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Co-creation as a collaborative process between organizations and customers generates unique value for both internal and external stakeholders for the company. Research generally examines and portrays customer-company co-creation as a balanced and harmonious relationship. However, a successful co-creation strategy involves understanding the shared interests of the parties and resolving tensions between internal and external stakeholders to avoid co-destruction. This study aims to draw on the intersection of organizational behavior and marketing literature and to examine shared interests and conflicting tensions involved in the co-creation in the context of sports entertainment. This context allows the researchers to unpack and present a more complex process of co-creation that fosters co-creativity and innovation.

Based on a qualitative case-based approach of a major university in the USA, the authors draw on interviews and observations from their athletic administration and fans engaged in a men’s Division I team through an entire season.

This qualitative study illustrates an alternative, more complex dilemma of co-creating emotional and symbolic value based on shared interests while reconciling conflicting internal and external stakeholder interests. The findings suggest a tug of war based on tensions, where management adopted contrasting managerial strategies ranging from attempting to reconcile tension through organic co-creation to controlled manufactured creation.

Emotional and symbolic game experience value is an interdependent process which cannot be created without consumer engagement. Both emotional and symbolic values are enhanced during games to the extent consumers perceive participation in the creative pre-game stages.

This study draws on sports entertainment to identify sources of tension in co-creation and discuss type of solutions among internal and external stakeholders.

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

Two primary approaches have been used to study employment brands and branding. First, there is a long history of the study of organizational attraction. Second, in the past 10–15 years, there has been growth in a hybrid stream of research combining branding concepts from the consumer psychology literature with I/O psychology frameworks of organizational attraction and applicant job search behavior. In this chapter, we take an entirely different approach and suggest that the theoretical models built around product/service brand knowledge can readily accommodate employment brands and branding without hybridizing the framework with I/O psychology. This merging of employment brand with product and service brands is accomplished simply by recognizing employment as an economic exchange between workers and employers and recognizing workers as cognitive and emotional beings that vary in their talents and have their own vectors of preferences for the employment offering. After developing a testable model of the components, antecedents, and consequences of employment brand knowledge, we review the existing employment brand and organizational attraction literature and identify multiple opportunities for additional research.

Matt Bloom, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Management Department at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Before receiving his doctorate he worked as paramedic, psychiatric technician, and then as a consultant for Arthur Young & Company and American Express. Matt's current research interests center on well-being at work and include exploring topics such as what work is like when people experience it as a calling and what conditions help people to be at their cognitive and emotional best at work. He is currently undertaking a program of research to study well-being among people in the caring professions.