Prior research on organizational responses to normative pressures has cataloged a spectrum of strategies, ranging from accommodation to resistance, but more assertive responses have largely been overlooked. We expand the existing repertoire to include the more aggressive, targeted, and intertemporal response of organizational repression.
After being generated, a new idea is rarely perfect but must be clarified, improved, and developed in more detail. Unfortunately, idea elaboration and creativity do not always come together: many new ideas become less creative when elaborated. This research examines who elaborates new ideas more creatively.
Prior literature suggests many benefits stemming from founders’ strong identification with their firms. We suggest, however, that there is also a potential dark side. We argue that founders can become overidentified with their organizations, making them more likely to engage in irresponsible behavior that protects the firm but harms others, as moral and societal norms are viewed as obstacles to fulfilling an organization’s goals.
Can decision-maker roles—roles with responsibility for allocating resources toward ideas—shape which ideas people in those roles view as creative? Prior theory suggests that expertise should influence creativity assessments, yet examples abound of experts in different roles disagreeing about whether the same idea is creative. We build and test a social context model of creative idea recognition to show how decision-maker roles can shift creativity assessments. In an experimental study, we show that relative to non-decision-making roles, decision-making roles inculcate an economic mindset and so lead to downgrading otherwise creative ideas with cues of low social approval.
The authors provide an overview of the main accomplishments of private equity since the emergence of leveraged buyouts in the 1980s, and of the challenges now facing the industry—challenges that have been encountered before during three major growth waves and two full boom-and-bust cycles.
Speed is often critical for successful commercialization of a new technology, and patents help entrepreneurs secure funding, enter the market, and avoid expropriation of their ideas. In this article, we employ a recent change to U.S. patent law—the introduction of an elective program accelerating patent examination—to investigate the role of patent examination speed in strategic entrepreneurship.
This paper evaluates the pros and cons of including private equity fund investments in defined contribution plans. Potential benefits include higher returns and improved diversification as well as a relatively safe method for accessing investments previously only available to institutions and the very wealthy. Despite these enticing benefits, they need to be weighed against potential challenges and costs that may arise from creating this broader access to private funds. The complicated structure and uncertainty around the mechanism to provide required liquidity backstops may bring increased fees or even disrupt the private fund model.
We consider the problem of minimizing daily expected resource usage and overtime costs across multiple parallel resources such as anesthesiologists and operating rooms, which are used to conduct a variety of surgical procedures at large multispecialty hospitals. To address this problem, we develop a two-stage, mixed-integer stochastic dynamic programming model with recourse.
We consider a firm that can use one of several costly learning modes to dynamically reduce uncertainty about the unknown value of a project. Each learning mode incurs cost at a particular rate and provides information of a particular quality. In addition to dynamic decisions about its learning mode, the firm must decide when to stop learning and either invest or abandon the project.
Co-production (simultaneous production of multiple outputs) occurs in some emission-intensive basic material and agricultural industries. This paper is motivated by ones in which a supplier sells its primary product to a buyer that incurs an emissions cost (voluntarily, or due to government-imposed climate policy) and sells co-products into markets without emissions costs.
Professional psychologists are increasingly encouraged to document and evaluate the quality of the treatment they provide. However, there is a significant gap in knowledge about the extent to which extant definitions of treatment quality converge with patient perceptions. The primary goal of this study was to examine how adolescent substance users (ASU) and their caregivers perceive treatment quality.
This article introduces a new data enrichment method that combines revealed data on consumer demand and competitive reactions with stated data on competitive reactions to yet-to-be-enacted, unprecedented marketing policy changes. The authors extend the data enrichment literature to include stated competitive reactions, collected from subject-matter experts through a conjoint experiment.
Financial distress can disrupt a durable goods producer's provision of complementary goods and services such as warranties, spare parts and maintenance. This reduces consumers' demand for the core product, causing indirect costs of financial distress. We test this hypothesis in the market for used cars sold at wholesale auctions.
There is a growing trend among consumers to serially consume small, incomplete “chunks” of multiple media types – television, radio, Internet and print – within a short time period. We refer to this behavior as “media multiplexing” and note that key challenges for integrated marketing communications (IMC) media planners are (1) predicting which media or combination their target audience is likely to consume at any given time and (2) understanding potential substitutions and complementarities in their joint consumption.
We empirically study the impact of the entry of a new theater on two important product decisions that incumbents in the movie exhibition industry face: (1) whether to invest in screening movies that are expected to be popular, and (2) when to adopt new releases. For theaters, both of these decisions feature a cost-demand trade-off inherent in quality decisions: Although screening popular and recent movies brings more patrons to the theater, distributors take a higher share of the revenue for such movies.
Retail stores are geographically dispersed as a part of a multiunit organization. In such a setting, store managers play an important role in driving store performance. To motivate them to exert effort, retailers have provided group incentives for store managers. Using data from 75 stores of a U.S.-based retail chain that changed its incentive plan for store managers from being purely dependent on store performance to being dependent upon both store and corporate performance, we investigate the effect of this change on store performance.
Management scholars are often interested in congruence effects, which they analyze using polynomial regressions and response surface analyses. They also more and more frequently conduct moderation analyses of these polynomial regressions to understand how response surfaces change as a function of a third variable. Our review of the literature in management and applied psychology that tested moderation of response surface models reveals three shortcomings of the current practices.
We find evidence of systematic optimism and pessimism among credit analysts, comparing contemporaneous ratings of the same firm across rating agencies. These differences in perspectives carry through to debt prices and negatively predict future changes in credit spreads, consistent with mispricing. Moreover, the pricing effects are the largest among firms that are the most opaque, likely exacerbating financing constraints.
We document differences in human capital deployment between diversified and focused firms. We find that diversified firms have higher labor productivity and that they redeploy labor to industries with better prospects in response to changing opportunities. The opportunities and incentives provided in internal labor markets in turn affect the development of workers' human capital. We find that workers more frequently transition to other industries in which their diversified firms operate and with smaller wage losses than workers in the open market, even when they leave their original firms. Overall, internal labor markets provide a bright side to corporate diversification.
We examine the interplay of behavioral and environmental uncertainty in shaping the effectiveness of two key governance mechanisms used by strategic alliances: contractual and trust-based governance. We develop and test hypotheses, using a meta-analytic dataset encompassing over 15,000 strategic alliances across 82 independent samples. We find that contractual governance works best under low to moderate levels of behavioral uncertainty and moderate to high levels of environmental uncertainty, while it is detrimental to alliance performance when both types of uncertainty are low or high.