Difficult differences pave the creative road from diversity to performance

In this article, we argue that engagement with differences is important for the relationship between diversity and organizational performance. This importance is explained by the increased potential for creativity and innovation coming out of working in diverse teams. We recognize that difference and diversity can act as a double-edged sword for creativity and also contend that such differences are a fundamental condition for novelty and value to emerge. It is because of differences and not despite them that we create at individual, group, and organizational levels and a European approach to this topic – given Europe's history and philosophical traditions – recognizes the major role played of creative tensions and even conflict in innovation and in society more broadly. In this paper, we review literature that relates creativity and business performance, creativity, and diversity and examine the role of disagreement and tension, both conceptually and based on empirical evidence. We conclude by stressing the point that creativity often comes out of difficult differences, a European lesson that is easily forgotten, in Europe as well as globally.     

Top management team diversity and ambidexterity: The contingent role of shared responsibility and CEO cognitive trust

Earlier research has suggested that diversity is a double-edged sword when achieving organizational ambidexterity. While it may contribute to the development of new combinations of exploration and exploitation, it may also lead to disagreements and potential conflict within top management teams (TMTs). To improve our understanding of the effectiveness of diversity in ambidextrous organizations, we develop a synergistic perspective on TMT diversity and examine how two types of diversity – functional and age diversity – affect the achievement of organizational ambidexterity. We also identify shared responsibility and CEO cognitive trust as important contingencies that may complement the effects of diversity within TMTs in terms of resolving potential conflicts and managing tensions between exploration and exploitation effectively. Based on multisource data, our study shows that CEO cognitive trust and shared responsibility moderate the relationship between different types of diversity and ambidexterity. Our study has important implications for research on organizational ambidexterity, diversity, and senior leadership.     

Knowledge Diversity and Venture Growth: The Contingent Effects of Early Planning and Experimentation

Drawing on an information processing perspective, we explore to what extent early venture activities allow founding teams to leverage their diverse knowledge to achieve venture growth. Using data from 103 young ventures, we find that early planning enables founding teams to better exploit the diverse knowledge resulting from their heterogeneity in educational background. However, venture growth is highest when diverse teams simultaneously plan and experiment in the early venture phase. This study challenges extant explanations of when early behaviours shape the efficient usage of existing venture resources. We discuss the contribution of these findings to the literature on founding teams, planning and experimentation, and team diversity.     

Job-related diversity: the comprehensiveness and speed of board decision-making processes—an upper echelons approach

Strategic decision-making processes influence firm-level outcomes. Using the theory of upper echelons, this study investigates how diversity in directors’ skills, knowledge, and industry experience influence board decision-making processes that may impact overall strategic decision-making processes. Such diversity has been commonly accepted to be a ‘double-edged sword’—enhancing comprehensiveness but hindering the speed of decision-making. On the contrary, we used an existing large survey database to show that directors’ diverse educational background, functional background, and industry experience (job-related diversity) have a positive effect on comprehensiveness as well as the speed of board decision-making. In addition, our results indicate that board processes (directors’ use of their knowledge and skills) play an important role by transmitting the positive effects of diversity. The study is in a tradition of exploring how boards may influence firms’ strategic decision-making processes. Our findings provide additional arguments for adding job-related diversity to boards of directors.     

Managing Nationality Diversity: The Interactive Effect of Leaders’ Cultural Intelligence and Task Interdependence

In light of the workforce's increasing nationality diversity, our study explores the antecedents for the successful management of nationality diversity as visualized in a favourable diversity climate and enhanced team performance. We propose a double‐contingency model in which we argue that the effects of nationality diversity will be dependent upon task interdependence and leaders’ cultural intelligence. We propose that nationality diversity will be more consequential in more interdependent teams, in which team interactions and processes are more salient. Moreover, team leaders with higher cultural intelligence will possess the skills to foster adequate team processes and thereby enhance diversity climate and performance of nationally diverse, more interdependent teams. We collected multi‐source data from 63 work teams (N = 410) and their supervisors at a German facility management company. Moderated regression analyses supported the hypothesized three‐way interaction between nationality diversity, task interdependence and leaders’ cultural intelligence. Additional simple slope analysis showed that nationality diversity is positively related to diversity climate and performance only when both team leaders’ cultural intelligence and task interdependence are high. Our study not only provides recommendations for successful nationality diversity management but also yields theoretical implications for diversity and cultural intelligence research.     

Top management team diversity and high performance: An integrative approach based on upper echelons and complexity theory

This paper analyses Top Management Team (TMT) composition diversity as an antecedent of firm performance in accordance with a recent paradigm based on Complexity Theory. Research into TMT diversity is commonly seen as a double-edged sword because inconclusive results have been achieved in prior studies. This controversy has reinforced the call to employ a more appropriate methodology by moving beyond the reliance on multiple regression analysis and towards the use of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The study provides various TMT diversity configurations that lead to high performance. The study therefore contributes towards the TMT diversity literature by utilising asymmetric testing to advance in the understanding of the diversity of TMT attributes as an antecedent of high firm outcome. The paradigm currently facing TMT internal complexity is doubly relevant for managers, to ascertain the best TMT diversity compositions to achieve the best strategic goal and thereby the highest firm outcome, and for new research avenues in the demographic literature, to obtain richer insights from TMT data, which might provide additional information on the complex relations established within these TMTs.     

Conceptualizing Emergent States: A Strategy to Advance the Study of Group Dynamics

In this review, we aim to advance work on group and team dynamics by examining how important elements of dynamism are embedded in the current literature on emergent states in groups. We use the concept of emergence as an organizing frame, building block, and critical lens, first summarizing key aspects of the extant literature on emergence, and then drawing four core characteristics of emergent phenomena from this literature. We use these characteristics to organize our review and examine how emergent states are portrayed in the past decade of groups literature. We end by exploring challenges to the development of a more dynamic perspective and by offering specific suggestions to guide and advance future work on groups and teams.     

Leading teams in the digital age: Four perspectives on technology and what they mean for leading teams

Digital technologies are changing the nature of teamwork in ways that have important implications for leadership. Though conceptually rich and multi-disciplinary, much of the burgeoning work on technology has not been fully integrated into the leadership literature. To fill this gap, we organize existing work on leadership and technology, outlining four perspectives: (1) technology as context, (2) technology as sociomaterial, (3) technology as creation medium, and (4) technology as teammate. Each technology perspective makes assumptions about how technologies affect teams and the needs for team leadership. Within each perspective, we detail current work on leading teams. This section takes us from virtual teams to new vistas posed by leading online communities, crowds, peer production groups, flash teams, human-robot teams, and human-artificial intelligence teams. We identify 12 leadership implications arising from the ways digital technologies affect organizing. We then leverage our review to identify directions for future leadership research and practice.     

Determinants of group-level overconfidence in teams: A quasi-experimental investigation of diversity and tenure

Teams of business leaders make most strategic decisions in organizations. However, although a large body of research has analyzed cognitive biases of individual leaders, little is known about how those biases affect teams on the group level. Therefore, on the basis of research into group decision making and group diversity, we analyze demographic diversity and group tenure as two important determinants of overconfidence in groups. We report findings from a quasi-experimental field study involving 46 management teams, which suggest that diversity and tenure have separate, direct effects on group overconfidence. More specifically, we show that demographic diversity reduces group overconfidence, while group tenure increases it. These findings add a dynamic dimension to the conceptualization of group overconfidence in teams.     

渠道多元化对制造商-经销商之间合作关系的影响

从渠道冲突、渠道协作(共同制定计划和共同解决问题)入手,探讨渠道多元化对制造商-经销商之间合作关系的影响。通过对477份调查问卷所得数据进行统计分析,实证研究表明:①渠道多元化会增加制造商-经销商之间的冲突;②渠道多元化会促进双方的协作水平;③渠道多元化对制造商-经销商之间的合作关系有“双刃剑”效应,即渠道多元化会激化渠道冲突从而降低制造商对合作的满意度,同时会促进渠道协作从而提升制造商对合作的满意度。     

Cultural and societal influences on shared leadership in globally dispersed teams

Leading globally dispersed teams poses critical challenges, especially if the team members are not only physically separated, but also culturally diverse and their tasks are dynamic and complex. It has been argued that shared leadership behaviors, such as continuous reflection, anticipation of a team's information needs, and initiating a team's social influence, positively influence virtual team performance. Country-level effects on shared leadership in globally dispersed teams, however, have been neglected. Building on the country institutional profile developed by Kostova (1997), we argue that regulative, cognitive, and normative components influence the likelihood that the individual will engage in shared leadership behaviors. Analyzing the differences between the institutional profiles of team members' home countries as reflected in institutional diversity as a team-level property, we furthermore point to different levels of institutional diversity as an enabling or hindering condition of shared leadership.     

Team Microdynamics: Toward an Organizing Approach to Teamwork

ABSTRACT

Team researchers in the field of organizational behavior (OB) seem to be increasingly aware of the need to embrace the organizing nature of teams. In this article, we outline the limitations of the prevailing static collectivist explanations in team research and suggest how an increased emphasis on a microdynamics-oriented approach that takes into account the essentially relational and organizing nature of teams can provide new insights to our understanding of teamwork. We argue that a multilevel, multi-theoretical, and multi-period framework may help enhance our understanding of teams. To show the advancements of the field in this sense, we review the OB literature on teams and highlight exemplars of research that have started to emphasize the microdynamic nature of teams consistent with this general framework, and their contributions to our understanding of team phenomena. We conclude by outlining the opportunities and needs for a microdynamic insight into team and teamwork, providing guidance for scholars who are interested in adding a microdynamic perspective into their models of teamwork.     

The effect of cognitive diversity on the illusion of control bias in strategic decisions: An experimental investigation

By integrating cognitive diversity into debiasing literature, this paper contributes towards opening the black box of executive judgment. Based on information processing theory we investigate the role of cognitive diversity in strategic decision making. We apply a vignette-based experimental research design to examine the effect of cognitive diversity in teams on decision maker's illusion of control. The results of these experiments provide evidence for a positive influence of high cognitive diversity for debiasing judgment while similarly indicating no such effect for groups with low cognitive diversity. These findings suggest that group composition aspects can play an important role for improving judgment in decision making teams and open promising new avenues for studying debiasing in behavioral strategy research.     

Communication after an integrity-based trust violation: How organizational account giving affects trust

How can an organization repair trust through communication after an ethical failure? This study examines how trust is repaired after an integrity-based trust violation using three different accounts: apology, excuse, and refusal. In our approach, we rely on two strands of attribution theory, which suggests that different attributions for responsibility and credibility affect trust. An experiment with n = 368 was conducted to explore trust repair effectiveness of apology versus refusal and apology versus excuse after an integrity-based trust violation. Results revealed apology as a double-edged sword; it repairs trust more successfully than refusal and excuse because it is evaluated as more credible. However, it is less successful than refusal and excuse because it is evaluated as more responsible.     

Transformer in navigation: Diverse government roles for open innovation in China's high-speed rail

Based on a longitudinal case study of China's high-speed rail embedded in the emerging economy context, we focus on what role the government plays and how that matters to open innovation (OI) for competitive advantage. By linking the OI literature with the national political institutions literature to motivate our research question, we propose a statist-based OI view to differentiate diverse government roles, investigating how government adopts roles in a combined way to push OI in stages. Our findings suggest that government is an important strategic decision-maker for OI. Specifically, the government plays various roles as commander, protector, cultivator, and intermediator, reflecting state activism derived from national political institutions, to construct institutional-level OI for domestic OI activities, and inbound and outbound OI across national borders. We find government can deliberately and strategically use its diverse roles in a combined way to push OI for competitive advantage through the industrial evolutionary process over time. Our study contributes to the OI literature and integrates the strategic management literature with the study of OI to provide new insights to explain the origins of competitive advantage from the state perspective.     

The double-edged sword of CEO/chairperson duality in corporatized state-owned firms: evidence from top management turnover in China

This study examines how board leadership structure (CEO duality) affects the corporate governance of corporatized state-owned firms where the state shareholders use these firms to serve both profit and non-profit objectives. We propose that CEO duality will generate a positive (negative) significant impact on the firms’ corporate governance when state owners tend to monitor their CEOs on the basis of profit (non-profit) considerations. We test our hypotheses by examining the relations between CEO duality and CEO turnover in Chinese listed companies that are ultimately controlled by central or local governments. We find that CEO duality is negatively related to turnover in marginal profit-making firms where turnover would be value-enhancing. This suggests that CEO duality is detrimental to these firms’ corporate governance because it entrenches relatively poorly performing CEOs. Duality is also negatively related to turnover in high-profitability firms where turnover would be non-value-enhancing. This suggests that CEO duality might positively contribute to the corporate governance of these firms by reducing the occurrence of non-value enhancing turnover. Overall, our study suggests that CEO duality is a double-edged sword in corporatized state-owned firms.     

More than a Metaphor: Assessing the Historical Legacy of Resource Dependence and its Contemporary Promise as a Theory of Environmental Complexity

At its inception, resource dependence (RD) held the promise to become a robustly developed theoretical perspective. However, behind an ever-growing citation count, scholars—including one of its key architects—have asserted that RD no longer inspires much substantive research and now serves as little more than an appealing metaphor about organizations [Pfeffer, J. (2003). Introduction to the classic edition. In J. Pfeffer & G.R. Salancik, The external control of organizations: A resource dependence perspective (classic edition). New York: Harper & Row]. A systematic analysis of RD's uses in the management literature lends some credence to this assessment. However, our analysis also shows a perspective that has been broadly influential and well-supported in applications that cross multiple empirical domains. Moreover, this impact has been achieved despite the widespread neglect of what is arguably RD's most distinctive insight; namely that an organization's external environment is composed of other organizations with diverse agendas and interests. The complexity that arises from these competing demands represents an important challenge for contemporary organizations. As scholars begin to crystalize a research agenda around this theme using an institutional logics perspective, we suggest that RD's unique insights on the topic are the keys to unlocking its contemporary relevance.     

Brand deletion implementation: The effect on performance of context and process factors

Although brand deletion (BD) is a key strategic decision within brand portfolio management, it has received very little attention in the scientific literature. This research expands the knowledge base on the BD strategy, particularly in the execution phase. Based on the literature addressing strategic change and marketing strategy implementation, this study explores the main and interaction effects of context (decentralization and consensus) and process (formalization and communication) implementation factors on the success of BD, measured in terms of its contribution to the firm’s economic performance. Using a representative sample of 155 cases of BD, we show that the four factors are related to BD performance, although these relations are complex and intertwined. Consensus, communication, and decentralization positively affect BD performance, with consensus being particularly influential. Formalization is found to be a double-edged sword as the effects of formalizing the execution of the deletion are particularly convoluted.     

基于SKT-ARFIMA-HYGARCH-VaR模型的股票型基金投资风格漂移风险测度研究

投资风格漂移是把双刃剑,基金在获取短期超额收益的同时,其背后也折射出巨大的漂移风险。本文以2004年成立的8只开放式股票型基金为研究样本,在量化基金投资风格漂移收益及分析其序列呈尖峰、厚尾与有偏特征的基础上,通过引入skt分布来刻画新生变量的分布,构建ARFIMA-HYGARCH-VaR模型来测度基金投资风格漂移风险值,并与skt分布下的RiskMetrics及GARCH族等5种VaR模型的风险测度能力做了比较实证分析,同时对各种VaR模型进行失败频率回测检验与动态分位数测试。研究结果表明:在不同显著性水平下,skt分布下的各种模型基本都有较好的风险测度能力,但ARFIMA-HYGARCH模型的VaR风险测度更加精确与稳定;Person吻合度检验也证实了skt分布能较好刻画投资风格漂移日收益序列的分布。本研究为控制较严重的投资风格漂移及规范基金产品创新设计与发行无疑具有重要的理论价值与现实意义。     

The Formation of Group Affect and Team Effectiveness: The Moderating Role of Identification

In the current research we use the social identity perspective to enhance our understanding of group affect (i.e. a collectively shared pattern of affective states among group members). Because higher identification (i.e. the extent to which group members define themselves in terms of their group membership) is related to higher attentiveness to fellow group members, we expected that group identification would foster affective convergence, and that the effects of group affective tone on team effectiveness would be stronger for higher identifying groups. A survey of teams (n=71 teams) confirmed our expectations. A scenario experiment (n=121 participants) added to our findings by showing that identification does indeed lead group members to affectively converge to their fellow group members and that this affective convergence, in turn, explains subsequent team‐oriented attitudes. Our study testifies to the notion that team managers may want to take notice of and manage affect in work groups, because, especially in higher identifying teams, affect may spread among team members and influence the team's effectiveness.