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Research Series Spring 2002 Marketing & Management colleagues sharing scholarly pursuits: presenting research works-in-progress in a supportive and engaging atmosphere |
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Spring 2002 back to Research Series home | |
| Fri, Feb 1 | Mark Clark, KSB Management "Perceived Relational Diversity: Moving Beyond Demographic Attributes" | |
| This study builds on the research in human
diversity, distributional demography, and relational demography by
proposing a new construct, perceived relational diversity, that refers to
the extent to which employees perceive themselves to be similar to (or
different from) other members of their workgroup on a wide range of human
differences, attributes, and beliefs. Results from a sample of 346
employees indicated that perceived relational diversity accounted for a
significant percentage of variance in job satisfaction, turnover
intention, affective organizational commitment, and satisfaction with
coworkers beyond that accounted for by commonly used objective demographic
indices. However, perceived relational diversity did not explain unique
variance in individual performance ratings. Further, perceived similarity
to others on personal attributes (e.g., values, goals, personality) was
consistently important for explaining outcomes while perceived similarity
on other attributes (e.g., power, physical attributes) was generally not
important. Implications and directions for further research are discussed.
**Coauthored with Cheri Ostroff, Columbia U; & Leanne Atwater, Arizona State University-West |
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| Fri, Mar 1 | Detlev Zwick, KSB Marketing "The Speed of Money" | |
| As market liberalism and
economic individualism (re)gain political ascendancy on a global scale,
individuals are investing in the stock market in unprecedented numbers.
Investors are getting younger, more technologically savvy, and
self-reliant. Online brokers are booming and the number of individual
investors using the Internet to conduct stock and other financial
transactions is increasing. These autonomous “renegade capitalists” have
not been trained in business schools and many ignore the conventional
rules of the professional investment game. New investor subjectivities ,
if not a whole new investor class, are emerging at the intersection of
complex economic, social, and cultural forces. I suggest in this work,
that studying individual online investing as consumer behavior and
analyzing it within an interdisciplinary framework as a sociocultural
practice allows us to generate a nuanced and multifaceted picture of the
individual investor. |
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| Friday, Mar 22 | Niklas Myhr, KSB Marketing "Partnership Performance in Supply Chains: The Impact of Collaboration" | |
| Today
companies not only have to excel at what they do, they must also develop
close partnerships with other companies to withstand increasing
competitive pressures. In fact, supply chain management researchers and
practitioners see whole sets or chains of organizations as deliberately
collaborating to achieve joint goals in competition with other supply
chains. This study investigates the performance consequences of
collaboration in supply chain partnerships, and also investigates whether
environmental uncertainty affects the degree to which collaboration is
desirable. With a sample drawn from international subsidiaries of Nordic
multinational corporations (MNCs), the authors find that collaborative
partnerships contribute to increased levels of partnership
performance both in terms of relationship effectiveness and in terms of
cost reduction benefits. The moderating effect of environmental
uncertainty, however, had no impact on collaboration. The implications of
these findings for academics and practitioners are discussed.
*Coauthored with Robert E. Spekman, Univ of Virginia |
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| Fri, Apr 5 | Sally Fowler, KSB Management "Virtual Embeddedness: Managing Interorganizational Linkages in the New Economy" | |
| The
restructuring of industries that we have witnessed over the past two
decades has not only transformed the competitive landscape for many firms,
but has also challenged many of the traditional concepts, relationships
and theoretical assumptions that have formed the foundation for research
in strategic management. The concept of “embeddedness” is a pivotal
element in explanations of economic action in strategy research, as well
as in organization theory and economic sociology. This concept highlights
the ways in which economic action is embedded in a context that includes
not only economic structures, but social, cognitive, cultural and
political structures as well (Dacin, Ventresca and Beal, 1999; Granovetter,
1985; Zukin and DiMaggio, 1990). The innovations that are restructuring
industries are also transforming the shifting social, cognitive, cultural
and political structures that form the context for economic action. More
dramatically, we argue that these innovations are also producing a
situation in which the nature of embeddedness is changing in a fundamental
manner. Prototypical discussions of embeddedness have focused on the role of direct, social ties among economic actors (Galaskiewicz, 1979; Granovetter, 1973, 1985; Uzzi, 1997, 1999). Research on embeddedness has suggested that the social ties among firms and other economic actors may be crucial to success in many industries. This approach to embeddedness may be too limited, however, to deal with the technological and social conditions that have emerged under the rubric of the new economy. The vastly improved access to rapid, low-cost sources of information and communication, along with the globalization of many industries, has led to a transformation in the ways that economic activity is embedded (Atkinson and Court, 1998; Bettis and Hitt, 1995; Gergen, 1991; Shapiro and Varian, 1999). The development of fast, efficient, low-cost electronic information networks, especially the Internet, has radically altered the potential for new ventures to connect to a wide variety of stakeholders and embed themselves in their environments. In this paper, we address the issue of embeddedness in the new economy by examining the dynamics and effects of electronically facilitated inter-actor ties. We propose the concept of “virtual embeddedness”, which we use to indicate both the use of technology to effect a network of inter-actor ties, and the idea that such a network can provide some of the effects of traditional forms of embeddedness more quickly and at a lower cost. In developing the concept of virtual embeddedness and examining its strategic dynamics, we believe that this paper makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the restructuring of industries and how firms may be able to manage the changing competitive barriers they face. We present our argument in four stages. First, we briefly review the existing organizational literature on embeddedness, highlighting its defining characteristics and key organizational benefits. Next, we develop the concept of “virtual embeddedness”, defining it and contrasting its dynamics with those of traditional, social embeddedness. In the third section, we explore the conditions under which each of social and virtual embeddedness is most likely to occur, both separately and together. Finally, we conclude the paper with a discussion of the ways in which virtual embeddedness may alleviate some of the liabilities of overembeddedness, and some implications for research and practice. *Coauthored with Thomas Lawrence, Univ of Victoria |
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| May | Ellen Drost, KSB Intl Business Moderated Structural Equation Modelling in "Toward A Unified Theory of Task-Oriented and Relationship-Oriented Leader Behavior: A Multi-Country Generalizability Study" | |
| There is a significant
recurrence throughout the leadership literature of two distinct leadership
behaviors, task orientation and relationship orientation. These two
behaviors appear as important phenomena in leadership theorizing and
research. They are widely recognized as the most consistently observed and
measured behaviors in leadership research (House & Aditya, 1997). Because
organizations are both task-performing and social institutions, it seems
logical that a set of common task-oriented behaviors must be performed to
ensure organizational performance, and a set of common
relationship-oriented behaviors that must be performed to maintain
cohesiveness and social integration among organizational members, units,
and processes (Misumi, 1985; House & Aditya, 1997). As such, these two
sets of common behaviors are assumed to be generic behaviors, which are
universally observed and applied in organizations across cultures, even
though they may be uniquely enacted in organizations across cultures. This
study will hypothetically develop and empirically confirm these
assumptions.
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