Managerial ties, strategic initiatives, and firm performance in Central Asia and the Caucasus

Managerial ties are an area commanding managers' attention in emerging economies. However, no previous study has drawn on cross-country data to address a crucial question: Are more developed market-supporting institutions associated with less use of managerial ties in emerging economies? Further, to strive for better performance, firms also need to develop market-based strategic initiatives. How do these initiatives impact performance? What role do managerial ties play in the relationship? Addressing these questions, this article extends research on managerial ties in emerging economies to an underexplored region-Central Asia and the Caucasus

Collecting data on TMTs’ organizational design: good practices from the StiMa project

Studying how Top Management Teams (TMTs) organize their managerial labor and decision-making processes is a relevant research avenue in light of the prominence of TMTs within modern firms. However, data on TMTs’ organizational design are usually not available from secondary sources and must instead be collected through surveys given to top executives. To help researchers in this difficult endeavor, the present paper offers a set of good practices for designing and implementing surveys on TMTs’ organizational design. To this end, we use as a basis the first-hand experience that we gained by working on the StiMa project, a large-scale data collection effort concerning the TMTs of a representative sample of Italian firms. We describe in detail all of the steps that we followed in preparing and administering the survey and in setting up and executing the additional data collection from secondary sources, which integrates survey data. We are confident that the lessons we learned from the StiMa project will help scholars in gathering better data on TMTs’ organizational design, thus advancing academics’ and practitioners’ conversations on the topic

Design and Poverty : A Review of Contexts, Roles of Poor People, and Methods

Design is essential to fulfil unmet or under-served needs of resource-poor societies, supporting their social and human development. A great deal of design research has been undertaken in such low resource settings, and is discussed under different names, such as ‘community development engineering’, ‘humanitarian engineering’, ‘appropriate technology’, ‘design for development’, ‘design at the Base of the Pyramid’, etc. This has created an important need to know what has been examined and learnt so far and to plan for further investigation. To address this, we review a broad range of literature, with close examination of 30 design studies in this field. This reveals a multifaceted picture, showing a great diversity in investigation and reporting of attributes of context (income, rural and urban, design sectors, countries, and gender), the roles of poor people (consumers, producers, and co-designers), characteristics of research methods employed (e.g. descriptive and prescriptive, data collection methods, qualitative and quantitative aspects, and unit of analysis), and design topics. Based on the review results, we offer recommendations for further research, identifying concerns that researchers ought to have about this field and suggesting ways in which research in this field can be undertaken and reported