Building on Meynhardt’s public value concept, which has been developed to make transparent an organization’s contributions to the common good, we investigate the influence of organizational common good practices in the perceptions of employees (measured as public value) on employees’ work attitudes and life satisfaction. The proposed model is tested on a sample of 1045 Swiss employees taken from the 2015 Swiss Public Value Atlas data-set. Study findings reveal that organizational public value is positively related to employee life satisfaction, and that this relationship is partially mediated by work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Further, we show that employee common good orientations strengthen the positive impact of organizational public value on employee work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Results also provide evidence that the indirect effects of organizational public value on employee life satisfaction via work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior are stronger at higher employee common good orientation levels.
Wir kommen in dieser Gesellschaft nicht mehr hinterher. Sie ist schwindelerregend geworden und lockt deshalb Schwindler an. Ist die Zukunft postdemokratisch und neofeudal?
The corporate development and strategy function (CDSF) at firms’ headquarters is critical for their strategy activities, yet we know little about its design and structure. We argue that environmental uncertainty, strategic task demands, and structural complexity affect the need for strategy resources at the corporate level and, thus, the size of the CDSF. Drawing upon a survey of strategy heads from 105 large, listed European firms as well as archival data, we find that a firm’s market fragmentation, related diversification strategy, acquisition activity, overall size, and organizational centralization are positively associated with the number of CDSF employees. We also find, however, that the function’s size does not affect a firm’s financial performance.
We build on intraorganizational power literature to study the influence of the chief strategy officer (CSO) within organizations. We argue that the CSO's individual characteristics - structural power, expert power, and prestige power - as well as institutional forces of the firm's environment - cultural power distance and industry power level - affect the extent of the CSO's actual power over a broad range of strategic decisions. Further, we hypothesize that the CSO's actual power is positively associated with firm performance. An analysis of survey and archival data of 104 European firms reveals that the host country's cultural power distance and the industry's power level, however, not the CSO's individual characteristics, determine the CSO's actual power within the firm. Moreover, we find that firms benefit from powerful CSOs.
This study examines the interorganizational strategy process as documented by two case ecologies within the emerging domain of electric mobility. We argue that interorganizational strategy-making oscillates between meta- and firm-level and unfolds within constructed strategic arenas through an ongoing negotiation between dispersed actors. We report findings about strategic activity that seems to compensate for the absence of hierarchical structures and authorities as present in collaborative arrangements. Our study also points towards the salient roles of individuals in building common strategies by linking actors that are spread across ecologies, as well as giving "voice and face" to interorganizational endeavors.
Prior studies argue that behaviorally complex managers may contribute to an organizational unit's ambidexterity. While some suggest that such managers reconcile exploration and exploitation directly, others propose that they foster both activities indirectly by framing an ambidextrous behavioral context. We hypothesize that these direct and indirect processes are not independent alternatives, but are interrelated. Based on two samples, we find that SMEs' managers affect unit-level ambidexterity directly and indirectly, while those of larger corporations' business units only have an indirect effect. Our study extends and reconciles the literature on managerial and contextual ambidexterity, as well as that on individual-level and unit-level ambidexterity. The insight that the effectiveness of different paths to ambidexterity may depend on the type of organization under study, is further discussed.
This article aims to promote a dynamic perspective on the issue of strategy tool implementation and rejection. While research on strategy tools mainly used surveys for a long time, practice and process perspectives of strategy enriched the discussions about the actual use and value of strategy tools. However, the process of implementation and subsequent rejection of a successful strategy tool cannot be explained by existing research. On the basis of a revelatory case study, we present the process of strategy tool implementation by means of a systems model. We provide an initial dynamic hypothesis that explains the underlying dynamics of the boom and bust phenomenon.
The novels and political ideas of Ayn Rand (1905-1982) have recently experienced a renaissance, also thanks to the Tea Party movement. While Rand is widely read across the United States, she is practically unknown in Europe, where she was born. The letters she received from European readers often lamented the fact that she did not receive any attention in their respective home countries. It is commonly thought that this difference in popularity is due to ideological reasons, the less individualistic culture of many European countries, for instance. This paper, however, will argue that other factors have also contributed to the lack of success of Rand's American bestsellers in Europe. To this end, the paper first provides a brief European publication history of Rand's oeuvre. It will then analyze the reasons practical and personal, as well as political and economic for the lack of success of Rand's novels in the European book markets.
One of the most dramatic trends in banking since 2000 has been the secular movement away from core banking and interest generating activities towards enhanced reliance on non-interest-generating activities that focus largely on fees and trading profits. This has changed the banking model from traditional asset formation, such as deposit taking and lending, towards a model built on fees and non-banking activities. In this paper, we draw on a dataset covering over 10,000 US banks and 542 bank holding companies and find no evidence that this shift in the bank business model harms bank profitability and / or increases failure rates, idiosyncratic risk, or systemic risk.
