Knowledge that Transforms

We argue that the pressure MNE subsidiaries face to engage in corrupt practices in their host country varies positively with the institutionalization of corrupt practices in both host and home country environments. We further argue that the relationship between an MNE's home country environment and the pressure it faces in the host country is moderated by its localization strategy. Results suggest a positive relationship between the host country corruption environment and the pressure subsidiaries face to engage in bribery locally. Mixed results emerged concerning MNEs from home countries participating in the OECD Convention for Combating Bribery. Results concerning the impact of the home country corruption environment are best viewed in light of significant moderating effects. When MNEs did not have local partners, firms from less corrupt home countries reported less pressure to engage in corrupt practices locally; however, the presence of local partners eliminated this relationship. Results will help managers understand the pressures their firm is likely to face when operating in corrupt host country environments, and also offer guidance concerning how the firm might reduce its exposure to those local institutional pressures.

Prior studies have reported mixed findings on the impact of corporate information technology (IT) investment on firm performance. This study investigates the effect of corporate governance, an important management control mechanism, on the relation between IT investment and firm performance in the Taiwanese electronics industry. Specifically, we explore board independence and foreign ownership, which have increasingly become salient factors concerning corporate governance in emerging markets. We address their roles across firms of different sizes and in industries where degrees of competitiveness run a wide gamut. Our results show a positive moderating effect of board independence on the IT investment‐firm performance relation, especially when competition intensifies. Furthermore, we find that the greater the foreign ownership in small firms, the more positive the IT investment‐firm performance relation, suggesting that foreign investors may bring IT expertise to help small firms reap the benefits of using IT.

We study the determinants and consequences of family‐friendly workplace practices (FFWP) using a sample of over 450 manufacturing firms in Germany, France, U.K., and U.S. We find a positive correlation between firm productivity and FFWP. This association disappears, however, once we control for a measure of the quality of management practices. We further find that firms with a higher proportion of female managers and more skilled workers, as well as well‐managed firms, tend to implement more FFWP. Conversely, a firm's environment does not have a significant impact on the FFWP it provides. © 2010 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

We develop and test a sensemaking model of early internationalization that ties domestic mindsets to international industry conditions and early international performance. Our central contention is that the fit between international industry conditions and domestic mindsets will lead to superior early international performance. We test this contention with a sample of 178 large and established domestic firms from 20 industries. Our results highlight the role of domestic mindsets in the early phases of internationalization and prescribe the types of domestic mindsets needed to maximize early international performance in global, multi‐domestic, and transnational industry conditions. Our results also provide valuable insights to top managers of large and established firms on how to reduce the risk of failure and how to successfully prepare for and cope with international environments by matching their domestic mindsets with international industry environments.

We present an ordinal method for studying persistence in firm profitability. The method is based on the degree of stability in a ranked performance distribution over time. The method gives a numerical index of rank friction (Rf) that can be applied to any ranked data over any period of time. Rf is nonparametric and can be used to test theoretical assumptions in strategic management. We illustrate the method in an empirical study of 40 years of profit data in 12 industries.

This article examines how leader firms should respond to the erosion of competitive advantages caused by rapid imitation and innovation in hypercompetitive environments. On the one hand, shorter‐lived advantages induce leaders to develop new advantages faster. On the other hand, hypercompetition also erodes the expected returns from new advantages—reducing leaders' incentives to accelerate investments. Since investing faster also raises costs, this article shows that leaders often prefer to renew competitive advantages more slowly in more hypercompetitive industries—thereby increasing the probability of being displaced by competitors. This phenomenon is dubbed self‐displacement. Firms' decision to self‐displace themselves from industry leadership with greater probability is deliberate and rational—not a result of leaders' inability to respond to competitive threats, as previously assumed in the literature. This article also shows that leaders' rule of thumb in more hypercompetitive environments should be to accelerate the development of advantages with high competitive value but low market value. This study is based on a theoretical model and numerical analysis grounded on stylized empirical facts that govern industry competitive macrodynamics and firm investment microdynamics in most industries. Because the model builds on empirically observable constructs, its theoretical propositions are amenable to large sample testing.

Prior work examines competitive moves in relatively stable markets. In contrast, we focus on less stable markets where competitive advantages are temporary and R&D moves are essential. Using evolutionary search theory and an experiential simulation with in‐depth fieldwork, we find that the relationship between performance and subsequent competitive moves depends on the type of market, not just on whether performance is high or low. High performers seek to maintain status quo, but this requires different strategies in different markets. They are conservative in established markets and bold in new ones. In contrast, low performers seek to disrupt the status quo. Again, this requires different strategies in different markets. Unlike high performers, low performers are bold in established markets and conservative in new ones where they lack understanding of how to disrupt rivals. Overall, our results incorporate unstable markets in theories of competitive dynamics and competitive interaction in theories of evolutionary search. By examining R&D moves, we also extend competitive dynamics research to include technology‐based firms for whom temporary advantages are often essential.

Extant approaches to rent appropriation are static in that they explore bargaining power at a fixed point in time. This article contributes by examining how capabilities and bargaining power coevolve. As capabilities are developed, those who are favored by knowledge asymmetries make decisions that balance value creation potential against the rent appropriation regime, such as the organizational form in which the capability will be embedded. Using the example of Apple's development of the iPod, this article illustrates how stakeholders plan for rent appropriation as they assemble new capabilities—well before any value is actually created. Given that firm performance is an outcome of both capability development and rent appropriation, a robust theory must incorporate an understanding of how they coevolve. As such, the article highlights the need to integrate property rights theory with theories of value creation and governance costs as actors constantly make trade‐offs along these dimensions.

This paper investigates the effect of compensation of corporate personnel on their investment in new technologies. We focus on a specific corporate activity, namely corporate venture capital (CVC), describing minority equity investment by established‐firms in entrepreneurial ventures. The setting offers an opportunity to compare corporate investors to investment experts, the independent venture capitalists (IVCs). On average, we observe a performance gap between corporate investors and their independent counterparts. Interestingly, the performance gap is sensitive to CVCs' compensation scheme: it is the largest when CVC personnel are awarded performance pay. Not only do we study the association between incentives and performance but we also document a direct relationship between incentives and the actions managers undertake. For example, we observe disparity between the number of participants in venture capital syndicates that involve a corporate investor, and those that consist solely of IVCs. The disparity shrinks substantially, however, for a subset of CVCs that compensate their personnel using performance pay. We find a parallel pattern when analyzing the relationship between compensation and another investment practice, staging of investment. To conclude, the paper investigates the three elements of the principal‐agent framework, thus providing direct evidence that compensation schemes (incentives) shape investment practices (managerial action), and ultimately investors' outcome (performance).

In this paper, we offer a comprehensive alliance portfolio diversity construct that includes partner, functional, and governance diversity. Grounding our work primarily with the resource‐ and dynamic capabilities‐based views, we argue that increased diversity in partners' industry, organizational, and national background will incur added complexity and coordination costs but will provide broadened resource and learning benefits. Increased functional diversity results in a more balanced portfolio of exploration and exploitation activities that expands the firm's knowledge base while increased governance diversity inhibits learning and routine building. Hypotheses were tested with alliance portfolio and performance data for 138 multinational firms in the global automobile industry during the twenty‐year period from 1985 to 2005. We found alliance portfolios with greater organizational and functional diversity and lower governance diversity were related to higher firm performance while industry diversity had a U‐shaped relationship with firm performance. We suggest firms manage their alliances with a portfolio perspective, seeking to maximize resource and learning benefits by collaborating with a variety of organizations in various value chain activities while minimizing managerial costs through a focused set of governance structures.