Betrachtung emergenter Strategien durch das Prisma der Improvisation

The fact, that strategies contain as well deliberate qualities as emergent elements has been pointed out by Mintzberg nearly 20 years ago. The term “emergent strategies” has been translated into German and used in very different ways and meanings since then. Whereas some of these interpretations retain the original sense of “emergent” as “unexpected” or “unforeseen”, a number of German scholars try to identify a broader understanding of “emergent”. This different understanding of “emergent” is based to some extent on the philosophical discussion of emergence, but in some cases the scholars define a new, divergent sense of “emergent”. This leads to a confusing meaning of the word “emergent” and to a low force of expression of the results and of the findings, which are based on these interpretations. These different meanings and interpretations of the word “emergent” as well as the findings of the resulting studies are examined in the present paper. It is proposed to analyse the conception and realisation of strategies from the perspective of improvisation. Moreover, it is shown, that the use of the perspective of improvisation leads to a better understanding and a brighter explanation of strategic management beyond the limits of planning than the divergent interpretations of “emergent strategies”.     

Team personality composition,emergent leadership and shared leadership in virtual teams: A theoretical framework

Limited theory and research has been devoted to the role of team personality composition, as well as emergent and shared leadership, in virtual teams. In an effort to provide a theoretical basis for the role of team personality composition, as well as emergent and shared leadership, in virtual teams, we propose a virtual team framework that portrays the team personality composition as predictors of emergent and shared leadership. These in turn are expected to impact virtual team performance. We further posit that the relationships between team personality composition and virtual team performance are indirect, through emergent leadership and shared leadership. Finally, we present team virtuality as a moderator between team composition and team processes. Suggestions for future research and implications for the management of virtual teams are presented.     

Team familiarity—Boon for routines,bane for innovation? A review and future research agenda

Teams play a vital role in achieving an organization's goals, so achieving high levels of team familiarity is regarded as essential to HRM strategies. This paper aims to stimulate the debate on team familiarity: the effectiveness, antecedents, outcomes, and theoretical underpinnings. Our systematic literature review uses a VOSviewer-based bibliometric analysis, combined with qualitative thematic analysis. The current dominant viewpoint is that team familiarity leads to positive performance outputs at work, higher team performance and organizational success. Existing studies also agree that familiarity enhances team cognition and takes time to develop. However, we reveal that existing studies use a limited range of theoretical underpinnings, remain vague on the meaning of “time” and “how long it takes for teams to become familiar”, and avoid critical discussions on potential counterproductive outcomes that may lead to a decline in team performance. Based on these gaps, we suggest advancing the team familiarity literature and provide ideas for future research. Overall, we argue that whereas team familiarity is favorable for routine and structured contexts, it might be less effective for innovative task environments. Our future research agenda also suggests 1) advancing the theoretical underpinnings around team relationships, social roles, and team formation; 2) engaging in discussion on the key antecedent “time”, with longitudinal studies to reveal which moments matter most in devolving team familiarity; 3) considering positive social outcomes for individuals and groups; and importantly, 4) contributing fresh knowledge on potential counterproductive outcomes and U-shaped developments in innovation work.     

Future business and the role of purchasing and supply management: Opportunities for ‘business-not-as-usual’ PSM research

The raison d'être for this article is simple: traditional ways of researching, theorizing, and practicing purchasing and supply management (PSM) are no longer sufficient to ‘meet the moment’. Scholars need to advance a “business-not-as-usual” footing approach to their work, if they are to make a meaningful contribution to addressing the current and future emergencies, as highlighted by recent extreme weather and the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, what can this, or should this, mean for a field rooted in traditional business thinking? This article builds on the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management's (JPSM) 25th Anniversary Special Issue editorial (2019); members of the JPSM's editorial team advance their unique perspectives on what “business-not-as-usual” means for PSM. Specifically, we advocate both thinking much more widely, in scope and ambition, than we currently do, and simultaneously building our ability to comprehend supply chains in a more nuanced and granular way. We explore whether the bias toward positivist work has omitted potentially interesting findings, and viewpoints. This leads to a call to re-think how we approach our work: should the key criteria always be to focus on theory development or testing? Should academics “think bigger”? Turning to specific research themes, illustrations of how our current thinking can be challenged or broadened by addressing the circular economy, and role of purchasing and innovation. Specifically, the focus on the PSM function as an intrapreneur within the larger organization, and the role of innovation and technology in PSM work. Taken together, we hope the ideas and arguments presented here will inform and inspire ambitious and novel approaches to PSM research with significant and enduring impact on the transformation of business.     

Cross-boundary teaming for innovation: Integrating research on teams and knowledge in organizations

Cross-boundary teaming, within and across organizations, is an increasingly popular strategy for innovation. Knowledge diversity is seen to expand the range of views and ideas that teams can draw upon to innovate. Yet, case studies reveal that teaming across knowledge boundaries can be difficult in practice, and innovation is not always realized. Two streams of research are particularly relevant for understanding the challenges inherent in cross-boundary teaming: research on team effectiveness and research on knowledge in organizations. They offer complementary insights: the former stream focuses on group dynamics and measures team inputs, processes, emergent states, and outcomes, while the latter closely investigates dialog and objects in recurrent social practices. Drawing from both streams, this paper seeks to shed light on the complexity of cross-boundary teaming, while highlighting factors that may enhance its effectiveness. We develop an integrative model to provide greater explanatory power than previous approaches to assess cross-boundary teaming efforts and their innovation performance.     

Outstanding fundraising practice: how do nonprofits substantively increase their income?

• In this paper, we examine the characteristics of charities that have generated substantive increases in their fundraising income. We interviewed 25 fundraising directors and team members, from organizations experiencing rapid growth, adopting a “decoding the discipline” approach to identify how each organization had overcome key barriers to its success. We identify that fundraising leaders in these exceptional nonprofits focus particularly on matters connected to their team, organizational structures that support that team, and the development of an organization‐wide learning culture. We also find that these teams were successful because of the “systems” way in which they understood and coped with the complexities of decision making. They were exceptional in isolating the right problems and exceptional too in the processes they adopted to solve them.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Creating high performance teamwork in organizations

The adoption of teams continues to increase in almost every domain of modern work life. In the current article we review evidence of the complexity of modern work, industry trends in the use of teams, and the challenges of achieving the full potential of organizational work teams. We aimed to meaningfully move forward the science of high performance teamwork by assembling a focused set of review articles in the present special issue. We consider four themes that capture the articles in this special issue and avenues for achieving the full potential of teams: (1) work across boundaries; (2) build effective team processes and states; (3) manage team development issues; and (4) leverage human capital. Collectively, the contents of this special issue offer important new opportunities for advancing future research and for making a practical difference in the effectiveness of teams in organizations. We identify six areas in which future research efforts in high performance teamwork should be directed based on “realities” that, in our view, need to be addressed.     

Teams in extreme environments: Alterations in team development and teamwork

We rely upon teams to perform complex tasks in highly demanding environments, ranging from space exploration to response to earth-bound disasters. In this article, we first briefly review the rich historical legacy of research on teams in extreme settings. Second, we orient our discussion of team performance in extreme environments by focusing on the contextual environment—the high demand, high-stress environment in which these teams operate. We discuss the mechanisms through which extreme demands or stress may impact team behavior, and discuss specific team processes and emergent states that may be impacted by these conditions. Finally, we address challenges in conducting research on extreme teams, and describe implications for application and practice.     

Metaphors of virtuality: shaping an emergent reality

In this paper, we explore the contemporary discourse associated with the new phenomenon of virtual organizing, and identify a number of metaphors used in this discourse to characterize various aspects of virtuality. We believe paying attention to such metaphors is important because in the absence of experiences (direct or vicarious) to guide practice, the images and ideals promoted in the discourse will shape people's views of and actions towards this new way of organizing. As such, metaphors play a powerful role in structuring the reality of virtuality. To understand the kind of reality being imagined and incited, we examine the various metaphors being proposed in the practitioner-directed literature on virtual organizing. We find that this discourse contains a multiplicity of different metaphors, each highlighting and hiding distinct aspects of virtual organizing. We identify five overarching metaphors in this discourse. These metaphors (re)present virtual organizing as a platform, as existing in space, as composed of bits, as operating as a community, and as engaging in a network of relationships. We analyze these metaphors in terms of their assumptions and presumptions about how to organize work, as well as their affordances and challenges. We conclude by considering what the consequences might be for people acting on the basis of such different, and often contradictory, metaphors in practice.     

Selecting the key research areas in nano-technology field using technology cluster analysis: A case study based on National R&D Programs in South Korea

In the early 21st century, Korean government issued a policy recommendation that Korean public research institutes should select strategic research fields to concentrate their resources, based on a careful review of the various strategic R&D factors. The government has emphasized the “selection and concentration” strategy for the efficient use of R&D resources and as a way to increase the national competitiveness of Korea. This paper suggests a method, a “Technology Cluster Analysis,” for selecting the strategic research areas, mainly targeting large, multi-disciplinary and long-term programs. The technology cluster analysis groups near technologies together based on key indicators. In this study, the method is applied to national R&D programs in the nano-technology field. Fifty-six nano-technologies are analyzed and grouped into three main clusters based on the survey data from 180 experts. Technological distances and correlations among individual technologies are depicted by hierarchical dendrogram. Three main clusters in nano-technology field are found and termed nano-materials, nano-devices, and nano-bio. These three clusters are expected to be the core technology clusters in nano-technology field in South Korea.     

From Every Direction—How Personality Traits and Dimensions of Project Managers Can Conceptually Affect Project Success

Based on extensive literature review, this theoretical paper adds to the “soft skill” research stream by enlarging the scope of personality dimensions and their subsequent effects on project success and, second, considers dimensions heretofore not explored within the project management body of knowledge. We posit that a project manager's extent of communication apprehension, degree of innovativeness, level of self‐monitoring, conflict management style, degree of change orientation and Myers‐Briggs (MBTI) personality type can affect project outcomes. Additionally, we conjecture that organizational dynamics such as structure, incentive systems, and organizational project management maturity can moderate the relationship between these personality dimensions and project success.     

Animal spirits and unemployment: a disequilibrium analysis

The past decade has seen a number of advances in modelling disequilibrium dynamics. This paper draws on separate approaches to disequilibrium dynamics to demonstrate a Keynesian result concerning the formal relevance of “animal spirits” in production economies. Specifically, it is shown that a parameter that can be associated with the “animal spirits” of firms is crucial to the stability of full employment equilibrium in a production economy. This approach to “animal spirits” is different to that taken by recent New Keynesian DSGE-type models, but similar in spirit to “Old Keynesian” approaches, including that of the General Theory. The corollary of the main conclusion is that price flexibility is not a sufficient condition for convergence on full employment equilibrium.     

Can Good Apples Be Mixed with Bad Economics? A Mengerian Critique of the Alchian and Allen Theorem

Abstract . The Alchian and Allen Theorem has been a popular staple of many economics classes since Armen Alchian and William Allen first introduced it in their well‐known text University Economics. The Theorem says that the addition of the same fixed cost to two similar goods will result in an increase of demand for the higher‐priced, “higher‐quality” good relative to the lower‐quality item. Response to the Theorem ranges from an informal comment that it is a “parlor trick” to it being called the “Third Law of Demand.” We review some of the literature, and use Carl Menger's economic analysis to challenge the Theorem's validity. Based on Menger's analysis, we conclude that the Theorem is not, in fact, a theorem because it is does not describe a general case, but instead only applies in some cases, thereby becoming, at best, a special case of Menger's more general analysis. Further, we find evidence that Alchian and Allen themselves unwittingly contradict their own argument elsewhere in one of their texts.     

Measuring immigration's effects on labor demand: A reexamination of the Mariel Boatlift

Why do immigration shocks tend to have benign effects on native wages? One reason is that immigrants as consumers contribute to the demand for their services. We model an economy where workers spend their wages on a locally produced good, then test it via a reexamination of the 1980 “Mariel Boatlift” using Wacziarg's Channel Transmission methodology. Current Population Survey data on workers in 9 different retail labor markets and Survey of Buying Power data on retail spending by consumers in Miami and four comparison cities are used. We find strong evidence that the Mariel Boatlift augmented labor demand.     

Philosophical foundations of sociological measurement: a note on the three level model

Even a cursory perusal of the social science literature suffices to show the prevalence of dichotomous thinking. Many of these dichotomies deal with some aspect of the “conceptual versus empirical” distinction. This paper shows that while dichotomies predominate for some reason, the actual research process that they are designed to represent deals minimally with three separate and necessary levels. We term these the conceptual level (X), the empirical level (X′), and the operational or indicator level (X″). This minimal three level model is applied to an analysis of philosophical foundations of measurement, specifically the formulations of Northrop and Bridgman. It is shown that both of these formulations are essentially dichotomous, while the phenomena they deal with are trichotomous. For example, Northrop's “concepts by postulation” and “concepts by intuition” are purportedly separate levels connected by an epistemic correlation. Application of the three level model reveals that both are true concepts, and thus belong on the same level of analysis (X). Similarly, application of the three level model to Bridgman's formulation shows that both mental and physical concepts belong on the same level (X). Bridgman's formulation is valuable in pointing out that operations are not restricted to one level of analysis, and in fact we see them to be crucial on all three levels. The three level model is not a panacea, but does provide an efficacious framework for the difficult but important task of analyzing the philosophical underpinning of measurement.     

Heterogeneity and centrality of “dark personality” within teams,shared leadership,and team performance: A conceptual moderated-mediation model

Shifting from the much-studied five-factor model of personality, this paper focuses on dark personality (i.e. the “Dark Triad”: Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) to advance understanding of team composition, processes, and performance. The research responds to a call to explore dark personality's manifestation within – and impact on – teams. Specifically, this paper will examine the impact of within-team heterogeneity in dark personality on team performance, with shared leadership as mediator of this relationship. Additionally, I propose two moderators of the relationship between within-team dark triad heterogeneity and shared leadership – team network centrality of the team member scoring highest on the Dark Triad, and team mean Dark Triad score. This research aims to make a uniquely valuable contribution to scholarship on leadership within teams through bridging literatures on social network analysis, teams, leadership, and the dark triad and should have implications for team selection and performance.     

The impact of implicit collective leadership theories on the emergence and effectiveness of leadership networks in teams

Leadership in today's high-performing teams is a relational process best understood from a multilevel emergent perspective. Implicit theories of leadership and followership play an important role in predicting leader emergence in more traditional hierarchical structures, but are inadequate for understanding and predicting leadership as networks in teams, as they do not consider the complex dynamics of leading and following activities inherent in such structures. To address this theoretical gap, we propose the concept of Implicit Leadership Network Theories (ILNTs) that integrates implicit leadership and followership theories with contemporary social network perspectives of leadership in teams to predict the shape and structure of leadership network emergence and subsequent team outcomes. More specifically, we propose that the combination of team member self-ILNTs (i.e., expectations regarding one's own role within a leadership network) and network-ILNTs (i.e., expectations regarding the prototypical team leadership structure) will shape the emergence and effectiveness of leadership in teams. We describe several prototypical team configurations of ILNTs and discuss implications for future research and human resource management.     

Leading corporate sustainability: The role of top management team composition for triple bottom line performance

Sustainable development at the corporate level requires balancing social, environmental, and financial performance goals. Achieving such “triple bottom line” (TBL) performance is a very challenging task. In this study, we explore the role the organization's top management team (TMT) plays in leading their organization towards corporate sustainability. We focus on how two distinct aspects of the TMT's structural composition—the presence of a “chief sustainability officer” (CSO) and the TMT's functional diversity—affect the organization's ability to reach high levels of TBL performance. We follow the presence of 22 global energy companies in Corporate Knight's “Global 100” sustainability index for a period of 11 years and find that, surprisingly, the presence of a CSO does not boost TBL performance. However, we do find a positive effect for TMT functional diversity, suggesting that more diverse TMTs are better able to lead their organization to higher levels of TBL performance.