The mediation between participative leadership and employee exploratory innovation: Examining intermediate knowledge mechanisms

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.We examine mediation effects of coworker knowledge sharing and absorptive capacity on the participative leadership–employee exploratory innovation relationship in R&D units of Taiwanese technology firms. Deploying a time-lagged questionnaire method implemented over four business quarters, data is generated from 1600 paired samples (managers and employees) in R&D units of Taiwanese technology firms. The structural equation modeling results reveal that (1) participative leadership is positively related to employee exploratory innovation; (2) coworker knowledge and (3) absorptive capacity partially mediate the relationship between participative leadership and employee exploratory innovation independently; and, (4) coworker knowledge sharing in combination with absorptive capacity partially mediates this relationship. The results extend previous research on participative leadership and innovation by demonstrating that participative leadership is related to employee exploratory innovation (Lee and Meyer-Doyle, 2017; Mom et al., 2009).Results also confirm that participative leadership drives employee exploratory innovation through employee absorptive capacity. This reinforces the need highlighted by Lane et al. (2006) to investigate the role of absorptive capacity at the individual-level. Collectively, while participative leadership is important for employee exploratory innovation it is the knowledge mechanisms existing and interacting at the employee-level that are central to generating increased employee exploratory innovation from this leadership approach

Ambidexterity: The Interplay of Supply Chain Management Competencies and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems on Organizational Performance

Understanding the business value of information systems (IS) is one of the key issues among practitioners. Specifically, the role of IS in supply chain management (SCM) is one of the main areas that practitioners focus, as the largest portion of production costs are traceable back to supply chain costs. Hence, inter-organizational systems (IOS) gain importance as a result of the increased competition between supply chain networks. Particularly, implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP), which is a type of IOS, becomes the new trend among organizations. Although organizations use similar ERP, some gained significant benefits by using them, while others struggled to achieve the same level of success. The performance differences among ERP using organizations illustrate that ERP accrues several indirect benefits to organizational performance via intermediating organizational capabilities. SCM explorative and exploitative competencies are two such capabilities. Although, previous research indicates that ERP needs to be supported by mature SCM processes to maximize the benefits of ERP, there is still a lack of knowledge of how ERP is used to improve SCM competencies and increase performance. Thus, the goal of this study is to evaluate the indirect benefits that accrue to organizations via the mediating effect of SCM competencies on the relationship between effective ERP usage for SCM and organizational performance. Customer relationship management (CRM), customer service management (CSM), supplier relationship management (SRM) are adopted as the three key ERP based SCM processes, and profitability, market value, and productivity are utilized as the three main aspects of overall organizational performance. PLS-SEM is used to investigate this relationship. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that effective ERP usage for SCM improves SCM competencies, which leads to higher organizational performance. Specifically, the results suggest that although effective ERP usage for CRM is related to both SCM explorative and exploitative competence, effective ERP usage for CSM experience better SCM explorative competence, and effective ERP usage achieves better SCM exploitative competence. The results also indicate that, while SCM exploitative competence influences all three aspects of organizational performance, SCM explorative competence affects only the market value and organizations that manage to balance SCM explorative and exploitative competence efforts outperform their competitors

Software Development Process Ambidexterity and Project Performance: A Coordination Cost-Effectiveness View

Software development process ambidexterity (SDPA) is the ability to demonstrate both process alignment and process adaptability simultaneously. Realizing process ambidexterity has recently been suggested as an effective approach to improving the performance of software development (SD) projects. To understand the mechanisms underlying the effects of ambidexterity, we focus in this study on the mediating effects of coordination, one of the most important activity in SD projects. Specifically, we hypothesize a mediating effect of coordination costs and coordination effectiveness on the relationship between SDPA and project performance. We conducted a quantitative study involving 104 SD projects across 10 firms to test the model. The results strongly suggest that the positive relationship between SDPA and project performance is negatively mediated by coordination costs and positively mediated by coordination effectiveness. We validate our research model with a case study in an organization employing several hundred IT professionals and derive several practical implications on this basis

International business competence and innovation performance : the role of ambidextrous organizational culture and environmental dynamism

Author's accepted manuscript (postprint).This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Emerald in International Journal of Organizational Analysis on 24/08/2021.Available online: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJOA-03-2021-2689/full/htmlacceptedVersio

Agglomeration, social capital and interorganizational ambidexterity in tourist districts

Knowledge is a basic factor of competitiveness with a firm’s exploration and exploitation capabilities acting as the main antecedents of innovation. However, a firm has two main options to obtain new knowledge: internal generation and external acquisition. This paper analyzes how tourism firms located in tourist districts develop ambidexterity through the combination of co-exploration and co-exploitation. Specifically, we study how the features that characterize a tourist district, such as the level of firm and institutional agglomeration, affect the development of co-exploration and co-exploitation capabilities, taking into account the mediation effect of social capital. The population under study includes all the Spanish hotels located in Spanish coastal towns, making a total sample of 210 establishments. The results confirm that agglomeration has a positive impact on the ambidexterity of Spanish hotels. Moreover, the results show that agglomeration causes an increase of social capital in hotels, and that social capital has a positive impact on ambidexterity. We find that social capital partially mediates the effect of agglomeration on ambidexterity. Some implications for managers and policymakers are presented

An Exploration of the Relationship between Boundary Spanning and Organizational Performance

Technology ManagementIn this paper, we present a study that examines how individuals who take the role of boundary spanner affect organizational innovativeness inside the team. Recently, there has been growing attention from burgeoning interests in open innovation and interdisciplinary R&D on boundary spanning and its impact on innovative culture or the capability of organizations. Boundary spanning is concerned with detecting internal or external information and then creating networks that connect between the environment and the organization. Such informational boundary spanners successfully translate acquired information and knowledge across communication boundaries. Therefore, they are considered key players of open innovation in many cases. To fill this role, they are usually aware of contextual conditions on both sides of the boundary and able to control the situation inside the firm. For organizational innovativeness, we consider ambidexterity and absorptive capacity as theoretical foundations of our research. Ambidexterity refers to an organizational characteristic that pursues the balance between exploration of new knowledge and exploitation of existing knowledge. It is not counterintuitive that boundary spanning is associated with the activities of exploration as they are intended for tapping into diverse expertise and insights. Our research model posits associations among vertical and horizontal boundary spanning within an organization, organizational combinative capabilities, and ambidexterity. We expect that this study can provide a better understanding on the dynamic mechanism of boundary spanning and the role of innovation leaders and also an insight into the questions: what is the bottleneck in the innovation process of our company? And how can we overcome the obstacles? Specifically, we will examine the relation among (1) Boundary spanning, (2) Diversity inside the unit, (3) Empowerment, (4) Ambidexterity, (5) Organizational performance. Thus, the main goal of this research is to examine whether the organizational performance varies as a results of boundary spanning roles which could be influenced by the diversity of the unit and empowerment. The main method of our study was survey of professionals working in R&D departments. After reviewing relevant literature and selecting a pool of items, we conducted a survey. The questionnaire distributed randomly, and we mainly used survey instruments adopted from prior works. All components inside construct were measured with multi-item scales. Boundary spanners, ambidexterity, power relation, diversity, and performance were the latent variables. To remove the common method bias, we used Modern MTMM technique and Harman’s single-factor test. Also we examined differences between non-response biases. After checking the construct and content validity, and the reliability of the instruments, we employed PLS (partial least squares regression) analysis to find out the relations among variables.ope

How and when do big data investments pay off? The role of marketing affordances and service innovation

Big data technologies and analytics enable new digital services and are often associated with superior performance. However, firms investing in big data often fail to attain those advantages. To answer the questions of how and when big data pay off, marketing scholars need new theoretical approaches and empirical tools that account for the digitized world. Building on affordance theory, the authors develop a novel, conceptually rigorous, and practice-oriented framework of the impact of big data investments on service innovation and performance. Affordances represent action possibilities, namely what individuals or organizations with certain goals and capabilities can do with a technology. The authors conceptualize and operationalize three important big data marketing affordances: customer behavior pattern spotting, real-time market responsiveness, and data-driven market ambidexterity. The empirical analysis establishes construct validity and offers a preliminary nomological test of direct, indirect, and conditional effects of big data marketing affordances on perceived big data performance