A performance measurement paradigm for integrating strategy formulation: A review of systems and frameworks

Measuring organizational performance plays a very important part in translating corporate strategy into results. Various emerging (non-traditional) performance systems have recently been devised to aid firms in selecting and implementing measures. This paper discusses the strategy/measurement initiatives and compares ten emerging performance measurement systems with respect to a list of performance dimensions, the characteristics of performance measures, and the requirements of development process. Although these systems have constraints borne with their own application domains, they stand by themselves empirically and/or theoretically, and provide guidance about what to measure and how to design performance measures that could be linked to the corporate strategy and objectives of an organization. This paper concludes that there is a need to develop a paradigm for integrating strategy formulation and performance measurement in organizations.     

The research frontier in corporate governance

In this paper we attempt to identify the research frontier in corporate governance using three different approaches: (1) what challenges does the financial crisis 2007–2009 pose for corporate governance research? We show that the financial crisis is a huge natural experiment which has exposed gaps in our knowledge of corporate governance and is likely to lead of a rethink of central concepts like shareholder value, debt governance, and management incentives (2) what do we know and what do we need to how about the impact of national institutions on corporate governance? (3) What research questions are raised by a focus on current corporate governance practices?     

Shades of Grey: Guidelines for Working with the Grey Literature in Systematic Reviews for Management and Organizational Studies

This paper suggests how the ‘grey literature’, the diverse and heterogeneous body of material that is made public outside, and not subject to, traditional academic peer‐review processes, can be used to increase the relevance and impact of management and organization studies (MOS). The authors clarify the possibilities by reviewing 140 systematic reviews published in academic and practitioner outlets to answer the following three questions: (i) Why is grey literature excluded from/included in systematic reviews in MOS? (ii) What types of grey material have been included in systematic reviews since guidelines for practice were first established in this discipline? (iii) How is the grey literature treated currently to advance management and organization scholarship and knowledge? This investigation updates previous guidelines for more inclusive systematic reviews that respond to criticisms of current review practices and the needs of evidence‐based management.     

How Does Performance Management Affect Workers? Beyond Human Resource Management and Its Critique

While performance management (PM) is pervasive across contemporary workplaces, extant research into how performance management affects workers is often indirect or scattered across disciplinary silos. This paper reviews and synthesizes this research, identifies key gaps and explores ‘recognition theory’ as a nascent framework that can further develop this important body of knowledge. The paper develops in three main stages. The first stage reviews ‘mainstream’ human resource management (HRM) research. While this research analyses workers’ reactions to performance management in some depth, its focus on serving organizational goals marginalizes extra‐organizational impacts. The second stage reviews more critical HRM research, which interprets performance management as a disciplinary, coercive or inequitable management device. While this literature adds an important focus on organizational power, there is scope to analyse further how PM affects workers’ well‐being. To develop this strand of PM research, the third stage turns to the emerging field of recognition theory independently developed by Axel Honneth and Christophe Dejours. The authors focus especially on recognition theory's exploration of how (in)adequate acknowledgement of workers’ contributions can significantly affect their well‐being at the level of self‐conception. Although recognition theory is inherently critical, the paper argues that it can advance both mainstream and critical performance management research, and also inform broader inquiry into recognition and identity at work.     

Supply Chain Knowledge and Performance: A Meta‐Analysis

Many firms make significant investments into developing and managing knowledge within their supply chains. Such investments are often prudent because studies indicate that supply chain knowledge (SCK) has a positive influence on performance. Key questions still surround the SCK–performance relationship, however. First, what is the overall relationship between SCK and performance? Second, under what conditions is the relationship stronger or weaker? To address these questions, we applied meta‐analysis to 35 studies of the SCK–performance relationship that collectively include more than 8,400 firms. Our conservative estimate is that the effect size of the overall relationship is  = .39. We also find that the SCK–performance relationship is stronger when (i) examining operational performance, (ii) gathering data from more than one supply chain node, (iii) gathering data from multiple countries, (iv) examining service industries, and (v) among more recently published studies. We also found that studies that embraced a single theory base (as opposed to using multiple ones) had a stronger SCK–performance relationship. Looking to the future, our meta‐analysis highlights the need for studies to (i) include lags between the measurement of SCK and performance, (ii) gather upstream data when examining innovation, (iii) examine SCK within emerging countries, and (iv) provide much more information relative to the nuances of the SCK examined.     

Operations Management Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship

The field of Production and Operations Management (POM) is increasingly perceived as a rigorous but narrow field, antiquated and not very relevant to the current challenges and concerns of managers in job‐creating growth companies vital to our economies. I argue that a narrower positioning of POM in the past is responsible for its perceived limited utility to growth firms and global economies. POM at its core is about “doing more with less,” which is very well aligned with the context and needs of resource‐constrained entrepreneurial companies. My discussion is focused on how the research paradigm of POM is and can be relevant to meeting the emerging challenges of growth companies of tomorrow. Specifically, I examine how POM can help meet the needs of these organizations to become scalable and sustainable. The objective is to stimulate thought and discussion and encourage early‐stage POM scholars to seriously consider the contexts of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship, and growth companies as avenues for future research.     

Strategic planning in a turbulent international environment

What we have argued in this paper is that fundamental changes in the multinational corporate environment are taking place raising proaches to multinational environmental surveillance and multinational strategic management. We arenot offering this as a forecast of what the future will bring. Instead, we are proposing this framework to point to the need for greater environmental orientation and adaptation. MNCs are now in a double squeeze and managers must unlearn past models and criteria to understand problem. But the challenge is more than conventional corporate planning. The problematique can be decribed as one of multinational strategic management. In the area of environment we need research and learning to address three basic questions:What is the MCE? What concepts of the environment should be considered for strategic management? What parameters should be monitored? What are some consequences of the concept of interdependence and turbulence?What multinational environmental surveillance should be done? What methodologies are needed? How can these be made operational? How can the corporation be educated to behave in the new mode required in view of these changes?What new strategic issues and challenges lenges emerges from the MCE? What new demands must be factored into the multinational corporate planning processes? What new content does the changing environment procedure? How can the broadening field of opportunities and threats be systematically mapped and understood?     

Big Data and Performance: What Can Management Research Tell us?

The special issue focuses on the theory and evidence linking the use of Big Data related technologies by businesses with their performance. Here we connect the papers accepted for the special issue to the overarching theme of Big Data as an emerging concept within the business management literature. We present two prominent case studies examining the use Big Data technologies on performance and strategy, followed by a discussion on how themes around Big Data and Performance may be examined from a theoretical perspective. Finally, based on a synthesis of papers in the current issue, we discuss the emerging issues and trends within the academic literature, relevant for future research.     

Time,Space, Confucianism and Careers: A Contextualized Review of Careers Research in China – Current Knowledge and Future Research Agenda

Career studies attract significant attention, but most of the theories and concepts were developed and tested in Western contexts. Based on a systematic review and analysis of 95 articles published in the field of careers that focus on China in the period between 1991 and 2017, this paper identifies emerging trends and outlines a profile of the current development of careers research in the Chinese context. Using a time and space analytical framework, the review evaluates the theoretical and empirical career lenses embedded in the unique Chinese cultural, institutional and organizational contexts and confirms that research on Chinese careers is significantly underdeveloped. Through a theoretical lens of Confucianism, we propose a need to consider context‐specific factors, in particular time and space, when conducting Chinese careers research, and present implications for future research on careers in China.     

Developing new avenues for growth: Challenges presented by five trends in the global environment

This paper documents five major trends in the global environment, and examines the impact of each on the corporate strategies of multinational firms striving for higher rates of growth in corporate earnings. The five trends documented are: 1. shifts in economic activity and growth between and within regions of the world; 2. increasing demand for goods and services among the very poor in emerging markets; 3. a faster pace and wider locus of technological innovation; 4. Increasingly global labor markets; and 5. increasingly ubiquitous and inexpensive access to information and knowledge.Each of these trends presents multinational firms with a potentially new avenue for growth, or an avenue down which they should consider moving further and/or faster. These potentially new avenues for growth are encouraging managers of multinational firms to challenge the current corporate strategies of their firms, and examine the need to reorient or renew them. The paper discusses the strategic challenges associated with these new avenues for growth, and the need for more research on the concept of country risk, on the concepts of the transnational strategy and organizational structure, and on the challenges of very limited sustainable capacity to consume among the very poor.     

Path to “Stardom” in Globally Distributed Hybrid Teams: An Examination of a Knowledge‐Centered Perspective using Social Network Analysis

Although distributed teams have been researched extensively in information systems and decision science disciplines, a review of the literature suggests that the dominant focus has been on understanding the factors affecting performance at the team level. There has however been an increasing recognition that specific individuals within such teams are often critical to the team's performance. Consequently, existing knowledge about such teams may be enhanced by examining the factors that affect the performance of individual team members. This study attempts to address this need by identifying individuals who emerge as “stars” in globally distributed teams involved in knowledge work such as information systems development (ISD). Specifically, the study takes a knowledge‐centered view in explaining which factors lead to “stardom” in such teams. Further, it adopts a social network approach consistent with the core principles of structural/relational analysis in developing and empirically validating the research model. Data from U.S.–Scandinavia self‐managed “hybrid” teams engaged in systems development were used to deductively test the proposed model. The overall study has several implications for group decision making: (i) the study focuses on stars within distributed teams, who play an important role in shaping group decision making, and emerge as a result of a negotiated/consensual decision making within egalitarian teams; (ii) an examination of emergent stars from the team members’ point of view reflects the collective acceptance and support dimension decision‐making contexts identified in prior literature; (iii) finally, the study suggests that the social network analysis technique using relational data can be a tool for a democratic decision‐making technique within groups.     

Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in the Workplace: A Conceptual and Operational Review and Future Research Agenda

Employees need to regulate their own emotions as well as the emotions of others to enhance the quality of interactions with their colleagues. How well this is achieved has important outcomes for both employees and the organizations in which they work. In the field of organizational science, however, differing approaches have emerged regarding the conceptualization and operationalization of emotion regulation (ER) particularly in terms of interpersonal interactions. The present review examines contemporary theoretical perspectives of ER and its measurement with a view to resolving the confusion that currently exists around interpersonal ER in a workplace context. To understand how this field of research has developed so diversely, the authors begin by demonstrating the influence of three major individual‐level ER models on interpersonal‐level approaches: (1) the ER process model; (2) emotional labor; and (3) emotional intelligence. Moreover, to make sense of the range of interpersonal‐level research underpinned by these theories, the authors present a 2×2 categorization, developed by Zaki and Williams (2013), which shows how workplace researchers have variously approached interpersonal ER as an intrinsic vs. extrinsic process, with activation of either response‐dependent or response‐independent categories. This categorization broadly shows interpersonal ER theory used in work contexts tends to fall into four groupings as: (1) a purely extrinsic process; (2) a differentiation of extrinsic interpersonal from intrinsic individual ER; (3) co‐occurring intrinsic and extrinsic interpersonal ER; or (4) interpersonal coregulation. This paper also discusses the measurement of interpersonal ER and concludes by highlighting emerging research directions.     

Organizational change and rigidity during crisis: A review of the paradox

When and how do existential crises, threatening business continuity, stimulate organizational change or cause the opposite—rigid preservation of established business practices? This question remains unresolved, despite three decades of deliberations in the academic literature, which still yields contradicting theoretical arguments and empirical results. One view argues and finds support for the hypothesis that posits an amplified propensity to change within threatened organizations. The other view supports the threat-rigidity thesis, implying reinforcing habitual practices. In this paper, we provide a novel holistic typology of organizational crises and then review the literature on the topic, summarizing existing insights within a theoretical framework comprising three interrelated sequential processes: organizational cognition, decision-making, and implementation. We analyze the gaps in the field's knowledge within each process and propose a research agenda to address these voids.     

Performance measurement: a critical analysis of the literature with respect to total quality management

This paper represents a comprehensive review of the literature on performance measurement. The roadmap used for this analysis is from the evolution of performance measurement, to the way it is currently defined and how it is applied from a corporate-wide perspective. One useful contribution of this review is a special focus on performance measurement in a non-financial, non-traditional sense. This discussion was further amplified by referring to newly developed tools and techniques and by highlighting critical factors of success in the application of performance measurement.
The key factors from this literature review reveal that, although interest in the area of measurement is growing significantly, this is not reflected by the tangible and credible experiences in the organizations concerned. There is a concurrent view amongst various writers that there are both hard and soft issues reflecting, for instance, the lack of strategic thinking and goal clarity, putting measurement systems in the driving seat and therefore trusting unreliable designs and not focusing on the true ethos of modern measurement towards continuous improvement and thereby not engaging employees and neglecting the culture change aspects.
The paper concludes by highlighting the dearth in research in the important field of performance measurement and, in particular, the design and implementation of performance measurement systems that cover all the essential aspects through an integrated perspective.     

Building cross-disciplinary bridges in leadership: Integrating top executive personality and leadership theory and research

The top executive personality literature has grown significantly in recent years. We review this literature, consider its contributions to leadership research and practice, and discuss how future research on top executive personality should draw more heavily on the broader leadership literature. The paper first describes the top executive context and highlights the advantages and challenges of studying top executives. We then review the top executive personality literature in four areas that capture the bulk of the research: leadership of human resources, ethical leadership, strategic leadership and corporate governance, and firm performance. We examine how the top executive personality research in each area compares with other research on leaders' and their personalities that has been conducted on similar topics. The paper concludes with a future research agenda, which identifies other leader, team, and contextual considerations to advance our understanding of top executive personality and its influence. We also address methodological challenges related to measurement and endogeneity, because they are important for theory development and have received much attention in top executive personality research. In short, our paper examines how the literatures on top executives and leadership inform one another, and it helps lay a foundation for integrating these literatures more thoroughly.     

Far from Silicon Valley: How emerging economies are re-shaping our understanding of global entrepreneurship

In this paper we describe three distinct but interrelated processes — spillover and catch up, brokering and bottom up — that link globalization to entrepreneurship in emerging economies. We then outline an ambitious research agenda concerning entrepreneurship in the emerging economy context. Is most of such entrepreneurship Kirznerian or Schumpeterian? How do brokering processes work in this context? What informal and formal institutions will emerge to govern entrepreneurship? Does entrepreneurship at the base of the pyramid represent just another MNE-inspired spillover, or will the severe constraints lead to truly revolutionary innovations in business models, governance arrangements and social relations? Most fundamentally, will the entrepreneurial processes in emerging economies conform to or transform the organization of entrepreneurship as we know it?     

Artificial Intelligence for Natural Hazards Risk Analysis: Potential,Challenges, and Research Needs

Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have seen increasingly widespread use in everything from consumer products and driverless cars to fraud detection and weather forecasting. The use of AI has transformed many of these application domains. There are ongoing efforts at leveraging AI for disaster risk analysis. This article takes a critical look at the use of AI for disaster risk analysis. What is the potential? How is the use of AI in this field different from its use in nondisaster fields? What challenges need to be overcome for this potential to be realized? And, what are the potential pitfalls of an AI-based approach for disaster risk analysis that we as a society must be cautious of?     

A systematic literature review of mining weak signals and trends for corporate foresight

Due to the ever-growing amount of data, computer-aided methods and systems to detect weak signals and trends for corporate foresight are in increasing demand. To this day, many papers on this topic have been published. However, research so far has only dealt with specific aspects, but it has failed to provide a comprehensive overview of the research domain. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review to organize existing insights and knowledge. The 91 relevant papers, published between 1997 and 2017, are analyzed for their distribution over time and research outlets. Classifying them by their distinct properties, we study the data sources exploited and the data mining techniques applied. We also consider eight different purposes of analysis, namely weak signals and trends concerning political, economic, social and technological factors. The results of our systematic review show that the research domain has indeed been attracting growing attention over time. Furthermore, we observe a great variety of data mining and visualization techniques, and present insights on the efficacy and effectiveness of the data mining techniques applied. Our results reveal that a stronger emphasis on search strategies, data quality and automation is required to greatly reduce the human actor bias in the early stages of the corporate foresight process, thus supporting human experts more effectively in later stages such as strategic decision making and implementation. Moreover, systems for detecting weak signals and trends need to be able to learn and accumulate knowledge over time, attaining a holistic view on weak signals and trends, and incorporating multiple source types to provide a solid foundation for strategic decision making. The findings presented in this paper point to future research opportunities, and they can help practitioners decide which sources to exploit and which data mining techniques to apply when trying to detect weak signals and trends.     

International diversification and performance: A study of global law firms

This paper is an exploration of the internationalization-performance relationship in the context of contemporary knowledge intensive services. After background literature, we build theory in the context of service firms to explain how performance in international diversification largely depends on building various relevant organizational competencies. We develop two hypotheses: one concerning a reverse u-shaped internationalization-performance function for these firms in general, and another differentiating between U.S. and U.K. firms. Data on 76 U.S. and 13 U.K. firms are analyzed using hierarchical regression. The findings sustain the reverse u-shaped internationalization-performance relationship for these firms in general, but also suggest that the prospects are quite different for U.S. versus U.K. firms. Our findings add to an emerging stream of research that indicates a resolution to the hitherto ambiguous internationalization-performance relationship; and we also suggest a convergence between findings in capital-intensive and knowledge-intensive industries. The paper concludes with some implications for practitioners.