infonet-economy

Organisation und Steuerung gehören zu den fundamentalen Aufgaben einer Firma. Ihre Perfektionierung als Organisations- und Steuerungsinstrument ist ein Ziel, welches bedeutende Investitionen rechtfertigt – ISO 9001, Six Sigma und ERP-Systeme belegen dies. Mit radikalem Kontrollverzicht experimentieren dagegen vorwiegend Communities von lose verbundenen Amateuren. Dass ihre kontrollarmen Produktionsmodelle äußerst konkurrenzfähig sind, hat der Erfolg von Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) gezeigt. Kommerzielle Anwendungen der Modelle versprechen die Erlangung von bedeutenden Wettbewerbsvorteilen, doch die Umsetzung von Kontrollverzicht und die Entwicklung passender, profitabler Geschäftsmodelle ist eine enorme Herausforderung. Dieser Beitrag skizziert Chancen und Risiken dieses Phänomens.

The importance of firm-specific knowledge for a company’s sustainable competitive advantage is well established in the knowledge-based theory of the firm. However, the impact of corporate governance design on firm-specific knowledge investments is underexplored. We assess existing co-determination systems in Europe and their impact on firm performance; then we discuss voluntary co-determination as a new corporate governance design that fosters firm-specific knowledge investments, intrinsic work motivation, efficient monitoring, and board diversity while lowering transaction costs. Our analysis indicates that shareholders can increase their company’s value by adopting customized co-determination rules.

Research evaluation is praised as the symbol of modern quality management. We claim firstly, performance evaluations in research have higher costs than normally assumed, because the evaluated persons and institutions systematically change their behavior and develop counter strategies. Moreover, intrinsic work motivation is crowded out and undesired lock-in effects take place. Secondly, the benefits of performance evaluations are questionable. Evaluations provide too little information relevant for decision-making. In addition, they lose importance due to new forms of scientific cooperation on the internet. Thirdly, there exist superior alternatives. They consist in careful selection and supportive process coaching – and then leave individuals and research institutions to direct themselves.

Recently there has been an intense debate amongst scholars on how to increase the practical relevance of research. Although the notion of ‘relevance’ is frequently mentioned in the literature, it is hardly ever defined and may have different, even contradictory, meanings in different contexts. This article presents a taxonomy of different forms of relevance, based on a textual analysis of the ‘relevance literature’ and of a set of 450 articles in three leading academic management journals that are renowned for their practical relevance. The main categories of this taxonomy are then discussed against the background of different aspects of the social dynamics of science in order to ascertain the forms of relevance that can justifiably be expected from management science.

Current reforms in the public sector are characterized by the introduction of businesslike incentive structures, in particular the introduction of “pay for performance” schemes in public institutions. However, the public sector has some specific characteristics, which might restrict the naive adoption of pay for performance. Our article analyzes whether the impact of pay for performance on performance is bound to conditions, and if this is the case, under which conditions pay for performance has a positive or a negative effect on performance. We explore this contingency in a meta-analytic review of previous experimental studies on the effects of pay for performance on performance. We further show why pay for performance sometimes negatively affects personal efforts. With an experimental vignette study we demonstrate (a) that motivation is likely to be a key influence on the effect of performance-related pay on performance, and (b) that pay for performance is generally more costly as it appears because it almost always produces hidden costs of rewards. Our findings help to explain the modest success of pay for performance in the public sector.

Past innovation research has largely neglected potential effects of corporate governance issues on strategic choices, and thereby on innovation management outcomes. The theory of upper echelon implies that strategic choices result from idiosyncrasies of top management teams (TMT). Building on this theory, we hypothesize that TMT diversity enhances firm performance by facilitating an innovation strategy that increases the firm's new product portfolio innovativeness. Our findings support the relevance of considering a corporate governance view for explaining innovation outcomes. Empirically, we can show that TMT diversity has a strong impact on the strategic choice of firms to focus on innovation fields. Such focus then drives new product portfolio innovativeness and firm performance. As corporate governance arrangements thus seem relevant in the context of innovation management, we can derive implications for both policy makers and innovation researchers.

Keywords: Theory of upper echelon; TMT diversity; Innovation strategy; Corporate governance; New product portfolio innovativeness

The present paper takes a look at the particularities of German strategy research over the last three decades. In contrast to much of the Anglo-Saxon research, which has focused on competition as a guiding concept in theorizing about strategy, German research has typically been concerned with more fundamental questions about the general relationship between organizations and their environments and, as a result, tended to be more conceptual than empirical. Researchers have been particularly influenced by the German sociological and philosophical traditions, specifically by the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas and by the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Also, there are authors who draw on the economic tradition of the Austrian School in order to develop a competence-based theory of the firm. Another branch builds on Anthony Giddens's structuration theory and Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction. As we will demonstrate, much of the research has been concerned with fundamental theoretical tensions: evolution vs. planning, selection vs. compensation, cognitive–instrumental rationality vs. moral–practical rationality, etc. We note that, as a consequence, much of German strategy research shows a particular interest in paradoxa and oxymora (such as ‘planned evolution’, ‘productive misunderstandings’ or ‘unfocused monitoring’). This paper will identify and explore important strands of German strategy research and discuss its particularities compared to mainstream strategy research in the United States.

Research Question/Issue: Why did the majority of directors prior to the financial crisis not have the foresight to predict the problems of taking on too much risk? We analyze whether executives' characteristics affect strategic choices due to bounded rationality, as proposed by the theory of upper echelons. The literature has thus far not empirically opened this black box. Relying on psychological economics, we develop hypotheses under which conditions expertise and gender can lead to biased information-processing.

Research Findings/Insights: To test the hypotheses, we propose a two-study methodology and take the financial crisis as a natural experimental setting. In Study 1, we analyze individual phenomena and show that under conditions of uncertainty, the processing of information by financial experts and men is worse than by non-financial experts and women. In Study 2, we test these findings for organizational phenomena. We show that banks with a higher percentage of financial experts within TMTs perform better in stable environments, but are more negatively affected by the financial crisis.

Theoretical/Academic Implications: An important moderator within the theory of upper echelons is financial market discipline during turbulent periods, explaining why the performance of homogenous TMTs is volatile and why the performance of diverse TMTs is sustainable. The theory can be strengthened by including the insights of psychological economics as a micro-foundation.

Practitioner/Policy Implications: For a sustainable performance, greater TMT diversity in public companies should be instituted by the board of directors.

Manuscript Type: Empirical

The Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice provides the first comprehensive overview of an emerging and growing stream of research in strategic management. An international team of scholars has been assembled to produce a systematic introduction to the various epistemological, methodological and theoretical aspects of the strategy-as-practice approach. This perspective explores and explains the contribution that strategizing makes to daily operations at all levels of an organization. Moving away from a disembodied and asocial study of firm assets, technologies and practices, the strategy-as-practice approach breaks down many of the traditional paradigmatic boundaries in strategy to investigate who the strategists are, what strategists do, how they do it, and what the consequences or outcomes of their actions are. Including a number of detailed empirical studies, the handbook will be an essential guide for future research in this vibrant field

Eine hohe Anzahl von Fusionen und Übernahmen scheitert. Gleichwohl sind Fusionen und Übernahmen an der Tagesordnung. Als eine Erklärung hierfür wird die Hybris-Hypothese diskutiert, d.h. die These, dass sich Entscheidungsträger der aufnehmenden Unternehmen systematisch überschätzen. Um diese These zu testen und um gegebenenfalls Maßnahmen gegen Hybris zu ergreifen, sind verlässliche Indikatoren für Hybris erforderlich. Die Arbeit stellt die in der Literatur entwickelten Indikatoren vor und diskutiert deren Vor- und Nachteile.
Although corporate acquisitions are ubiquitous a large number of M&A fails. One explanation for such failure is the hubris hypothesis for corporate takeovers. A decision maker affected with hubris (or overconfidence) will overestimate his abilities in raising potential synergies and is likely to make investment decisions destroying shareholder wealth. The growing literature on CEO hubris proposes various ways to measure hubris. We present these indicators and discuss possible advantages and drawbacks. (71 words)
Schlüsselwörter Hybris - Mergers & Acquisitions

Keywords Hubris - Mergers & Acquisitions

JEL Classification G34 - M10