Knowledge that Transforms

Organizational identification, which reflects how individuals define the self with respect to their organization, may be called into question in the context of virtual work. Virtual work increases employees’ isolation and independence, threatening to fragment the organization. This study finds that virtual workers’ need for affiliation and the work-based social support they experience are countervailing forces associated with stronger organizational identification. Furthermore, perceived work-based social support moderates the relationship between virtual workers’ need for affiliation and their strength of organizational identification. Thus, when work-based social support is high, even workers with lower need for affiliation may strongly identify with the organization.

The resource-based view can be positioned relative to at least three theoretical traditions: SCP-based theories of industry determinants of firm performance, neo-classical microeconomics, and evolutionary economics. In the 1991 article, only the first of these ways of positioning the resourcebased view is explored. This article briefly discusses some of the implications of positioning the resource-based view relative to these other two literatures; it also discusses some of the empirical implications of each of these different resource-based theories.

This article posits a framework that shows how market-based assets and capabilities are leveraged via market-facing or core business processes to deliver superior customer value and competitive advantages. These value elements and competitive advantages can be leveraged to result in superior corporate performance and shareholder value and reinvested to nurture market-based assets and capabilities in the future. The article also illustrates how resource-based view (RBV) and marketing considerations in the context of generating and sustaining customer value can refine and extend each other’s traditional frames of analysis. Finally, the article posits a set of research directions designed to enable scholars to further advance the integration of RBV and marketing from both theory-driven practice management as well as a problem-driven theory development perspectives.

This paper examines the relationship between resource-based theory and entrepreneurship and develops insights that advance the boundaries of resource-based theory and begin to address important questions in entrepreneurship. We extend the boundaries of resource-based theory to include the cognitive ability of individual entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs have individual-specific resources that facilitate the recognition of new opportunities and the assembling of resources for the venture. By focusing on resources, from opportunity recognition to the ability to organize these resources into a firm and then to the creation of heterogeneous outputs through the firm that are superior to the market, we help identify issues that begin to address the distinctive domain of entrepreneurship.

At present, the resource-based view of the firm is perhaps the most influential framework for understanding strategic management. In this editor’s introduction, we briefly describe the contributions to knowledge provided by the commentaries and articles contained in this issue. In addition, we outline some additional areas of research wherein the resource-based view can be gainfully deployed.

A meta-analysis of the data from empirical investigations of diversity in work groups was used to examine the impact of two types of diversity attributes, highly job-related and less job-related, on work group cohesion and performance. This distinction was used to test the proposition that different types of diversity will differentially impact work group cohesion and performance. In addition, type of team was examined as a possible moderator of the relationship between diversity and performance. Results showed that neither type of diversity had a relationship with cohesion or performance. Explanations and directions for future research are offered.

This paper reviews and extends recent scholarly and popular literature to provide a broad overview of how information technology (IT) impacts organizational characteristics and outcomes. First, based on a review of the literature, we describe two of the principal performance enhancing benefits of IT: information efficiencies and information synergies, and identify five main organizational outcomes of the application of IT that embody these benefits. We then discuss the role that IT plays in moderating the relationship between organizational characteristics including structure, size, learning, culture, and interorganizational relationships and the most strategic outcomes, organizational efficiency and innovation. Throughout we discuss the limitations and possible negative consequences of the use of IT and close by considering several key areas for future research.

Managerial resources, defined as the skills and abilities of managers, are important contributors to the entire bundle of firm resources that enable some firms to generate rents. Here we build on our original analysis (Castanias & Helfat, 1991) and present an expanded classification of managerial resources, elaborate on how this classification relates to the fundamental resource-based characteristics of value, scarcity, inimitability, and difficulty of substitution, and highlight the issue of appropriability of rents from managerial resources. We then move well beyond the original analysis to examine a large number of empirical implications of our model, including many contingency factors, and discuss recent empirical research. Finally, we suggest extensions of the model to include managerial cognition and social capital, and draw implications for resource-based theory more generally.

The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has influenced the field of strategic human resource management (SHRM) in a number of ways. This paper explores the impact of the RBV on the theoretical and empirical development of SHRM. It explores how the fields of strategy and SHRM are beginning to converge around a number of issues, and proposes a number of implications of this convergence.