Strategic Management Policy Commons^™

How Product Innovation And Process Innovation Impact Product Performance, Wei Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In an increasingly competitive global market characterized by accelerating technological iteration and rapidly evolving consumer demands, innovation has become a critical means for firms to adapt to dynamic changes and achieve competitive advantage. Grounded in dynamic capabilities theory and the resource-based view, this study empirically investigates the mechanisms through which product innovation and process innovation affect product performance, drawing on survey data from 215 products. It further examines the mediating role of product flexibility and the moderating effect of product positioning. The results indicate that both product innovation and process innovation have a significant positive impact on product performance. Product …

Global Value Chains And Economic Inequality, Vivek Soundararajan, Ari Van Assche, Hari Bapuji, Gokhan Ertug

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In their inaugural editorial, Van Assche and De Marchi (2024) argued that meaningful progress in international business policy requires a more fine-grained understanding of how private international business practices intersect with public policy objectives. This editorial builds on that insight by applying it to a critical yet still underexplored issue – one on which we hope to see more research in this journal: the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and global value chains (GVCs) in shaping economic inequality within developing economies. Decisions related to sourcing, contracting, and GVC governance are inherently distributional rather than neutral, with important implications for how …

Collaborative Work Management Technologies And Managerial Intensity In U.S. Corporations: An Examination, Piyush Gulati, Arianna Marchetti, Phanish Puranam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Do digital technologies reinforce managerial hierarchies or, instead, make them less relevant? We propose that the answer to this question depends on the nature of the technology: specifically, its relative impact on managers' capacity to supervise and on subordinates' need for supervision. Applying this framework to collaborative work management (CWM) technologies that facilitate real-time collaboration, communication, and task coordination, we predict that the adoption of such technologies should reduce managerial intensity and increase decentralization in organizations. To test this prediction, we use a difference-in-differences design on a novel data set built from over 26 million job listings (Lightcast) and over …

The Impact Of Innovation Belief On Strategic Product R&D, Yan Zhou

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In highly uncertain innovation scenarios characterized by long R&D cycles and high risks, how to continuously drive enterprises to develop market-competitive blockbuster products has become a critical issue of shared concern in both practice and academia. Existing research has mostly explained differences in blockbuster product R&D from perspectives such as resource allocation, organizational structure, or institutional incentives, while paying insufficient attention to cognitive and belief factors at the individual level. Based on this, this paper introduces the psychological and cognitive variable of "innovative belief" to systematically examine its impact mechanism on blockbuster product R&D capability.

Taking the R&D team of …

Market Culture And Innovation Acceptance In Fire Safety Products: The Moderating Role Of Perceived Market Regulation, Xu Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Against the backdrop of continuously rising global fire safety standards and ongoing technological iteration in fire protection products, whether innovative fire protection products can be effectively accepted by the market has become a critical issue influencing the returns on firms’ innovation investments and the high-quality development of the industry. Existing studies have predominantly explored innovation diffusion mechanisms from the perspectives of technological attributes or organizational factors, while paying relatively limited attention to market culture as a contextual factor, as well as to the differentiated role that government regulation may play in this process. Based on this, this study takes institutional …

Are Less Hierarchical Firms Organized Around Stronger Cultures? Evidence From Big Data, Arianna Marchetti, Phanish Puranam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: Are less hierarchical firms organized around stronger cultures instead? We analyze 1.5 million employee reviews on Glassdoor.com from 23,000 US-based firms, alongside data on managerial hierarchy estimated from 42 million professional social media profiles. Our findings confirm a negative association between managerial hierarchy and organizational culture strength. We explore two potential explanations for this association: Functional equivalence between the two, and culture fragmentation caused by managerial hierarchy. Multiple correlational tests show support for functional equivalence as a plausible explanation for the observed negative correlation. Our findings enhance our understanding of the complex relationships between organizational structure and culture …

Eliciting Supplier Cooperation For Value Chain Decarbonization: A Field Experiment With Smallholder Farmers In India, Sukti Ghosh, Jasjit Singh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many firms are pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across their value chains. However, this requires their suppliers to also adopt more climate-friendly practices for decarbonization. This can involve addressing gaps in not only the suppliers’ ability but also their willingness to adopt such practices, which can be challenging if the suppliers perceive the practices as risky or potentially detrimental to their economic well-being. We examine the effectiveness of relational investments to help mitigate this challenge, arguing that relational investments can serve as a signal of the firm’s commitment towards joint value creation. In a field experiment conducted with supplier …

The Distinctiveness Effect: How Cross-Country Dissimilarities Influence Governance Decisions, Ilya Cuypers, Gokhan Ertug, Niels G. Noorderhaven, Korcan Kavusan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Transaction cost theory is one of the most commonly used theories to explain how firms govern their economic activities. In the context of cross-border collaborations, transaction cost theory proposes that dissimilarities between the partners’ home countries, which constitute a key source of behavioral uncertainty, affect how collaborations are governed (i.e. whether firms opt for equity joint ventures or non-equity alliances). Although many firms are likely to face more than one dimension of dissimilarity—for example, in terms language and religion, as well as culture—studies in transaction cost theory typically focus on how each source of dissimilarity impacts governance choices independently, in …

The Asymmetric Effects Of Posting An Online Review On Future Spending And The Dark Side Of Solicitations, Hulya Karaman

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Motivated by the prevalence of online review creation and solicitation, this paper examines whether posting an online review impacts the reviewer’s future spending on the reviewed brand. Identifying the causal effects of posting an online review is challenging because reviewers self-select into posting, making it an endogenous decision. I overcome this challenge by using randomized online review solicitations as an instrument for the endogenous treatment variable of posting an online review and establish that doing so decreases the average future spending by the reviewers on the reviewed brand. Additionally, I show that soliciting customers to post increases their propensity to …

Sports And Corporate Innovation, Bing Qin

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Driven by the digital economy and intensifying global competition, corporate innovation has become a core driver of sustainable growth. Topmanagement members are key strategic decision-makers, and their individual characteristics critically influence the formulation and implementation of innovation strategies. While existing studies have examined the impact of topmanagement’s cognitive and psychological traits on innovation performance, significant gaps remain in understanding how their routine behavioral preferences—particularly running, a globally prevalent exercise—affect innovation performance through psychological mechanisms. The systematic relationship between running preferences, top management’s psychological traits, and organizational innovation outcomes remains underexplored.

Against this backdrop, the study investigates the mechanismthroughwhich top management’s …

The Impact Of Executives’ Social Networks And Digital Capabilities On Firm Performance In Dynamic Environments, Lijun Men

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the acceleration of digital transformation, improving firm performance in complex and dynamic market environments has become a central challenge for companies. This study examines the effects of executives’ social networks and firms’ digital capabilities on firm performance. Further, it investigates the moderating roles of digital capabilities and environmental dynamism in these relationships. Using panel data for Chinese listed firms from 2005 to 2024, we conduct empirical analyses with fixed-effects models. The results indicate that executives’ political, business, and academic networks all contribute positively to firm performance, underscoring the importance of executives’ social networks in resource acquisition, information flows, and …

Winner-Take-All In International Markets? Performance Persistence Of Social Platforms, Yang Yang, Liang Chen, Jiang Wei, Yang Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Strategy research has long linked sustained competitive advantage to barriers to imitation. We highlight network effects as an alternative mechanism and adopt a geotemporal perspective to theorize how firms sustain advantage as it unfolds over time in international markets. Our study examines this question through the performance persistence of social platforms, focusing on how institutional and demand-side conditions shape the sustainability of platforms’ competitive advantages. We propose that intellectual property rights protection may restrict the degree of freedom in information dissemination, dampening the role of network effects in sustaining superior performance, whilst demand heterogeneity may enhance the value of sizable …

Algorithm Envelopment In Platform Markets, Liang Chen, Zhou Zhou, Lester Chan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The theory of platform envelopment rests on network effects as the key mechanism for value creation, which nonetheless receives mixed support for its efficacy in determining competitive outcomes. We argue that the value of network effects depends on matching quality, which is a function of platform-specific algorithm technology and market-level data-driven learning. In formalizing these conceptualizations, we analyze a model that demonstrates how an entrant with a superior algorithm technology may outcompete an incumbent possessing a user base advantage, a strategy we call “algorithm envelopment.” By considering specific characteristics of data-driven learning, our analysis leads to propositions regarding the entry …

Multihoming And Single-Homing Complementors' Responses To Intensified Between-Platform Competition: Evidence From The Youtube–Twitch Rivalry, Niloofar Abolfathi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: This paper examines how heterogeneous YouTube content creators-specifically, single-homing and multihoming channels-respond to a sudden increase in the exposure of the rival platform, Twitch. Contrary to expectations, I find that multihoming channels reduce their content creation efforts and underperform relative to single-homers. To make sense of these surprising results, I develop a formal model that characterizes the strategic behavior of different types of complementors operating across two platforms with varying levels of user exposure. The model offers a plausible explanation for the observed empirical patterns, suggesting that intensified competition between platforms, as a consequence of their changing exposure, …

Trading With The Enemy: A Coopetitive Perspective Of Resource Exchange At Arm’S Length, Zhefei Li, David Gomulya, Heli Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: Research on inter-firm cooperation often focuses on long-term strategic alliances while overlooking the distinct form of arm's-length resource exchanges. Our study addresses this gap using the National Basketball Association (NBA) data for precise resource exchange measurements. Contrary to strategic alliances, where competitive pressure fosters cooperation, we find that competitive pressure reduces cooperation in arm's-length exchanges. However, relational capital helps to facilitate resource exchanges. We also found that while resource bundling exacerbates the negative effect of competitive pressure, it amplifies the positive effect of relational capital. Interestingly, relational rivalry intensifies the impact of competitive pressure but does not diminish …

A Study On The Influence Of Entity Internet Hospital Platforms And Health Literacy Facilitation On Postoperative Patients’ Platform Usage, Hong Ye

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Entity Internet Hospital (EIH) is emerging online medical service platforms in China. Currently, while EIHs in China are developing rapidly, their usage rates remain low. However, postoperative patients have substantial follow-up consultation needs. Consequently, incentivizing postoperative patients to use EIH from the demand side is a highly challenging proposition in the current era. Grounded in Technology Acceptance Model and Health Belief Model, this study examined the impacts of platform and health literacy facilitation on platform usage (including intention and frequency) among 631 postoperative patients with cardiovascular disease from four medical institutions in Wuhan, and explored the moderating role of literacy …

Research On The Impact Mechanism Of The Development Level Of Smart Agriculture On Farmers' Income, Baoping Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Agriculture is a fundamental and strategic industry essential to national food security and farmers’ well-being. Faced with global population growth, climate change, and resource constraints, the traditional high-input agricultural model is unsustainable. Smart agriculture, empowered by IoT, big data, and AI, has become critical for agricultural transformation and sustainable development. However, existing research overemphasizes technical efficiency and neglects how smart agriculture systematically affects farmers’ income, especially its transmission mechanism and regional heterogeneity.

Against China’s rural revitalization and digital village strategy, this study investigates how smart agriculture development influences farmers’ income, using a hybrid framework of macro empirics and micro analysis. …

Corporate Strategic Changes In Response To Negative Performance Gaps: The Role Of Listing Board In China, Lei Yu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation investigates how Chinese listed companies respond strategically to negative performance gaps under different institutional environments defined by the Main Board and ChiNext Board of China’s capital market. Drawing on Performance Feedback Theory and New Institutional Theory, it explores whether and how listing board heterogeneity moderates the relation between performance shortfalls and corporate strategic transformation, and further examines the boundary effects of internal governance factors including ownership type, CEO power, and resource slack.

Using panel data of A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2019 obtained from the CSMAR database, this study employs multiple regression analysis and interaction modeling to …

Research On Building Sustainable Competitive Advantage Of Mutual Fund Management Companies In The Era Of Pan-Asset Management, Li Ren

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In the context of China’s “big asset management” era, public mutual fund management companies face intensifying competition and an urgent need to build sustainable core competitiveness. Existing research has not clearly identified their key resources or explained how these resources interact with strategic management capabilities to generate competitive advantage. Drawing on the resource-based view and strategic management theory, this study develops a conceptual framework of core competitiveness for public mutual fund management companies. It proposes a three-dimensional resource classification system—valuable, rare, and inimitable resources—tailored to the mutual fund industry and incorporates strategic management capability as a mediating mechanism through which …

Research On The Impact Of Strategic Orientation, Employees’ Environmental Identity, And Use Of Artificial Intelligence On Corporate Green Innovation, Hao Yang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Based on social cognitive theory and integrating the perspective of technology enablement, this study constructs a moderated mediation model to systematically explore how environmental policy orientation and environmental market orientation influence corporate green innovation through environmental identity, and to examine the boundary role of AI application intensity. Through empirical analysis of 313 teams and 939 valid questionnaires, the following conclusions are drawn: First, both environmental policy orientation and environmental market orientation independently and significantly promote green innovation. Second, environmental identity plays a partial mediating role between the two orientations and green innovation, indicating that strategies need to be internalized as …

Foreign Director Exit In The Midst Of Deteriorating Bilateral Political Relations, Xiaocong Tian, Yuehua Xu, Daphne W. Yiu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Amid global geopolitical realism pushing for a race of hegemonic rivalry nowadays, an outflow of global human talents is a pressing organizational concern. Our study draws attention to the underexamined phenomenon of the exit of foreign directors from their host countries during geopolitical tensions. Theorizing from a sensemaking logic, we posit that the deterioration of bilateral political relations serves as an unexpected event that activates foreign directors’ schemas for dual identity conflict, propelling them to react behaviorally to such identity threats by exiting the board in the host country. In addition, we further posit that the sensemaking process is contingent …

Design-Led Leadership: A Mixed Methods Study On Understanding How Design Thinking Capabilities Impact Leadership Effectiveness, Tareq Waleed Muhmood

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

“Widespread design thinking among organisation leaders is desirable for the creation of a humanly and sustainable future” (R. J. Boland et al., 2008a)

This study investigates the impact of design thinking capabilities on leadership effectiveness through a mixed-methods research design.

While design thinking is widely used in product and service innovation, its application as a leadership development framework remains underexplored.   To address this gap, the study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods, including pre- and post-intervention survey of leaders, their supervisors, and subordinates within an education business in Vietnam (EBV), as well as semi-structured interviews with senior leaders at a …

Marching To The Beat: The Role Of Complementor Alignment In The Architectural Evolution Of Ecosystems, Pengxiang Zhang, Liang Chen, Yang Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The evolution of innovation ecosystems hinges on the effective coordination between ecosystem leaders and complementors. While ecosystem-sponsored architectural innovations create new technological opportunities for complementors, they may unintentionally disrupt the performance of complementor products that were originally developed based on legacy architectural designs. This study provides empirical evidence of these disruptive effects and explores how complementors’ alignment with the ecosystem leader mitigates such challenges. Focusing on Apple’s release of Core ML—a proprietary artificial intelligence module—in its mobile ecosystem, we employ a difference-in-differences design to investigate variations in complementor performance after adopting this ecosystem-sponsored architectural innovation. Our findings reveal that complementors’ …

Organization Research As An Applied Science: Lessons From Fields That Shape Practice And Policy, Stephen X. Zhang, Gokhan Ertug

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

As an applied science, our field aims to improve organizational effectiveness and solve practical problems (Hideg, DeCelles & Tihanyi, 2020; Pfeffer & Fong. 2002; Pillutla & Thau, 2013). However, despite the increasing sophistication in methods and greater emphasis on theory in recent decades, we have not made commensurate strides in relevance and impact. As we see it, the heart of this challenge is the culture in our field that demands novel theoretical advancement from every paper (Aguinis & Cronin, 2022), which may inadvertently constrain our ability to address pressing organizational challenges. Previous appeals to enhance our impact as an applied …

High Flying Adored: How Ceo Narcissism Influences Firms’ Responses To Above-Aspiration Performance With Risky Organizational Change, Korcan Kavusan, Daniel Mack, Matthew P. Mount, Gokhan Ertug

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: Research on performance feedback presents conflicting views on how above-aspiration performance influences organizational change. Some studies argue that it constrains change due to a lack of organizational motivation, while others suggest that it enables change by expanding managerial discretion. Reconciling these perspectives, we suggest that managers’ narcissistic tendencies can fundamentally alter how a firm responds to above-aspiration performance. We theorize and find evidence that high-narcissism CEOs respond to above-aspiration performance with more acquisitions—attention-generating actions that align with their self-enhancement motives, while under similar conditions low-narcissism CEOs avoid acquisitions, due to their uncertainty and risk. Our findings highlight the …

Not All Political Ties Are The Same: Firms' Ties To The Government And Pollution, Wen Helena Li, Ilya R. P. Cuypers, Gokhan Ertug, Hari Bapuji, Wei Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Complementing research on the implications of political ties for firms’ strategic decisions and financial performance, recent studies are increasingly focusing on the environmental consequences of firms’ political connections. We contribute to this stream of work by integrating insights from the literature on political ties and the multifaceted nature of governments to explore how the level of government influences the pollution implications of firms’ political ties. Specifically, we theorize and demonstrate that, in China, firms' achieved political ties with high levels of the government reduce pollution, while such ties with low levels of the government increase it. Furthermore, we examine how …

Relational History: Correcting Temporal Myopia In Social Network Research, Julia Brennecke, Gianluca Carnabuci, Gokhan Ertug

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Scholars have used network concepts and methods to explain a wide range of organizational phenomena. Despite this broad interest, prevalent approaches tend to neglect a critical constitutive dimension of network ties: their history. We invoke the concept of relational history to signify the temporal path and biography of a network tie. We argue that a network tie’s history shapes what the relationship means to the parties involved, what can be accomplished in and through the relationship, and how the relationship might further evolve. In directing the attention of organizational network researchers to the relational history of network ties, we aim …

Leading With Narrative, Tanvi Gautam

Asian Management Insights

Storytelling as a catalyst for strategy execution.

Acquisition Strategy For Innovation Under Competence-Destroying Change: Empirical Study—Pharmaceutical Company's Biotechnology Company Acquisition, Joo Tae Sung

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In response to declining R&D productivity and successive patent cliffs, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly acquiring biotechnology firms to sustain innovation. These acquisitions often occur under conditions of competence-destroying change, where the acquirer's chemistry-based knowledge base does not overlap with the biotechnology expertise of the target, challenging traditional theories that emphasize absorptive capacity and knowledge similarity.
This study introduces therapeutic knowledge, defined as the acquirer’s expertise in specific disease areas, as a distinct and critical dimension that interacts with both chemistry-based and biotechnology-based knowledge. Using a dataset of 212 observations across therapeutic areas from 80 acquisitions, the analysis uncovers an inverted …

Beyond The Binary: Rethinking Work-From-Home Policies, Vineeta Dwivedi, Snehal Shah

Asian Management Insights

The right approach depends on your organisation’s readiness.