Strategic Management Policy Commons^™

Metacritiques Of Upper Echelons Theory: Verdicts And Recommendations For Future Research, Brett H. Neely Jr., Jeffrey B. Lovelace, Amanda P. Cowen, Nathan J. Hiller

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

After more than 35 years, Hambrick and Mason’s upper echelons theory (UET) stands as one of the most influential perspectives in management research. However, as the literature and its attendant reviews have become more numerous and specialized, discussion of the fundamental conceptual and methodological critiques leveled against research utilizing the UET perspective has grown fragmented. As such, the first aim of the present review is to identify and synthesize a set of common critiques levied against UET research. In doing so, we unpack important nuance within each critique while establishing a common vocabulary to facilitate greater consistency in how these …

Learning And Adaptation Under Uncertainty And Ambiguity, Lei Zheng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The first essay is about how high and moderate aspiration levels compare in terms of affecting the decision making and reinforcement learning in an uncertain environment. After developing a thought experiment and a computational model, I used lab experiments to test the model’s predictions: a high (moderate) aspiration level reduces (increases) feedback ambiguity about the relative attractiveness of different options, thus increases the exploitation (exploration) tendency of the decision maker. The behavioural difference suggests that high aspirations lead to better performance in stable environments, but worse performance after disruptive shocks. The second essay investigates whether organizations should commit more (or …

Making Connections: Social Networks In International Business, Ilya R. P. Cuypers, Gokhan Ertug, John Cantwell, Akbar Zaheer, Martin Kilduff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Insights from social network research have generated significant advancements in disciplines such as sociology, economics, and psychology. In comparison, the incorporation of social network ideas into international business (IB) research remains more limited. The purpose of this special issue is to foster further research on social networks in IB. In our introductory essay, we provide a brief overview of network research in the IB domain to give a sense of some of the major ongoing themes and to illustrate how the social network approach can provide fresh insights and add substantive value to the field. To emphasize the considerable potential …

The Resilience Of Family Controlled Business Groups: Survival Of The Unfit, Nirmalya Kumar, Phanish Puranam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The COVID crisis has demonstrated that family controlled business groups, usually criticized as being inefficient and diverse, have higher survival rates for precisely these reasons.

How Does Your Garden Grow? The Interface Of Employee And Sales Growth Post Ipo, Varkey K. Titus Jr., Jenna R. Pieper, Matthew Josefy, Theresa M. Welbourne

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

Research Summary: Firms often succumb to a growth imperative, yet little is known about how congruence between various forms of growth affects firm value. We argue that the (in)congruence between net hiring rates (e.g., growth in the number of employees) and sales growth has significant implications for firm value, assessed via Tobin's Q. We further contend that R&D expenditures and industry dynamism—factors that influence a firm's ability to realize value creation—moderate the relationship between growth pattern and firm value. We use a sample of 1,181 firms that conducted their initial public offerings from 1996 to 2006 to test our conceptual …

Leadership Doctorates Newsletter: Volume 6, Number 2, Larry Starr, Phd

Leadership Doctorates Newsletter (Formerly Strategic Leadership Newsletter)

In this Issue:

• End of the Ideal Doctorate
• Pandemic Scholarship
• Coronavirus Coping and Responding
• Coronavirus Contributions
• Dissertation Proposals and Defense
• Commencement 2020: Congratulations to our Doctoral Candidates
• Congratulations to Tom Guggino
• Congratulations to Professor John Pourdehnad
• Congratulations Scott Koerwer, Cohort 1
• Congratulations to Jim Plummer, Cohort 2
• Congratulations Syed Kazmi, Cohort 4
• Congratulations to Jay Combs-Harris, Cohort 7
• Congratulations to John Ervin, Cohort 6
• Congratulations to Andrew Braverman, Cohort 6
• Research from the Spring 2020 Class of DSL 712
• Faculty Scholarship

Do Coaches In The National Basketball Association Actually Display Racial Bias? Replication And Extension, Gokhan Ertug, Massimo Maoret

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We replicate and extend empirical evidence that has been interpreted as an indication of coaches’ racial bias in the National Basketball Association (NBA) by Schroffel and Magee (2012) and Zhang (2017; 2019). After replicating the published results, we extend them by modeling coaches’ decisions of “resting the starters,” a common tactical decision based on players’ quality and not on their race, thus exploring whether this tactic may provide an alternative explanation for associations that might thus far have been taken to indicate racial bias. Our results show that, after empirically accounting for “resting the starters,” the magnitude of associations that …

Transparency And Fairness In Organizational Decisions: An Experimental Investigation Using The Paired Ultimatum Game, Jared Nai, Reddi Kotha, Phanish Puranam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Organizations often keep secret their decisions about what employees receive (e.g., salary, budgets, benefits) to manage fairness concerns. We propose that this can be counterproductive because of a mechanism we call the “escalation of deservingness under secrecy”, where the existence of peers can inflate one’s own sense of deservingness, even when the actual allocations to peers are unknown. Building on the ultimatum game, we developed a Paired Ultimatum Game (PUG) in which a player and a peer respondent engage with the same offeror simultaneously but with no direct competition between respondents. Across three experiments- a live interaction study as well …

The Triumph Of Nonsense In Management Studies: A Commentary, Peter Kai, Howard Thomas

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Professor Dennis Tourish’s recent essay (AMLE, March 2020) provides an analysis of why business schools and management education are perceived to be in a state of crisis. This commentary focuses on one important aspect of Tourish’s criticism of the management education field; namely, the quality, value, and appropriateness of the field’s research in advancing knowledge. His main criticisms are that the failure of management research arises from its extremely strong focus on theory development, its inadequate writing, and the formulaic, template style and formal structure of research papers in leading journals. Indeed, the rules and practices underlying the …

Race To Learn: Knowledge Characteristics And Resource Structure, Chandan Acharya, Isabel Rechberg, Xiaodan Dong

Publications and Research

Purpose

This paper studies the impact of the interactive effect of knowledge characteristics – tacitness, specificity and availability— and resource structure —complementarily and asymmetric—on learning race behavior among International Joint Venture (IJV) partners in China.

Design/methodology/approach

Preliminary in-depth interviews with three IJV managers were conducted to develop and evaluate the tentatively developed questionnaire. The finalized survey questionnaire was distributed to middle and top-level managers of IJVs, resulting in a total of 124 usable surveys. The psychometric properties of data were evaluated using Cronbach’s alpha and confirmatory factor analysis, and hypotheses were tested using a Generalized Linear Model.

Findings

The results …

A Business School Disrupted: A View From Singapore, Richard Raymond Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changed our world. And through the preparation, rapid response, and early vigilance of the universities and the government in Singapore was admirable Richard Smith looks at the challenges still ahead.

Cfos Play Crucial Role In Surviving Covid-19 Crisis, Themin Suwardy

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In recent years, chief financial officers (CFOs) have been called upon to do many things. They have stepped beyond their traditional technical finance functions, embracing technology and innovations to partner chief executive officers (CEOs) and boards on strategic issues. But if asked at the end of 2019, probably no CFO would place "managing through a global pandemic and economic crisis at the same time" among their top five things to do in 2020. Like many others, CFOs are being asked to do even more in a very short timeframe.

Learning From Digital Failures? The Effectiveness Of Firms’ Divestiture And Management Turnover Responses To Data Breaches, Gui-Deng Say, Gurneeta Vasudeva

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine whether firms learn from digital technology failures in the form of data breach events, based on the effectiveness of their failure responses. We argue that firms experiencing such technological failures interpret them broadly as organizational problems, and undertake unrelated divestitures and top management turnover to achieve better standardization and to remove dysfunctional routines. We test our hypotheses on unrelated subsidiary divestitures and chief technology officer (CTO) turnovers undertaken by 8,760 publicly traded U.S. firms that were at risk of experiencing data breaches in- volving the loss of personally identifiable information during the period 2005–2016. We find that data …

Strategic Alliances As Treatment For Covid-19 And Beyond, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Aoife Brophy Haney, Alet Meiring

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Novel strategic alliances have been emerging quickly in response to the Covid-19 crisis. We know much at alliance and firm-level about the benefits and challenges associated with different types of alliance configurations, however there are still gaps in our knowledge about the connection between alliances and impacts on society and the environment. In this paper, we use a novel dataset of 217 strategic alliances that have emerged between January and April 2020 in response to the Covid-19 crisis. We analyze which alliances have emerged and how these alliances are tackling different needs related to the crisis. We find that alliances …

Geographical Influences On The Relationship Between Corporate Philanthropy And Corporate Financial Performance, Jane Lu, Xueji Liang, Heli Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Building on stakeholder theory, the paper argues that geographical differences in stakeholders’ reactions to corporate philanthropy lead to differences in the relationship between corporate philanthropy and corporate financial performance across regions. When comparing the United States and China and different regions within China, it is found that the differences in stakeholder perceptions (as reflected by sinful industry) and information availability (as indicated by advertising intensity) across regions significantly moderate the corporate philanthropy–corporate financial performance relationship. The findings show that the value of corporate philanthropy varies by region and that stakeholder perception and information availability are two important mechanisms through which …

Essays On Corporate Social Responsibility And Strategic Leadership, Li Tong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation two issues related to business ethics: how corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects the value creation in an acquisition and how corporate decoupling behaviors are driven by the CEO narcissism, consisting of two essays. The first essay examines how target corporate social responsibility affects the economic gains for acquirers, as reflected in market reaction to acquisition announcement, from two distinct perspectives: stakeholder preservation versus stakeholder appropriation. The stakeholder preservation perspective suggests that positive market reaction to an acquisition stems from potential new value creation by honoring implicit contracts and maintaining good relationships with target stakeholders. By contrast, the stakeholder …

Covid-19 And Japanese Shareholder Activism: Brief Respite For Japan's Self-Healing Concrete, Toru Yoshikawa, Gavin Chua

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Extrapolating from modern international understanding of corporate Japan’s distinct form of managerial capitalism, we elaborate on the growing momentum of shareholder activism in Japan leading up to the COVID-19 health crisis, so as to inform the subsequent discussion on the relevant primary considerations that belie the future direction of shareholder activism in Japan post-COVID-19. On an initial logical extrapolation, it appears probable that COVID-19 could mark the peak of Japanese activism. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that the success of Japan’s managerial capitalism have also declined, which poses a question on to which direction Japanese corporate governance may be …

A Scenario-Based Analysis On The Impact Of Covid-19 On The Public Sector, Private Sector, And International Business, Charles Nastopoulos

Senior Theses

Drawing on four years of academic education received from the #1 International Business Program at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina Honors College, this is a comprehensive and forward-thinking strategic thought piece addressing the international business world and its potential post-pandemic reality. This thesis will answer the overarching question: What are the short- and long-term impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on international business?

Systems View Of Coronavirus, Sung Won Paek, Larry M. Starr

School of Continuing and Professional Studies Coronavirus Papers

No one envisioned the kinds of problems that emerged from the novel coronavirus nor had anyone considered its interactive scope. Now is the time to begin to redesign our processes and systems so that when confronted again we can cope and navigate better. Everyone needs to be a partner in these redesigns and each of the health, social, educational, and other systems must be integrated because it is their interconnections that coproduce and give meaning to our lives.

Analyzing Local Alcohol Vendor Inventory Management Strategy, Angelo J. Amore

Senior Theses

This paper attempts to analyze how local alcohol vendors maintain their inventory throughout the year in Columbia, attempting to manage factors such as the season, sporting events, and other public gatherings and events. The research question resulted in contacting over 30 local alcohol vendors in Columbia, to ask them questions regarding their strategy in alcohol inventory management. The responses to these questions were then used to organize the vendors into groups by whether or not they utilize a reorder point to purchase/brew alcohol, or if they utilize periodic ordering. The vendors were also asked to rank the seasons from most …