Distances in Organizations: Innovation in an R&D Lab

The distance between actors in an organization affects how they interact with each other, and particularly whether they will exchange (innovative) knowledge with each other. Actors in each other's proximity have fewer conflicts, more trust towards each other, for example, and are thus more involved in knowledge transfer. Actors close to others thus are believed to perform better: by being more innovative, for instance. This theory of propinquity's claim resonates widely in the literature and has intuitive appeal: ‘people are most likely to be attracted towards those in closest contact with them’ (Newcomb, Th. (1956). American Psychologist, 11, p. 575). Knowledge that a focal actor receives from alters who are close is more readily accessed, better understood and more readily useable. At the same time, however, and in contrast to the what the theory of propinquity suggests, knowledge that a focal actor receives from alters who are at a greater distance may be more diverse, offer unexpected and valuable insights, and therefore give rise to innovation. In order to understand these opposing expectations, scholars have indicated that distance must be conceived of as multifaceted: individuals can be close to each other in one way, while at the same time distant in another. No prior paper has extensively studied the effects of distance as a multifaceted concept, however. This study offers two distinct contributions. It argues, first, why some instances of distance affect the opportunity to interact with alters, potentially lowering an actor's performance, while other instances of distance affect the expected benefits from interaction. The latter would increase an actor's performance. Secondly, this paper is the first study to test empirically the expectations about how seven different measures of distance affect an actor's innovative performance. Innovative performance is measured as both creative contribution and contribution to knowledge that has immediate commercial use (patents). In the setting of a large research lab, it is found, contrary to expectations, that distance does not hurt individual innovative performance and sometimes helps it in unexpected ways.     

Putting Behavioral Economics to Work: Testing for Gift Exchange in Labor Markets Using Field Experiments

Recent discoveries in behavioral economics have led scholars to question the underpinnings of neoclassical economics. We use insights gained from one of the most influential lines of behavioral research—gift exchange—in an attempt to maximize worker effort in two quite distinct tasks: data entry for a university library and door‐to‐door fundraising for a research center. In support of the received literature, our field evidence suggests that worker effort in the first few hours on the job is considerably higher in the “gift” treatment than in the “nongift” treatment. After the initial few hours, however, no difference in outcomes is observed, and overall the gift treatment yielded inferior aggregate outcomes for the employer: with the same budget we would have logged more data for our library and raised more money for our research center by using the market‐clearing wage rather than by trying to induce greater effort with a gift of higher wages.     

What Happens in the Field Stays in the Field: Exploring Whether Professionals Play Minimax in Laboratory Experiments

The minimax argument represents game theory in its most elegant form: simple but with stark predictions. Although some of these predictions have been met with reasonable success in the field, experimental data have generally not provided results close to the theoretical predictions. In a striking study, Palacios‐Huerta and Volij ( 2008 ) presented evidence that potentially resolves this puzzle: both amateur and professional soccer players play nearly exact minimax strategies in laboratory experiments. In this paper, we establish important bounds on these results by examining the behavior of four distinct subject pools: college students, bridge professionals, world‐class poker players, who have vast experience with high‐stakes randomization in card games, and American professional soccer players. In contrast to Palacios‐Huerta and Volij's results, we find little evidence that real‐world experience transfers to the lab in these games—indeed, similar to previous experimental results, all four subject pools provide choices that are generally not close to minimax predictions. We use two additional pieces of evidence to explore why professionals do not perform well in the lab: (i) complementary experimental treatments that pit professionals against preprogrammed computers and (ii) post‐experiment questionnaires. The most likely explanation is that these professionals are unable to transfer their skills at randomization from the familiar context of the field to the unfamiliar context of the lab.     

RFID‐Enabled Visibility and Retail Inventory Record Inaccuracy: Experiments in the Field

Accurate inventory records are key to effective store execution, affecting forecasting, ordering, and replenishment. Prior empirical research, however, shows that retailer inventory records are inherently inaccurate. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enables visibility into the movement of inventories in the supply chain. Using two different field experiments, the current research investigates the effectiveness of this visibility in reducing retail store inventory record inaccuracy (IRI). Study 1 used an interrupted time‐series design and involved daily physical counts of all products in one category in 13 stores (8 treatments and 5 controls) of a major global retailer over 23 weeks. Results indicate a significant decrease in IRI of approximately 26% due to RFID‐enabled visibility. Using an untreated control group design with pre‐test and post‐test, Study 2 expands the number of categories to five and the number of stores to 62 (31 treatment and 31 control stores). Results show that the effectiveness of RFID in reducing IRI varies by category (ranging from no statistically significant improvement to 81%). Results also suggest that RFID ameliorates the effects of known determinants of IRI and provide the key insight that the technology is most effective for product categories characterized by these determinants.     

Idea Generation and the Role of Feedback: Evidence from Field Experiments with Innovation Tournaments

In many innovation settings, ideas are generated over time and managers face a decision about if and how to provide in‐process feedback to the idea generators about the quality of submissions. In this article, we use design contests allowing repeated entry to examine the effect of in‐process feedback on idea generation. We report on a set of field experiments using two online contest websites to compare the performance of three different feedback treatments—no feedback, random feedback, and directed feedback (i.e., in‐process feedback highly correlated with the final quality rating of the entry). We posted six logo design contests for consumer products and accepted submissions for 1 week. We provided daily feedback during the contest period using one of the three treatments. We then used a panel of target consumers to rate the quality of each idea. We find that directed feedback is associated positively with agent participation. For outcome, while directed feedback benefits the average quality of entries submitted, we don't find that relationship for the best entries—indeed, no feedback or random feedback may produce better top‐end entry quality. We also find that, under directed feedback, the variance in quality declines as the contest progresses.     

Pluralism in Organizations: Learning from Unconventional Forms of Organizations

The bureaucratic organization is still regarded as the conventional organizational form, but is ill‐suited to an increasingly pluralistic world. Research on the variety of organizational forms has increased dramatically over the past three decades and offers the potential to understand better how pluralism is manifested and managed within organizations. However, this research remains fragmented. The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize research on unconventional organizations to explore how organizations resolve or attenuate the tensions related to pluralism. Drawing from research in leading management journals, it covers seven distinct literatures: ‘referent organization’, ‘temporary organization’, ‘pluralistic organization’, ‘meta‐organization’, ‘bridging organization’, ‘hybrid organization’ and ‘field‐configuring event’. For each literature, the authors trace the genealogy of the key concepts and review their distinct insights regarding organizational pluralism. They then synthesize and discuss their collective contributions and conclude with avenues of research for pluralism in organizations.     

Extending the Cognitive Approach to Strategic Change in Organizations: Some Theory

This paper claims that organizational cognitions are manifested as argumentation. Such argumentation can be represented as organizational construct systems (systems of constructs shared by important organization members). Such organizational construct systems enable us to detect structural features of an organization's cognition which indicate its chances of survival or failure.     

Introduction to the Symposium: Communities,Organizations, and Restorative Justice Reform

Restorative justice, in treating organizations as communities, and viewing them as both cause and solution to problems of crime, harm and conflict, provides its revolutionary insights and groundbreaking efforts to transform and localize intervention in response to these problems. The contributions to this special issue focus on restorative justice as a way of addressing crime and crime-related concerns to the greatest extent possible within such community organizational contexts (i.e., workplaces, schools, universities, and residential programs for delinquents). The authors demonstrate how restorative practices have implications for community building and organizational reform based generally on a learning theory of cultural change.     

编制总量的核定方法与模型──地方政府机关编制

确定政府机构人员编制总量是一个十分重要而又难度很大的决策课题。对于地方政府机关编制,本文提出一种核定编制总量的方法,并采用数据包络分析方法和神经网络技术建立了编制总量的核定模型。     

Explaining Suicide in Organizations: Durkheim Revisited

Drawing on Durkheim's concept of anomie, we address the under‐explored phenomenon of anomic suicide in contemporary organizations and discuss the consequences of solidarity for organizations and society. The relations of social solidarity to issues of identity and insecurity are explored through the cases of France Telecom Orange and Foxconn. Remedial implications for organizing, considered as community building, are discussed. Durkheim wrote not only about anomic but also altruistic suicide. We will also analyze examples of this type of suicide. Some tentative suggestions are made for how to organize to minimize the incidence of suicidal violence in organizations.     

Governance in Organizations: A Cognitive Perspective

Governance in organizations according to traditionalagency theory is based on the premise that managersand employees do not have identical goals. As aconsequence, employees need to be monitored andcontrolled. If legal contracts are not sufficient forproper control, incentive contracts should be used. This paper argues that incentive contracts are notsufficient to solve governance issues in organizationsdue to problems in measurability and enforceability ofpresumed contract violations. Such problems arecomplicated by asymmetries in power, perspectives andaspirations between managers and employees. Acognitive argument is advanced suggesting that timeconstraints and bounded rationality render the idea ofmonitoring relatively ineffective. Governance ideasthat focus on communication flow and informationsharing are described. The role that other cognitiveelements such as memory play in a more comprehensiveand interdisciplinary framework for understandinggovernance relations is discussed.     

Click and mortar: Organizations on the web

The webpages of organizations are both a form of representation and a type of narrative. They entertain, persuade, express a point of view, and provide a means to organize collective action and economic exchange. Increasingly, webpages are the primary point of access between an organization and its environment. An organization's online presence offers a major new source of rich information about organizations. In this paper, we develop three perspectives on websites from an organizational point of view: as identity projects, tools, and relational maps. We draw on data from the online and offline presences of “brick and mortar” nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area to both illustrate how a digital transformation shaped these organizations and identify a host of new methods that can be used to study organizations using webpages. Finally, we reflect on both the strengths of these new sources of data as well as possible limitations and conclude with theoretical implications for organizational scholars.     

Using CEO Succession to Integrate Acquired Organizations: A Contingency Analysis

The study proposes that organizations engaged in related acquisition may encourage CEO succession as a mechanism for integrating acquired organizations. Further, we suggest that the risk of CEO succession at the time of acquisition will vary based on the need for integrative action and the power of acquired organizations. Results show that CEO succession is more likely when the participating organizations have incompatible types of ownership and when acquired CEOs have longer tenure than their counterparts. Conversely, the probability of CEO succession is lower among larger acquired organizations. Performance of the acquired organization does not affect the relationship between related acquisition and CEO succession.     

Dynamic Simulation as an Approach to Understanding Hurricane Risk Response: Insights from the Stormview Lab

This article investigates the use of dynamic laboratory simulations as a tool for studying decisions to prepare for hurricane threats. A prototype web‐based simulation named Stormview is described that allows individuals to experience the approach of a hurricane in a computer‐based environment. In Stormview participants can gather storm information through various media, hear the opinions of neighbors, and indicate intentions to take protective action. We illustrate how the ability to exert experimental control over the information viewed by participants can be used to provide insights into decision making that would be difficult to gain from field studies, such as how preparedness decisions are affected by the nature of news coverage of prior storms, how a storm's movement is depicted in graphics, and the content of word‐of‐mouth communications. Data from an initial application involving a sample of Florida residents reveal a number of unexpected findings about hurricane risk response. Participants who viewed forecast graphics, which contained track lines depicting the most likely path of the storm, for example, had higher levels of preparation than those who saw graphics that showed only uncertainty cones—even among those living far from the predicted center path. Similarly, the participants who were most likely to express worry about an approaching storm and fastest to undertake preparatory action were those who, ironically, had never experienced one. Finally, external validity is evidenced by a close rank‐order correspondence between patterns of information use revealed in the lab and that found in previous cross‐sectional field studies.     

Organizations in Public Management: Guest Editors' Introduction

This brief introduction sets the scene for the symposium. It identifies three factors which prompted its preparation, and then outlines the six contributions to it.     

Verandah Discourses: Critical Management Education in Organizations

The small but thriving Critical Management Studies community has so far confined its interest in education to that delivered in university settings. This paper identifies a framework for recognizing and understanding critical education as it is enacted within organizational settings. It analyses a portion of the data collected for a research study into alternative identities within organizational management education in order to suggest that critical management education (CME) fails to take account of the individualistic conventions that shape critical practice in organizations. The organizational version of CME works through a disruption of the ability of the manager to sustain managerialist narratives of the self. Two types of alternative practice are used to illustrate the ways in which this operates and are compared to an 'orthodox' performance of management education.     

From Resources to Value and Back: Competition Between and Within Organizations

Examining the relationship between the competitive processes between and within organizations, we use selection system theory to link resource value to product value. We identify three dimensions (in‐selection, before‐selection and after‐selection) that facilitate determining the value of resources based on the functions they serve in the competitive process between organizations in the product market, i.e. the external selection system. Subsequently, we use these dimensions to explore the competitive process among resource providers within organizations, i.e. the internal selection system. This leads us to formulate three propositions that link the competitive process within organizations to the competitive process between organizations. First, we posit that if resources that individually score highly along only one of the three dimensions are bundled, it is more likely that organizational performance can be sustained. Second, we argue that providers of resources scoring highly along multiple dimensions will enjoy stronger means of appropriation in comparison with providers of resources scoring highly along only one of the three dimensions. Third, we contend that the extent to which an organization endeavours to remunerate its resource providers based on their perceived contribution to the organization's competitive position has a curvilinear (inverted U‐shaped) relationship with organizational performance.