Stigma is known as a serious liability for business. But can it also be an asset? That is the question we set out to answer in new research published in the Journal of Management Studies. To answer this question, we investigated how the market responds to firms...
Management Insights
What can we learn from Platform-based Entrepreneurial Firms’ Scaling up process?
Many platform firms are now operating in ecosystems to deliver complex value propositions to customers. These platforms largely rely on network externality- benefits consumers reap from the use of a platform increase with the number of its users, generativity, loosely...
Are you ready to revise your offshoring decision? Understanding how performance discrepancies and cognitive biases affect decision makers’ re-evaluation of foreign investments
Since the 1990s, offshoring –the movement of firm activities to foreign countries– has emerged as an important strategy implemented by companies to support their competitive advantage. Manufacturing and services have been offshored in search of low costs and/or access...
Kissing up and kicking down: When, why, and how managers do it
Alex, a middle manager working in the HR department who is right on track to the next promotion, dials into the video call with the executive board. Over the last weeks, unbeknownst to anyone, Alex had pushed some high performing subordinates to “finally stop crying...
Rethinking Organizational Purpose: Exploring Individual Perceptions
Organizational purpose has recently gained great popularity in management research and practice. An increasing number of organizations have decided to designate a purpose that goes beyond pure profit maximization and aims to contribute to the common good. Even...
Hunting for New Business Ideas? Use Your Head, As Well As Your Gut!
Many high-profile business leaders claim to rely on their gut feelings, also referred to as intuition. Intuition has three qualities; it is quick, emotionally charged (e.g., we have a good or bad feeling about someone or something) and it is non-conscious (i.e., it’s...
Managing employees or orchestrating workforce ecosystems?
Challenges of finding better ways to work together Interprofessional collaborations are becoming widespread in many professional contexts from healthcare to construction. However, it is unrealistic to think that simply bringing professionals in teams will lead to...
The Buddhist philosophy of “no-self”: How Chinese Buddhist entrepreneurs get access to external resources for their new ventures?
Entrepreneurial resource acquisition Entrepreneurship, the process by which “opportunities to bring into existence ‘future’ goods and services are discovered, created, and exploited”, has long been recognized as a critical driver of economic efficiency and growth,...
Walling in and Walling out: Middle Managers’ Boundary Work
Managers’ work is largely a process of working across boundaries. In carrying out strategy, and in communicating workers’ needs and know-how, managers must work across hierarchical boundaries in which they represent and translate the experiences of different actors,...
We are family: Understanding how long-lived family firms manage competing economic and non-economic goals
Goals tensions: economic versus noneconomic goals In seeking to make decisions, firm decision-makers in all firms, and family firms in particular, face temporary goal tensions, which cannot be solved, only managed. For instance, family firm decision-makers often...