Search results

Managerial cognition is a fundamental area informing all sub-fields in strategy, and therefore, a systematic review of the methodological choices of premier strategy publications aids cognition researchers in choosing methods. However, past studies have given little attention to the methods recently published in premier journals. This chapter both illustrates a common cognitive method – content analysis – and uses it to analyze the methodological content of 573 publications from two prominent management journals. Our findings provide cognition scholars with useful information about current methodological standards. Our findings also will help students choose methods courses and will spark a healthy debate about methodological expectations.

Extant research posits that mergers and acquisition (M&As) do not create value. Still many firms adopt expansion strategies such as alliances, joint ventures (JVs), and M&As to grow and enhance their performance. Through performing a meta-analysis on 204 papers that assess the relationship between the three most prevalent expansion strategies formed by firms, alliances, JVs, and M&As and their different substantive and symbolic performance effects, this study contributes in two ways. First, it becomes clear that alliances and M&As enhance a firm’s substantive performance, while no positive performance effect is observed for JVs. In turn, all three expansion strategies boost a firm’s symbolic performance in terms of its legitimacy and status. Second, a distinction between their effects on a firm’s substantive performance in terms of their market-based and accounting-based performance shows that alliances and M&As both positively contribute to a firm’s accounting-based performance, while only the former spurs a firm’s market-based returns. This indicates that M&As have more long-term accounting-based performance effects compared to alliances and JVs, which suggests that in the long-term firms do best by expanding through M&As.

While qualitative work has a long tradition in the strategy field and has recently regained popularity, we have not paused to take stock of how such work offers contributions. We address this oversight with a review of qualitative studies of strategy published in five top-tier journals over an extended period of 15 years (2003–2017). In an attempt to organize the field, we develop an empirically grounded organizing framework. We identify 12 designs that are evident in the literature, or “designs-in-use” as we call them. Acknowledging important similarities and differences between the various approaches to qualitative strategy research (QSR), we group these designs into three “families” based on their philosophical orientation. We use these designs and families to identify trends in QSR. We then engage those trends to orient the future development of qualitative methods in the strategy field.

Longitudinal regression analysis is conducted to clarify causal relations and control for unwanted influences from actor heterogeneity and state dependence on theoretically important coefficient estimates. Because strategic management contains theory on how firms differ and how firm actions are influenced by their current strategic position and recent experiences, consistency of theory and methodology often requires use of longitudinal methods. We describe the theoretical motivation for longitudinal methods and outline some common methods. Based on a survey of recent articles in strategic management, we argue that longitudinal methods are now used more frequently than before, but the use is still inconsistent and insufficiently justified by theoretical or empirical considerations. In particular, strategic management researchers should use dynamic models more often, and should test for the presence of actor effects, autocorrelation, and heteroscedasticity before applying corrections.

Since March (1991) presented his ideas on organizational learning, hundreds of empirical tests have been conducted on relationships among the activities of exploration, exploitation, ambidexterity, and firm performance. Despite continued interest in his ideas, there has not been a systematic assessment of extant research to reveal whether, and to what extent, these activities relate to firm performance. This study uses meta-analysis to take a next step by aggregating results of 117 studies from more than 21,000 firms. I find strong performance effects for exploration and exploitation, but contrary to received theory, I discover ambidexterity yields weaker effects than a focus on either exploration or exploitation. Thus, I leverage these findings to offer future research opportunities.

Organizational performance is widely recognized as an important – if not the most important – construct in strategic management research. Researchers also agree that organizational performance is a multidimensional construct. However, the research implications of the construct's multidimensionality are less understood. In this chapter, we use a synthesis of previous attempts to describe the dimensions of performance and our own analysis of performance measurement in the Strategic Management Journal to build a conceptual model of organizational performance and its dimensions. Our model suggests that operational performance and organizational performance are distinct, and that organizational performance can be further dimensionalized into accounting returns, stock market, and growth measures. The model has implications for how future research might advance understanding about performance and how empirical studies should conceptualize and measure performance.

Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.

Acquisition integration is important to realize synergies and to achieve acquisition success. However, there is a lack of clarity on pertinent integration approaches suggesting that integration is more complex and dynamic than traditionally assumed. In this chapter, we shed light on ambiguous cause effect relationships by investigating the effect of integration related decisions on intermediate goals. Additionally, we argue that entrepreneurial integration skills, or proactivity under ambiguity, are needed to keep pace with the dynamism inherent in acquisition integration. Based on primary data on 116 acquisitions, we find that entrepreneurial integration skills can display both advantages and disadvantages. While it helps to realize expected and serendipitous synergies, it can also trigger employee uncertainty due to decreased transparency. In supplementary analysis, we show measures to outperform with various integration approaches. Implications for management research and practice are identified.

In the academic field of business management, several potential theories were established during the last decades to explain companies' decisions, organizational behavior, consumer patterns, and internationalization, among others. As a result, businesses and scholars were able to analyze and decide based on theoretical approaches to explain the current conditions of the market. Secondary research was conducted to collect more than 36 management theories. This chapter aims to develop the most famous theories related to business applied in the international field. The novelty of this chapter relies on the compilation of recognized previous research studies from the academic literature and evidence in international business.