Structural Differentiation and Ambidexterity: The Mediating Role of Integration Mechanisms

Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses

Abstract: Organizations face institutional complexity whenever they confront incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. Our interest is in how plural institutional logics, refracted through field-level structures and processes, are experienced within organizations and how organizations respond to such complexity. We draw on a variety of cognate literatures to discuss the field-level structural characteristics and organizational attributes that shape institutional complexity. We then explore the repertoire of strategies and structures that organizations deploy to cope with multiple, competing demands. The analytical framework developed herein is presented to guide future scholarship in the systematic analysis of institutional complexity. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.

Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance

Abstract: Organizational ambidexterity has emerged as a new research paradigm in organization theory, yet several issues fundamental to this debate remain controversial. We explore four central tensions here: Should organizations achieve ambidexterity through differentiation or through integration? Does ambidexterity occur at the individual or organizational level? Must organizations take a static or dynamic perspective on ambidexterity? Finally, can ambidexterity arise internally, or do firms have to externalize some processes? We provide an overview of the seven articles included in this special issue and suggest several avenues for future research.

Exploration and Exploitation Within and Across Organizations

Abstract: Jim March's framework of exploration and exploitation has drawn substantial interest from scholars studying phenomena such as organizational learning, knowledge management, innovation, organizational design, and strategic alliances. This framework has become an essential lens for interpreting various behaviors and outcomes within and across organizations. Despite its straightforwardness, this framework has generated debates concerning the definition of exploration and exploitation, and their measurement, antecedents, and consequences. We critically review the growing literature on exploration and exploitation, discuss various perspectives, raise conceptual and empirical concerns, underscore challenges for further development of this literature, and provide directions for future research.

Organizational Ambidexterity: Past, Present and Future

Abstract: Organizational ambidexterity refers to the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit--to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed. In the past 15 years there has been an explosion of interest and research on this topic. We briefly review the current state of the research, highlighting what we know and don't know about the topic. We close with a point of view on promising areas for ongoing research.

CROSSROADS---Microfoundations of Performance: Balancing Efficiency and Flexibility in Dynamic Environments

Abstract: Our purpose is to clarify the microfoundations of performance in dynamic environments. A key premise is that the microfoundational link from organization, strategy, and dynamic capabilities to performance centers on how leaders manage the fundamental tension between efficiency and flexibility. We develop several insights. First, regarding structure, we highlight that organizations often drift toward efficiency, and so balancing efficiency and flexibility comes, counterintuitively, through unbalancing to favor flexibility. Second, we argue that environmental dynamism, rather than being simply stable or dynamic, is a multidimensional construct with dimensions that uniquely influence the importance and ease of balancing efficiency and flexibility. Third, we outline how executives balance efficiency and flexibility through cognitively sophisticated, single solutions rather than by simply holding contradictions. Overall, we go beyond the caricature of new organizational forms as obsessed with fluidity and the simplistic view of routines as the microfoundation of performance. Rather, we contribute a more accurate view of how leaders effectively balance between efficiency and flexibility by emphasizing heuristics-based “strategies of simple rules,” multiple environmental realities, and higher-order “expert” cognition. Together, these insights seek to add needed precision to the microfoundations of performance in dynamic environments.

The moderator–mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations.

Abstract: In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators.

Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage

Abstract: Understanding sources of sustained competitive advantage has become a major area of research in strategic management. Building on the assumptions that strategic resources are heterogeneously distributed across firms and that these differences are stable over time, this article examines the link between firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Four empirical indicators of the potential of firm resources to generate sustained competitive advantage-value, rareness, imitability, and substitutability are discussed. The model is applied by analyzing the potential of several firm resources for generating sustained competitive advantages. The article concludes by examining implications of this firm resource model of sustained competitive advantage for other business disciplines.

Absorptive capacity: a new perspective on learning and innovation

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that the ability of a firm to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends is critical to its innovative capabilities. We label this capability a firm's absorptive capacity and suggest that it is largely a function of the firm's level of prior related knowledge. The discussion focuses first on the cognitive basis for an individual's absorptive capacity including, in particular, prior related knowledge and diversity of background. We then characterize the factors that influence absorptive capacity at the organizational level, how an organization's absorptive capacity differs from that of its individual members, and the role of diversity of expertise within an organization. We argue that the development of absorptive capacity, and, in turn, innovative performance are history- or path-dependent and argue how lack of investment in an area of expertise early on may foreclose the future development of a technical capability in that area. We formulate a model of firm investment in research and development (R&D), in which R&D contributes to a firm's absorptive capacity, and test predictions relating a firm's investment in R&D to the knowledge underlying technical change within an industry. Discussion focuses on the implications of absorptive capacity for the analysis of other related innovative activities, including basic research, the adoption and diffusion of innovations, and decisions to participate in cooperative R&D ventures. **

Dynamic capabilities and strategic management

Abstract: The dynamic capabilities framework analyzes the sources and methods of wealth creation and capture by private enterprise firms operating in environments of rapid technological change. The competitive advantage of firms is seen as resting on distinctive processes (ways of coordinating and combining), shaped by the firm's (specific) asset positions (such as the firm's portfolio of difftcult-to- trade knowledge assets and complementary assets), and the evolution path(s) it has aflopted or inherited. The importance of path dependencies is amplified where conditions of increasing retums exist. Whether and how a firm's competitive advantage is eroded depends on the stability of market demand, and the ease of replicability (expanding intemally) and imitatability (replication by competitors). If correct, the framework suggests that private wealth creation in regimes of rapid technological change depends in large measure on honing intemal technological, organizational, and managerial processes inside the firm. In short, identifying new opportunities and organizing effectively and efficiently to embrace them are generally more fundamental to private wealth creation than is strategizing, if by strategizing one means engaging in business conduct that keeps competitors off balance, raises rival's costs, and excludes new entrants. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

On the evaluation of structural equation models

Abstract: Criteria for evaluating structural equation models with latent variables are defined, critiqued, and illustrated. An overall program for model evaluation is proposed based upon an interpretation of converging and diverging evidence. Model assessment is considered to be a complex process mixing statistical criteria with philosophical, historical, and theoretical elements. Inevitably the process entails some attempt at a reconcilation between so-called objective and subjective norms.