Business Horizons最新文献

A select few top-tier OMBA (Online Master of Science in Business Administration) programs have disrupted the conventional MBA market, now offering comparable—if not superior—value to students compared to many in-person, full-time MBA experiences. Utilizing data collected from interviews with 36 admission staff and administrators representing 24 OMBA programs, as well as a large-scale study of 135 students and alumni of one top-tier OMBA program, we apply Kim and Mauborgne’s Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create framework to highlight the emergence of a new value curve for the very best OMBA programs. The article explores the importance, relevance, value, and mechanisms for how some OMBA programs have successfully repositioned. These high-quality, high-impact OMBA programs have sought to reconcile traditional tradeoffs between OMBA and full-time MBA programs and may pave the way for a transformation of the OMBA marketplace from a focus solely on convenience to programs designed to provide the highest value to students.

Existing management research and practice provide a generalized recipe for organizational success, but they do not work equally well in all situations. In perpetually changing systems (e.g., most modern organizations), standard practices may even prove to be counterproductive. Inspired by and in tribute to Dr. Timothy Baldwin, we identify three leadership domains in which a counterintuitive approach is likely to be useful: (1) motivating subordinates, (2) garnering and wielding social influence, and (3) managing performance. We then provide examples of counterintuitive leadership techniques from each area. Understanding the science behind how and why these techniques work is essential to their effective use in the workplace. Finally, we outline how having a relational orientation as an important corequisite for counterintuitive leadership can yield maximum benefit for organizations and their employees.

Organizations use sponsorships to influence various marketing, financial, and public relations outcomes. Sponsorship communications occur in socially complex markets where messages diffuse quickly. Such messages are also widely accessible to and influenced by various audiences, which can be supportive, neutral, skeptical, or decisively antagonistic. These conditions require managers to adopt nuanced and holistically integrated ways of making their messages acceptable and engaging for a wide variety of audiences, while also being robust to scrutiny. The article addresses this challenge by drawing on signaling theory to present a process model and guidelines for managing sponsorships within socially complex markets. Specifically, it outlines how different message content and sponsorship characteristics combine to influence signal reception, market responses, and feedback. The model is then merged with research on sponsorship authenticity to guide managerial application. Initially, sponsors establish the signal content and primary target audiences through selecting sponsee partners with whom they have authentic fit (Guideline 1). Sponsors can then develop specific characteristics of commitment, observability, and credibility (Guidelines 2–4). Finally, sponsors should conduct prelaunch and postlaunch assessments to adapt to how the sponsorship is received by various audiences and subgroups on an ongoing basis (Guideline 5).

One of the best known writers in the world today, Stephen King is a superstar storyteller. His story-selling skills are equally outstanding. With 65 chart-topping novels to his name, he knows everything there is to know about moving the merchandise in an overcrowded market. Irrepressibly irreverent, the rock ’n’ roll-inspired novelist is an outstanding “authorpreneur” whose achievements contain lessons for self-starters and scholars alike. Half a century after Carrie, the first of his many bestsellers, this article identifies the secrets of Stephen King’s success.

When low-income and disadvantaged individuals start businesses—herein, poverty entrepreneurs—the experience of fear can be especially impactful on their behavior. In this article, we explore the role of fear as an obstacle and facilitator in both the launching and development of ventures by poverty entrepreneurs. Two primary fears are examined. The first, fear of failure, has been examined extensively by scholars yet has received scant attention concerning poverty entrepreneurs. Our second focus is the fear of success, which has received even less emphasis and is not well-understood in the context of business. It is a seemingly paradoxical notion that individuals can perceive negative consequences from what is otherwise a successful outcome. Using experiences from the Urban Poverty and Business Initiative—an 11-month annual intervention program that operates in 32 cities across the globe and serves over 2,000 disadvantaged entrepreneurs—we developed a series of focus groups with poverty entrepreneurs to learn more about their encounters with fear. A reconceptualization of these fears in a poverty context is provided. The potential upsides and downsides of fear when it comes to entrepreneurial behavior are examined, and implications are drawn from the coexistence of fears of failure and success.

The rise of employee mobility over the past few decades has significant implications for both organizational performance and individual careers. The traditional organizational response aims to combat turnover with increased retention efforts, but we offer an alternative strategy. In this article, we suggest that organizations also support employee mobility by proactively implementing practices that prepare workers for the next step in their career, whether that be internal or external from the company. When strategically combined, these practices can support a climate for career mobility. Drawing on extant management literature and industry publications, we demonstrate how organizations can create and support a climate for career mobility via workforce planning, job design, recruiting, onboarding, offboarding, and total rewards. Taken together, a strategic bundle of practices allows employers to support the careers of mobile workers as well as advance the goals and performance of the organization.

The Web 2.0 digital economy, centered on dominant platforms, generates substantial opportunities for managers and entrepreneurs yet creates critical dependencies. Platform-dependent businesses engage in competitive actions—rivalrous, competitive-cooperative, and relational—vis-à-vis digital platforms to gain a fair share of economic value. While the (supposedly) trustworthy custodians of digital data have captured a disproportionate share of revenue and profits, Web3 promises to tilt the balance away from dominant platforms by providing mechanisms that replace centralized organizational trust with decentralized technological trust. Here, innovations such as blockchains and smart contracts complement antitrust laws and regulations in limiting platform power. Furthermore, this study suggests that end users, peers, and regulators may play an important role in helping businesses draw investors’, users’, and customers’ attention away from Web 2.0 platforms. To effectively leverage decentralized trust as a novel aspect of competitive actions, business leaders must pursue Web3 technologies that are reliable, high-growth market segments that are credible, and ventures that are investable.