Executive Overview A new competitive landscape is developing largely based on the technological revolution and increasing globalization. The strategic discontinuities encountered by firms are transforming the nature of competition. To navigate effectively in this new competitive landscape, to build and maintain competitive advantage, requires a new type of organization. Success in the 21st century organization will depend first on building strategic flexibility. To develop strategic flexibility and competitive advantage, requires exercising strategic leadership, building dynamic core competences, focusing and developing human capital, effectively using new manufacturing and information technologies, employing valuable strategies (exploiting global markets and cooperative strategies) and implementing new organization structures and culture (horizontal organization, learning and innovative culture, managing firm as bundles of assets). Thus, the new competitive landscape will require new types of organization and leaders for survival and global market leadership.
This study directly tests the effect of personality and cognitive style on three measures of Internet use. The results support the use of personality-but not cognitive style-as an antecedent variable. After controlling for computer anxiety, self-efficacy, and gender, including the Big Five personality factors in the analysis significantly adds to the predictive capabilities of the dependent variables. Including cognitive style does not. The results are discussed in terms of the role of personality and cognitive style in models of technology adoption and use.
Abstract We evaluate whether, in addition to seeking higher stock performance from acquisitions, firm managers also seek predictable stock performance. Building on prior research, we argue that higher volatility in a firm's stock performance following an acquisition is associated with divestment of a prior acquisition. Survival analysis of a longitudinal, panel dataset of 738 matched US acquisitions with 9,973 firm‐year observations shows that higher volatility in an acquiring firm's stock performance, following an acquisition, significantly predicts divestment of a prior acquisition. This effect is independent and stronger than the effect of the mean stock performance of an acquiring firm following an acquisition. We also find moderating effects for acquisition relatedness and acquiring firm stock performance after an acquisition. When an acquired unit is related to the parent firm's operations, it will be more likely to be divested if subsequent stock performance displays higher volatility. Still, higher overall stock performance makes a parent firm less likely to divest an acquired unit, suggesting that larger mean returns override concerns about higher stock performance volatility during corporate restructuring.
Divestment represents an important corporate strategic tool; however, research on divestment is eclipsed by acquisition research, and divestment is often incorrectly considered the opposite of an acquisition. Our review provides a more complete picture of the stages of divestment with a focus on summarizing literature on divestment antecedents, processes, and outcomes. The result shows a need to integrate theoretical perspectives and look at divestment more holistically. Additionally, divestment capabilities may be limited to specific divestments modes (e.g., sell-off). Additional implications for management research and practice are identified.
Executive Overview Managers are challenged to develop strategically flexible organizations in response to increasingly competitive marketplaces. Fortunately, a new generation of information and telecommunications technology provides the foundation for resilient new organizational forms that would have not been feasible only a decade ago. One of the most exciting of these new forms, the virtual team, will enable organizations to become more flexible by providing the impressive productivity of team-based designs in environments where teamwork would have once been impossible. Virtual teams, which are linked primarily through advanced computer and telecommunications technologies, provide a potent response to the challenges associated with today's downsized and lean organizations, and to the resulting geographical dispersion of essential employees. Virtual teams also address new workforce demographics, where the best employees may be located anywhere the world, and where workers demand increasing technological sophistication and personal flexibility. With virtual teams, organizations can build teams with optimum membership while retaining the advantages of flat organizational structure. Additionally, firms benefit from virtual teams through access to previously unavailable expertise, enhanced cross-functional interaction, and the use of systems that improve the quality of the virtual team's work.
Divestment represents an important corporate strategic tool; however, research on divestment is eclipsed by research on mergers and acquisitions, and divestment is often incorrectly considered an inverse of an acquisition. Further, most divestment research focuses on performance at the expense of antecedents and processes that set the foundation for later performance. Our review provides a more complete picture of the stages of divestment with a focus on summarizing literature on divestment antecedents and processes. The result shows a need to integrate theoretical perspectives and look at divestment more holistically at the same time that divestment capabilities may be limited to specific modes. Additional implications for management research and practice are identified.
Negative personal behaviors that happen outside of top managers’ professional roles are becoming more frequently reported in the media and are having an impact on firms. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is underexplored, with little theoretical development, and mixed empirical findings. We rely on signaling theory to suggest that top managers, as reliable decision-makers of the firm, with their negative personal behaviors disclose information that investors find valuable about the quality and intent of the management of the firm. Furthermore, we use managerial and organizational reputation as moderators that partially explain variations on the reaction of the investors. Using a sample of 126 negative behaviors of managers from publicly traded firms in North America, we found that those behaviors that are more proximal to the job of the top manager have a higher impact on the short-term financial performance, while this relationship is moderated by managerial reputation, but not by organizational reputation. We discuss important implications of the findings for practice and theory.
