Hong Kong managers' perceptions of American business values

This report describes empirical research conducted to study the research question, “To what extent do foreign managers' own cultural values influence their perceptions of the corporate values of companies in other cultures?” Using the authors' “Business Values Questionnaire,” business managers from Hong Kong gave their perceptions of publicly stated corporate values of very large U.S. service companies. A similar United States sample was used as a comparison group. Results gave partial support to the authors' hypotheses that an individual's own cultural values influence perceived values of another culture.     

Values and behaviors of effective lean managers: Mixed-methods exploratory research

Lean Management is a managerial approach focused on enhancing customer value through the elimination of non-value adding steps from work processes. Lean Management is also enjoying a resurgence, largely because its ‘do more with less’ philosophy is particularly well-suited for the austere conditions of a 'Great Recession' recovery. Despite this resurgence with practitioners, however, academic research of Lean Management, in particular research on the leadership of lean initiatives, remains limited. In this study, we identify a constellation of lean values and behaviors of effective lean managers, based on extant research and the views of expert practitioners, and a field study of lean managers. In the first of two empirical studies, we produce an initial list of values and behaviors, derived from both the lean and leadership literature, and from three Delphi rounds with 19 expert lean practitioners. In study 2, we corroborate and refine the list with a sample of effective lean middle managers, through 18 interviews; a survey (N = 43); and fine-grained video-analyses of their in situ behaviors during meetings with subordinates. The values identified include: honesty, candor, participation and teamwork, and continuous improvement—all indicative of self-transcendence and openness to change. Regarding behaviors, we find that the effective lean middle managers of our sample, compared to other middle managers, engage significantly more in positive relations-oriented “active listening” and “agreeing” behaviors, and significantly less in “task monitoring” and counterproductive work behaviors (such as “providing negative feedback” and “defending one's own position”). To conclude, we put forward five new propositions intended to guide future research and a more successful practice of ‘lean leadership.’     

An organizational approach to undoing gender: The unlikely case of offshore oil platforms

This case study of two offshore oil platforms illustrates how an organizational initiative designed to enhance safety and effectiveness created a culture that unintentionally released men from societal imperatives for “manly” behavior, prompting them to let go of masculine-image concerns and to behave instead in counter-stereotypical ways. Rather than proving how tough, proficient, and cool-headed they were, as was typical of men in other dangerous workplaces, platform workers readily acknowledged their physical limitations, publicly admitted their mistakes, and openly attended to their own and others’ feelings. Importantly, platform workers did not replace a conventional image of masculinity with an unconventional one and then set out to prove the new image—revealing mistakes strategically, for example, or competing in displays of sensitivity. Instead, the goal of proving one's masculine credentials, conventional or otherwise, appeared to no longer hold sway in men's workplace interactions. Building on West and Zimmerman's (1987: 129) now classic articulation of gender as “the product of social doings,” we describe this organizationally induced behavior as “undoing” gender. We use this case, together with secondary case data drawn from 10 published field studies of men doing dangerous work, to induce a model of how organizational cultures equip men to “do” and “undo” gender at work.     

Do dimensions of culture exist objectively? A validation of the revised Minkov-Hofstede model of culture with World Values Survey items and scores for 102 countries

Decades ago, Hofstede claimed that dimensions of culture are entirely subjective creations. In this study, we claim that some measures of culture have an objective element. We focus on Hofstede's classic model, reduced to just two dimensions: individualism-collectivism (IDV-COLL) and long-term orientation, renamed “flexibility-monumentalism” (FLX-MON). Recent studies showed that: (1) all valid and reproducible dimensions of culture, from all models, are essentially variants of these two, (2) this 2D model has a close analogue in dimensions of behaviors measured across the world's countries, (3) the same model emerges across the 50 US states, (4) an analysis of all recurrent culture-related items in the World Values Survey (WVS) yields a similar 2D model that can be further aligned with it after targeted rotation, (5) the model is aligned approximately with the Earth's geographic axes. In this study, we used WVS items and expanded Minkov's IDV-COLL and FLX-MON 55-country indices with scores for another 47 countries. Our IDV-COLL and FLX-MON 102-country indices are predictors of 20 important extraneous variables, relevant in international business (such as transparency-corruption, political and economic freedom, competitiveness, innovation output, ICT adoption, fatalities in transport and industry, gender equality, economic equality, educational achievement, working hours, violent crime, etc.). Of all dimensions of culture, IDV-COLL and FLX-MON are the only predictors of the two factors behind these extraneous variables. IDV-MON and FLX-MON also yield the highest correlations with objective geographic variables, such as latitude-longitude, Welzel's “cool water”, as well as pathogen prevalence. This gives further credibility to the revised Minkov-Hofstede 2D model and confirms its objective element.     

Heterogeneous Submission Behavior and its Implications for Success in Innovation Contests with Public Submissions

Innovation contests are increasingly adopting a format where submissions are viewable by all contestants and the information structure changes during the contest. In such an “unblind” format, contestants must weigh the costs of revealing their submissions against the benefits of improving their submissions through emerging information. We take a closer look at how contestants solve problems in innovation contests with public submission of solutions—that is, unblind contests, by examining the implications of their submission behavior for contest outcomes. We analyze the submission behavior in terms of three dimensions: the position of first submission by the contestant, the number of submissions the contestant makes, and the length of active participation by the contestant. The econometric analysis of a large dataset of unblind innovation contests and participating contestants indicates that, despite the potential for free riding and intellectual property loss from disclosure of submissions, contestants who have a lower position of first submission are more likely to succeed in the contest. Further, we find some evidence of a curvilinear relationship between a contestant's number of submissions and her likelihood of success, indicating a potential “quality–quantity” trade‐off in unblind innovation contests. Finally, our findings indicate that increasing the length of participation in a contest has a positive effect on a contestant's likelihood of success. Departing from prior studies on innovation contests, where a contestant's success is assumed to be a function of her prior experience and problem‐solving skills, our study provides new empirical evidence that, in innovation contests with public submissions, the submission behavior of a contestant also plays an explanatory role in a contestant's success.     

Managers in the NAFTA countries: A cross-cultural comparison of attitudes toward upward influence strategies

This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison of U.S., Canadian-Anglophone, Canadian-Francophone, and Mexican managers' attitudes toward upward influence strategies. Generally, it was found that all four groups have similar perspectives in terms of the relative acceptability of various influence strategies. However, examination of absolute ratings of influence behaviors suggests that Canadian-Francophones could serve as a cultural “linking-pin” along a continuum anchored by Anglo cultures at one end and the Latin-American culture of Mexico at the other. Implications for cross-cultural interactions within the NAFTA region are discussed.     

Labor Market Intermediaries and the New Paradigm for Human Resources

Labor market intermediaries (LMIs) are entities that stand between the individual worker and the organization that needs work done. They include well-known operations such as executive search firms that act as brokers to fill jobs and temp agencies that lease labor to clients but also less familiar entities such as professional employer organizations (PEOs) that take on the legal obligations of employment for clients. LMI's mediate between individual workers and the organizations that need work done, shaping how workers are matched to organizations, how tasks are performed, and how conflicts are resolved [Autor, D.H. (2009). Studies of labor market intermediation: Introduction. In D. Autor (Ed.), Studies of labor market intermediation (pp. 1–26). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press]. They essentially disintermediate aspects of management that had been performed by employers. The growth and increasing prominence of LMI's is important for all research associated with the workplace because we can no longer do a study of “workers” in an organization and assume that they are all employees: Some may be temps under contract to an agency, some may be “employed” by a PEO, some may work for vendors. The reason that matters is because LMI's appear to alter attitudes and behaviors on all sides. For example, they change the bilateral, employee–employer relationship into a three-way “triangular” relationship. They may well create “dual allegiance” issues, where individuals feel ties to the search firm that placed them in their current job and their employer or the agency that employs them and the client on whose behalf they are currently working. Most fundamentally, they challenge the existing paradigms we have used to understand the workplace: Does “attraction–selection–attrition” have any relevance, for example, when employers hire temps placed by agencies into permanent jobs? What does career development mean when the person with the most influence over your next job is a search consultant? There is already an extensive literature on LMIs, but it is spread across disciplines and fields and mainly examines the labor market outcomes associated with the use of LMIs. The literature lacks a management voice. We know relatively little about the effects of LMIs on workplace attitudes and behaviors, the central focus of organizational behavior; about how LMIs and the associated rise of outside hiring change how we should think about topics such as recruiting and selection, a central concern of personnel psychology; we know even less about how LMIs change the way firms think about competencies and boundaries of the firm, central topics in strategy, when the firm's workforce is actually employed by another organization or when it can be reshuffled very quickly. We develop a taxonomy of LMIs and use it to classify the burgeoning but disjointed literature on LMIs across the social sciences. We classify LMIs in terms of three main attributes of human resource (HR) practices that they perform: Information Providers, Matchmakers, and Administrators. We describe first how LMI activities differ from HR management practices performed by employers in the traditional relationship. Second, we outline the existing research about how LMIs affect employment outcomes, such as access to employment, wages, work-related attitudes and behaviors, working conditions, and skill development. Finally, we highlight the implications of LMIs for management research, especially new, understudied research questions that need to be addressed.     

An organizational approach for the study of the diffusion of process innovation strategies in internal auditing and control systems

Davenport (1993a) has pointed out that the diffusion of innovation approach as a behavioral process change has been limited to the study of how new information technology can be successfully adopted, rather than “how innovation can improve organizational performance.” This article extends Davenport's challenge to bridge this research gap by applying the diffusion of innovation approach to study accounting and control systems as an administrative process innovation approach to improve business performance. We chose to study internal auditing because it constitutes an important aspect of an administrative process innovation program that is critical for improving business performance programs.     

The role of transformational leadership in enhancing organizational innovation: Hypotheses and some preliminary findings

A wide range of factors has been found to affect organizational innovation. Of these, top managers' leadership style has been identified as being one of the most, if not the most, important. Yet, few studies have empirically examined the link between this factor and innovation at the organizational level. This study builds on the extant literature to propose four hypotheses about how top managers' leadership styles directly and indirectly (via empowerment and organizational climate) affect their companies' innovation. A multisource approach is used to collect survey data from 32 Taiwanese companies in the electronics/telecommunications industry. The findings support a direct and positive link between a style of leadership that has been labeled as “transformational” and organizational innovation. They also indicate that transformational leadership has significant and positive relations with both empowerment and an innovation-supporting organizational climate. The former is found to have a significant but negative relation with organizational innovation, while the latter has a significant and positive relationship. The implications of the findings and possible directions for future research are discussed.     

Complementary effects of clusters and networks on firm innovation: A conceptual model

We develop a conceptual model that explains how a firm's cluster and network complement each other in enhancing the firm's likelihood of technological innovations. We identify critical innovation catalysts-awareness and motivation—and innovation barriers—resource constraints, organizational rigidity, and uncertainty. Our conceptual model explains how various factors in the cluster such as competitive intensity, social interaction intensity, and cluster vitality and network factors such as resource potential, acquisition orientation, co-development orientation, and network vitality impact innovation catalysts and barriers and subsequently the firm's likelihood of generating incremental and breakthrough innovations. We discuss several promising avenues for future research.     

Examining Pathways from Innovation Orientation to Patient Satisfaction: A Relational View of Healthcare Delivery*

The federal government and industry leaders view innovation as a potentially fruitful way to improve hospital performance, specifically patient satisfaction. However, translating a hospital's innovation orientation into improved performance is challenging given that important network participants—namely physicians—may possess different aims. Grounded in Relational RBV, this study tests a model linking innovation orientation to patient satisfaction through a pathway of knowledge‐sharing routines (physician partnering and customer relationship management) and complementary capabilities (hospital responsiveness). Further, this study investigates the moderating role of physician employment (a form of governance) by examining hospitals with high and low levels of employed physicians. Structural Equation Modeling results from a paired sample of primary survey and secondary data from 173 acute care hospitals in the USA reveal the following. Hospitals with high levels of employed physicians translate innovation orientation into patient satisfaction by using customer relationship management (CRM) programs to influence hospital responsiveness directly, ultimately leading to patient satisfaction. Hospitals with low levels of physician employment use CRM programs in a fully mediated fashion to inform physician partnering activities, which influence hospital responsiveness, driving patient satisfaction.     

Following unique logics despite institutional complexity: An inductive study of academic inventors and institutional logics

This paper examines how institutional complexity, due to the availability of multiple logics, influences the behavior of academic inventors during an innovation process. Based on four case studies of medical technology innovations, this paper identifies three logics influencing academic inventors’ behavior: academic, market, and care logics. We identify several patterns that characterize the practices of academic inventors in a context with multiple institutional logics. Despite the availability of multiple logics, we observe a strong pattern of academic inventors predominantly following the market or the care logic. As for the influence of multiple logics, we find very limited interaction between logics (i.e., reinforcing, complementary and conflicting interaction), with the prevalent pattern being “no interaction” between institutional logics. Thus, instead of following several logics, academic inventors’ specific practices are mostly guided by a “unique” logic. This influence of logics leads to a clear pattern of “dominant” influence on behavior, reflected in individual strategies of “entrenching,” that is, a strategy based on building one’s behavior on a “unique” logic. However, the same available logics can also generate "aligned" influence, entailing behavior guided by several logics. But this occurs only if the academic inventor faces uncertainty regarding the exploitation of the intellectual property. With these findings, we add to the ongoing discussion concerning institutional complexity and individual behavior by elucidating in detail how institutional complexity can entail behavior guided by “unique” logics.     

How Provider Selection and Management Contribute to Successful Innovation Outsourcing: An Empirical Study at Siemens

It is becoming increasingly common to involve external technology providers in developing new technologies and new products. Two important phases involved in working with technology vendors are vendor selection and vendor management. Because for both steps theory development of key decision guidelines is still immature, we use detailed case studies of 31 innovation outsourcing projects at Siemens to develop grounded theory on provider selection criteria and on project management success drivers. A selection criterion often associated with successful outsourcing is the provider's “track record” or previous experience. Our cases suggest that there is no standard “track record” for success but that a “match” between the client firm's outsourcing motivation and the provider's strengths appears to be a necessary condition for a successful outsourcing collaboration. As to the second phase—managing the vendor—we identify a number of operational project success drivers. There seems to be no universal checklist, but the most important drivers seem to be contingent on the type of vendor chosen and on the maturity of the technology. We compare five provider types—universities, competitors, customers, start‐up companies, and component suppliers—and find that some success drivers are common to all providers, while others are relevant only for certain types of provider. Moreover, drivers in the case of a mature technology are more focused on successful transfer to manufacturing than on development itself. Our findings offer guidelines for innovation managers on how to select innovation providers and how to manage them during the project.     

Putting the “psychic” Back in Psychic Distance: Awareness,Perceptions, and Understanding as Dimensions of Psychic Distance

Unlike the IB literature whose emphasis within the term ‘psychic distance’ has been more on “distance” and less on “psychic,” our starting point is all “psychic” and no “distance,” assuming distance is defined as the difference between two countries. We propose that psychic distance be centered on the firm's managers and explain how their cognitive limitations, perceptions, heuristics, and experiences interact with a foreign environment to influence their decision making. We replace the conventional definition of distance with the cognitive dimensions of managerial awareness, perceptions, and understanding. Awareness captures the manager's consciousness of foreign context elements relevant to the firm's decision, perception is the manager's interpretation of the extent of these relevant environmental elements, and a manager's understanding captures the relationships among these context elements and the firm's decision. We argue that a multidimensional psychic distance construct is necessary as many of distance's problems are due to the illusion it promises of capturing a manager's perception of a complex foreign environment in a single number. Our approach eliminates distance's problems of symmetry and linearity. It also eliminates the constraint that distance is only associated with negative outcomes. After explaining the theoretical value of awareness, perception, and understanding by developing propositions predicting context traps, we present our operationalization of psychic distance.     

Coping with Diversity in Alliances for Innovation: The Role of Relational Social Capital and Knowledge Codifiability

Alliances are increasingly considered a key element for innovation, especially in knowledge‐intensive firms. While this is true, the mere membership to alliances does not explain innovation performance, and thus the alliance's characteristics that determine high performance must be examined. This research address the question of how the diversity of partners in a certain alliance for innovation affects innovation performance, and how this influence can be moderated by certain characteristics, such as the relational dimension of social capital and the type of knowledge shared among partners. The empirical analysis of a sample of 90 biotech companies shows that there is an inverted U‐shaped relationship between alliance partner diversity and innovation performance and confirms the positive moderating effects of relational social capital and knowledge codifiability. These findings contribute to the current research on alliances for innovation by providing empirical evidence on why some alliances perform better than others. Also, the results suggest that the study of alliance partner diversity, as a determinant of alliance performance, should not be addressed in isolation.     

R&D员工领导创新期望、内部动机与创新行为研究

在现代组织行为研究领域推动员工创造、创新的组织行为研究是一个热点问题。本文通过对我国跨地区企业研发员工的问卷调查研究对领导创新期望、员工内部工作动机及其创新行为间的关系进行了实证探讨。研究发现,在我国背景下,直属领导对下属员工的创新期望、员工之间横向交换对研发员工创新的行为都具有正向预测作用,其中员工内在工作动机在领导创新期望、员工横向交换对员工创新行为的作用路径关系中起到中介效应。本研究的调查结论不仅有助于加深我们对组织内员工创新行为推动和作用机制的深入了解,同时也会对我国企业,特别是高新技术企业推动员工创新的管理实践提供借鉴。     

Ecological stewardship in Japanese firms

As pressure develops for foreign multinationals to follow the lead of U.S. companies by providing greater accountability on environmental performance and the development of environmental management systems; author Jacob Park brings CES readers a rare insight into the nature of Japanese environmental strategy. With examples from NEC's “green innovation” plan, Mr. Park reveals the strategic initiatives Japanese companies institute to address their own unique set of internal and external pressures.     

Chemicals,companies, and countries: The concept of diffusion in management research

In the field of organizational behavior, the term “diffusion” has come to be implicitly paired with the concept of innovation and a peculiar set of conceptual choices. We explore how this came about, and examine the evolution of the concept “diffusion” from its inception in the English language through its use in the natural and social sciences to its current meaning in organizational research. A sensemaking perspective on researchers’ cognition helps us explain the changing meaning of the concept, and alerts researchers to the subtle but far-reaching effects of revisions in a field's conceptual language. Even though the field of organizational studies ostensibly treats diffusion as a neutral phenomenon, it implicitly narrates diffusion as a mechanical and positive process that should be welcomed and encouraged. The implications of this reframing become even more important with the increasing focus on innovation in recent diffusion studies. The diffusion of new products among consumers and the diffusion of market institutions around the world are things of a rather different nature and consequence, but treating them as implicitly equivalent “innovations” that “diffuse” naturalizes and hence legitimates them. We conclude by noting implications of our findings for exploring the evolution of meaning for other concepts, and their utilization in research on organizations.     

Identifying success factors for female entrepreneurs using the AMO framework: Empirical evidence from Japan

This study applies deep insights from the ability, motivation, and opportunity (AMO) framework as an overarching theoretical perspective to identify critical success factors for female entrepreneurs. In doing so, it investigates how entrepreneurial persistence (i.e., motivation or “M”), together with prior venture experience (i.e., ability or “A”) and competitive intensity (i.e., opportunity or “O”) influence the success of women's entrepreneurial activities. Using data from 308 Japanese female entrepreneurs, we show a positive association between entrepreneurial persistence and female entrepreneurs' venture growth, which becomes stronger when prior venture experience and competitive intensity are considered. Most importantly, the three-way interaction between these factors maximizes the business performance of female entrepreneurs. Thus, venture growth is the highest in the presence of high levels of entrepreneurial persistence, prior venture experience, and competitive intensity. Our findings suggest that policy makers should improve the competitiveness of women-led ventures and create supportive business environments for female entrepreneurs.     

On becoming a leader in Asia and America: Empirical evidence from women managers

In concordance with recent calls for cross-cultural leadership research as well as research on women leaders, this study investigated how women in Asia and the U.S. become leaders and how they enact their leadership. In-depth interviews with 76 mid- to upper-level female managers in Asia (China, India, Singapore) and the U.S. were conducted. Analyses revealed that a simple dichotomy of “Asian” versus “Western” leadership did not appropriately describe the data. Rather, factors such as achievement orientation, learning orientation, and role models emerged as crucial success factors for advancement to leadership positions across continents. However, the particular meaning differed between countries. Furthermore, with regard to women's leadership style differences between Asian countries were more salient than between Asia and the U.S. Implications for leadership theory and practice are discussed.