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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mixed results of the relationship between technological resources and internationalization performance. It argues that a high proportion of technological resources bound to be used in home countries decrease internationalization performance, which is moderated by organizational slack.

This study uses data from Korean-listed pharmaceutical firms from 1998 to 2010. Tobit regression is used to test the hypotheses since the dependent variable takes a value within a limited range.

The empirical results show that a high ratio of home country-bound technological resources reduces internationalization performance. This negative relationship is reinforced as organizational slack increases.

This study reveals why technological resources do not always result in effective internationalization. Furthermore, its focus on organizational slack as an intrafirm contingency contributes to recent attempts to reveal organizational slack’s role in internationalization.

Organizational legitimacy is greatly influenced by firm corporate social responsibility (CSR) records. An organization with a poor CSR record can either try to improve its practices or attempt to manipulate institutional norms and belief systems in order to convince the society that its practices are acceptable. The authors argue that firms’ corporate political strategies (CPS) – attempts by firms to influence public policy outcomes in a favorable way – can be very effective in shaping legitimacy norms and offsetting negative public image. The purpose of this paper is to draw on institutional theory and propose that firms with negative CSR records consider investing in political strategies necessary in order to construct new legitimate standards in line with their strategies.

The authors test the hypotheses on 348 manufacturing firms using data from “The Center for Responsive Politics.” MSCI (formerly known as KLD) and COMPUSTAT. Research methodology used to test hypotheses is hierarchical ordinary least square regression analysis.

The authors find that firms with high CSR concerns invest more in CPSs. In addition, the results indicate that organizational visibility and organizational slack positively moderate this relationship. In other words, visible firms and firms with high organizational slack invest more in CPSs if they are facing CSR concerns compared to firms that are less visible and with less organizational slack.

In this paper, the authors focus on the corporate governance dimension of CSR. Although focussing on the negative corporate governance practices gives us an opportunity to have a more focused approach, there are other important aspects of CSR such as environmental practices, employment issues, and accounting practices that are not addressed in this study.

This paper can serve as a testament to the value of investing in political strategies to the practitioners. The results indicate that firms can manage their image and reputation through political spending and this is especially true for firms that are more visible and have more organizational slack.

Much of the previous literature explores the relationship between market factors such as financial status of the firm and political strategies. This paper contributes to the literature by showing that other non-market forces such as poor social standing can also motivate companies to invest in political strategies.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between unexpected financial slack and small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) diversification and growth performance.

Using the phenomenon of IPO over-financed in China as the empirical context, the authors constructed a firm-level measure of unexpected financial slack based on over-financed capital resources and extended the nascent inquiry on unexpected slack.

The authors proposed and tested that, with unexpected slack obtained from IPO over-financed, SMEs did not engage in diversification until slack was extraordinarily high (a curvilinear relationship). And in such cases, SMEs preferred geographic diversification rather than industry diversification. Moreover, SMEs were able to sustain growth performance both in the short term and in the long term.

This study had important implications for regulators and managers. The findings of this study suggested that proper regulations on usage of over-financed capital helped SMEs’ sustain their growth performance. Regulatory policies could curb managers from cognitive biases to behave more prudently and deploy the resources more consciously. However, with sufficient resources, managers should also consider more explorative growth drivers such as diversification.

This study joined the efforts of extending the antecedents of slack formation from internal managerial behaviors to external uncertain factors. As the first study to explore the role of unexpected slack at firm level, the results of this study shed more light on the effects of unexpected slack resources.

The proposed theoretical model offers a systematic approach to synthesize the fragmented research on organizational crisis, disasters and extreme events.

This paper offers a theoretical model of organizational responses to extreme threats.

The paper explains that organizations choose between hypervigilance (freeze), exit (flight), growth (fight) and dormancy (fright) when faced with extreme threats. The authors explain how the choice between these responses are informed by the interplay between slack and routines.

The study’s theoretical model contributes by explaining the nature of organizational responses to extreme threats and how the two underlying mechanisms, slack and routines, determine heterogeneity between organizations.

The authors advance four key managerial considerations: the need to distinguish between discrete and chronic threats, the critical role of hypervigilance in the face of extreme threats, the distinction between resources and routines during threat mitigation, and the recognition that organizational exit may sometimes be the most effective means for survival.

The novelty of this paper pertains to the authors’ use of the comparative developmental approach to incorporate insights from the study of individual responses to life-threatening events to explain organizational responses to extreme threats.

This study aims to examine the relationship between organizational capacity, slack resource, platform strategic choice and firm performance. It also tackles the endogenous issues regarding the strategic choice of platform types.

This study uses Heckman’s two-stage procedures to examine the relationship between the variables. The sample in this study comes from Compustat annual company and segment files. The sample used in the main analysis consists of 252 individual corporations globally and 3,528 firm-year observations from 2004–2017.

The empirical results suggest that: (1) firms are more likely to develop physical platforms than virtual platforms when they possess higher levels of available slack, potential slack, research and development (R&D) capacity and marketing capacity; (2) in general, firms developing physical platforms perform better than firms developing virtual platforms after the endogeneity bias are controlled; and (3) firms that choose to develop physical platforms perform better than if they had chosen to develop virtual platforms.

This study contributes to the platform research literature by proposing the endogenous role of platform type choice in firm performance in the context of the retail industry. Prior conceptual and theoretical platform studies have seldom focused on the retail industry through a strategic choice perspective. Furthermore, one of the contributions of this study is the derivation of empirical support for the research’s prediction using data from actual firms carried out by global physical and virtual platform companies. This study also presents many opportunities for further explorations on the relationship between firm strategic choice and firm performance in the context of platform retail industry.

The findings of this study suggest that firms must realize that their performance is not necessarily affected by these platform type choice determinants in terms of potential slack, available slack, R&D capacity and marketing capacity. By contrast, they should pay more attention to developing physical platforms if it is possible. The study findings indicate that although virtual platforms have grown rapidly because of the development of technology, firm performance is at all times superior when firms choose to develop physical platforms.

Prior platform studies have focused on the topic of network structure, platform architecture, pricing strategy, platform leadership and platform design and governance within the context of video game industry, software industry, hardware industry and telecommunications industry. Seldom of them focus on other industries through a strategic choice perspective. Furthermore, one of the contributions of this study is the derivation of empirical support for the research’s prediction using data from actual firms carried out by global physical and virtual platform companies.

This paper undertakes an empirical analysis of the impact of absorbed and unabsorbed slack, employing three different measures for each slack type, on firm profitability. We find that unabsorbed slack has a more favorable influence on future firm profitability than absorbed slack. While all the absorbed slack indicators have a significant negative influence on future profitability, the three unabsorbed slack indicators present positive, negative, and non-significant influences, respectively. The fewer constraints of unabsorbed slack on the redeployment to exploit new opportunities point to its comparative advantage over absorbed slack. We find evidence for the differential impact of absorbed versus unabsorbed slack on profitability in firms with lower levels of slack, which suggests firms prefer to withdraw resources from current business and redeploy them to develop new and more favorable business opportunities.

Innovation is the most important quality of enterprise management. It is an important and controversial issue whether the heterosexual leadership structure of the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) makes the work “easy” or “very tired” in enterprise innovation. This study investigates the specific impact of the heterosexual leadership structure on enterprise innovation investment, and further explores influence mechanism between them from two perspectives. Specifically, from the perspective of enterprise leaders including the chairman and CEO, this paper analyzes the impact of surname sharing, intergenerational differences and top management team (TMT) external social network between the heterosexual leadership structure and enterprise innovation investment. And from the perspective of enterprise itself, this study explores the impact of ownership and organizational slack between the heterosexual leadership structure and enterprise innovation investment.

By using ordinary least squares regression (OLS), this study mainly takes the unbalanced panel data of A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2019 in Shanghai and Shenzhen as the research sample to empirically analyze the relationship and influence mechanism between the heterosexual leadership structure and enterprise innovation investment.

The results show that the heterosexual leadership structure of the chairman and CEO has a negative impact on enterprise innovation investment. Surname sharing and ownership positively moderate the negative impact of the heterosexual leadership structure of the chairman and CEO on enterprise innovation investment. Intergenerational differences and TMT external social network negatively moderate the relationship between the heterosexual leadership structure of the chairman and CEO and enterprise innovation investment. In addition, the moderating effects of intergenerational differences and TMT external social network on the relationship between the heterosexual leadership structure and enterprise innovation investment both depend on organizational slack. When organizational slack is lower and intergenerational differences are higher, the negative impact of the heterosexual leadership structure of the chairman and CEO on enterprise innovation investment will be the strongest. And when organizational slack is lower and TMT external social network is higher, the negative impact of the heterosexual leadership structure of the chairman and CEO on enterprise innovation investment will be the strongest.

By exploring the influence and the boundary mechanism of the heterosexual leadership structure of the chairman and CEO on enterprise innovation investment, the “heterosexual difference effect” is verified in this paper, that is, when men and women work together, work is very tired. This not only enriches the existing research of enterprise innovation investment, but also provides practical guidance for effectively improving enterprise innovation investment from a new perspective. In addition, it broadens the moderating mechanism of the impact of the heterosexual leadership structure of the chairman and CEO on enterprise innovation investment, which is conducive to reasonable response to improve enterprise innovation investment.

When the management of an information technology (IT) manufacturing firm perceives a need for innovation due to any threat in the external environment, it will be prompted to use organizational resources to support innovation and improve organizational performance through the implementation of the innovation. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether an IT manufacturing firm’s budget slack, information quality of information system (IS), process innovation and product innovation would interact to collectively form an innovation capacity, which is termed “innovation capability configuration (ICC)”, and whether ICC mediates the relationship between perceived innovation requirement and organizational performance.

To answer these questions, a structural equation model was built and a questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from research and development and production managers of IT manufacturing companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and Over-The-Counter markets.

The results showed that budget slack, IS information quality, process innovation and product innovation are all significantly related to ICC, in which high-quality information and low level of budget slack are the key factors that underpin the innovation capacity. In addition, ICC has a full mediation effect, that is, perceived innovation requirement positively influences ICC, which, in turn, improves organizational performance.

Because all items in a questionnaire were answered by a manager, the common method variance might exist in this study. In addition, the effective recovery rate of the questionnaire was not high due to which the non-response bias might occur. Following the research limitations, several future research recommendations are proposed.

This study offers managerial implications for the development of an IT manufacturing firm’s innovation strategy and structure to smooth the implementation of innovation in the severe environment.

The study is the first attempt to integrate the four elements clearly illustrating the ICC, which is a more complete innovation strategy, thus contributing to improve the past fragmental studies and clarify some controversial points existing in the extant innovation research.

The slack-innovation relationship has interested scholars for years. The authors aim to delve into the impact of financial slack on firm innovation by replicating a classic study arguing that this relationship has an inverse U-shape.

The sample consists of all US firms that were publicly traded between 1993 and 2011. The authors employ the standard econometrics methodology of panel regression with firm-fixed effect and time-fixed effect to estimate the regression equation of firm innovation on financial slack.

The authors find that the relationship between financial slack and R&D investments is similar to that suggested by earlier authors, thus enhancing the generalizability of this important finding in management research. The authors also find that this relationship holds even during economic downturns.

The authors replicate Nohria and Gulati's classic study by considering the impact of slack on innovation. The authors also move away from survey data, as used by Nohria and Gulati. The authors utilize actual firm-level data for a large sample of US publicly traded firms from 1993 to 2011, thus enhancing the generalizability of these findings.

The purpose of this study is to explain how factors relating to resource availability affect managerial risk-taking with regard to the geographic and institutional proximity of cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) targets. The paper further considers the impact of organizational learning by testing the moderating effect of the acquiring firms’ prior international M&A experience.

This study uses linear regression with robust standard errors to account for dependence among clustered observations at the firm level. The authors used country and industry fixed-effects specifications to account for unobserved heterogeneity.

The results suggest that when internal and external resources are more abundant, firms pursue cross-border M&As that are more geographically and institutionally distant. The findings further indicate that a firm’s prior international M&A experience positively moderates the aforementioned relationships..

Extending the behavioral theory of the firm beyond organizational slack resources, the results highlight the importance of taking a multi-level, open-systems perspective of the strategic impact of resource availability. The authors’ theory and findings also provide a more nuanced view of the critical role organizational learning plays in the relationship between resource availability and organizational outcomes.

This is the first study to the authors’ knowledge that develops and tests a theoretical model exploring the impact of both internal (organizational slack) and external (environmental munificence at both the industry and home-country levels) resource availability, as well as prior organizational experience on an important multinational business practice.