Search results

The purpose of this paper is to address the limitations of prior views regarding knowledge source exploitation by proposing a phenomenological approach to managerial attention and the antecedents of exploiting knowledge sources within the multinational corporations (MNC) network.

A phenomenological approach to attention is taken to explain the antecedents of managerial attention in knowledge source exploitation behavior. This approach provides an alternative way of conceiving of knowledge source remoteness and familiarity, on the one hand, and exclusion and inclusion on the other.

Drawing on a phenomenological approach to attention, the merits and limits of prior studies of attention and knowledge seeking/exchange behavior are addressed and three modes of managerial attention are proposed – relative attention, mimetic attention, implicit attention – to explain the antecedents of managerial attention to MNC knowledge sources.

This approach to knowledge source exploitation and attention provides a rich conceptualization of taken‐for‐granted assumptions in extant literature on managerial attention and knowledge‐seeking behavior. The framework offered here builds on a conceptually rigid foundation of attention that overcomes dualisms such as mind‐body, subject‐object, and thinking‐acting that are often embedded in other mainstream approaches to managerial attention.

Safety and organizational research indicates that fostering resilience in organizations is a promising way for improving safety, albeit concrete means to implement resilience are still lacking, especially in the educational field. The purpose of this paper is to propose four principles for training design derived from past and current studies the authors conduct in high-risk organizations.

Training for resilience is considered within an enactive approach of human activity building on its properties of autonomy, structural coupling, self-organization, emergence, sensemaking, and metastability.

The article describes four educational design principles aiming at improving individual, collective, and organizational resilience: encourage mimetic experiences; pay attention to attention and concernedness; perturb and turn into an event; support participatory-sensemaking and collective sensemaking.

The training program the authors propose may be challenging to assess. Besides, the most durable solutions to improve safety through resilience are to be found at the crossroad between organizational design and training/development policies. Future research should determine the implementability criteria which are likely to support the use of the principles the authors propose, and contribute to enrich this educational foundation.

Education and training are conceived herein as high-order means to improve safety through resilience in high-risk organizations, fostering the capacity of the operators and organization to develop efficiently and in the long run. We provide independent but complementary training principles that cannot be hierarchized, but that can be locally prioritized in organizations.

Many international management scholars have expressed concern about whether societal culture changes so rapidly that research which attempts to represent it has little utility. We address this fundamental concern of international management by providing three theoretical lenses to examine the forces that produce and maintain a society's culture: functional theory, neo-institutional theory and complexity theory. We consider principles of progressive change and problems of social psychology from functional theory, the three pillars and conflicting institutional logics of neo-institutional theory and the ideas of stable equilibrium, oscillations and chaos of dynamic systems from complexity theory. Although these three theoretical lenses sometimes produce conflicting explanations of culture change, they often complement each other. Together, they provide a more realistic picture of the dynamics of the societal cultural milieu of organizations than do cultural representations that favour stability or those that completely discount the utility of any attempt at representing cultural continuity.

Learning theory explains how organizations change as a result of experience, and can be used to predict the competitive strength of individual organizations and competitive pressures in organizational populations. We review extant learning theoretical propositions on how competitive strength is affected by experienced competition, founding conditions, and observed failures of other organizations. In addition, we propose that niche changes are an important source of learning. We test these propositions on data from the Norwegian general insurance industry. We find that historical density increases failure rates, contrary to some earlier findings, and also that the effect of founding density supports the density delay rather than trial-by-fire hypothesis. We find that failures of others before and during the lifetime of the organization reduce failure rates, and niche changes reduce failure rates for joint-stock companies but not for mutual firms. Overall the findings suggest that organizations learn more cheaply from the failures of others than from their own experiences, and that the stresses of competition can overwhelm the learning effects of competition.

In this chapter we ask a simple question: how can we tell if strategic management research is making progress? While other limitations are noted, we argue that it is the absence of metrics for gauging research progress that is most limiting. We propose that research should focus on measures of effect size and that “precision” and “generalizability” in our predictions of important phenomena represent the core metrics that should be used to judge whether progress is occurring. We then discuss how to employ these metrics and examine why existing research practices are likely to hinder efforts to develop cumulative knowledge.

Corporate environmental innovation (CEI) is a proactive type of response to increasing public scrutiny regarding firms’ environmental performance. While past studies have overwhelmingly focused on coercive mechanisms and assumed a closed national institutional field, less attention has been given to non-coercive and transnational inter-firm mimetic mechanisms. This paper aims to investigate the joint effect of coercive isomorphic mechanisms from domestic institutions and mimetic isomorphic mechanisms from foreign multinational enterprises (MNE) on CEI adoption in domestic firms.

The study’s empirical analysis is based on data from 1,967 firms from the 2010 Korean Innovation Survey, as well as other official statistics.

This study reports the following results: the direct effects of domestic institutions on CEI adoption in domestic firms vary according to institution type; foreign MNEs have a positive effect, whether using global or local CEI strategies; and the positive effect of foreign MNEs strengthens when the stringency of domestic environmental regulation increases.

This paper shows that CEI diffusion is driven by both coercive institutional pressures and inter-firm mimetic mechanisms, including their joint effects. Foreign MNEs act as boundary-spanners that activate a dual isomorphic mechanism, affecting social as well as economic development in host countries. Finally, evidence of interaction between domestic coercive and transnational mimetic mechanisms supports the authors’ contention that national institutional fields are increasingly interconnected.

Using the institutional and natural resource-based view theories, the purpose of this study is to examine the influence of religious, cultural and mimetic orientations on proactive environmental strategy, corporate environmental responsibility and traditional environmental strategy. Relying on data collected from managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the study further examines how proactive environmental strategy, corporate environmental responsibility and traditional environmental strategy drive relational capital and firm performance of SMEs operating in Ghana.

The study employed a survey research design, a quantitative approach and a partial least square structural equation modelling technique in making data analysis and interpretations due to its appropriateness for predictive research models.

The results suggest that mimetic orientation robustly and significantly influence the dimensions of environmental orientation. While religious orientation only had a robust and significant influence on proactive environmental strategy, cultural orientation robustly and significantly influences both proactive and traditional environmental strategies. Despite the positive and significant interactions that exist between proactive environmental strategy, corporate environmental responsibility, traditional environmental strategy, relational capital and firm performance, the findings particularly revealed that proactive and environmental strategies insignificantly correlated with relational capital contrary to past study findings.

The study is among the few to examine how religious, cultural and mimetic orientations interrelate with proactive and traditional environmental orientations, relational capital and firm performance in an emerging economy. Based on the findings, implications and directions for future research are discussed while also providing guidance for policymakers, regulatory bodies, scholars and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the factors influencing the adoption of new information systems (IS) in organizations. Based on the institutional theory, this research proposes that organizations may induce their employees to adopt new IS by creating three types of institutional pressure: coercive, normative and mimetic. It is further argued that the effects of these three institutional pressures on employees’ new IS usage depend on their cultural orientations.

Model testing relies on data collected from 370 banking sector employees during the implementation of a new “customer relationship management” system. The hypothesized model was tested by using the structural equation modeling technique in MPlus 7.0.

The findings of this research reveal that institutional pressures (coercive, normative and mimetic) have positive effects on employees’ attitudes to using the new IS, which, in turn, positively influences their IS usage. In addition, collectivism strengthens the positive effect of coercive and normative forces on attitudes to using the new IS. Conversely, collectivism weakens the effect of the mimetic force on employees’ attitudes to using the new IS.

This research is among pioneering studies that explain the effect of institutional pressures (coercive, normative and mimetic) on employees’ IS usage. It is the first study of its nature that demonstrates that each of the three institutional pressures has differential effects on employees with highly collectivist orientations in comparison with employees with low collectivist orientations.

Albeit gradual and uneven, the emergence of social and environmental reporting by publicly held corporations has been a major development in the last few decades. This paper aims to explore patterns of the emergence of these disclosures. Using an institutional theory lens, this paper considers mimetic, normative and coercive possibilities.

US publicly traded company data from 2013 to 2019 is used to test the hypotheses. Mimetic forces are proxied with corporate board interlock frequency. Normative ones use the extent of gender diversity on corporate boards. Measures of business climate and industry regulatory sensitivity proxy coercive potentiality.

Studied in isolation, each of the three forces through which organizations pursue the heightened legitimacy of enhanced environmental and social disclosures has credibility. The strongest support exists for mimetic and normative mechanisms, perhaps because the US government has been reluctant to make these expanded disclosures mandatory.

In the world of voluntary action, more attention to diffusion is needed. For these purposes, better proxies will be needed to study change. Social and environmental information should be separated for individual analysis.

At least in the USA, companies are attentive to what other companies are doing. There is something to be said for the ethical dimension of corporate transparency.

Governmental action in this area has not been effective, at current levels. Corporate leadership is essential. Critical information is shared about disclosure by board members.

Although institutional theory makes several appearances in this area, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study is the first empirical archival study to examine the three forces simultaneously, providing evidence as to the relative magnitude of each institutional force on environmental and social disclosures. Should these disclosures not be mandated by government, this study shows pathways for enhanced disclosures to continue to spread.

The purpose of this paper is to fill the following research gaps. First, few studies have examined isomorphic behavior of multinational corporations (MNCs) with respect to foreign subsidiary staffing. Second, the adoption by an MNC of its internally preferable practices, which is referred to as internal mimetic behavior, has been less extensively investigated when compared with the imitation of practices adopted by a large number of peer firms. Lastly, factors that facilitate internal mimetic behavior have not been extensively explored.

This study hypothesizes that internal mimetic behavior is affected by both formal and informal institutional distance. The hypotheses are tested using the panel data set that consists of 3,981 foreign subsidiaries of Japanese MNCs.

This study finds that as the formal institutional distance between the host country and the home country increases, MNCs are more likely to adopt internal mimetic behavior. Furthermore, it demonstrates that as the informal institutional distance increases, the likelihood that MNCs adopt internal mimetic behavior decreases.

This study suggests that MNCs need to consider the consequences of internal mimetic behavior when they adopt it without having economic rationale. It also suggests that when uncertainty can be mitigated, MNCs should avoid internal mimetic behavior.

This study fills the aforementioned research gaps by examining what factors facilitate internal mimetic behavior. It suggests that both economic rationale and isomorphic behavior need to be considered to advance an understanding of foreign subsidiary staffing.