Top-down, bottom-up, or both? Toward an integrative perspective on operations strategy formation

Operations strategy is formed via complex processes that transpire in multiple directions at multiple organizational levels. While most previous studies focus on the “macro-level” process of strategy formation from the dominant top-down perspective, this study investigates the “micro-level” process of strategy formation that governs interactions among competitive priorities, objectives, and action plans within operations. Using 111 (59 top-down and 52 bottom-up) action plans collected from six German manufacturing plants, we build on Kim and Arnold's (1996) framework and propose an integrated process model of operations strategy formation that encompasses both top-down planning and bottom-up learning. We also identify a contingency factor that affects their balance: centralized versus decentralized organizational structure. Finally, based on the analysis of their respective strategic content, we provide evidence concerning the complementary roles of top-down and bottom-up action plans in operations strategy

How Temporary Assignments Boost Innovation

When front-line manufacturing employees are exchanged between company sites, they contribute more valuable ideas

Implementing operations strategy: how vertical and horizontal coordination interact

We study the implementation of operations strategy at six German manufacturers in mature businesses. Search theory argues that vertical coordination (i.e., unilateral top-down adjustment of lower-level search actions) balances stability against the improvement potential enabled by frontline search and also that horizontal coordination (i.e., bilateral adjustment among lower-level search actions) is required to ensure compatibility among the initiatives generated in various organizational subunits. Much less is known about how vertical and horizontal coordination interact in operations strategy implementation—that is the focus of this paper. We first study how horizontal and vertical coordination affect the compatibility and creativity of distributed search, triangulating our cross-level interviews with data on the manufacturers’ productivity gains and their strategic projects. We then examine whether and how vertical and horizontal coordination interact. Our case comparisons suggest that leaving either one of them “loose” and keeping the other one “tight” results in a useful balance between compatibility and creativity; in contrast, tightening both types of coordination suppresses creativity and loosening both types risks incompatibility of initiatives across units. These results lead to a theoretical framework that identifies vertical and horizontal coordination as partial substitutes for operations strategy implementation

Workforce Mobility and Innovation Outcomes

Employee ideas are a valuable starting point to improve operational efficiency. Organizations therefore systematically tap into employee knowledge. In this paper we empirically investigate how moves between problems and sites affect the innovation value created by employee ideas for the organization. We document that the dynamic effects of problem switches differ fundamentally from the effects of site switches: The innovation outcomes of problem switching employees follow a concave inverse u-shaped pattern, whereas the innovation outcomes of site switching employees follow a convex u-shaped pattern over time. Our findings first contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of workforce mobility and its effects on innovation outcomes. Furthermore, using an evolutionary lens, we develop a search-based framework that coherently explains the dynamics of innovation outcomes. We thus contribute to search theory by theoretically linking worker mobility, search behaviour and innovation outcomes