Dynamic talent management capabilities and organizational agility—A qualitative exploration

Today's business environment is becoming increasingly dynamic, and the concept of agility is gaining attention in the corporate world and in academia. The objective of our research is to explain how talent management (TM) can shape talents as key human resources, according to company-specific agility needs, and thus contribute to gaining competitive advantage in dynamic firm environments. We approach this task by viewing it from the perspective of dynamic capabilities. A total of 24 semistructured interviews were conducted with senior TM professionals working in German companies differing in terms of size, age, structure, industry, and ownership. As a result, we identified three different types of dynamic TM capabilities promoting organizational agility to various extents. By rooting our qualitative study in the research fields of TM and agility in the under-researched theoretical realm of dynamic capabilities, we contribute to the theoretical as well as the empirical discussion by addressing the specific challenges of an increasingly dynamic environment. As a result, we provide a contextualized viewpoint from which to explain the process inherent in dynamic TM capabilities that continuously shape talent and organizational agility.     

Country‐Specific Profiles of Performance Management in China,Germany, and the United States—An Empirical Test

The vast majority of the literature on performance management (PM) chooses a contextual perspective, focusing on the cross‐country comparison of single elements of the PM system. Simultaneously, a conceptual basis and an encompassing comprehension of country‐specific peculiarities are lacking. Based on a suggested conceptualization of the elements of PM (criteria, actors, methods, purposes, feedback) and hypotheses developed from an encompassing literature review, the authors present empirical findings from a quantitative study including 167 managers from multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiaries in three culturally and institutionally diverse major economies (Germany, United States, and China). Contrary to what the literature suggests about the local peculiarities of PM, the results of the present study show significant country‐specific differences in only 6 out of 16 investigated PM features. Furthermore, the analytical categorization of “Western” countries versus China cannot be empirically confirmed. In contrast, more similarities between China and Germany than between Germany and the United States are identified. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Beyond panopticism: On the ramifications of surveillance in a contemporary professional setting

This paper provides fieldwork evidence, which solidifies an emerging view in literature, regarding the limitations of the panoptical metaphor in informing meaningfully and productively the analysis of contemporary surveillance and control. Our thesis is that the panopticon metaphor, which conceives of the organization as a bounded enclosure made up of divisible, observable and calculable spaces, is becoming less and less relevant in the age of contemporary surveillance technologies. Through a longitudinal socio-ethnographic study of the ramifications of surveillance ensuing from the implementation of a computerized knowledge management system (KMS) in a Parisian tax/law firm, our analysis points to the proliferation of lateral networks of surveillance having developed in the aftermath of implementation. In this complex and unstable constellation of rhizomatical controls, peers are involved in scrutinizing the validity of one another’s work, irrespective of the office’s hierarchies and official lines of specialization. As a result, games of visibility (exhibitionism), observation (voyeurism) and secrecy (hiding one’s work from the KMS) abound in the office. One of our main conclusions is to emphasize the pertinence of apprehending control and surveillance from angles that take into account the ambiguities, complexities and unpredictability of human institutions, especially in digitalized environments.     

Do Japanese MNCs use expatriates to contain risk in Asian host countries?

We investigate the impact of host-country risk on the expatriation strategies of multinational firms, using data on Japanese subsidiary firms in manufacturing industries in 13 host countries in Asia. We find that country risk is negatively correlated with the degree of expatriation and that, rather than host-country risk, firm-specific factors (particularly capital intensity, ownership share of parent firms in subsidiaries and the age of the venture) explain most of the variation in the degree to which subsidiaries rely on Japanese expatriates. Contrary to previous studies, the capital intensity of production is a key explanatory firm-specific variable that correlates positively with the degree of expatriation. Japanese multinational companies do not rely on expatria127=tes to off-set host-country risk, but to mitigate risk to parent investment in subsidiaries.     

Noise-independent selection in multidimensional global games

This paper examines many-player many-action global games with multidimensional state parameters. It establishes that the notion of noise-independent selection introduced by Frankel, Morris and Pauzner [D. Frankel, S. Morris, A. Pauzner, Equilibrium selection in global games with strategic complementarities, J. Econ. Theory 108 (2003) 1–44] for one-dimensional global games is robust when the setting is extended to the one proposed by Carlsson and Van Damme [H. Carlsson, E. Van Damme, Global games and Equilibrium selection, Econometrica 61 (1993) 989–1018]. More precisely, our main result states that if an action profile of some complete information game is noise-independently selected in one-dimensional global games, then it is also noise-independently selected in all multidimensional global games.     

The Value of Crowdsourcing: Can Users Really Compete with Professionals in Generating New Product Ideas?

Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive domain of marketers, engineers, and/or designers. Users have only recently been recognized as an alternative source of new product ideas. Whereas some have attributed great potential to outsourcing idea generation to the “crowd” of users (“crowdsourcing”), others have clearly been more skeptical. The authors join this debate by presenting a real‐world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm's professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest. Both professionals and users provided ideas to solve an effective and relevant problem in the consumer goods market for baby products. Executives from the underlying company evaluated all ideas (blind to their source) in terms of key quality dimensions including novelty, customer benefit, and feasibility. The study reveals that the crowdsourcing process generated user ideas that score significantly higher in terms of novelty and customer benefit, and somewhat lower in terms of feasibility. However, the average values for feasibility—in sharp contrast to novelty and customer benefit—tended to be relatively high overall, meaning that feasibility did not constitute a narrow bottleneck in this study. Even more interestingly, it is found that user ideas are placed more frequently than expected among the very best in terms of novelty and customer benefit. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development (NPD) literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, crowdsourcing might constitute a promising method to gather user ideas that can complement those of a firm's professionals at the idea generation stage in NPD.     

New Product Development Practices and Early‐Stage Firms: Two In‐Depth Case Studies

New product development practices (NPD) have been well studied for decades in large, established companies. Implementation of best practices such as predevelopment market planning and cross‐functional teams have been positively correlated with product and project success over a variety of measures. However, for small new ventures, field research into ground‐level adoption of NPD practices is lacking. Because of the risks associated with missteps in new product development and the potential for firm failure, understanding NPD within the new venture context is critical. Through in‐depth case research, this paper investigates two successful physical product‐based early‐stage firms' development processes versus large established firm norms. The research focuses on the start‐up adoption of commonly prescribed management processes to improve NPD, such as cross‐functional teams, use of market planning during innovation development, and the use of structured processes to guide the development team. This research has several theoretical implications. The first finding is that in comparing the innovation processes of these firms to large, established firms, the study found several key differences from the large firm paradigm. These differences in development approach from what is prescribed for large, established firms are driven by necessity from a scarcity of resources. These new firms simply did not have the resources (financial or human) to create multi‐ or cross‐functional teams or organizations in the traditional sense for their first product. Use of virtual resources was pervasive. Founders also played multiple roles concurrently in the organization, as opposed to relying on functional departments so common in large firms. The NPD process used by both firms was informal—much more skeletal than commonly recommended structured processes. The data indicated that these firms put less focus on managing the process and more emphasis on managing their goals (the main driver being getting the first product to market). In addition to little or no written procedures being used, development meetings did not run to specific paper‐based deliverables or defined steps. In terms of market and user insight, these activities were primarily performed inside the core team—using methods that again were distinctive in their approach. What drove a project to completion was relying on team experience or a “learn as you go approach.” Again, the driver for this type of truncated market research approach was a lack of resources and need to increase the project's speed‐to‐market. Both firms in our study were highly successful, from not only an NPD efficiency standpoint but also effectiveness. The second broad finding we draw from this work is that there are lessons to be learned from start‐ups for large, established firms seeking ever‐increasing efficiency. We have found that small empowered teams leading projects substantial in scope can be extremely effective when roles are expanded, decision power is ground‐level, and there is little emphasis on defined processes. This exploratory research highlights the unique aspects of NPD within small early‐stage firms, and highlights areas of further research and management implications for both small new ventures and large established firms seeking to increase NPD efficiency and effectiveness.     

Managing health authorities: One member's view

The Government have devoted a lot of energy to improving the quality of management in the Civil Service. Most of this effort has gone on internal management, leaving relatively untouched the management of Departmental and broader government programmes and of outside organisations such as the national health service ‐ with all its regions, districts, family practitioner committees, and medical practitioners. One reason for this imbalance may be that, as successive National Audit Office reports have shown, management in the broader sense is actually rather difficult.