Knowledge that Transforms

In recent years, organizational scholars have increasingly focused on various forms of bad behavior in the workplace. Notable examples of these behaviors include deviance, aggression, antisocial behavior, and violence. Unfortunately, as this body of work has grown, so too has a proliferation of concepts, constructs, and definitions. This article reviews the literature regarding the general set of concepts and constructs relating to bad behavior in organizations. The authors identify both areas of uniqueness as well as areas of overlap among these various concepts and constructs. They also propose a typology to guide future theory development and empirical research.

Due to the nature of the data employed and of the concepts tested, standard tests for mediating variables in management research can often violate an assumption on which these tests are built. As a result, estimates from standard tests of mediating variables can often lack desirable statistical properties and lead to incorrect conclusions. This article highlights when data in management research will violate assumptions underlying tests of mediating variables, suggests an alternative strategy that provides better estimates, discusses the theoretical and empirical demands of the alternative strategy, and demonstrates the magnitude to which estimates improve by using the suggested approach.

Previous research on supplier involvement in product development projects has produced contradictory results, with some studies showing a positive relationship, others no relationship, and still others a negative relationship between supplier involvement and project performance. Drawing on data from 124 managers, project leaders, buyer members, and supplier members pertaining to 28 product development projects, the authors find that buyer-supplier collaboration positively relates to product quality, adherence to product cost targets, adherence to development budgets, and adherence to development schedules. Furthermore, their analyses show that communication frequency and intensity has a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship with project development budget and product cost.

E-learning, an instructional strategy for imparting needed knowledge, skills, and attitudes in organizations, is here to stay. Its viability, effectiveness, and potential to return tangible benefits to organizations depend largely on how it is designed, delivered, and evaluated. This article provides a comprehensive review of the state of the art of e-learning methods in organizations. The authors also critically examine e-learning’s effectiveness by reviewing the current literature on the outcomes of e-learning. Finally, they offer a research agenda designed to bridge the gap between the practice and science of e-learning.

This study proposes and tests a model for top-management influence on innovations. Three research questions are addressed: Is top managers’ influence on innovation a function of their leadership? Does socio-cultural context directly affect leadership? and, Does sociocultural context moderate the relationship of leadership with top-management influence on innovation? These questions are investigated with data from 12 European countries. The results show that leadership factors have strong effects on top-management innovation influence. In support of the culture-specific view of leadership, sociocultural context directly influences leadership and moderates its relationship with organizational innovation.

This article examines how the choice of governance mode for external R&D, along with openness to new ideas and codifiability of knowledge, affects R&D performance. Superior R&D performance is therefore viewed as arising through (a) the choice of approaches used by the firm to access knowledge from outside (university partnering, alliance partnering, and contracting), (b) the knowledge context of the firm (its openness to new ideas and the codifiability of its knowledge assets), and (c) the interactions between these two sets of factors. These arguments are tested, and mostly supported, using data on the R&D activities of 107 large firms based in the United Kingdom and Sweden.

The use of executive coaching as a developmental intervention for managers has increased dramatically during the past decade. Consequently, there has been a burgeoning practitioner literature on the topic of executive coaching. Empirical research on executive coaching, however, has lagged far behind, and theoretical work on the processes underlying effective coaching has been limited. In this review, we investigate the construct of executive coaching and examine how coaches’ professional training, client characteristics, and types of coaching impact the effectiveness of this intervention. The article concludes with an agenda for future research on this emerging form of management development.

Team virtuality is an important factor that is gaining prominence in the literature on teams. Departing from previous research that focused on geographic dispersion, the authors define team virtuality as the extent to which team members use virtual tools to coordinate and execute team processes, the amount of informational value provided by such tools, and the synchronicity of team member virtual interaction. The authors identify the key factors that lead groups to higher levels of team virtuality and the implications of their model for management theory and practice.

Entrepreneurs looking to exploit market opportunities and create economic value must concern themselves with both value creation and value appropriation. In this context, entrepreneurs face an unusual challenge; they must accomplish these two tasks before the economic value of the market opportunity is known, even probabilistically. The purpose of this article is to describe how entrepreneurs in these settings organize a firm to solve their resource coordination and profit appropriation problems. Three different ways of organizing firms in these settings are examined, and their implications for research in entrepreneurship and other fields are discussed.

This study provides a theoretical framework illustrating how the internal social structure of the organization can mediate the relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and organizational performance. HPWS positively influence the internal social structure by facilitating bridging network ties, generalized norms of reciprocity, shared mental models, role making, and organizational citizenship behavior. Although HPWS are conceptualized as a system of human resource (HR) practices, each category ofHRpractices has a differential relationship with the mediating variables. HPWS lead to (a) financial performance via administrative efficiency and (b) sustainable performance via flexibility arising from the coordination and exploitation of knowledge resources.