Often, these new entrants introduce digital platforms that modify prevalent value creation and capture mechanisms to allow them to take on powerful keystone positions. While prior research has mostly analysed the organizational consequences for firms, we follow a growing field of interest studying the effects of digital platforms on business ecosystems and explore when and how platformization of a business ecosystem occurs. Our study of the platformization of the Dutch music industry from the 1990s to 2016 makes two contributions. First, we identify two mechanisms that drive the platformization of business ecosystems: digital transaction platforms reconfigure value capture as well as value creation, and translators – a new actor-type proficient in digital technologies – emerge that help incumbent keystone actors translate physical products into digital offerings. Second, we theorize this process as business ecosystem envelopment; a viable strategy for digital transaction platforms to absorb a traditional business ecosystem's focal offering without taking over its functionality.

Strategic initiatives are temporary group undertakings designed to renew organizational capabilities and are crucial to organizational performance. Despite the inherent goal heterogeneity stemming from individual, departmental, organizational, and initiative levels, research conceptualizes goals as unitary within the team. Our objective is to explore ways to manage goal heterogeneity for the successful development of strategic initiatives within the intraorganizational context. We argue that organizational controls and decision comprehensiveness can be effective in mitigating the negative effects of heterogeneity. This will help facilitate a group of individuals in behaving as a team and being committed to the agreed-upon task at hand. We also articulate the positive role of strategic consensus in moving initiatives in the resource allocation process. Our theory building provides a roadmap for managing strategic initiatives in the resource allocation process and contributes to research on strategic initiatives and goals and, more broadly, to behavioral theory.

Research on contractual governance has traditionally viewed exchange hazards as having mutual effects on contractual design at the transaction level. To advance our understanding of contracting decisions in interorganizational relationships, I depart from the traditional emphasis on the mutual aspects of interorganizational relationships by examining how exposure to idiosyncratic exchange hazards may impact the divergent contractual arrangement interests of each side of the dyad. Viewing the locus of exchange hazards and contract design as dyadic broadens the conventional emphasis on the add-on perspective of governing relationships to further emphasize how excluding contractual rights selectively may be an alternative way for controlling the threat of exchange hazards. Through an analysis of franchise disclosure documents and contracts for 136 restaurant franchise systems in the U.S., I found that, when confronted with exchange hazards, a firm can strengthen its own protection not only by enhancing contractual rights in its own interests but also by limiting contractual rights in favor of its partner. With a dyadic perspective, my paper sheds new light on the discriminating alignment principle and generates new insights into the strategic implications of intentionally leaving gaps in contracts.

Numerous scholars have suggested that the global technology-intensive sector has become hypercompetitive, yet few have tested this empirically. Those that have find seemingly conflicting evidence. Applying commonly used measures, we explore whether this could be due to hypercompetition being more time and context specific than previously thought. Based on data from the United States, Europe, Japan, and China covering 1980–2018, we find no indication of a generalized increase in business performance volatility in this sector across regions. We do find a declining stability in the performance of Japanese firms over the study period, but in US firms only leading up to the burst of the dotcom bubble. A structural break analysis helps us conclude that hypercompetition is a phenomenon limited in both location, time, and industry, linked to industry breakpoints across its life cycle.

Organizational members must constantly confront and manage numerous paradoxical tensions inherent in organizational life, such as exploration and exploitation. Although prior research suggests that a paradox mindset helps individuals navigate such tensions, we know little about how paradoxical leaders might engender such a mindset in their followers. To shed light on this issue, we differentiate between cognitive and behavioral influences on followers' paradox mindset development. Drawing on primary data from 273 employees, our study indicates that the two influences are interrelated, with behavioral mechanisms mediating the effects of cognitive mechanisms. Our study advances extant theory by providing insights into how paradoxical leaders guide employees to situationally engage with specific paradoxical tensions and influence followers’ paradox mindset in general.

Although many cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) by emerging-market multinationals (EMMs) are aimed at improving domestic operating performance, the conditions under which such CBAs are the most effective have been underexplored. Drawing on global strategy research on resource recombination and organizational learning, we propose that the effectiveness of domestic-improvement oriented CBAs crucially depends on EMMs' cross-cultural experience, as EMMs apply different forms of resource recombination to such CBAs as a function of that experience, with varying degrees of success. Specifically, we hypothesize a U-shaped relationship between an EMM's cross-cultural experience and the domestic productivity growth it realizes from a domestic-improvement oriented CBA, and that this relationship is steeper for acquisitions involving more intensive integration or relatively larger targets but flatter for acquirers from countries with larger institutional voids. Measuring both the depth and breadth of firms' cross-cultural experience, we obtain support for our hypotheses in a sample of 423 domestic-improvement oriented CBAs by manufacturing firms from 13 emerging economies, thereby shedding light on what determines the effectiveness of such CBAs.

Access to unique knowledge of a target firm is the strategic rationale for many firm acquisitions with the expectation of improving the acquirer's innovation performance. We argue that the acquisition price reflects opportunities for value creation through innovation and investigate whether acquirers pay not just for the target firm's knowledge but also for the opportunity to access localized knowledge when targets are embedded in the knowledge flows of their region. Accordingly, we integrate embeddedness theory with literature on the expectations for knowledge-based value creation in M&A. We hypothesize that target firms that are highly embedded in local knowledge flows have higher acquisition prices. Using data on 520 technology-oriented firm acquisitions in Europe between 2001 and 2010, we find that the acquisition price increases with the target firm's local embeddedness. The effects are weaker when an acquirer's knowledge base is closely related to the localized knowledge and stronger when the target's knowledge base is closely related to the localized knowledge, suggesting that local embeddedness conditions the ability of acquirer and target to absorb localized knowledge.