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Firms pursue a number of redeployment strategies in order to achieve growth and create value for their stakeholders. While the majority of previous research focuses on how firms create synergic value by sharing resources across multiple business units, we lack a systematic analysis of the determinants of different redeployment strategies. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that allows us to systematically investigate how intrinsic resource characteristics affect resource redeployment strategies. Our framework identifies four critical characteristics of resources, that is, fungibility, scale-free nature, decomposability, and tradability. We develop a number of predictions that provide guidance for researchers to identify the optimal resource redeployment strategy appropriate for resources with a certain set of characteristics.

This paper introduces the volume on Resource Redeployment and Corporate Strategy, which is devoted to exploring a relatively new justification for how multi-business firms create value – having flexibility to internally redistribute non-financial resources across their businesses. We clarify how a theory around resource flexibility differs from other theories of how multi-business firms create value. We then synthesize the collection of papers in this volume and describe how they contribute to this line of inquiry. Finally, we offer our own views on opportunities for elaboration of this theory.

This paper addresses resource redeployment in ecosystems. Prior research examines the value of resource redeployment across product markets in multi-business firms. In contrast, resource redeployment across ecosystems is an important corporate strategy employed by both single- and multi-business ecosystem firms that has received little attention. To address this gap, we present a case study of resource redeployment by an entrepreneurial firm in the US residential solar industry. We propose that the value creation mechanisms (i.e., improving capabilities, bottleneck relief) are fundamentally different when resources are redeployed in ecosystems. We identify “consumption-side” interdependence of components and “production-side” resource relatedness as playing critical roles in both types of value creation and propose conditions under which resource redeployment is most valuable. Overall, we contribute insights into the literatures on resource redeployment and strategy in business ecosystems.

Although scholars in strategic management have identified innovating and exit as firms’ two sequential strategic responses to long-run crisis, the potential interdependency has yet remained implicit. Specifically, in the context of Chinese Privately Owned Enterprises (POEs), this study investigates the interrelationship of these two strategic responses during long-run crisis. Building on resource redeployment perspective, the authors propose that firms tend to simultaneously leverage innovating and exit responses.

The authors use the data from the 2010 Chinese POEs survey to verify how firms in the long-term crisis made strategic responses after the 2008 financial crisis. Besides, the authors utilize Probit regressions as the basic analysis and further employ bivariate Probit regressions to conduct robustness tests.

This study provides empirical evidence confirming that firms in the long-run period of the crisis tend to adopt both exit and innovating strategies at the same time, that is, the strategy of resource redeployment. Moreover, this study further finds that government subsidies, the degree of marketization and firm’s organizational capability could all accentuate the decision-making of firms’ resource redeployment.

The authors thus contribute to the study of strategic responses to crisis in strategic management by dynamically find out the interdependency of two responses and enrich the research on resource redeployment perspective by identifying three influential positive antecedents, adding to the ongoing investigation on positive drivers of resource redeployment.

Strategy research has long understood that reconfiguration of the scope of the activities a firm engages in over time is critical to its long-run success, while under-emphasizing differences in redeployment strategy that underlie apparently similar scope and changes in scope. In this paper, we build on the idea that a firm’s number of activities (scope) and change in activities (turnover) arise from two fundamental rates of redeployment: the rate at which activities are added and the rate at which activities are subtracted. In net, the turnover rate reflects how actively a firm reconfigures its resource base by redeploying resources via addition and subtraction of activities. We develop a model that links addition and subtraction with the composition of a firm’s activities and then provide an empirical illustration using data from the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office. As an example of one extension, the model can be generalized to incorporate elements of absorptive capacity. The analysis contributes to our understanding of how firms reconfigure their activities and provide managers with a clearer understanding of tools that guide redeployment of existing resources.

The purpose of this original research is to explore whether firms redeploy the resources that were withdrawn from existing businesses and use them to enter an emerging product market. We studied 244 firms that have exited from at least one business and analyzed whether the firms entered the emerging product market as a new business. The inducements of resource redeployment vary with information cues in media rhetoric about emerging and shifting threats of substitution between the firm’s existing businesses and the new one. Through our hazard rate analysis of entries of firms that exited existing businesses, we examined the hypotheses that resource redeployment through exit and entry may be driven by an interaction of the volume of substitution rhetoric with the resource commitments that the firm had made in the domain of the new business as well as the market relatedness between the firm’s existing businesses and the new one. Our study makes conceptual and methodological contributions to the research on inducements, by theorizing how performance advantages of new over existing businesses vary with product evolution and by characterizing emerging and shifting threats of substitution with content analysis of media rhetoric. Our study suggests that prior work investigating corporate diversification provides an incomplete picture of the contribution of resource relatedness to firm value and firm decision-making.

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.

Organizational scholars and practitioners alike have long recognized the role of corporate culture in shaping the strategic and operational choices that organizations pursue. It is the responsibility of those who plan for change to select approaches that are compatible with the enduring elements of the organization’s dominant culture. A large sample of Canadian hospitals were surveyed to assess how organizational culture impacts the choices that organizations make in managing fiscal cutbacks. Results suggest that approaches and strategies used by Canadian hospitals in managing the change are variably influenced by CEO perceptions of the prevailing corporate culture.

This article seeks to provide a comprehensive model of leadership applicable to managers in the public sector. Although it is based on the leadership literature, the format is intended for practitioners and teachers; that is, although it uses a highly detailed specification of leadership elements, it purposely oversimplifies causal relationships. Leaders first assess their organization and the environment (8 elements are identified) as well as look at the constraints that they may face (4 elements). From this information they set goals including deciding on the level of focus and the degree of change emphasis. Leaders bring to the concrete leadership situation a number of traits (10 elements) and overarching skills such as communication capability (4 elements). The totality of leaders' actions are perceived as styles based on key factors such as decisional input, which are more or less appropriate based on the situation. Leaders may or may not have a broad range of styles at which they excel. Finally, the model identifies concrete management behaviors that leaders typically engage in-with more or less success based on their styles, traits, and skills. These behaviors are categorized as largely being task-oriented, people-oriented, or organization oriented (21 elements). Ultimately, leaders evaluate their organizations' and their own performance, and the cycle begins again. The model's strength is the detailed articulation of leadership elements (50 including goal setting and leader evaluation).

Firms in mature or declining industries are faced with the challenge of redeploying their excess resources to new applications, and M&A strategies can be an important component of this effort. I consider two ways in which excess resources are applied to more attractive business opportunities through M&A, and I analyze these strategies through the lenses of industrial organization economics, resource-based view, evolutionary perspective and agency theory. In the redeployment strategy, firms seek attractive opportunities in related industries, using acquisitions to fill any resource deficiencies. In the consolidation strategy, firms combine with their competitors within the same industry. The resulting larger pool of resources provides greater opportunities for disposing off their under-utilized resources through the market, while enhancing their profitability. Either way, excess resources can find new applications, within the firm in the former strategy and through the market in the latter. I also discuss some implications for future research and practice.