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Purpose – Market‐based theories assume that firms’ different strategic commitments to businesses lead to different strategic positions within the industry. While the institutional perspective from organization theory emphasizes the institutional pressures which lead to legitimacy and firm isomorphism, it is not clear yet how intra‐industry organizations behave during institutional transitions. The purpose of this paper is to combine the insights of these theories by examining the role of market and institutional forces in affecting industry strategic variety and its impact on average industry performance in transitional China, based on the strategic view of neoinstitutional theory. Design/methodology/approach – Empirical tests are carried out using industrial enterprise data of China from 2000 to 2006. Findings – Empirical results using industrial enterprise data of China from 2000 to 2006 suggest that: industry competitiveness has a strong positive influence on strategic variety; the weakening relationship between government and market leads to increased strategic variety; and indicators of strategic variety have complicated effects on industry performance. Originality/value – The strategic view of neoinstitutional theory was used to gain a better understanding of intra‐industry strategic variety during the institutional transition of China. Thus this paper combines seemingly contradictory theories in our understanding of how intra‐industry organizations behave in response to institutional change.

This study introduces a framework for the management of product variety in strategy and operations. It combines the analysis of five case studies in the UK and Brazil with a research background based on the existing literature. The framework describes the elements and steps involved in the process of dealing with product variety needs in manufacturing systems. The results suggest how operations management should evaluate the gaps between the importance and performance of product variety to develop appropriate adaptive and flexibility measures when dealing with product variety requirements in operations and strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an epistemological vantage point for theory development in the case of strategic leadership, an emerging focus of scholarly attention in strategic management.

The authors invoke Rescher's epistemological platform for making the case, Rescher being one of the most influential philosophers in the USA.

The analysis suggests that since strategic leadership differs from supervisory leadership, both on organizational reach and incorporation of external elements, defining the strategic leadership problem exclusively as a difference in context – what Weick referred to as a strategy of knowledge growth by extension – is likely to prove unproductive. Rescher's platform can be put to use for specifying the two critical though inter‐related epistemological challenges in the beginning of the theory development project: the choice of concepts, and the type of relations among the concepts. These epistemological challenges may be reframed as opportunities to capture the phenomenal variety embedded in these concepts, and to deploy a diversity of approaches to examine their correspondence.

Contending and complementary views on strategic leadership, and hence concepts representing alternate views should be allowed. Bridges should be built between islands of scholarship, but these bridges are likely to be found in special issues of journals (devoted deliberately to nurture multiple perspectives), edited books and invited conferences.

Engagement with “strategic” leaders is an epistemological necessity for both theoretical and pragmatic reasons.

This paper demonstrates how epistemology can strengthen theory building in the case of strategic leadership. Given the signal importance of this phenomenon, good theories and, therefore, epistemological challenges should occupy a central stage of discussions in this early stage.

Drawing on the “Giffoni Experience” case study, the purpose of this paper is to establish a conceptual link between requisite variety and organizational life cycle. The law of requisite variety states that – to be viable – a system should be able to achieve the minimum number of states which are required to deal with environmental uncertainty.

A descriptive case study approach was taken, which allowed a holistic analysis of the subject being investigated. Multiple sources and different techniques were used to collect relevant data, including: document analysis, unstructured interviews with key informants, and participant observation.

The development of requisite variety is intended to fill the gap between organizational adaptability and increased environmental complexity. The process of requisite variety generation is influenced by the organizational life cycle stages, turning out to be reactive in the early phases of life and proactive in the maturity ones. Ultimately, the development of requisite variety makes the organization able to establish a co-evolving relationship with the environment, which paves the way for greater organizational adaptability and effectiveness.

The research findings are not generalizable; besides, the exploratory nature of this study did not allow to point out a consistent relationship between requisite variety and the organizational life cycle.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first attempts to examine requisite variety adopting the conceptual lenses of organizational life cycle. Empirical research works dealing with requisite variety are uncommon and generally overlooked by management scholars and practitioners.

Under acute global competitive pressure, many companies have viewed product diversification as a strategic weapon with which to win market shares. Nevertheless, product diversification increases costs and sometimes degrades product quality. Many businesses today confront the dilemma of whether to broaden product lines or to focus production. This article explores both theoretically and empirically the possible impacts of product diversification. The emerging technologies and adaptive manufacturing strategies, potentially meeting a variety of customer needs while enhancing other competitive advantages, are examined.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of organizational commitment to employees (OCE) on organizational performance through two different approaches – a configurative approach and a universalistic approach. The theoretical model formulated in this paper integrates both propositions with the aim of analyzing which has the most relevant impact on organizational performance.

Structural equation models were applied to test these propositions by means of a survey of a random sample of 230 service firms.

It was found that the configurational hypothesis is more important than the universalist hypothesis.

The study only included information from one member of executive management staff. This study is an initial attempt in the strategic human resource management literature to examine the configurative perspective as a covariation pattern.

OCE by itself does not affect organizational performance. It is necessary to consider the context in which it is applied in order to understand the effect of OCE on performance. This explains why not all employers pursue an OCE model.

It is proved that “fit as covariation” can be adequate for studying the configurative theory. A complementary vision of the configurative and universalistic hypotheses was adopted, according to which these two hypotheses are not contradictory and could be tested simultaneously.

The resource-based view of the firm and strategic groups research are two of the most investigated frameworks in strategic management. Historically, assumptions behind these two views have seemingly put them at odds. The resource-based view of the firm argues that sustained competitive advantage is best attained when firms have unique resources, while strategic groups research argues that a number of firms within the same industry can achieve sustained profitability with strategies that are similar to one another, but distinct from other industry members. The two views focus on different levels of analysis and each largely ignores the other’s focal level. Yet neither offers any propositions that are incompatible with the tenets of the other. Thus, conceptual integration that crosses levels of analysis is possible and potentially fruitful. Indeed, some strategic groups research has begun to bridge the gap between these two theories by suggesting that firm differences exist both within and between strategic groups. This article adopts a multi-level view by developing propositions concerning contingencies when firm differences, group processes, or both may lead to sustained competitive advantage. Implications for practitioners as well as suggestions for future theory building and empirical tests are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how response time in a laboratory experiment on bank runs affects withdrawal decisions.

In the authors’ setup, the bank has no fundamental problems, depositors decide sequentially whether to keep the money in the bank or to withdraw, and they may observe previous decisions depending on the information structure. The authors consider two levels of difficulty of decision-making conditional on the presence of strategic dominance and strategic uncertainty. The authors hypothesize that the more difficult the decision, the longer is the response time, and the predictive power of response time depends on difficulty.

The authors find that response time is longer in information sets with strategic uncertainty compared to those without (as expected), but the authors do not find such relationship when considering strategic dominance (contrary to the hypothesis). Response time correlates negatively with optimal decisions in information sets with a dominant strategy (contrary to the expectation) and also when decisions are obvious in the absence of strategic uncertainty (in line with the hypothesis). When there is strategic uncertainty, the authors find suggestive evidence that response time predicts optimal decisions.

Being a laboratory experiment, it is questionable if depositors in real life behave similarly (external validity).

Since episodes of bank runs are characterized by strategic uncertainty, the result that under strategic uncertainty, longer response time leads to better decisions suggests that suspension of convertibility is a useful tool to curb banking panics.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study concerning the relationship between response time and the optimality of decisions in a bank-run game.

Most research of post-acquisition integration examines integration of individual business units. The research pays less attention to corporate level integration processes, by which we mean the standardization of integration routines and synchronization of integration activities across a firm’s business units. We argue that corporate level acquisition activities and post-acquisition integration processes strongly influence long term corporate performance, particularly as a firm which comprises interdependent business units becomes geographically diffuse. Acquisitions tend to increase system diversity and goal diversity across business units. Some goal diversity is beneficial, but excessive goal diversity and the existence of system diversity can reduce long run corporate performance by requiring greater managerial effort and increasing the opportunity cost of managerial efforts. The negative effects become stronger as a firm becomes geographically diffuse or if business units are interdependent. Firms that employ active corporate level integration processes – particularly firms that acquire frequently and have interdependent business units – can enhance the benefits and eliminate some of the problems of diversity.