Search results

This paper seeks to explore the effect of performance duration (rather than intensity) on the subsequent initiation of strategic change by firms. Specifically, the effect of outperformance and underperformance duration on strategic change, as well as the moderating effect of environmental dynamism, is studied.

Using a fixed-effects model, analyzing a sample of 34,907 firm-year observations from 1980 to 2018 across 112 industries mostly supported proposed hypotheses.

Results revealed a U-shaped relationship between outperformance duration and strategic change and an inverted U-shaped relationship between underperformance duration and strategic change. The moderation role of environmental dynamism was only partially supported.

This study examines a new dimension of performance feedback, namely duration, rather than the widely used intensity of performance feedback, to enhance our understanding of the behavioral theory of the firm.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of change readiness and resolve as a principal feature of strategic teams. Change leadership and management in the context of strategy, talent and culture provide the organization with the capacity for navigating change at the process, category and business levels. This paper provides a practical look at the cultivation of strategic teams as agents for making change strategy happen.

The authors have examined a series of variables that inform the strategic agenda, talent blocks and beams, and the cultural agenda for organizations large and small. They have built a general framework for mapping and engaging what serves as a strong mind-set of change readiness and resolve, along with specific team-building elements for learning and development.

Strategic teams that are part of the structure and culture of the organization serve as development grounds for change competence and capacity at the group and individual levels. Further, because there are several types of strategic teams with diverse roles and functions, the change readiness and resolve mechanics are subject to experimentation and adaptation. This results in a strong mind-set for change leadership and management and the ability to deploy effectively across a range of situations, needs and challenges.

This work offers a practical set of views on change and adaptive capacity, and the development pathways that afford an organization the ongoing preparation of individuals and groups for changes in process and policy, programs and categories and business models through the most demanding transformation journeys.

This study aims to examine how business executives' political connections are associated with government subsidies and strategic change, and how they, in turn, influence firm performance, measured by return on assets (ROA) and market share.

Hypotheses were tested using the large firm-level dataset provided by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of China for the period 2003–2013. This is one of the most comprehensive datasets of Chinese manufacturing companies and includes 321,722 firms on average per year, which spans over 37 industries.

The authors found that political connections, measured by senior executives' membership in the National People's Congress of China (NPC), were positively associated with government subsidies but were not associated with strategic change. Also, government subsidies, as the underlying mechanism, mediated the relationships between NPC membership and firm performance but strategic change did not.

By examining the possible mediators between corporate political strategies and firm performance, the authors confirmed the thought that the impact of political connections on firm performance is a complex phenomenon and goes beyond a simple direct effect. However, future research could explore other mediators in this relationship.

While the direct relationship between political connections and firm performance has been examined in management literature, the results are mixed. For the first time, the authors addressed the gap and opened the “black box” – the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. This study's findings contribute to the literature on corporate political activity, strategic change, and their influences on firm performance.

The health sector is increasingly dynamic and complex, in which (strategic) change has become a constant in the sector's adaptation to different challenges. This study aims to meet the need to understand which trends in the literature on strategic change in the health sector and which elements comprise it.

To advance research in this area, the authors systematically review 285 articles collected from the Scopus database. The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis using the VOSviewer software by applying the bibliographic matching method to understand how these articles were grouped and thus characterise the literature trends.

Through a systematic literature review (SLR), this study analyses the various lenses of literature on strategic change in the context of the health sector, classifying and conceptually mapping existing research into four thematic groups: key factors in strategic change, theories and models underlying strategic change, decentralisation in strategic change and the challenges to strategic change in this millennium.

The trends in the literature on strategic change in the health sector explore strategic change from different perspectives. Key features in strategic change suffered reciprocal influence from the theories/models of strategic change and decentralisation of health care so that the health sector could define strategies to respond to the challenges it faced.

The health sector has been in great prominence worldwide, specifically due to the recent events that have occurred on a planetary scale. Therefore, a systematic review is essential to help understand the strategic changes that have occurred in the health sector and their impact. The authors did not find any SLR that focuses on global strategic changes in the health sector, so this study will fill this gap, systematising the main topics on strategic change in the health sector. The authors also suggest an integrative research framework and a future research agenda.

This study aims to investigate the joint effect of foreign directors (FDs) and firm performance on the corporate strategic change.

A theoretical framework linking foreign directors, firm performance and strategic change is proposed and tested. This study uses a sample of longitudinal data from 958 US listed firms over the period 2010–2018. The basic model of study first tests whether there is a direct relationship between FDs and level of strategic change. It then incorporates firm performance as a moderating variable, testing its effect on the relationship between foreign director and strategic change.

Consistent with the study’s expectations, the empirical findings indicate that FDs rich in appropriate experience are associated with superior strategic change, measured both in terms of variation in firm strategy over time and deviation from industry norms. The findings confirm that FDs are a salient driver of strategic change. The strength of the effect, however, depends on the firm performance.

This paper has implications for effective global leadership development based on international appointments. First, directors can benefit from being assigned to work in foreign countries so that they are exposed to a wide range of experiences and can learn to overcome culture shock. Second, posting directors to foreign countries can improve their international knowledge and enhance various competencies related to creativity, leadership and problem-solving. By demonstrating that the board’s characteristics can play a role in corporate strategy development, the current study thus has implications for both study and practice with regard to board composition. The number of seats on any given board is finite, and each individual director is thus expected to not only monitor top management but also to apply their knowledge and relevant experience in service to the company’s ambitions. Except in cases where high firm performance leads to strategic persistence, the results suggest that greater levels of FDs correlate positively with strategic change.

The practical implications of this paper pertain to director recruitment and selection. First, the findings echo support for the inclusion of members with greater levels of international experience on boards and top management teams. It seems that, despite the importance of this characteristic, directors at US companies often lack substantial experience abroad (Carpenter and Westphal, 2001). A possible reason for this could be that internationally experienced employees otherwise lack the social capital necessary for promotion to directorships because of time spent stationed away from the firm’s headquarters. It is thus essential for companies to create networking opportunities for directors assigned to foreign offices.

Although previous research has provided some insight into how chief executive officer international experience can manifest in strategic change, this understanding remains far from complete for the members of board of directors. Furthermore, the topic of firm performance as a potential moderating influence remains underexplored. The aim of this study, therefore, is to assess the impact of FDs among directors on corporate strategic change while taking into account the possible confounding role of firm performance in this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the roles played by organizational learning (OL) and innovation in organizations immersed in the processes of adaptation and strategic fit in dynamic and turbulent environments. The authors analyze whether OL and innovation act as sources of strategic fit, and whether strategic fit positively affects performance.

The authors use data from a survey of a representative sample of 204 respondents from European firms active in high-technology sectors (response rate: 10.42 percent) and structural equation modeling (using the EQS 6.1 program) to undertake a transversal study.

The model confirms that OL and the capacity to innovate positively influence managers’ decisions to adapt their organizations to changes in dynamic environments. The achievement of strategic fit, in turn, improves organizational performance. The authors propose considering the innovation climate as a facilitator of new product and process development, although the innovation climate is not a direct antecedent of fit.

This study is limited by the fact that the analysis is cross-sectional and by the fact that all measures used are based on managers’ perceptions.

Managers should create and support an entrepreneurial culture that stresses continuous learning. They should also foster programs aimed at developing abilities, and promote the development of capabilities that facilitate acceptance of organizational change. Investments in building certain capabilities, such as OL and the capacity to innovate, are strategically justified, especially in turbulent environments.

This study is one of the first to investigate the complex interactions among OL, innovation, strategic fit, and performance. The results improve our understanding of the links between strategic fit and performance.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical account of how firms make choices between dynamic capability-based and ad hoc problem-solving approaches toward strategic change.

A model has been developed to answer the questions of how and under what conditions firms develop appropriate approaches to handle strategic change.

Drawing upon structural inertia theory (SIT) and the resource-based view (RBV), the model predicts that firms, regardless of their age and size, are more likely to adopt an ad hoc problem-solving approach to handle change in both highly dynamic and low-dynamic environments. However, in moderately dynamic environments, a dynamic capability-based approach may be more appropriate, depending on which theoretical logic (SIT or RBV) the decision is made.

The paper builds on the useful distinction made by Winter (2003) in terms of the ways to handle organizational change and extends the recent research on temporary vs sustainable competitive advantages to investigate how firms tackle strategic change within the contexts of both environmental dynamism and organizational attributes.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of boards’ demographic diversity on firms’ strategic change and the interaction effect of firm performance.

This paper used secondary data derived from publicly listed firms in Kenya during 2002-2010 and analyzed the data using fixed effects regression model to test the effect of board demographic and strategic change, while moderated regression analysis was used to test the moderating effect of firm performance.

The results partially supported board demographic diversity–strategic change hypothesis. In particular, results indicate that age diversity produces less strategic change, while functional diversity is associated with greater levels of strategic change. The moderated regression results do not support our general logic that high firm performance enhances board demographic diversity–strategic change relationship. In effect, the results reveal that at high level of firm performance, board demographic diversity produces less strategic change.

Despite few studies that have examined board demographic diversity and firm performance, this paper introduces strategic change as an outcome variable. This paper also explores the moderating role of firm performance in board demographic diversity–strategic change relationship, and finally, the study uses Kenyan dataset which in itself is unique because most governance and strategy research uses data from developed countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how executives can rapidly gain employee acceptance for strategic change through reciprocal sensegiving. The author draw on a processual case study of a transformational European merger to study this question, highlighting the properties of reciprocity in making sense of urgent strategic change, then developing them through the lens of a gift exchange.

The author draws on several qualitative methods to study sensegiving and sensemaking processes in Alpha and Beta from 2011 to 2014: insider-outsider team meetings at the beginning, mid-way and at the end of the merger integration process, ethnographic field notes during a four-month research internship, one focus group meeting with Alpha and Beta managers after the announcement of the redistribution of managerial positions, interviews with a carefully selected sample of top and middle managers, participant observation in key sensegiving meetings with top managers and “custodians,” triangulation with secondary data from the database Factiva, and finally follow-up insider corroboration of the findings by the research intern who took up a management position at Alpha in 2014.

Likening executive and employee sensegiving to a gift-giving and gift-returning exchange, the author elucidates how executives induce employees to quickly “give in” to strategic change imperatives. the author single out the key third party role of custodians of reciprocity in the mechanism, using the metaphor of the Trojan horse to illustrate its executive use and point to the underexplored darker side of prosocial sensegiving dynamics.

Further research should clarify the long-term advantages and disadvantages of the mechanism. The Trojan horse mechanism possibly sacrifices long-term reciprocity for short-term purposes. Following the example of executives in this case study, use of the Trojan horse mechanism should be followed by attention to socio-political balance concerns, including new procedures that clarify the link between value creation aims and employees’ collective contribution. Without such a cohesion-building exercise, employees’ feelings of procedural injustice may build up, resulting in negative reciprocity in subsequent change projects.

The work indicates that a leader’s visionary credentials are not the main source of her norm-shaping power in a project of urgent strategic change. Visionary credentials are welcomed by the dominant group of employees as long as they are framed as a symbolic management exercise that will not substantially impact socio-political balance. Substantively, employees make sense of the justice of urgent strategic change primarily through the lens of custodians and their “power from the past.”

All in all, executives should use the Trojan horse mechanism sparingly, in contexts of urgent strategic change and institutionalized employee behavior. Working with sources and voices of resistance from lower levels of management is more likely to yield symbiotic integration benefits.

Applied to the problem of rapid strategic change in a non-crisis context, the Trojan horse mechanism is a solution to the question: how can executives avoid lengthy socio-political confrontations and quickly induce employee ownership of painful strategic changes?

The primary purpose of this research is to review and discuss the potential associations among strategic change, organisational learning, and firm performance, and to propose a conceptual model to investigate such relationships.

The literature on the strategic change‐performance relationship was explored with the emphasis on elaborating the effects of frequency of strategic change on firm performance. In addition, a moderating role of organisational learning on such a relationship is introduced.

From the literature review, it is proposed that the relationship between strategic change and firm performance is an inverted U‐shape. Extremely frequent and infrequent strategic changes are deemed to be detrimental to firm performance. However, the research reveals that the strategic change‐performance relationship may alter due to the moderation of organisational learning.

Given the conceptual nature of this paper, a review of relevant literature and a conceptual model are presented with suggestions for future empirical study. This paper also extends the strategic change‐performance research by advocating an inverted U‐shape relationship as one plausible explanation for inconsistent findings found in past literature.

Managers should try to understand their organisations and implement an appropriate level of strategic change in order to maximise the firm's overall performance. In addition, a significant role of organisational learning in supporting firms to manoeuvre in today's increasingly dynamic and competitive environment is highlighted to managers.

This paper attempts to explain: why firms might attain different levels of performance provided that they undergo various degrees of strategic change (in terms of frequency); and what factors contribute to the variations in organisational performance among firms that have undertaken the same number of strategic changes during a given period of time.