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Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

The purpose of this paper is to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

In the early eighteenth century, an English carpenter and clock maker, John Harrison, was awarded a phenomenal sum of money – £15,000 – when he made a great scientific and technological breakthrough. Harrison invented the marine chronometer which determined ships' longitude at sea. The Longitude Prize was established after the likes of Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton had failed to come up with a solution. Recalling the story in the Harvard Business Review, Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhari make the point that this is really an early example of what we now call crowdsourcing – getting ideas or creating new products and services by enlisting the help of a large body of people.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

Employees play an essential role in interactive innovation activities in Open Innovation Communities (OICs). Nevertheless, the factors influencing employees' innovation behavior in OICs have not been studied in depth. This study selects personality traits and social network characteristics to explain why and how these two factors affect employees' innovation behavior in OICs.

Three regression models were constructed to test the relationship between personality traits, social network characteristics, and interactive innovation behaviors. The authors examined how employees' personality traits (Big Five personality traits) influence employees' innovative behavior (initiating and supporting innovation) directly in OICs and explored whether social network characteristics (social group) mediate the relationship between employees' personality traits and employees' innovation behavior.

Using empirical data on 162 employees from Salesforce's IdeaExchange, the authors found that extraversion and openness to experience have significant positive effects on employees' interactive innovation behaviors, while conscientiousness has a significant negative effect on employees' interactive innovation behaviors in OICs. Furthermore, the mediation effect test results indicated that social network characteristics have a mediating effect on the relationship between extraversion and innovative behavior, and between openness and innovative behavior.

This study analyzes how personality traits influence innovation behavior in an open innovation environment, thus enriching research related to the factors influencing interactive innovation behavior. Meanwhile, the study integrates personality, social network, and innovative behavior research streams and clearly explains the relationship between the three variables. The research findings assist firms in selecting suitable employees to participate in interactive innovation behaviors in OICs.

Crowdsourcing – a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries – provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. Integrating work on organization theory and innovation, the authors first develop a framework that characterizes crowdsourcing into a main sequential process, through which organizations (1) define the task they wish to have completed; (2) broadcast to a pool of potential contributors; (3) attract a crowd of contributors; and (4) select among the inputs they receive. For each of these phases, the authors identify the key decisions organizations make, provide a basic explanation for each decision, discuss the trade-offs organizations face when choosing among decision alternatives, and explore how organizations may resolve these trade-offs. Using this decision-centric approach, the authors continue by showing that there are fundamental interdependencies in the process that makes the coordination of crowdsourcing challenging.

Traditional utility analysis only calculates the value of a given selection procedure over random selection. This assumption is not only an inaccurate representation of staffing policy but also leads to overestimates of a device's value. This paper presents a more accurate method for computing the validity of a selection battery for when there are multiple selection devices and multiple criteria. Application of the method is illustrated using previous utility analysis work and an actual case of administrative assistants with eight predictors and nine criteria. A final example also is provided that includes these advancements as well as other researchers' advances in a combined utility model. Results reveal that accounting for multiple criteria and outcomes dramatically reduces the utility estimates of implementing new selection devices.

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.

This paper aims to review the challenges of performance appraisal in organizations and argue that these challenges can and must be overcome.

The authors review research on performance appraisal in organizations and on claims that organizations are abandoning performance appraisal.

Structured performance appraisals are still the norm in organizations around the world. There are clear and practical strategies for improving appraisals. These include improving feedback and removing unnecessary complexity, clarifying the goals of appraisal systems, focusing appraisal on behaviors and outcomes under the employee's control and increasing the fairness of appraisal systems.

Research is needed on the effects of changing the ways performance appraisals are conducted in organizations.

Practical strategies for improving performance appraisal are outlined.

Better performance appraisals will benefit organizations and their members.

This paper refutes the growing claim that organizations are abandoning performance appraisal and illustrates practical strategies for improving performance appraisal.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature assessing the return-on-investment (ROI) of healthy workplace programs.

Used a narrative review to summarize and evaluate findings.

Although substantial ROI data now exist, methodological and logical weaknesses limit the conclusions that can be drawn.

A strategy for monetizing the benefits of healthy workplaces that draws on both human resource accounting and strategic human resource management is described.

The promotion of healthy workplaces is an important goal in its own right. To the extent that ROI estimates are important in advancing this goal, these estimates should be based on clear logic and strong methodology.

The paper suggests the need for stronger research designs but also note the difficulties in monetizing outcomes of the healthy workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence of generational differences in items measuring workplace attitudes (e.g. job satisfaction, employee engagement).

Data from two empirical studies were used; the first study examined generational differences in large sample, multi-organizational administrations of an employee survey at both the item and general-factor levels. The second study compared job satisfaction ratings between parents and their children from a large nationwide longitudinal survey.

Although statistically significant, most generational differences in Study 1 did not meet established cutoffs for a medium effect size. Type II error was ruled out given the large power. In Study 2, generational differences again failed to reach Cohen’s cutoff for a medium effect size. Across both studies, over 98 percent of the variance in workplace attitudes lies within groups, as opposed to between groups, and the distributions of scores on these variables overlap by over 79 percent.

Prior studies examining generational differences in workplace attitudes focused on scale-level constructs. The present paper focused on more specific item-level constructs and employed larger sample sizes, which reduced the effects of sampling error. In terms of workplace attitudes, it appears that generations are more similar than they are different.