Re-examining Strategic Flexibility: A Meta-Analysis of its Antecedents, Consequences and Contingencies

Strategic flexibility (SF) is a concept that has evolved from strategy through other disciplines, including management, marketing, innovation, entrepreneurship and operations. However, despite attempts to consolidate the domain of SF, there remain theoretical and empirical tensions underlying its antecedents, the consequences and contingencies of SF. Based on 106 independent samples reported in 98 different studies (n = 26,940 firms), we provide a meta-analytical examination of these tensions. We highlight and resolve several disagreements regarding the enablers, inhibitors and triggers of SF, and we reveal an adjusted mean performance effect of 0.24. We further find that the measurement of SF, as well as some, but not all, dimensions of the environment, moderate the performance effect. Finally, an explorative analysis reveals that innovation outcomes and market outcomes mediate the positive relationship between SF and financial outcomes, in addition to a negative direct effect. These insights provide a comprehensive and coherent understanding of the nomological network of SF and a stronger basis for further theorising and conducting empirical research. Moreover, our findings help firms to refine their strategy by implementing the right enablers that drive SF and to understand how and when their investment in SF pays off

Communication in the Gig Economy: Buying and Selling in Online Freelance Marketplaces

The proliferating gig economy relies on online freelance marketplaces, which support relatively anonymous interactions by text-based messages. Informational asymmetries thus arise that can lead to exchange uncertainties between buyers and freelancers. Conventional marketing thought recommends reducing such uncertainty. However, uncertainty reduction and uncertainty management theories indicate that buyers and freelancers might benefit more from balancing, rather than reducing, uncertainty, such as by strategically adhering to or deviating from common principles. With dyadic analyses of calls for bids and bids from a leading online freelance marketplace, this study reveals that buyers attract more bids from freelancers when they provide moderate degrees of task information and concreteness, avoid sharing personal information, and limit the affective intensity of their communication. Freelancers’ bid success and price premiums increase when they mimic the degree of task information and affective intensity exhibited by buyers. However, mimicking a lack of personal information and concreteness reduces freelancers’ success, so freelancers should always be more concrete and offer more personal information than buyers do. These contingent perspectives offer insights into buyer–seller communication in two-sided online marketplaces; they clarify that despite, or sometimes due to, communication uncertainty, both sides can achieve success in the online gig economy

Omnichannel Value Chain: Mapping Digital Technologies for Channel Integration Activities

In order to provide a seamless customer experience, researchers and practitioners have proposed creation of an omnichannel retailing environment by integrating online and offline channels. Channel integration necessitates use of digital technologies and there are myriads of technological solutions available. However, retailers are struggling with selection and implementation of suitable technologies to add value through channel integration. Despite the strong practical need, this issue has not been effectively addressed in the academic literature. This paper presents an omnichannel value chain underpinned by Porter’s value chain model. We identify ten channel integration activities for value creation by carrying out a synthesis of current research on omnichannel retailing. Enabling digital technologies are then mapped to these activities using technology implementation examples and provide a guideline for retailers to select appropriate technologies for the identified value creation activities

How family CEOs affect employees’ feelings and behaviors: a study on positive emotions

Research suggests that firms with family CEOs differ from other types of businesses, yet surprisingly little is known about how employees in these firms feel and behave compared to those working in other firms. We draw from family science and management research to suggest that family CEOs, because of their emotion-evoking double role as family members and business leaders, are, on average, more likely to infuse employees with positive emotions, such as enthusiasm and excitement, than hired professional CEOs. We suggest that these emotions spread through firms by way of emotional contagion during interactions with employees, thereby setting the organizational affective tone. In turn, we hypothesize that in firms with family CEOs the voluntary turnover rate is lower. In considering structural features as boundary conditions, we propose that family CEOs have stronger effects in smaller and centralized firms, and weaker effects in formalized firms. Multilevel data from 41,200 employees and 2,246 direct reports of CEOs from 497 firms with and without family CEOs provide support for our model. This research suggests that firms managed by family CEOs, despite often being criticized as nepotistic relics of the past, tend to offer pleasant work environments.The fourth author’s work on this paper was partly funded by a grant from the Basic Research Fund of the University of St. Gallen