Search results

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the relationship between individuals’ shared core knowledge within a firm and a collective understanding of management’s strategic priorities.

The study develops three sets of competing hypotheses to predict how three different aspects of individuals’ shared core knowledge – extent, diversity and interpretation – are related to their understanding of the organization’s strategic priorities. The hypotheses are tested using a cognitive mapping approach within the context of a manufacturing plant in the USA.

Organizational members with a lower proportion of shared core knowledge exhibit a greater appreciation of the firm’s strategic priorities. More diversity in this shared knowledge is associated with a greater appreciation of strategic priorities and when members agree on the relative importance of different types of knowledge, whether they actually share this knowledge, they have a better understanding of the firm’s strategic priorities.

The study uses data from a single firm in one industry.

This research helps to highlight and empirically isolate different aspects of shared knowledge that influence individuals’ understanding of organizational priorities. It also demonstrates the varying importance of different aspects of shared knowledge (e.g. extent, diversity and interpretation in explaining individuals’ understanding of the firm’s strategic priorities.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the effect of the National Hockey League (NHL) collective bargaining agreement (CBA) of 2005 between the NHL owners and the NHL Players Association, to determine whether competitive balance in the NHL increased after the CBA.

Competitive balance in the NHL was compared between 11 seasons before the NHL Lockout Season in 2004-2005 and 11 seasons after, with a new CBA and a new revenue sharing plan. Competitive balance was measured in multiple ways, within seasons, across multiple seasons, by the margin of victory in individual games, by the concentration of teams winning and playing in the NHL championship, in the correlation of winning percentage of a season with subsequent seasons, and the number of consecutive winning or losing seasons.

There was greater competitive balance after the Lockout Season and the new CBA than before on all of the measures of competitive balance. The NHL has found a management solution to the effective management of a common pool resource and avoided a tragedy of the commons.

While this research builds on previous work which examines the presence of competitive balance in the NHL, it encourages those engaged in labor policy to consider not only the merit of design when negotiating labor policy, but also to explore the impact of policy on organizational outcomes over time.

This paper combines perspectives and insights from multiple disciplines including economists’ ideas about competitive balance in a sports league, ecologists’ ideas about effective management of a common pool resource, and strategic management ideas about management solutions to a sustainability problem.

In competitive environments, explicitly seeking institutional changes to adopt a new technology, rather than exploiting current resources, can harm more than help organizations’ efforts to achieve their performance goals. However, institutionally embedded organizations often respond to the introduction of industry disruptive technology in counterproductive ways. This paper aims to study the paradox of embedded agency in competitive environments and explore the diffusion of new occupations associated with data analytics.

This study uses the context of the Major League Baseball where the digital platform, PITCHf/x, implemented during 2006 and 2007 seasons facilitated the professional baseball clubs to create occupations for data analytics.

This study found that long-term low performance of organizations resulted in creating occupations for a new technology and deploying professionals to them and the public media’s negative tenor mediated the relationship between the signal of institutional inefficiency and such a boundary work in a competitive environment.

This research enriches our understanding of the early disperse of a new occupation in the times of the emergence of digital platform by exploring the temporal attributes of organizational performance and the role of public media as the antecedents to embedded agency.