Articles

  • Structural differentiation and corporate venturing
    9 April 2009, Article by Frans A.J. Van Den Bosch, Henk Volberda & Justin Jansen

    Research has suggested that corporate venturing is crucial to strategic renewal and firm performance, yet scholars still debate the appropiate organizational configurations to facilitate the creation of new business in existing organizations. Our study investigates the effectiveness of combining structural differentiation with formal and informal organizational as well as top management team integration mechanisms in establishing an appropiate context for venturing activities. Our findings suggest that structural differentiation has a positive effect on corporate venturing. In addition, our study indicates that a shared vision has a positive effect on venturing in a structurally differentiated context. Socially integrated senior teams and cross-functional interfaces, however, are ineffective integration mechanisms for establishing linkages across differentiated units and for successfully pursuing corportate venturing.

  • Why New Business Development Projects Fail
    9 April 2009, Article by Frans A.J. Van Den Bosch & Henk Volberda

    Managing through projects has become important for generating new knowledge to cope with technological and market discontinuities. This paper examines how the fit between the creation of technological and market knowledge and important project management characteristics, i.e. project autonomy and completion criteria, influences the success of new business development (NBD) projects. In-depth longitudinal case research on NBD projects commercialised from 1993 to 2003 in the consumer electronics industry highlights that project management characteristics focusing only on the creation of technological knowledge contributed to the failure of those NBD projects that required new market knowledge as well. The findings indicate that senior management support and engaging in an alliance with partners possessing complementary market knowledge can offset this misalignment of the organisation of NBD projects.

  • Organisational Perspective on Market Driven Efficiency Improvement
    8 April 2009, Article by Fietje Vaas
  • Alliance Capability as a Mediator
    8 April 2009, Article by Geert Duysters

    This study centres around the way in which firms can enhance alliance performance through the development of alliance capabilities. Whereas most research has focused on inter-firm antecedents of alliance performance, research on intra-firm antecedents pointing to prior experience and internal mechanisms to foster knowledge transfer has only recently emerged. As little is known about how firms develop alliance capabilities explain performance heterogenity. The data are derived from a detailed survey held among alliance managers and Vice-Presidents of 151 firms. The survey covers over 2600 alliances for the period 1997-2001. This study not only finds that alliance capabilities partially mediate between alliance experience and alliciance performance, but also yields novel insights into the micro-level building blocks underlying the process of alliance capability development.

  • Job-worker mismatch and cognitive decline
    8 April 2009, Article by Andries de Grip

    We have used longitudinal test data on various aspects of people's cognitive abilities to analyse whether overeducated workers are more vulnerable to a decline in their cognitive abilities, and undereducated workers are less vulnerable. We found that a job-worker mismatch induces a cognitive decline with respect to immediate and delayed recall abilities, cognitive flexibility and verbal fluency. Our findings indicate that, to some extent, it is the adjustment of the ability level of the overeducated and undereducated workers that adjusts initial job-worker mismatch. This adds to the relevance of preventing overeducation, and shows that being employed in a challenging job contributes to workers' cognitive resilience.

  • Structural Differentiation and Ambidexterity
    28 January 2009, Article by Frans A.J. Van Den Bosch, Henk Volberda & Justin Jansen

    Prior studies have emphasized that structural attributes are crucial to simultaneously pursuing exploration and exploitation, yet our understanding of antecedents of ambidexterity is still limited. Structural differentation can help ambidextrous organizations to maintain multiple inconsistent and conflicting demands; however, differentiated exploratory and exploitative activities need to be mobilized, coordinated, integrated, and applied. Based on this idea, we delineate formal and informal senior team integration mechanisms (e.g. contingency rewards and social integration) and formal and informal organizational integration mechanisms (e.g. cross-functional interfaces and connectedness) and examine  how they mediate the relationship between structural differentiation and ambidexterity. Overall, our findings suggest that the previously asserted direct effect of structural differentation on ambidexterity operates through informal senior team (i.e., senior team social integration) and formal organizational (i.e., cross-functional interfaces) integration mechanisms. Through this richer explanation and empirical assessment, we contribute to a greater clarity and better understanding of how organizations may effectively pursue exploration and exploitation simultaneously to achieve ambidexterity.