Search results

This paper examines three issues. First, do multiple possible paths to high versus low new product performance (NPP) occur among European, high-tech, industrial manufacturing firms? Second, what are the upstream influences on high NPP? For example, what background factors affect the levels of the KSFs? Third, do consistent country-level differences occur among Austrian, German, and Swedish executives in their evaluations of antecedents and high-tech NPP? To probe these issues, a total of 771 chief operating officers and project managers participated in face-to-face long interviews (McCracken, 1988) covering 241 less and 264 more successful than average industrial NPD projects. The empirical findings support the propositions that: (1) multiple paths lead to high versus low NPP; (2) unique antecedent variables affect the KSFs for high NPP; and (3) for several upstream and direct influences, consistent national differences occur among executives’ assessments of NPP. A key implication of the study for NPD executives is to recognize the possibility of alternative paths leading to successful NPD.

We examine how a firm’s market-oriented capabilities (in areas such as R&D or marketing) and consumer focus (business-to-business or business-to-consumer) foster its effectiveness in pursuing corporate political activities. We then explore the sustainability of any advantage that firms may gain from their political activities. We develop a conceptual framework to propose that a firm’s political capabilities to implement different political tactics, such as information provision and constituency building, are a product of how related these tactics are to different market-oriented capabilities and to the skills needed to serve different types of customers. Finally, we propose that the integration of market strategies and political strategies provides new insight into the sustainability of the advantages that a firm might gain through political activities.

This chapter proposes that organizational strategy formation should be characterized theoretically as a process that is subject to several interacting forces, rather than represented by separate discrete decision-models or theoretic perspectives, as is commonly done in the strategic management literature. Based on an extensive review of relevant theory and empirical work in strategic decision-making, organizational change theory, cognitive and social psychology, and strategy processes, seven kinds of “forces” – rational, imposed, teleological, learning, political, heuristic, and social – are identified as interacting in and having significant influence on the strategy formation process. It is further argued that by applying a holistic “forces-view” of the significant and interacting influences on strategy formation, we can better understand the dynamics and challenges in managing the process of defining and changing organizational strategies.

This study examines the impact of environmental activity management (EAM) on triple bottom line (TBL) performance and the role that sustainability strategies play in mediating these relationships. Data were collected using a survey of Australian managers and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The findings indicate that each of the three levels of EAM – Environmental Activity Analysis, Environmental Activity Cost Analysis, and Environmental Activity Based Costing – influence-specific aspects of performance, either directly and/or indirectly through environmental and social sustainability strategies. The findings suggest that managers could enhance their use of EAM practices through the use of sustainability strategies in order to enhance performance. This study provides empirical insight into the impact that EAM practices and environmental and social sustainability strategies have on all three aspects of TBL performance.

Most research issues in strategic management are essentially problem focused. To one extent or another, these problems often span levels of analysis, may align with different performance metrics, and likely hold different implications from various theoretical perspectives. Despite these variations, research has generally approached questions by taking a single perspective or by contrasting one perspective with a single alternative rather than exploring integrative implications. As such, very few efforts have sought to consider the performance implications of using combined, integrated, or multi-level perspectives. Given this reality, what actually constitutes “good” performance, how performance is effectively measured, and how performance measures align with different perspectives remain thorny problems in strategic management research. This paper discusses potential extensions by which strategic management research and theory might begin to address these conflicts. We first consider the multi-level nature of strategic management phenomena, focusing in particular on competitive advantage and value creation as core concepts. We next present three approaches in which strategic management theories tend to link levels of analysis (transaction, management, and atmosphere). We then examine the implications arising from these multi-level approaches and conclude with suggestions for future research.

We aim at providing a more precise differentiation of external stakeholder pressures and their impact on multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries’ political strategies. Thus, we analyse whether external stakeholder pressures entail a more intense use of political strategies, and whether pressures from public stakeholders are more influencing compared to pressures from private stakeholders. We use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis to test our hypotheses with data from 157 subsidiaries in Brazil, Russia, Turkey, India, China and South Africa. We found that the higher external stakeholder pressures on the MNC subsidiary, the more intensely subsidiaries apply political strategies. Furthermore, both public and private stakeholder pressures affect political strategies in a positive way, but our results show no statistical significance for a difference in impact. The study differentiates the general concept of external stakeholder pressures into pressures from national public and national private stakeholders.

Through a systematic review of the literature, this study analyzes the empirical literature on the adoption of environmental sustainability strategies in order to identify (i) the main conceptual aspects by which environmental sustainability strategies can be conceived of, (ii) the main determinants of the adoption of such strategies, (iii) the expected impacts on the company’s international performance, as well as (iv) the mechanisms that mediate the effect of environmental sustainability strategies on international performance. This study thereby offers propositions about the relationships between environmental sustainability strategies, their determinants (both in relation to the institutional environment and to the company’s domain), and their performance implications.