Transformational Leadership and Digital Creativity: The Mediating Roles of Creative Self-Efficacy and Ambidextrous Learning

Drawing insights from social cognitive theory and organizational learning theory, this study aims to uncover themediating mechanisms between direct manager’s transformational leadership behaviors and employees’ digital creativity in the context of digital technology. We conducted a field survey in China and collected data from 234 employees who utilized digital technologies to support daily work. Structural equation modelling analysis results showed that employees’ creative self-efficacy and two learning activities (exploitation vs. exploration) effectively transmitted the influence of transformational leadership ondigital creativity. Our study not only contributes to the understanding on effective use of digital technologies, but also provides practical insights for managers in the big data era

Ambidexterity in Strategic Alliances: How do Firms Manage Exploration and Exploitation Alliances? An Examination of U.S. High Technology Industries from 1985 to 2009

This dissertation examines the antecedents and consequences of exploration and exploitation in the context of strategic alliances. Research interest in the framework of exploration-exploitation has increased significantly with much progress made in current literature, yet many questions remain open. In this dissertation, I examine how environmental force (i.e., market uncertainty) and organizational features (i.e., innovative capacity and slack resources) drive organizations’ decisions on forming exploration versus exploitation alliances. In addition, I investigate the performance outcome of balancing exploration and exploitation alliances, by examining multiple approaches including the balance versus focus perspectives, the temporal separation approach, and the domain separation approach. My study of the antecedents reveals that firms with higher innovative capacity are more likely to form more exploitation alliances than exploration alliances; in contrast, those with more slack resources are inclined to engage in more exploration alliances than exploitation alliances. Under market uncertainty, firms tend to be risk adverse and reduce forming both types of alliances. Furthermore, higher innovative capacity and more slack generally mitigate the negative impact of market uncertainty on alliance formation. My findings regarding performance outcome of exploration and exploitation alliances suggest that balancing them simultaneously may hurt performance. Instead, balance can be executed via temporal separation (i.e., balancing through sequential emphasis on exploration and exploitation over time), or domain separation (i.e., balance through focus on exploration in one domain while exploitation in another), which is particularly important for smaller firms. Organizational ambidexterity does benefit firm performance, given that it is achieved tactically. On the aggregate, my findings confirm that exploration and exploitation are in tension. Organizational features may trigger a firm’s choice between exploration and exploitation in diverse directions; superior performance tends to be more dependent on effective management of the tension. In Previous research, inconsistent conclusions have been drawn regarding the antecedents of exploration and exploitation, and few studies have demonstrated how balance between exploration and exploitation alliances generates favorable outcomes. I have examined both the antecedents and consequences of this framework in the context of strategic alliances, in hope of contributing to a more coherent and complete body of work on this phenomenon

Essays on the Strategic Implications of Marketing Capabilities: Marketing Exploration and Exploitation

My dissertation examines how exploitation and exploration capabilities impact organizational performance for competitive advantage. The first essay reviews previous empirical, simulation, and theoretical studies to provide a synopsis and quantitative assessment of previous empirical research. The organizational performance implications of both exploration, exploitation, and their interaction (i.e., an ambidexterity) are evaluated through the substantiation of previous findings. Exploration and exploitation focus are discrete options that require a cognitive choice and are constrained by firm resources. The results show exploitation as having the greater relative impact on performance folloby exploration and ambidexterity. Essay two conceptualizes marketing capabilities as exploitation and exploration. Drawing on longitudinal objective data from publicly-traded manufacturing and service companies, this study examines how marketing exploitation and exploration capabilities impact performance over time. Study one constructs capability measures for marketing exploitation and exploration using stochastic frontier estimation. These measures are validated through a cross-industry survey of marketing executives using previously established scales. The results show a positive relationship between marketing exploitation and current organizational performance, a positive relationship between marketing exploration and forward-looking performance, and evidence that performance is impacted by industry dynamism and firm slack. Study two, examines the mercurial nature of the capability to performance relationship through the examination of industry dynamism and firms slack as moderators. I demonstrate that in times of high dynamism marketing exploration and exploitation each have a positive impact on firm performance

Justifying the Origin of Real Options and their Difficult Evaluation in Strategic Management.

This work explores and reviews the introduction of real option in the strategic management literature. The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the origin of the real option. By distinguishing between shadow and real option, and implementing entrepreneurship in the traditional option valuation framework we obtain a more exhaustive representation of the strategic decision processes in the firm. We explain the creation of a real option as an entrepreneurial process, which transforms inventive ideas into profitable innovation. This constitutes a step toward an option based-theory of the firm by describing the emergence of a firm’s options and the strategic building of new competences for exercising these options. In addition, this approach offers a parallel understanding of why the real option theory is less used in practice than in theory.Real Option, Theory of the Firm, Entrepreneurship, Dynamic Capabilities.

Self-Organizing Teams in Online Work Settings

As the volume and complexity of distributed online work increases, the collaboration among people who have never worked together in the past is becoming increasingly necessary. Recent research has proposed algorithms to maximize the performance of such teams by grouping workers according to a set of predefined decision criteria. This approach micro-manages workers, who have no say in the team formation process. Depriving users of control over who they will work with stifles creativity, causes psychological discomfort and results in less-than-optimal collaboration results. In this work, we propose an alternative model, called Self-Organizing Teams (SOTs), which relies on the crowd of online workers itself to organize into effective teams. Supported but not guided by an algorithm, SOTs are a new human-centered computational structure, which enables participants to control, correct and guide the output of their collaboration as a collective. Experimental results, comparing SOTs to two benchmarks that do not offer user agency over the collaboration, reveal that participants in the SOTs condition produce results of higher quality and report higher teamwork satisfaction. We also find that, similarly to machine learning-based self-organization, human SOTs exhibit emergent collective properties, including the presence of an objective function and the tendency to form more distinct clusters of compatible teammates

Supply chain organizational learning, exploration, exploitation, and firm performance: A creation-dispersion perspective

We introduce and empirically test the creation-dispersion model of supply chain organizational learning to align learning orientations in a supply chain context. Our paper seeks to advance the knowledge on supply chain organizational learning by showing that four distinct supply chain learning orientations (team, learning, memory, and systems), previously studied only as a collective, can be parsed strategically. We parse these four learning orientations into creation capacity (team and learning orientations) and dispersion capacity (memory and system orientations). The creation and dispersion capacity can enhance exploration (long-term) and exploitation (short-term) practices respectively in supply chain organizations. We used a survey questionnaire to collect data from 128 respondents belonging to firms of various sizes and different industries. We find that creation capacity is positively associated with exploration and indirectly associated with exploitation through exploration. Dispersion capacity is associated with exploitation and indirectly influences market share and profitability through exploitation. The findings demonstrate that creation and dispersion-based combinations of supply chain learning orientations coalesce to influence exploration and exploitation practices. We discuss the implications for supply chain organizational learning literature

Networks and Innovation : A Survey of Empirical Literature.

Networks are now understood to be an important mechanism to change economic and social outcomes through non-market means, and one of these outcomes is the contribution of networks to innovation and technological change in general. This survey covers the recent literature on networks as far as they have implications for knowledge transfer among actors, innovation and technological change. We present a recent survey of empirical research, covering inter-firm and intra-firm networks, since these are accepted to have the most important impact on knowledge dissemination and innovation. One important conclusion that can be derived from the survey is that, although there exists a tremendous increase in network research, it is still difficult in most cases to draw robust conclusions and generalizable results. Therefore, one of the aims of this survey is to highlight those areas in which some consensus has been achieved in the literature, and others which need more attention and research in the future.

Collective innovation

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-179).The ability to innovate sits at the heart of an organization's ability to succeed in a competitive environment. An organization can innovate by improving existing products, services, or processes or by generating new products, services, or processes. Achieving successful, repeated organizational innovation, however, is a significant challenge. The hurdles to such innovation run the gamut from psychological to structural to procedural. Managers can fall victim to myopia and other human level challenges. Organizational processes, structures, and values can short circuit innovation as well. Given these challenges, we posit that an innovation strategy embracing the concepts of collective intelligence and openness may enable organizations to surmount these hurdles. We refer to this approach as Collective Innovation and define it as a connected, open, and collaborative process that generates, develops, prioritizes, and executes new ideas. To develop our argument, we surveyed literature from a wide array of disciplines including economics, organizational behavior, social psychology, and organizational change.(cont.) We begin this thesis by drawing a connection between the economic theories of Adam Smith and Ronald Coase and research into the changing workplace by Thomas Malone. We then introduce the concepts of collective intelligence and openness, core tenets of Collective Innovation. After introducing Collective Innovation, we examine its place in the history of innovation strategy. Next, we outline and describe the four stages of the Collective Innovation process. Having dealt mainly in theory, we then turn to the application of Collective Innovation and the myriad challenges that managers will face when attempting to implement such a strategy. Keeping in mind these challenges, we outline four ways in which organizations might use Collective Innovation to power the exploration-side of their operations. Finally, we revisit several remaining questions before concluding our analysis.by Alex Slawsby [and] Carlos Rivera.M.B.A