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- 2020
- Article
Reflections: Toward a Normative and Actionable Theory of Planned Organizational Change and Development
By: Michael Beer
A normative and actionable theory of planned organizational change and development is proposed based on fifty years of engagement by the author as a scholar-consultant. Five principles are central features of the theory and practice proposed: 1) Organizations are...
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- 2021
- Article
Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy
By: Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans
Perhaps one of the most reaffirming findings to emerge over the past several decades is that humans not only engage in generous behavior, they also appear to experience pleasure from doing so. Yet not all acts of helping lead to greater happiness. Here, we review the...
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- July 8, 2020
- Article
Making a Difference: Developing Actionable Knowledge for Practice and Theory
By: Michael Beer
There is a widely acknowledged gap between academic research and practice. While the field of organizational studies and development has had an impact on management practice in some organizations, it has had only a modest impact on widely accepted management practice...
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- Article
Value of New Performance Information in Healthcare: Evidence from Japan
By: Susanna Gallani, Takehisa Kajiwara and Ranjani Krishnan
Mandatory measurement and disclosure of outcome measures are commonly used policy tools in
healthcare. The effectiveness of such disclosures relies on the extent to which the new information produced by the mandatory system is internalized by the healthcare...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 3 Transaction Free Zones
In Chapter 2 we saw that the most economical locations for transactions in a task network are the so-called thin crossing points—places where transfers are easy to define, count and pay for. However, in many places in the task network, transfers of material, energy,...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Ecosystems and Complementarities
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce two new building blocks to the theory of how technology shapes organizations. The first is a new layer of organization structure: a business “ecosystem.” The second is the economic concept of “complementarity.” Ecosystems are...
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- 1992
- Working Paper
Employment versus Sub-Contracting: The Real Trade-Offs
By: Amar Bhide and Howard Stevenson
By many accounts, sub-contracting is in the vogue while traditional employment relationships are on the outs. Ten years ago free-lancers, independent subcontractors and the like accounted for about 10 percent of the labor force; today they constitute 25 percent. Of the...
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- July 2020
- Article
Does Corporate Misconduct Affect the Future Compensation of Alumni Managers?
By: Boris Groysberg, Eric Lin and George Serafeim
Using data from a top-five global executive placement firm, the authors explore how an organization's financial misconduct may affect pay for former employees not implicated in wrongdoing. Drawing on stigma theory, they hypothesize that although such alumni did not...
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- June 2020
- Article
Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model
By: Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt
Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how...
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- April 2020
- Article
Long-term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of U.S. Manufacturers 1959–2015
By: Giovanni Dosi, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano and Federico Tamagni
Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a potential indicator of organizational “fitness” within a competitive environment, firm growth is also a central concern to...
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Keywords:
Firm Growth;
Organizations;
Growth and Development;
Theory;
Analysis;
Production;
Data and Data Sets
- 2020
- Working Paper
Shaping Nascent Industries: Innovation Strategy and Regulatory Uncertainty in Personal Genomics
By: Cheng Gao and Rory McDonald
In nascent industries—whose new technologies are often poorly understood by regulators—contending with regulatory uncertainty can be crucial to organizational survival and growth. Prior research on nonmarket strategy largely focuses on established firms in mature...
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- March 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Module Note
Sales Force Compensation
By: Doug J. Chung
The author developed this note for scholars, educators, and practitioners that are interested in sales force compensation. It is based on the author’s investigations across a variety of organizations in multiple industries and provides a conceptual framework for the...
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- March 2020
- Article
Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-family Narrative as a Social Defense Against 24/7 Work Culture
By: Irene Padavic, Robin J. Ely and Erin M. Reid
It is widely accepted that the conflict between women’s family obligations and professional jobs’ long hours lies at the heart of their stalled advancement. Yet research suggests that this “work-family narrative” is incomplete: men also experience it and nevertheless...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee Eun Shin
We examine the incentive effects of subjective adjustments in the allocation of tournament-based financial rewards and penalties based on performance rankings. We use data from a company where the reward and penalty allocations are based on a combination of objective...
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Keywords:
Compensation Interdependence;
Nominal And Opportunity Effects;
Managerial Discretion;
Performance Measurement;
Subjectivity;
Rewards;
Expectancy Theory;
Tournament-based Incentives;
Penalties;
Tournaments;
Reciprocity Theory;
Employees;
Compensation and Benefits;
Management;
Decisions;
Performance;
Measurement and Metrics
- Article
A Theories-in-Use Approach to Building Marketing Theory
By: G. Zaltman, Valarie A. Zeithaml, Bernard Jaworski, Ajay K. Kohli, Kapil R. Tuli and Wolfgang Ulaga
This article’s objective is to inspire and provide guidance on the development of marketing knowledge based on the theories-in-use (TIU) approach. The authors begin with a description of the TIU approach and compare it with other inductive and deductive research...
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- Article
Organizational Innovation in the Multinational Enterprise: Internalization Theory and Business History
By: Teresa da Silva Lopes, Mark Casson and G. Jones
This article engages in a methodological experiment by using historical evidence to challenge a common misperception about internalization theory. The theory has often been criticized for maintaining that it assumes a hierarchically organized MNE based on knowledge...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Rehabilitating Corporate Purpose
In this paper, I address how the ascendance of the theory of shareholder value maximization into the central consciousness of public corporations and its canonization as the only legitimate expression of corporate purpose has contributed to both a widening breach...
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- 29 Mar 2019
- Interview
Integrating Theory into Your Organization: Black Duck by Synopsys
By: Lou Shipley
The Disruptive Voice hits the road, heading to BlackDuck by Synopsys headquarters in Burlington, MA. We sit down with Lou Shipley (CEO), Patrick Carey (Director of Product Marketing), and Tim Kenny (VP of Culture) to hear how Competing Against Luck became a company...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Transaction Cost Economics in the Digital Economy: A Research Agenda
By: Frank Nagle, Robert Seamans and Steve Tadelis
Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) theory has played an important role in understanding when it is more efficient for a transaction between two parties to occur within the market or within an organization. However, as more transactions occur in a digitally-mediated...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 15 The IBM PC
The IBM PC was the first digital computer platform that was open by as a matter of strategy, not necessity. The purpose of this chapter is to understand the IBM PC as a technical system and set of organization choices in light of the theory of how technology shapes...
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