Relational capital, new knowledge and innovative ideas

Organisational learning occurs when people engage in exploration activities – activities aimed at acquiring and using new knowledge, ideas and insights. Exploration, explains Tom Mom, associate professor of strategic entrepreneurship at RSM, ‘is about people and organisations promoting things that are new to them,’ which can lead to new products, new technologies, or the company going into new markets

Investigating Managers' Exploration and Exploitation Activities: The Influence of Top-down, Bottom-up, and Horizontal Knowledge Inflows

This paper develops and tests hypotheses on the influence of a manager’s knowledge inflows on this manager’s exploration and exploitation activities. Based on a survey among managers of a leading electronics firm, the findings indicate, as expected, that top-down knowledge inflows of a manager positively relate to the extent to which this manager conducts exploitation activities, while they do not relate to a manager’s exploration activities. Furthermore, as expected, bottom-up and horizontal knowledge inflows of a manager positively relate to this manager’s exploration activities, while they do not relate to a manager’s exploitation activities. We contribute to current literature on exploration and exploitation by focusing on the manager level of analysis, and by adding the importance of knowledge flow configurations to the literature on the impact of organizational factors upon exploration and exploitation.Exploitation;Exploration;Bottom-up;Horizontal;Knowledge inflows;Manager-level;Top-down

Managers’ Exploration and Exploitation Activities: The Influence of Organizational Factors and Knowledge Inflows

Om succesvol te zijn en te blijven worden ondernemingen in een dynamische omgeving geconfronteerd met de uitdaging om nieuwe kansen te exploreren en bestaande zekerheden te exploiteren. Onderzoekers en managers worstelen echter met de vraag hoe exploratie en exploitatie binnen een bedrijf gemanaged kunnen worden. Deze studie levert een bijdrage door exploratie en exploitatie activiteiten van managers te onderzoeken, en door hypothesen te ontwikkelen en testen over de invloed van organisatiefactoren en kennisinstromen van managers op exploratie en exploitatie activiteiten van managers. De resultaten tonen aan dat organisatiefactoren niet alleen een directe invloed uitoefenen op managers’ exploratie en exploitatie activiteiten, maar ook een indirecte invloed door hun invloed op managers’ kennisinstromen; kennisinstromen van managers mediëren de invloed van organisatiefactoren op exploratie en exploitatie activiteiten van managers. We leveren een bijdrage aan de literatuur en aan de managementpraktijk door ons te richten op exploratie en exploitatie op het analyseniveau van de manager, door het belang aan te tonen, niet alleen van organisatiefactoren, maar ook van kennisstromen binnen een bedrijf, en door aan te tonen hoe en welke configuraties van organisatiefactoren managers in staat stellen of hinderen om te beantwoorden aan specifieke manieren waarop bedrijven exploratie en exploitatie kunnen combineren.In order to be successful over time, firms in a dynamic environment are challenged to explore new possibilities to achieve congruence with the changing business environment, and to exploit old certainties to secure efficiency benefits. However, both researchers and managers struggle to understand how firms may manage and organize exploration and exploitation. This study delivers a contribution by investigating managers’ exploration and exploitation activities, and by developing and testing hypotheses on the influence of organizational factors and managers’ knowledge inflows on managers’ exploration and exploitation activities. Results indicate that organizational factors not only directly influence managers’ exploration and exploitation activities, but also indirectly through their influence on managers’ knowledge inflows; i.e. knowledge inflows mediate the relationship between organizational factors and exploration and exploitation at the manager level. We contribute to current literature on exploration and exploitation and to management practice by focusing on the manager level of analysis, by adding the importance of knowledge flow configurations to the literature on the impact of organizational factors on exploration and exploitation, and by illustrating, which, and how, configurations of organizational factors enable or inhibit managers to respond to particular ways by which firms may combine exploration and exploitation

Strategic Growth and Implementation: Thriving in a Disruptive Landscape

To create wealth in a changing and competitive landscape, managers need to identify and develop opportunities for new strategic growth. They also need to have excellent implementation capabilities to reap the benefits of their new growth initiatives. Yet, most managers and companies struggle or even fail to do so. To address this struggle, management practice and research about strategic growth and about implementation need integration. In this inaugural address, I propose three avenues, which may contribute to this. First, for organizations to become really good at developing new strategies for growth and also at implementing them, they need ambidextrous managers, i.e., managers with the capacity to do two very different things equally well, like being entrepreneurial and strategic, conducting exploratory and exploitative learning, and putting in place top-down and bottom-up strategic processes. The second avenue is about creating close connections and systematic interactions between new growth and implementation activities within the organization and among the actors involved. This pertains to managers across different hierarchical levels and to the involvement of operational managers and employees. The third avenue points to scale-ups as an exciting context for practice and research on growth and implementation. Interest in scale-ups may benefit from going beyond typical macro questions of job creation as scaling-up a company rapidly is full of unique managerial and organizational challenges, and scale-ups have the potential to be impactful forces for positive change

Understanding variation in managers' ambidexterity: Investigating direct and interaction effects of formal structural and personal coordination mechanisms

Previous research focuses on firm and business unit level ambidexterity. Therefore, conceptual and empirically validated understanding about ambidexterity at the individual level of analysis is very scarce. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by investigating managers' ambidexterity, delivering three contributions to theory and empirical research on ambidexterity: first, by proposing three related characteristics of ambidextrous managers; second, by developing a model and associated hypotheses on both the direct and interaction effects of formal structural and personal coordination mechanisms on managers' ambidexterity; and third, by testing the hypotheses based on a sample of 716 business unit level and operational level managers. Findings regarding the formal structural mechanisms indicate that a manager's decision-making authority positively relates to this manager's ambidexterity, whereas formalization of a manager's tasks has no significant relationship with this manager's ambidexterity. Regarding the personal coordination mechanisms, findings indicate that both the participation of a manager in cross-functional interfaces and the connectedness of a manager to other organization members positively relate to this manager's ambidexterity. Furthermore, results show positive interaction effects between the formal structural and personal coordination mechanisms on managers' ambidexterity. The paper's theoretical contributions and empirical results increase our understanding about managers' ambidexterity and about how different types and combinations of coordination mechanisms relate to variation in managers' ambidexterity

Investigating Managers' Exploration and Exploitation Activities: The Influence of Top-down, Bottom-up, and Horizontal Knowledge Inflows

This paper develops and tests hypotheses on the influence of a manager’s knowledge inflows on this manager’s exploration and exploitation activities. Based on a survey among managers of a leading electronics firm, the findings indicate, as expected, that top-down knowledge inflows of a manager positively relate to the extent to which this manager conducts exploitation activities, while they do not relate to a manager’s exploration activities. Furthermore, as expected, bottom-up and horizontal knowledge inflows of a manager positively relate to this manager’s exploration activities, while they do not relate to a manager’s exploitation activities. We contribute to current literature on exploration and exploitation by focusing on the manager level of analysis, and by adding the importance of knowledge flow configurations to the literature on the impact of organizational factors upon exploration and exploitation

The Influence of Managerial and Organizational Determinants of Horizontal Knowledge Exchange on Competence Building and Competence Leveraging

Both in theory as in practice insight is limited about how firms in dynamic environments could organize to manage concurrently both the strategic processes of competence building and competence leveraging. To contribute to this issue, a conceptual framework is developed which considers the ability to exchange knowledge across organization units as a prerequisite for firms to achieve both the goals of competence building and leveraging. The framework shows how several important managerial and organizational determinants, associated with cross-unit knowledge exchange, may stimulate competence-building processes and how they may stimulate competence-leveraging processes. The conceptual framework will be illustrated by two case studies in different contexts of Novartis, one of the leading European life-science companies. These two contexts of respectively ‘organization-enabled’ and ‘web-enabled’ knowledge exchange appear to be complementary. The conceptual framework and cases provide insight into (1) possibilities about how firms could organize to deal with the tension between competence building and leveraging processes, and (2) how managing the determinants of horizontal knowledge exchange can contribute to changing a firm’s actual mixture of competence building/leveraging processes into a more desired strategic mixture

Should management relocate across borders?

As markets and industries become more global, it makes increasing sense for multinationals to shift some or all headquarters functions and resources abroad. However, this is a strategic decision that needs to be weighed carefully

A Multilevel Integrated Framework of Firm HR Practices, Individual Ambidexterity, and Organizational Ambidexterity

Research on strategic human resource (HR) management and organizational ambidexterity has assumed that organizational ambidexterity originates from operational managers that pursue both exploratory and exploitative activities. Yet, multilevel insights are absent about how and through which mechanisms HR practices may actually facilitate operational manager ambidexterity and how their ambidexterity may result into organizational ambidexterity. Our multisource and multilevel data from 467 operational managers and 104 senior managers within 52 firms reveals that the top-down effects of ability- and motivation-enhancing HR practices on operational manager ambidexterity are partially mediated by their role breadth self-efficacy and intrinsic motivational orientation. Furthermore, we find that the bottom-up relationship between operational manager and organizational ambidexterity is contingent on firm opportunity-enhancing HR practices. With that, our study provides important new multilevel insights into the effectiveness of strategic HR systems in supporting individual and organizational ambidexterity

Relational Capital and Individual Exploration: Unravelling the influence of goal alignment and knowledge acquisition

We investigate how the relational capital of a person within an organization affects the extent to which she or he conducts exploration activities. Our theory separates out a negative effect that comes from aligning goals with other organizational members from a positive effect that stems from acquiring knowledge from them. Our data from 150 members of the R&D teams of three leading R&D-intensive firms support the theoretical model. By developing and testing this theory, we contribute to the literature on exploration, which lacks understanding of the antecedents of individual exploration in organizations. We also contribute to relational capital literature, which has focused on organizational and group-level exploration, but which has shown inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between relational capital and exploration. A reason for this may be that this body of research has emphasized positive effects of relational capital for exploration only, and has not accounted for the different mechanisms that mediate the effects of relational capital on individual exploration activities. Our theory offers a more comprehensive view by explaining how relational capital may provide both benefits and liabilities to individual exploration activities