Team and organizational resources, strategic orientations, and firm performance in a transitional economy

Firms in transitional economies are learning to develop strategies to exploit new market opportunities though bounded by their lack of market experience and resources as well as institutional and cultural heritage. This paper examines the managerial orientations of top managers in the transitional economy of China by focusing on a firm's team and organizational resources. Specifically, the following antecedents motivate a firm to put more emphases on strategic orientations: the firm has an effective top management team, strong managerial competences, and when the firm has ample endowment of slack resources, social network, and support from the institutional environment. Empirical results support that team orientation, managerial competence, social network, and local institutional support are instrumental in developing market-focused strategic orientations. In addition, strategic orientations with heavy emphases on overall low costs and product innovation relate to higher firm performance.     

Investigating the Moderating Effects of Perceived Technological Change on Sales Force Acceptance

ABSTRACT

Purpose: Prior literature has shown that the acceptance of new technologies can improve the long-term performance of sales forces and firms. However, new technologies are likely to introduce obstacles to acceptance, especially for those technologies that represent a massive change for the user. Sales force members who drastically change their work processes in order to integrate a technology sacrifice both time and effort and may be distracted from their primary goals (e.g. hitting deadlines or sales goals). Thus, we investigate how perceived technological change can negatively moderate individual motives to accept a new technology. Furthermore, we analyze how managerial support can help overcome the acceptance issues caused by perceived technological change.

Methodology/approach: Data for this study was collected from 163 sales force members via an online survey. Respondent data was collected using a private market research firm that provides access to online panels. We utilize structural equation modeling for factor analysis and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression for testing the hypotheses.

Findings: We find that perceived technological change negatively moderates the influence of individual goal orientation on to acceptance of new technology. We also find that managerial support, as opposed to team goal commitment, will positively moderate an individual’s goal orientation onto acceptance of new technology. This suggests that managerial support is necessary in order to encourage acceptance of technologies that present drastic change for the end user. Post-hoc analysis takes a deeper look into potential curvilinear effects, a three-way interaction, and differences among categories of technologies. This analysis reveals that the negative influence of perceived technological change specifically affects the acceptance of behavioral-based technologies, as opposed to outcome-based technologies, thus necessitating the moderating influence of managerial support.

Contribution: This study demonstrates the acceptance issues presented by technologies associated with drastic perceived technological change. This article identifies and suggests how to more appropriately enhance acceptance of technologies that introduce drastic changes by sales force employees, thus enhancing potential long-term organizational performance.     

Team behavioral integration links team interdependence with team performance: an empirical investigation in R&D teams

Drawing on the input–mediator (a blend of team process and emergent state)–output (IMO) framework, we develop a conceptual model in which team behavioral integration is conceived of as a team-level mediator that links team interdependence (input) with team performance (output). Using a three-wave research design, we test the hypothesized model with the data of 102 R&D teams from three information technology companies in China. Results indicate that team interdependence positively influences team behavioral integration, and that team behavioral integration positively affects team performance. In addition, team behavioral integration is found to mediate the relationship between team interdependence and team performance. The theoretical and managerial implications of these results are discussed.     

Corporate culture,ethical stimulus,and managerial momentum: Theory and evidence

Research on organizational culture and ethical decision making has shown that ethical trainings predict and interact with other institutional variables to establish an ethical culture, while other studies suggest that the exposition of moral symbols leads to an increase of individuals' moral awareness. This study examines whether the relation between managerial momentum and fund performance is contingent upon ethical stimuli, team composition and interactions between them. It thus bestows insights to better inform institutional investors (including those working with mutual funds, pension funds, and insurance) about the nature and impact of ethical stimuli, when coupled with managers' momentum and team size, on the prediction of overall return of managed funds. I develop a new measure of managers' momentum termed “managerial momentum” and test our proposed theory and hypotheses using large samples of U.S. and Canadian mutual funds. The evidence reveals that there is sizeable positive effect of both corporate culture with its ethical dimensions and ethical stimulus on the fund performance. Furthermore, there is subtle evidence that both factors divulge additional information about the fund performance, but their effects are conditional on higher managerial momentum or team size, suggesting that managerial momentum alone is not sufficient. However, it is necessary to have the institutional ethical climate and/or managers' continuous ethical training to achieve viable and resilient investment opportunities tailored to the needs of different clienteles.     

Why is Manchester United So Successful?

Football is now a big industry worth studying in its own right: but it is also an excellent laboratory for studying success. The author argues that this is partly because, in contrast to say, American Football, there is less equalisation of resources between the clubs and English football is a highly competitive market. This article discusses one of the most successful clubs ever and argues that the reasons behind its success do not characterise football generally. It discusses how the different kinds of success in the English football industry are related to business success generally.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and Team Performance: The Mediating Role of Team Efficacy and Team Self-Esteem

This study examines the influence of three components of corporate social responsibility on team performance. In the proposed model of this study, team performance is indirectly affected by three dimensions of perceived corporate citizenship (i.e., economic, legal, and ethical citizenship) via the mediation of team efficacy and team self-esteem. Surveying members of 172 teams confirms most of our hypothesized effects. Our results show that economic citizenship influences team performance via the mediation of both team efficacy and team self-esteem. However, legal citizenship influences team performance via team efficacy alone, whereas ethical citizenship influences team performance only via team self-esteem. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.     

The Impact of Managerial Performance Decay on Franchisors' Store Allocation Strategies

Multi-unit franchising (i.e., one franchisee owning and operating multiple units) is no longer the exception; it is the norm. Nevertheless, because of the decay in managerial performance associated with the increasing span-of-control, systems built on multi-unit (versus single unit) expansion strategies may be jeopardizing some of the efficiencies which fueled franchising in the first place. Many franchisors have adapted to this problem by developing rules of thumb for allocating new outlets to new or existing franchises. This paper formalizes had compares several different strategies for allocating new outlets. In doing so, we specifically incorporate the effects of managerial performance decay on the various strategies. Using empirically obtained starting values for the rate of decay, we calcualate the reults for a hypothetical ten store expansion. The starting values are then varied systematically revealing complex relationship between decay rates, population variance, and managerial performance not accommodated in the less formal strategies currently employed.     

Slack resources in team learning and project performance

This study examines the effect of slack resources on the relationship between team learning and project performance. Regression analysis tests the hypotheses in a sample of 183 firms in Taiwan. The findings suggest that two assessments of team learning, exploitative learning and exploratory learning, associate positively with project performance. Exploratory learning relates positively to project performance as absorbed and unabsorbed slack resources increase. Thus, slack resources play a moderating role in the relationship between exploratory learning and project performance. Empirical results provide general support for the predictions. The article discusses managerial implications and future research directions.     

Market success as a criterion for assessing player contributions in sports businesses via a regression-based approach using adjusted performance measures and quasi-dummy variables

Using winning percentage as a well-established proxy for market success, this article proposes a method for estimating the relative contributions of players to victories as an assessment of their worth—that is, their value to team owners or their greatness as judged by sports fans. Specifically, the proposed approach regresses winning percentage on adjusted measures of team performance (with the players of interest omitted) plus quasi-dummy variables coded to represent the participation rates of the relevant players. Though this approach lends itself to use across a wide variety of sports (professional or college football, basketball, hockey, baseball, and so on) and situations (such as season, league, and history of team), it is described primarily in the context of major league baseball and is illustrated by means of a specific empirical application to the case of the New York Yankees.     

Three facets of satisfaction and their influence on the performance of innovation teams

This study investigates and demonstrates the mediating effect of job satisfaction between team deftness and team comprehension and the performance of 168 project teams involved in major innovation projects for their companies.The study demonstrates that there are at least three independent facets of job satisfaction: instrumental satisfaction with the way the task is progressing, social satisfaction with the way the team members interact with one another and the organization, and egocentric satisfaction with the individuals' perceived benefits to themselves.Previous studies have shown that innovation team performance is directly correlated with the two antecedents of performance: team deftness, which reflects how effectively the team works to achieve the innovation's purpose and team comprehension, which reflects how the team understands the linkages among key variables driving the innovation outcome. The study argues that these different facets of satisfaction differentially affect the ways in which team performance is affected by deftness and comprehension.There are three major results:

• 1.1. Social satisfaction mediates the relation between team deftness and performance—as social dissatisfaction of the team increases, it appears to impede the ability of the team to deploy its deftness in accomplishing the project's purpose.
• 2.2. Instrumental satisfaction mediates the relation between team comprehension and project performance—as instrumental dissatisfaction increases, it appears to impede the ability of the team to deploy its comprehension to accomplish the project's purpose.
• 3.3. Egocentric satisfaction does not appear to mediate the relation between team deftness and project performance.

Some managerial implications of these results are discussed.     

Discontinuity of required oral and literacy skills across job roles in achieving high work performance: An fsQCA approach

This study explores how the English proficiency of local employees in foreign subsidiaries of multinational enterprises mitigates language barriers and improves their work performance. A research framework is developed by introducing the multidimensionality of foreign language proficiency and employing insights from applied linguistics, the brain-drain model, and media synchronicity theory. By using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis for data analysis, this study finds that the relative importance of English literacy skill to oral skill in achieving high work performance varies across positions in foreign subsidiaries. Discontinuity of required linguistic skills between managerial and nonmanagerial positions implies that incremental development of a skill set required for lower positions does not assure successful capability development toward upper positions. This study also finds that competence that supports appropriate usage of English in a specific context plays an important role in mitigating language barriers and achieving high work performance.     

Multicultural managers and competitive advantage: Evidence from elite football teams

Successful organizations have dynamic capabilities that are aligned with their competitive environments. As competitive environments globalize, the dynamic capabilities driven by managers with multicultural backgrounds are increasingly relevant. These managers are more likely to seize cognitively distant opportunities than monocultural managers. Using panel analysis of multilevel data from 355 elite football (soccer) teams, we find support for a moderated relationship among the degree of globalization in the competitive environment, the multicultural background of team managers, and team performance. When the competitive environment is highly global, teams with multicultural managers outperform teams with monocultural managers. When the competitive environment is less global, the reverse is true. The same effect holds when tested both cross-sectionally and longitudinally.     

The Price of Team Spirit for Sensemaking Through Task Discourse in Innovation Teams

Despite interest in innovation teams, we have only limited insights into how team members make sense of innovation teams’ inherent ambiguity. By referring to the sensemaking literature and to the research on task discourse, our study introduces task discourse as a valuable sensemaking mechanism in innovation teams. We argue that team creativity and feasibility testing increases the need for task discourse, which in turn improves team performance. Beyond this, we consider ambivalent effects of team spirit. On the one hand, team spirit allows leveraging smoothly synergies to emerge but on the other hand, high team spirit can limit team member’s willingness to challenge each other’s different perspectives and opinions critically. Data on 250 innovation teams of German manufacturing teams support the assumed beneficial effects of task discourse and the ambivalent effect of team spirit. Teams need sensemaking through task discourse when they want to achieve benefits from team creativity. The total effect of creativity on team performance is insignificant, while the indirect effect of team creativity on team performance is significantly positive. Our study enriches current research on ambiguity and sensemaking in innovation teams, answers the call to elaborate benefits and drawbacks team spirit might bring to teams, and provides valuable managerial implications.     

Nationality biases in peer evaluations: The country-of-origin effect in global virtual teams

In a post-COVID-19 world, due to the increasing reliance on virtual work, global virtual teams (GVTs) are critical for the international success of firms. A fundamental challenge that firms face in this new remote work context is the need to measure the performance of individuals in GVTs. Peer evaluations are advocated as a way to improve the validity of performance appraisals. Peers work closely with one another and, presumably, are better positioned to observe and evaluate fellow team members’ performance. Even when completed in good faith, however, a fair evaluation of individual contributions and performance in GVTs could be distorted by subjectivity, bias, cultural and institutional differences, and the limitations of online communication tools. Based on a sample of 6634 GVTs comprised of 33,271 people in 79 countries that worked on an international business (IB) project, we tested the country-of-origin (COO) effect in peer evaluations within the context of GVTs. Results indicate that the nationality of the team member is a source of significant bias in peer evaluations. Our tests show that the prestige and the level of economic development of the country that a team member is from is a better predictor of peer evaluations received than objective measures of individual skills and competencies, including English proficiency, technical ability, and cultural intelligence, or national per-capita spending on education, suggesting that a COO effect based on personal bias may affect performance ratings more than actual contributions. We conclude that the COO effect in peer evaluations in GVTs has to be taken into account when designing evaluation systems and discuss implications for theory, practice and future research.     

Managerial Tenure and Recovery Following M-Form Reorganization in Diversified Firms

We identify two factors that affect how quickly highly interdependent diversified firms recover from the performance disruptions that typically accompany M-form reorganizations: (1) organizational tenure and (2) the tenure of top management teams. We find that top management teams with a rare combination of long organizational tenure and relatively short team tenure are associated with faster performance recovery in diversified firms with extensive business unit interdependencies. The effects of managerial tenure on recovery time were found to be inconsequential in unrelated diversified firms where the reorganization task is less complex.     

Investigating the Influence of a Joint Sponsorship of Rival Teams on Supporter Attitudes and Brand Preferences

The sponsorship of football is a multi‐million pound industry. Sponsors hope that supporters' enthusiasm for their team will translate into long‐term benefits for the sponsor. However, the intensity of team rivalry means that a sponsorship may also alienate opposing supporters. The rival Glasgow clubs, Celtic and Rangers, therefore undertook a joint sponsorship arrangement with the communications company NTL. This paper investigates how the benefits obtained compared to those that may have been expected from a single sponsorship. While the sponsorship was very effective in creating awareness for NTL, ambivalent attitudes were found towards the company. The most committed supporters were the least accepting of the sponsorship and the expected positive relationship between support for the club and brand preference for NTL was not found.     

Strategic actions in European soccer: Do they matter?

The objective of this paper is to discover (if and) what kind of strategic actions European football clubs conduct and whether these actions affect their financial performance and therefore their competitive position. In this paper we measure the context, content and process dimensions of strategic renewal and relate these to financial performance. The individual strategic actions undertaken by eight football organisations during the period 1995–2002 were examined. In total, 963 strategic actions could be assigned to three dimensions of strategic action. Our study shows that even in an environment in which other factors are crucial for surviving, undertaking strategic actions does contribute to the financial performance of firms. In the European football industry that requires some kind of ‘competitive balance’, strategic actions positively contribute to financial performance.     

不确定性条件下董事会监督管理层行为研究

董事会是代替股东监督管理层的主要机构,根据管理层的能力、努力程度和业绩作出监督决策。但在实际监督中,一方面信息不对称导致道德风险和逆向选择,另一方面不确定性因素也会影响监督决策强度,进而影响业绩。文章由不确定性理论研究出发,通过对2011年上市公司截面数据分析,用直接监督行为（董事会次数）和监督结果（高管薪酬、盈余管理）以及ROA作为被解释变量,从内部不确定性和外部不确定性两方面考察不确定性条件下董事会监督管理层的行为以及对业绩的影响。实证结果显示团队异质性与高管薪酬显著负相关,与业绩负相关;业务复杂性和规模与高管薪酬和业绩负相关;独立董事构成对监督和业绩影响不显著。而董事会会议和盈余管理与这些变量没有表现出相关关系。此外,财务危机导致的不确定性对监督强度和业绩都有显著负相关关系。总体说来,不确定性弱化了监督强度,与业绩负相关。     

New product portfolio performance in family firms

This study investigates the relationship between top management team (TMT) innovation orientation and new product portfolio performance in small and medium-sized family firms by exploring two family firm-specific sources of TMT diversity as moderators: the number of generations involved in the TMT and the ratio of family members in the TMT. Results indicate that family-induced diversity in the TMT has opposing moderating effects. Although a positive relationship exists between TMT innovation orientation and new product portfolio performance when multiple generations are involved in the TMT, TMT innovation orientation and new product portfolio performance experience a negative relationship when the ratio of family members in the TMT is high. The study discusses theoretical and managerial implications of the findings and develops avenues for future research.     

Managerial Buyouts, Incentives And Performance

The managerial buyout (MBO) is a means of motivating senior managers and institutional investors to increase their monitoring efforts and so raise the performance of the firm. This paper suggests that the typical MBO contains a mix of incentives which motivate managers by raising the rewards for success and increasing the penalties for failure. At the same time, the relationship between the new company and its institutional backers encourage the latter to monitor the efforts and achievements of the management team. Such a structure appears useful in raising the performance of divested divisions, particularly in mature industries.