基于企业学习策略的集群持续创新机制及实证研究

由于集群网络的复杂性,集群创新机制的研究目前较为缺乏,有限的研究也往往假设集群企业具有同质性.本文提出,集群企业依据其在集群网络中的位置采用不同的学习策略,领导型企业更加侧重于探索式学习,跟随型企业更加侧重于利用式学习,两者的分工和异质性互动构成了集群持续创新的内在机理.本文在个体和企业层次双重学习研究的基础上,结合集群特有的组织条件,提出集群双重学习的机制,据此将集群企业进行分类,并建立集群中企业学习的理论模型,接着选取国内某地化工产业集群的236家企业作为样本,运用结构方程模型对集群中企业进行分类检验和比较研究.研究结果表明,集群中不同类型企业的学习策略存在差异,集群网络的作用是产生这一差异的可能原因;集群中不同类型企业的学习策略具有互补性,有利于企业间互动和集群的持续创新.     

The dark side of business model innovation

Existing literature has tended to focus on the positive benefits and outcomes of business model innovation (BMI), despite emerging evidence that BMI can also have a dark side, with negative consequences. We systematically review the existing BMI literature, articulating it around three clusters of negative consequences: those affecting the firm as an entity; those affecting the firm's stakeholders; and those that are specific or context-dependent. In a similar fashion, we identify the driving factors and circumstances leading to these negative consequences and group them into four clusters: (1) managerial choices and processes, and three underpinning circumstances that influence such choices or processes; (2) trade-offs between the new and current business models; (3) managers’ ability to manage BMI; and (4) context within which BMI is situated. The paper provides the first attempt to gather prior research on the phenomenon and thereby develop a conceptual understanding of the dark side of BMI. Furthermore, by proposing a model that explains how the dark side of BMI may occur, we inform ongoing debates on the theorization of the consequences that may derive from BMI and how these can be managed to support firms’ innovative growth, arguing how the disruptive innovation literature can only partially explain the phenomenon. Second, our model provides important foundations to further distil the complex link between BMI and performance. Finally, we suggest a number of future research avenues, accounting for different dimensions of the phenomenon.     

Cluster life cycle and diaspora effects: Evidence from the Indian IT cluster in Bangalore

The role of local clusters has been of interest to scholars and policymakers in international business alike. Research found that clusters enable a region to develop faster compared to dispersed economic activity, based mainly on a local concentration of competing and cooperating firms and sophisticated domestic demand. Locating in a cluster has certain benefits for firms stemming from pooling of human capital and supporting institutions varying by industry and international specialization.In this paper, we extend the local view of clusters and emphasize the complementary role of non-local linkages, in particular diasporas, illustrating our model employing the case of the evolution of the Bangalore IT cluster. The novelty of our paper lies in its longitudinal character. We are thereby able to identify how the roles of local and non-local networks differ across life-cycle phases; moreover, we find that diasporas can trigger or accelerate local development. We discuss implications for managers and policy makers.     

Entrepreneurial openness: Concept development and measure validation

This study introduces entrepreneurial openness as a construct that helps understanding the impact of entrepreneur's personality on small firm's performance. We draw from the entrepreneurship and positive psychology literature to conceptualize entrepreneurial openness as an individual-level positive personal cognitive strength that has three subdimensions: engaging in learning, searching for novelty, and seeking feedback. We validated the construct's structure in three consecutive studies: Study 1 provided initial empirical evidence in support of the proposed scale with a pilot sample of Slovenian business owners; Study 2 assessed the reliability and validity of the scale with a cross-cultural study in Canada, Slovenia, and USA; and Study 3 tested the scale for its impact on business performance and job satisfaction. Findings from our empirical studies demonstrate the utility of entrepreneurial openness in explaining firm's performance by showing strong reliability, appropriate dimensionality, convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity.     

The Role of Cluster Presence and Quality Certification in Internationalization and Performance of Offshore Service Providers

Offshore Service Providers (OSPs) have been a subject of research for several years now. However, there is little known about what drives the internationalization of OSPs. In this paper, we combine insights from economic geography and institutional view to investigate cluster presence and quality certification as the drivers of OSP internationalization and their performance. We hypothesize the facilitating role these two factors play in driving the performance of internationalized firms. We test our hypotheses using data from Indian software firms between 1992 and 2002. We find a positive effect of certification on OSP internationalization. Although certification contributes negatively to OSP performance, it positively moderates the performance effect of OSP internationalization. Cluster presence was found to drive OSP's overall performance, but has no effect on internationalization. Through our findings, we contribute towards the literature on OSP internationalization.     

Research on Markets for Inventions and Implications for R&D Allocation Strategies

Several streams of literature have examined the phenomenon of “markets for inventions”, that is, the trade of elements of knowledge which are “disembodied” from individuals, organizations, and products. The aims of this paper are to bring together the various streams of research in this area and discuss their major assumptions and limitations, in order to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the phenomenon, and identify promising paths for future research. We start our review by identifying the object of market exchange—that is, an invention whose knowledge has been codified and disembodied from individuals, organizations, or artifacts. We then identify those factors that enable firms to trade inventions, distinguishing between institutional-, firm-, and industry-level factors. We close our analysis of the extant literature by discussing the implications of markets for inventions for firm behavior and performance. Against this background, we highlight an important avenue for future research. A neglected implication of the development of invention markets is that firms are confronted with a wide variety of technological paths from which to choose, because the opportunity to acquire technologies on the market offers them a greater variety that can their internal R&D departments. However, the streams of research on markets for inventions and on R&D allocation strategies have been surprisingly disconnected so far. Hence, in the final section, we start to establish and explore the link between these literatures, and to identify a research agenda in this domain.     

Digital internal communication: An interplay of socio-technical elements

Digital transformation has become a research focus in recent years. Likewise, internal communication (IC) is one of the fastest-growing specialisations in public relations and communication management. This research explores digital internal communication (DIC) at the nexus between digital transformation and IC. We provide an integrative review of the literature; our thematic analysis of selected journal articles and other scholarly texts is guided by the concept of organisations as socio-technical systems. Furthermore, we create a template using NVivo software to organise the emerging themes and clusters following the logic of communication levels. This template allows us to explain the phenomenon of DIC in a socio-technical organisational system and discuss how the emerging themes are interrelated, people-focused, and linked to competency development and trust-building. As a contribution to theory, we offer a conceptual model which illustrates the dynamics of DIC as an interplay of socio-technical elements on three communication levels. This conceptual model can be further developed in scholarly discussions on DIC and by organisations reflecting on their IC use in a digital workplace environment.     

A taxonomy of event-level dimensions: Implications for understanding leadership processes,behavior, and performance

Leader actions and their impact on follower, group, and organizational outcomes tend to be investigated at the aggregate person level, which may result in confusion between perception and performance-based evaluations of effectiveness. We advocate an alternative approach: assessing the link of leader behaviors to outcomes at the lower level of events, where adaptive leader responses and their variable influence on subsequent outcomes can be better assessed. To illustrate the potential benefits of an event-level approach, we first define events and how they differ by developing a taxonomy consisting of seven event dimensions. Important leadership implications of each event dimension are briefly discussed. We then apply our taxonomy to three existing theories of leadership to highlight its value in understanding performance. Strategies for measuring and researching leadership performance with our taxonomy are then introduced and discussed. Finally, event dimensions are used to address questions of critical significance to future leadership theory, such as determining what type of leadership is needed and ascertaining the leadership skills that are most likely to result in effective performance.     

REVISITING ALTERNATIVE THEORETICAL PARADIGMS IN MANUFACTURING STRATEGY

Testing and cross‐validation of theories and paradigms are necessary to advance the field of manufacturing strategy. When the findings of one study are also obtained in other studies, using entirely different databases, we become more confident in the results. Replication alleviates concerns about spurious results and is one motivation for this study. We examine aspects of the tradeoffs concept, production competence paradigm, and a manufacturing strategy taxonomy framework. In regard to the tradeoffs concept, we found evidence of tradeoffs between some, but certainly not all, manufacturing capabilities of quality, cost, delivery, and customization. The relationships get sharper when controlling for process choice. For example, the tradeoff between cost and customization is particularly strong between plants that have different process choices. We find that such tradeoffs can change, or even disappear, however, once the process choice is in place. With respect to the production competence paradigm, our analysis shows a statistically significant correlation between production competence and operations performance in batch shops, but not in plants with other process choices. Finally, using variables similar to those of Miller and Roth, our data produced three similar clusters even though their unit of analysis was much more macro than ours. Controlling for process choice is consistent with the current manufacturing strategy literature that emphasizes dynamic development of capabilities within the context of path dependencies. A major argument of this strand of research is that operations decisions not only affect current capabilities, but also set the framework for development of capabilities in the future. That being the case, controlling for process choice (or other factors such as industry or markets) should contribute to the understanding of capability‐development paths adopted by different manufacturing plants. In short, we found at least partial support for each of the theories examined here, even though the theories seem on the surface to be contradictory and mutually exclusive. Controlling for process choice or other measures of dependency goes a long way in uncovering consistency across different theories and empirical studies in operations management.     

跨国企业嵌入集群下链与链竞争动态网络模型分析

在产业集群背景下,跨国企业携技术领先优势进入集群,经历从竞争嵌入(斯坦伯格博弈)到融合均衡(古诺博弈)两阶段。基于此,本文研究集群原有供应链在跨国企业嵌入后,形成原供应链与新供应链之间相互竞争,以及最终达到集群整体网络动态均衡的变化过程,通过利用变分不等式和动态博弈方法,建立起考虑汇率下的链与链动态竞争网络模型,并给出相应的算法。通过实例发现,在第一阶段原有集群供应链能保持较高的消费者满意度,且市场占有率高于跨国企业供应链;在第二阶段,跨国企业供应链的市场占有率则反超。更重要的是,在第二阶段集群市场整体销量和整体利润总和均高于第一阶段。     

Randomization Tests Under an Approximate Symmetry Assumption

This paper develops a theory of randomization tests under an approximate symmetry assumption. Randomization tests provide a general means of constructing tests that control size in finite samples whenever the distribution of the observed data exhibits symmetry under the null hypothesis. Here, by exhibits symmetry we mean that the distribution remains invariant under a group of transformations. In this paper, we provide conditions under which the same construction can be used to construct tests that asymptotically control the probability of a false rejection whenever the distribution of the observed data exhibits approximate symmetry in the sense that the limiting distribution of a function of the data exhibits symmetry under the null hypothesis. An important application of this idea is in settings where the data may be grouped into a fixed number of “clusters” with a large number of observations within each cluster. In such settings, we show that the distribution of the observed data satisfies our approximate symmetry requirement under weak assumptions. In particular, our results allow for the clusters to be heterogeneous and also have dependence not only within each cluster, but also across clusters. This approach enjoys several advantages over other approaches in these settings.     

Exact and heuristic methods for a class of selective newsvendor problems with normally distributed demands

In this paper we study a class of selective newsvendor problems, where a decision maker has a set of raw materials each of which can be customized shortly before satisfying demand. The goal is then to select which subset of customizations maximizes expected profit. We show that certain multi-period and multi-product selective newsvendor problems fall within our problem class. Under the assumption that the demands are independent and normally, but not necessarily identically, distributed we show that some problem instances from our class can be solved efficiently using an attractive sorting property that was also established in the literature for some related problems. For our general model we use the KKT conditions to develop an exact algorithm that is efficient in the number of raw materials. In addition, we develop a class of heuristic algorithms. In a numerical study, we compare the performance of the algorithms, and the heuristics are shown to have excellent performance and running times as compared to available commercial solvers.     

On the meaning of ‘Waste’: review and definition

Waste reduction is one of the main principles of lean, but it has been taken for granted that we have a common understanding of what waste means. We first present a critical, qualitative discussion that identifies four distinct waste concepts. We then conduct a systematic review of the literature that examines the different uses of these concepts. We find that only the classic concept of the seven wastes and the concept of waste as non-value-adding activity are widely applied. However, both concepts are, at times, not only incompatible but used in a way that leads to open contradiction. A new definition, centred on an efficient, timely transformation process seeks to consolidate the literature. We outline two distinct waste types: (i) obvious waste, to refer to any waste that can be reduced without creating another form of waste; and, (ii) buffer waste, to refer to any waste that cannot be reduced without creating another waste. The paper has important implications for practice. To reduce waste, managers must undertake three interlinked tasks: the elimination of obvious waste; the reduction of variability to transform buffers into obvious waste; and, the balancing of remaining buffers to best achieve performance targets. The paper supports managers in their endeavours to identify waste, which is an important precursor to waste reduction/elimination.     

The Value of Organizational Ambivalence for Small and Medium Size Enterprises in an Uncertain World

Prior literature suggests two competing mechanisms for how organizations respond to environmental forces – absorption and reduction – but there is no consensus on which mechanism is more effective. We solve this puzzle by analysing one underlying dimension of these two mechanisms – organizational ambivalence – in a small and medium size enterprise context. Specifically, we believe that because of the difference in consuming resources, organizational ambivalence can be divided into latent and active, which exhibit different uses in dealing with environmental forces and improving firm performance. We conducted two studies in four countries to test our hypotheses. These two studies yield unanimous support for our hypotheses regarding the impact of organizational ambivalence on organizational performance and mixed support for our hypotheses concerning environmental impacts on organizational ambivalence.     

7. A contingent configuration approach to understanding the role of personality in organizational groups

We argue that past research has taken one of three basic theoretical approaches to explaining the nature of member personality effects on group process and team performance: (1) universal - certain traits always predict teamwork success; (2) contingent - certain traits predict team performance depending on the task or organizational culture; and (3) configuration - the mix of traits within a group, or the “fit” of individual members with each other, predicts team performance. Each of these three approaches to personality in groups has received significant empirical support in the literature and yet has some shortcomings. We offer suggestions for improving research using each approach but argue that a full understanding of the role of personality in group processes must integrate all three of these approaches into what we call the contingent configuration approach. We conclude by discussing the implications of adopting this approach to understanding the role of personality in organizational groups.     

Turnaround leadership core tensions during the company turnaround process

How leaders turn around declining performance is a significant issue for companies, their employees, their customers, their shareholders and, more generally, society. Leadership influence during times of change is well recognised in the literature; however, leadership during a turnaround is more complex and less understood. In-depth examinations of the role and activities of turnaround leaders have received insufficient attention in the literature to date. Specifically, studies have not investigated, in-depth, the tensions that leaders face during a turnaround process. To begin addressing this gap in the literature, we utilise case studies of four companies to examine the core tensions leaders experience, when they occur during the turnaround process and how they are managed. We frame our focus on leadership tensions in three prominent domains in the literature, leadership change, leadership assertiveness and strategic orientation. Our findings identify and detail the management of six core tensions that leaders experience across a five-stage turnaround process model. We conclude that effective turnaround leadership is less about particular skill sets or ‘types’ of leaders for different stages of the recovery process, and more about their ability to purposefully navigate and balance apparently conflicting activities within these tensions. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice.     

The Dynamic Capability View in Strategic Management: A Bibliometric Review

The dynamic capability view (DCV) is one of the most vibrant approaches to strategic management. In this study, the extant literature published between 1994 and 2011 is analysed, using bibliometric methods in order to explore the scope of this approach and detect current research priorities. For this purpose, the method of bibliographic coupling is introduced in management research, which shifts the focus of analysis from past traditions to current trends. Several clusters of thematically related research are extracted from bibliographic networks, which represent interconnected yet distinct subfields of inquiry within the DCV. The core cluster of the current DCV, which visualizes this research field's nascent but fragile identity, focuses on learning and change capabilities and relates them to firm performance, thus merging aspects of organization theory and strategic management. In addition, several peripheral clusters of research are identified, which reflect a parallel process of differentiation in the overall field. Both trends, i.e. of integration and differentiation, attest to the emancipation of the DCV as a distinct approach to strategic management. However, the DCV still lacks consensual concepts that allow comparisons of empirical studies and advance the theoretical understanding of dynamic capabilities. In the light of the above, some implications of this analysis for further research are discussed.     

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 task conflict and cooperation on performance of teams: Are the results similar for different task types?

There is ample agreement in the literature that task conflict is an important predictor of team performance. Nevertheless, the question of “how and why” specifically task conflict affects performance still remains open and existing studies found positive, negative, as well as insignificant results when testing the relationship. Researchers argue that intra-team cooperation is a crucial process through which a team can improve its performance. Using team-conflict theory we argue that the effect of task conflict on performance is mediated by team member cooperation. In this paper, we thus intend to test this relationship using a sample of 92 team-task observations. We further split the sample into decision-choice and creative-generating tasks in order to see if the outcome of this mediating chain is the same for different task types. The results contribute to the understanding of the “black box” of team processes and are of relevance for practitioners as they provide evidence of a potential trigger to improve team performance