Mapping strategic consensus within and between teams

Organisational scholars have been aware for some time that achieving a high degree of shared understanding about the strategy within the enterprise is extremely valuable. However, until now, managers have had few good tools for monitoring shifts in opinion at a granular level – and without that, most executives have had to simply reiterate the same messages again and again

Do disruptive visions pay off?

Entrepreneurs often articulate a vision for their venture that purports to fundamentally change, disturb, or re-order the ways in which organizations, markets, and ecosystems operate. We call these visions disruptive visions. Neglected in both the disruption and the impression management literature, disruptive visions are widespread in business practice. We integrate real options and impression management theories to hypothesize that articulating a disruptive vision raises expectations of extraordinary returns, which in turn increases the likelihood of receiving funding, but reduces the amount of funding obtained. A novel dataset of Israeli start-ups shows that a standard deviation increase in disruptive vision communication increases the odds of receiving a first round of funding by 22 percent, but reduces amounts of funds received by 24 percent. A randomized online experiment corroborates these findings and further shows expectation of extraordinary returns as the key mechanism driving investors’ sensemaking

Creativity and Innovation under Constraints: A Cross-Disciplinary Integrative Review

Generating creative ideas and turning them into innovations is key for competitive advantage. However, endeavors toward creativity and innovation are bounded by constraints such as rules and regulations, deadlines, and scarce resources. The effect of constraints on creativity and innovation has attracted substantial interest across the fields of strategic management, entrepreneurship, industrial organization, technology and operations management, organizational behavior, and marketing. Research in these fie ds has focused on various constraints that trigger distinct mediating mechanisms but is fragmented and yields conflicting findings. We develop a taxonomy of constraints and mediating mechanisms and provide an integrative synthesis that explains how constraints impact creativity and innovation. Our review thus facilitates cross-disciplinary learning and sets the stage for further theoretical development

Aspiration formation and attention rules

Research Summary: The behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF) proposes that firm behavior is goal-directed and that organizational aspirations are a function of prior historical aspirations, past performance, and the performance of others. Despite the centrality of aspirations in the BTOF, little is known about aspiration formation and why firms favor one aspiration type over others, that is, attention rules. Drawing on the attention-based view, we posit that attention rules are shaped by environmental volatility over time and vary by locus of attention across firms. Data from US manufacturing firms managing their toxic chemical waste provide evidence for attention-rule adaptation. Managerial Summary: Firms must set aspirations, measure, and improve their toxic waste levels to avoid costly economic, regulatory, and environmental hazards. Although aspirations play a vital role in driving firm behavior, we still have limited understanding of how managers allocate their attention to various performance feedback during aspiration formation. We argue that attention allocation differs for managers across organizational hierarchy exposed to varying degrees of environmental volatility. Greater volatility of the business environment steers managerial attention from the performance of others toward their own historical aspirations. We also suggest that the attention of managers at higher levels of the organizational structure are directed from their own historical aspirations toward performance of others. We find corroborating evidence for our conjectures.</p

Turkish artisanal Tulum cheese ripened in tripe: The importance of the milk type and changes with ripening

Karin Kaymagi is a type of Tulum cheese traditionally produced from sheep milk and ripened in tripe following the addition of cream to the curd. In this study, it was traditionally produced by mixing certain proportions of raw sheep and cow milk (100:0, 75:25, 50:50, 25:75, and 0:100). The samples were allowed to ripen, and analyses were made for chemical, biochemical, electrophoretic, sensory, and textural properties at the 3rd, 30th, 60th, and 90th days of ripening. According to the results obtained, both cheese type and ripening time had significant effects on dry matter, fat, protein, salt, salt in dry matter, % lactic acid, pH, ripening rate, NPN ratio, and PPN ratio (P < 0.05). Only cheese type had a remarkable effect on salt in dry matter and fat in dry matter (P < 0.05). The highest lipolysis value was determined in the samples made of sheep milk only (KK2) (P < 0.05). Electrophoretic analysis showed that αS1-casein and β-casein concentrations decreased until the end of ripening. Sensory analysis denoted that the KK2 sample was appreciated the most based on colour, appearance, structure, taste, and odor scores (P < 0.05)

Affective Leadership in Agile Teams

Agile management prescribes a set of structures and processes to help teams respond to change. This article presents an in-depth case study examining how high- and low-agility nursing teams differed in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizational restructuring, and floods. It unveils the crucial role of “affective leaders” in high-agility teams during those crises. These leaders constructed positive emotional experiences for their teams to successfully respond to adversity. The findings remind scholars and practitioners that agile management’s founding tenet of “valuing individuals and interactions” implies understanding, working with, and actively recalibrating emotions

Negative Spillovers Across Partnerships for Responsible Innovation: Evidence from the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

Humanity faces ongoing and contemporaneous grand challenges. Occasionally, abrupt shocks escalate a grand challenge’s salience over others. Prior research has advocated forming partnerships to address grand challenges via responsible innovation. Yet, it remains unclear how temporal changes in the salience of a grand challenge impact innovation performances of partnerships. We address this research gap by bridging the literature on issue salience, responsible innovation and interorganizational relationships. We argue that shocks either aid or harm the performance of partnerships for responsible innovation depending on whether their domains are directly or indirectly affected. The Ebola outbreak in 2014 sets the empirical context to test our theory. We find that while the innovation performance of Ebola partnerships formed after the outbreak rose eleven-fold, the performance of partnerships treating Influenza fell by 84.9 percent. Our theory and findings have immediate implications for today’s COVID-19 outbreak, cautioning against salience shifts among concurrent grand challenges

CEO Political Partisanship and Corporate Misconduct

Are firms led by liberal or conservative CEOs more likely to engage in corporate misconduct? This study unearths the ideological bases of misconduct by distinguishing the values and identity perspectives of political ideology. Rather than attributing misconduct to liberal or conservative values, we introduce and examine CEO political partisanship—i.e., the strength of a CEO’s identification with political and ideological groups. We hypothesize and find robust evidence for a positive relationship between CEO political partisanship and corporate misconduct in a sample of Fortune 500 CEOs from 2010 to 2018. Our findings thus contribute to the conversation on the role of political ideology in organizations by unearthing the organizational implications of political identities. As CEOs increasingly engage in political discussions and political divisions grow stronger, our study offers a timely warning about the harmful link between CEO political partisanship and corporate misconduct

Buffer optimization and robust design studies in asynchronous assembly systems using design of experiments approach

This research concentrates on the buffer specification problem of the design of asynchronous assembly systems (AAS). The objectives of the research are to determine an optimal area of buffers and to design AAS that are robust to noise factors. In order to determine an optimal area of buffers in which the throughput yields to maximum, the design of experiments (DoE) approach and discrete-event simulation are used, and appropriate buffer levels are identified accordingly. Studies indicated that determining an optimal area provided the design engineer the much needed flexibility to choose the buffer sizes within a range. The DoE approach also offered substantial information on the AAS that can serve the design engineer as an invaluable guideline and enable one to design the AAS with a better understanding. Furthermore, the use of DoE approach as an optimization tool is proposed, principally in cases where little known on the AAS that will be designed. Case studies using the DoE approach as a heuristic optimization method are presented. Additionally, in an attempt to study its effect, in some studies, the number of pallets has been considered as a decision variable. Studies conducted throughout this research indicated that the DoE approach to be an effective methodology. Robust design study is essential to design AAS that are insensitive to uncontrollable factors. Several systems have been investigated and analyses revealed the necessity of robust design study in AAS. Future research areas are suggested