Knowledge that Transforms

There is a rich debate in organizational theory about the contribution of supervisors to group process and performance, and about the span of control needed to make that contribution. In this paper, I summarize the debate and develop competing hypotheses. These competing hypotheses are tested using multisite survey and archival measures, and interpreted using qualitative data from the same study. I find that small supervisory spans improve performance through their positive effects on group process. In particular, supervisors with smaller spans achieved higher levels of relational coordination among their direct reports. Qualitative data suggest that supervisors with smaller spans achieved these results through working with, and providing intensive coaching and feedback to their direct reports.

This paper builds on prior theory and research on attention and identity to examine whether and how industries publicly attend to external events. Events are critical triggers of institutional transformation and industry evolution. However, they must first become the focus of public attention to have this effect. We draw on a paired case comparison of media coverage of eight nonroutine events affecting the natural environment and the U.S. chemical industry. We employ both deductive and inductive analysis to develop a model and hypotheses to explain two research questions. First, what determines the initial public attention to an event? Second, when and why do certain events attain high and sustained levels of industry attention? A key inference is that whether an event receives industry-level attention depends on either outsiders holding the industry accountable for the event, or insiders' internal concerns with the industry image. We further infer that an event can be transformed into a critical issue for an industry, warranting sustained attention, if there is contestation with outsiders over the accountability for the event and its enactment, and internal contradictions and challenges to the industry's identity.

An extensive body of literature indicates the importance of teamwork to the success of innovative projects. This growing awareness, that “good teamwork” increases the success of innovative projects, raises new questions: What is teamwork, and how can it be measured? Why and how is teamwork related to the success of innovative projects? How strong is the relationship between teamwork and various measures of project success such as performance or team member satisfaction? This article develops a comprehensive concept of the collaboration in teams, called Teamwork Quality (TWQ). The six facets of the TWQ construct, i.e., communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion, are specified. Hypotheses regarding the relationship between TWQ and project success are tested using data from 575 team members, team leaders, and managers of 145 German software teams. The results of the structural equation models estimated show that TWQ (as rated by team members) is significantly associated with team performance as rated by team members, team leaders, and team-external managers. However, the magnitude of the relationship between TWQ and team performance varies by the perspective of the performance rater, i.e., manager vs. team leader vs. team members. Furthermore, TWQ shows a strong association with team members' personal success (i.e., work satisfaction and learning).

The concept of strategic surprise has been used by writers on military strategy to explore the successful amplification of resources during battle. This paper applies the same concept to subcontracting relationships and develops a cognitive framework to explain the phenomenon of strategic surprises, using buyer-supplier relations as an example. We first examine the factors that produce vulnerability to strategic surprise in cooperative situations. Then, we explore the reasons why firms are caught by surprise in spite of their vigilance. We present a model representing false alarms and strategic surprises as judgmental errors. We argue that judgmental errors cause misinterpretation of evidence and a consequent sense of false security. Interactive norms, which exist in some industries and may be taken as proxies for enduring relationships, may increase the likelihood of misjudgment and strategic surprises.

While the recent focus on knowledge has undoubtedly benefited organizational studies, the literature still presents a sharply contrasting and even contradictory view of knowledge, which at times is described as “sticky” and at other times “leaky.” This paper is written on the premise that there is more than a problem with metaphors at issue here, and more than accounts of different types of knowledge (such as “tacit” and “explicit”) can readily explain. Rather, these contrary descriptions of knowledge reflect different, partial, and sometimes “balkanized” perspectives from which knowledge and organization are viewed. Taking the community of practice as a unifying unit of analysis for understanding knowledge in the firm, the paper suggests that often too much attention is paid to the idea of community, too little to the implications of practice. Practice, we suggest, creates epistemic differences among the communities within a firm, and the firm's advantage over the market lies in dynamically coordinating the knowledge produced by these communities despite such differences. In making this argument, we argue that analyses of systemic innovation should be extended to embrace all firms in a knowledge economy, not just the classically innovative. This extension will call for a transformation of conventional ideas coordination and of the trade-off between exploration and exploitation.

It is difficult for the firm competing through information technology resources to gain a sustainable advantage because systems are easy to imitate and substitute resources are often available to competitors. The innovator may be unable to appropriate all of the benefits from information technology investments. Airlines have installed computerized reservations systems in travel agencies to appropriate the returns from their investments in information technology. The airlines expected to obtain a number of benefits from this strategy, including increased efficiency, possible bias in favor of the computerized reservations systems owner on the part of the travel agent, and fees from other airlines for making reservations for them. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the appropriation of value by computerized reservations systems owners from deploying systems in travel agencies. These benefits, beyond fees from travel agents, should be seen in the vendor airline's market share between cities and in the overall performance of the airline at an industry level. This paper models airline performance as a function of computerized reservations systems ownership at two levels: for selected city-pairs and at the overall level of the firm. The city-pair analysis employs a multinomial logit market share model that analyzes five years of data on 72 city-pair routes. The industry model uses longitudinal data for a panel of 10 airlines for 12 years. The results of both analyses support hypotheses that computerized reservations systems ownership is positively related to airline performance. It appears that strong airlines have appropriated the benefits of their computerized reservations systems, turning them into highly specialized assets for further travel-related innovation. This work offers useful theoretical extensions and methodological approaches for the study of similar kinds of network technology innovations that are currently being deployed in association with electronic commerce on the Internet.

This study examines how historical resource endowments and competencies affect strategic change and its outcomes amid environmental turbulence. Drawing from both behavioral and economics-based literatures, we develop four distinct perspectives regarding the likely effect of resources on strategic change. These four perspectives offer alternative predictions about how and why resource endowments should affect the likelihood or magnitude of strategic change, and how and why they should moderate the relation between strategic change and performance. We examine the predictive power of these four alternative arguments using extensive longitudinal data from a single industry context characterized both by substantial resource heterogeneity and environmental turbulence. Results indicate that organizations possessing greater stocks of historically valuable resources were much less likely to engage in adaptive strategic change, but also that this resource-driven disinclination towards change tended to have a benign or even beneficial effect on performance. We discuss the implications of our theory and findings for the strategic change literature and also for the literature on the resource-based view of the firm.

Strategic learning aims to generate learning in support of future strategic initiatives that will, in turn, foster knowledge asymmetries that can lead to differences in organizational performance. From a case study of a unique organization whose purpose is to facilitate strategic knowledge distillation, it was found that this process is characterized by targeted information gathering that relies on diverse experts for interpretation as well as validation. It also embodies the organizational capability to leverage information technologies in the distillation effort, integrating them with processes for generating, storing, and transporting rich, de-embedded knowledge across multiple levels of the organization. As a result of the case study, a model of the strategic learning is developed and a series of propositions regarding its context and processes are presented based on this model. The model highlights key dimensions of strategic learning that suggest design parameters for organizations building strategic learning systems.

Does owner management necessarily eliminate the agency costs of ownership? Drawing on agency literature and on the economic theory of the household, we argue that private ownership and owner management expose privately held, owner-managed firms to agency threats ignored by Jensen’s and Meckling’s (1976) agency model. Private ownership and owner management not only reduce the effectiveness of external control mechanisms, they also expose firms to a “self-control” problem created by incentives that cause owners to take actions which “harm themselves as well as those around them” (Jensen 1994, p. 43). Thus, shareholders have incentive to invest resources in curbing both managerial and owner opportunism. We extend this thesis to the domain of the family firm. After developing hypotheses which describe how family dynamics and, specifically, altruism, exacerbate agency problems experienced by these privately held, owner-managed firms, we use data obtained from a large-scale survey of family businesses to field test our hypotheses and find evidence which suggests support for our proposed theory. Finally, we discuss the implications of our theory for research on family and other types of privately held, owner-managed firms.