Firms face a fundamental and persistent challenge in balancing the tensions between environmental sustainability and profitability, where elements that seem logical individually become contradictory when juxtaposed. Individual decision makers' beliefs about the tensions between environmental sustainability and profitability can shape decision outcomes, offering an intriguing micro-foundation for strategic

This study examines the effects of the industry environment, corporate governance, and business strategy on the firm's choice of CEO successors from outside the company or within the firm, as well as the endogenous implications of the succession type for post-succession performance. Our findings indicate that: (1) firms are more likely to select their CEO successors from outside the company than to

Mergers and acquisitions are a complex and persistent global phenomenon. Theoretical cross-fertilization enhances our understanding of their behavior, especially in different contexts. We use organizational learning theory and institutional logic perspective to hypothesize the direct effect of inward internationalization, the negative moderating effect of family ownership and domestic institutional

To remain competitive in a shifting sociocultural landscape, firms often introduce new meanings—new reasons why customers use their products or services—that must be embedded into their strategy. However, customers are active participants in value creation processes, rather than passive recipients. This is especially true in services, where value is created in the interaction between provider and consumer

The influence of mass media sentiment on the IPO performance of newly listed firms has received increasing research attention in management and entrepreneurship research. However, prior literature assumes the beneficial role of positive media sentiment in investors’ evaluation of the firm yet overlooks the potential downside of too much positive media sentiment. Based on two theories, dual processing

In this paper, we build theory concerning how top managers can capture and use the emotional expressions of peripheral actors—actors who are not typically involved in strategy—to help them formulate strategy, using a real-time case. We show how the existence of emotional tumult amongst peripheral actors can force top managers to reassess strategy and engage in ‘emotion processing.’ Through three inter-related

Competitive dynamics research has often used the AMC framework—awareness, motivation, and capability—to explain how different factors influence the identification of specific other firms as competitors and the likelihood of future competitive interactions with them. However, this stream of research has largely overlooked the role of social evaluations in determining which firms are targeted. We study

The performance benefits of functional capabilities in marketing, technology, and operations rely on their routinization in organizational processes, but these also require renewal in response to environmental change. This raises a fundamental tension: is it better to maximally develop functional capabilities that offer the highest contingent benefit in present market conditions, and/or to modify capabilities

Research has yet to explain how firms with acquisition experience can improve their success with acquisitions. With a multi-national sample, we study how acquisition experience can lead to integration capabilities that impact acquisition outcomes. We argue that different types of knowledge (tacit or explicit) and organizational designs (more centralized vs. less centralized) influence the development

While the literature has generated impressive insights on why emerging market multinationals enterprises (EMNEs) select certain foreign locations over others, we still lack an understanding of how the home country institutional weakness affects EMNEs' foreign location choices and the mechanisms through which EMNEs overcome this effect. In this study, we investigate how the home country institutional

Addressing endogeneity issues has been identified as a key priority for ensuring continued progress in the field of strategic management. We contribute to this research agenda by developing a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation approach that accounts for endogeneity in dynamic models. To illustrate how endogeneity bias impedes reliable interpretation, we examine the relationship between

This case study examines whether politically connected entrepreneurs benefit from their political connections. We study the regulated Thai telecoms industry from its inception in the early 1980s. We examine the telecoms firms owned by an entrepreneur turned politician, who rose to the position of prime minister in 2001 and was deposed in 2006. We develop the concepts of the political entrepreneur and

This paper investigates the use of open strategizing within a high-technology new venture during rapid growth. Open strategy can facilitate growth but also presents a dilemma when increased managerial control becomes necessary, particularly with high-risk growth phases. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, we distinguish between two forms of open strategizing - rhizomatic and arborescent -

This paper examines how private firms can align financial and social goals by including disenfranchised populations as beneficiaries. Using a quasi-experimental study in a Brazilian private for-profit school, we explore whether enfranchised (non-vulnerable) and disenfranchised (income-constrained) students benefit from interacting in more diverse settings. First, we find that diversity improves the

This study examines the relationships between an important market strategy (international diversification) and corporate environmental responsibility disclosure (CERD), a nonmarket strategy. We rely on institutional theory and the stakeholder perspective and hypothesize a positive relationship between international diversification and CERD. We also hypothesize a direct effect of performance-based cultural

The prevalence of platform-based multinational corporations (PMNCs) has been increasing, and these businesses are encountering several growing challenges. These challenges include the dynamics and diversification of the global egulatory context (R), the evolution of platform cosystems as innovative organization forms (E), the emergence of rtificial intelligence technologies as a new capability (A)

The general assumption is that multipartner alliances are increasingly favored by firms as means of creating larger pools of shared resources and capabilities. Yet, extant literature has hardly moved beyond anecdotal evidence to systematically address the mechanisms driving their configuration and performance. This study is a step toward clarifying important unknowns about multipartner alliances by

After decades of unregulated growth, the world's largest technology companies have now attracted the attention of regulators in both Europe and the US. Regulating “Big Tech”, however, has proven to be challenging, partly because of their size, but also because of their strategic importance in maintaining a competitive advantage between western nation-states and rising economies in Asia. The paradox

This study investigates the impact of reciprocal information exchanges within partnerships on organizational performance, with a focus on the mediating role of organizational creativity. We conducted a quantitative investigation using a survey of 401 micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Brazil, and analyzed the data using multivariate regression analysis. Our primary contribution to the

The demographic composition of a firm's Board of Directors (BoD) and Top Management Team (TMT) has important consequences for organizational processes and outcomes. However, researchers have focused on the independent effects of diversity in these strategic leadership groups (SLGs), foregoing how it affects their interactions. We adopt a strategic leadership system perspective to account for tasks

Short-termism in investment decisions often results in poor firm performance, though excessively long investments can also harm performance by reducing internal flexibility. This study investigated a quadratic, inverted U-shaped relationship between investment horizon and performance. Building on agency theory and resource-constraint arguments, we proposed that organizational slack moderates the relationship

The academic, consulting, and practitioner-oriented literatures present many examples of companies that have failed to adapt their strategy in the face of a changing competitive arena, even when their top managers and executives acknowledged the need for change—and had a reasonable idea of what ought to be done. By means of an in-depth study of two polar cases of large companies from the fast-moving

It is often assumed that business model innovation drives firm performance, especially when firms operate in highly dynamic environments. However, despite the rise in research on business models, there is little systematic evidence of how various levels of environmental dynamism actually influence the performance effects of two basic types of business model innovation, namely replication (i.e., scaling

The age-related career concerns of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) have generated considerable research attention over the past 25 years. Despite theory that both very young and very old CEOs may have career concerns that encourage pursuit of short-term profitability at the expense of long-term investment, the vast majority of past studies have examined whether firms with CEOs who are nearing retirement

Taking a social networks approach to the performance feedback model from the Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTOF), we examine how a firm’s position within a strategic alliance network—and the structure surrounding that position—creates distinct pressures that differentially impact decision makers’ problemistic search intensity to social and historical underperformance. We test our predictions on a

We theorize that contingent on whether acquisitions put more emphasis on realizing cost versus revenue synergy, they require different degrees of post-acquisition integration due to their different resource reconfiguration requirements. We use data from 448 US-based acquirers and 1452 domestic acquisitions to find strong support for our theoretical conjecture. On the one hand, we find that for acquisitions

Open innovation can support firms looking to deploy strategic agility through product innovations during periods of market and technological change. However, existing research lacks a comprehensive understanding of the microfoundations that underlie strategic agility in the context of open innovation. We address this gap using an in-depth analysis of a firm's open innovation activities in support of

Startups are crucial job creators and drivers of economic growth. Research on startups has predominantly targeted high-growth startups, while a comprehensive understanding of alternative growth journeys remains limited. Addressing this gap, we employ the theory of early firm growth and the time-calibrated theory of entrepreneurial action to examine 416 biotech startups. We use time series cluster analysis

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We study how firms can benefit from external knowledge resources contingent on absorptive capacity. We separate the three components of absorptive capacity – acquiring, assimilating, and exploiting external knowledge – and posit that the benefits of a firm's knowledge expansion through diversification into related and unrelated business domains differ by the firm's relative emphasis on the three components

Industrial organizations need to take a cultural leap in order to integrate social systems with rapidly evolving digital technologies. Subsequently, aspiration for digital transformation enabled by organizational culture is ubiquitous; however, guidance in the literature on how to refresh the culture in pursuit of digital transformation strategy is underdeveloped. We conducted a diagnostic multi-case

Decision makers switch between analytical-rational and intuitive-experiential approaches to decision making, a phenomenon termed “cognitive gear switching.” Such switching is crucial for decision making in any organization. However, how decision makers switch between the intuitive-experiential and analytical-rational approaches, the interplay between these approaches and contextual factors remains

Studies on corporate social performance advocate that interrelated yet conflicting goals, such as sustainability and profitability, give rise to specific dynamics and inherent tensions, and call for more research to investigate how the duality of goals is managed by specific individuals in organizations. Through a micro-foundational view of ambidexterity for corporate social performance, and by relying

Deciding which new product concepts to develop is an important strategic management decision. One part of it is to decide whether to develop “premium” products, priced above the average product on the market, or “economy” products, priced lower than the average product on the market. We hypothesize that, ceteris paribus, firms and individual decision makers prefer premium over economy innovation projects

When top managers task middle managers with implementing strategies, those strategies are often executed in a deviated form, which leads to the creation of unintended strategies. Despite much research on middle managers and their role and behaviors in strategy implementation, there is still only a limited understanding of the implementation activities that result in intended and unintended strategies

When setting a new strategy for their firm, managers engage in a range of sensegiving activities designed to introduce the new direction and explain the reasons for the change. These communication events commonly involve the use of strategic management terms and concepts to explain and justify the prescribed strategy. Literature thus far assumes that audiences understand and agree that these terms

Building on recent international business research that embraces insights from economic geography, we hypothesise that MNEs locating a high share of the total number of their subsidiaries in global cities (which we conceptualize as global city location intensity) exhibit higher financial performance. We further argue that knowledge-intensive firms benefit more from global city location intensity than

The sustainability of business models is commonly determined by their value creation for a wide range of stakeholders. This value is primarily conceptualised through the aggregated macro-level Triple Bottom Line (TBL) dimensions of social, ecological and economic value. However, few business model studies provide an explanation as to why and how stakeholders see such value in a business model. A problematising

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Digitalization is challenging traditional international business theories, shifting emphasis from the flows of goods and services to the flows of data, information, and knowledge, changing the distribution of international activity. From the internalization theory lens, we suggest that digitalization is reducing market imperfections, but this effect varies across industries, positing a linkage between

Choosing the right company name is challenging and may have major consequences for firm prospects. Drawing on the strategic conformity literature, we investigate the implications of “nonconforming” company names, i.e. foreign sounding and family-unrelated, for family firms’ performance. Consistent with the idea that such names endow the business with greater visibility and recognition, we find that

We examine the linkages between firms' M&A activity and the information exchange between executives and analysts during quarterly earnings calls. Prior M&A research has mostly focused on the considerations presented by information asymmetry between buyers and sellers themselves in M&A. However, these concerns also exist between the buying firm's executives and capital markets. We examine whether firms'

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Event studies, which have significantly advanced mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research, obtain excess returns based on a theory linking a firm's shareholder returns to those of the market. For outcomes lacking such a theory, we propose an empirical approach using a synthetic control method with machine learning to link outcomes for the acquirer or target to those for a group of comparison firms.

The relationship between pre-acquisition alliances and post-acquisition performance has been widely recognized, but there are differing explanations from existing theoretical perspectives. On the one hand, organizational learning emphasizes that prior strategic alliances allow the acquiring firm to learn from the target company, gaining new technological knowledge and skills. On the other hand, relational

This paper seeks to explain how location affects the likelihood of partner acquisition. We develop a novel framework that (i) emphasizes the decoupling between a firm's headquarters and its alliance-making division and their roles regarding alliance management and partner acquisition decisions and (ii) highlights that these decisions are contingent on location-related factors that shape the structural

This qualitative study examines the relationship between the mission statements of 161 Italian B Corps and their social impact performance, measured by the B Impact Assessment (BIA). The research combined different qualitative methods: content analysis, text mining, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) in a homogeneous research design to explore the content of B Corps mission statements

This study examines the effects of rival firms' negative earnings surprises on focal firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) investment. I theorize that rival firms' negative earnings surprises attract stronger scrutiny by shareholders in the focal firm, which exposes short-term pressure on the focal firm and makes it limit investments in socially responsible activities. I find that rival firms'

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are major events in organizational development and the post-merger phase is widely recognised as being crucial for value creation. One of the most important decisions in this process is the speed of integration. However, despite a growing body of literature on this subject, conclusions remain a source of persistent equivocality. In fact, this debate has been dominated

In emerging markets, where strategic information is hard to obtain and often unreliable, how local firms acquire information to execute cross-border acquisitions is unclear. In this paper, we posit that when the market for information is weak, and firms lack experiential knowledge, board interlocks with other cross-border acquirers affect the frequency and pace of cross-border acquisitions. Furthermore

Whether firms can survive a major crisis is an important question for both researchers and practitioners. Ambidexterity is frequently proposed as a sound strategy to achieve best performance when firms exist in turbulent environments; however, it is unclear whether this effect is sustained in a crisis, especially an internal one. Applying configuration and dynamic capability theories, this study extends

Emotions play a crucial role in the strategic management of family business organizations (FBOs). Yet, they are commonly treated as a black box, and we have a limited understanding of their antecedents, and the processes and mechanisms through which they develop and unfold in FBOs, ultimately leading to strategic outcomes. This paper opens the black box and develops a framework for studying emotions

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Strategic initiatives are temporary group undertakings designed to renew organizational capabilities and are crucial to organizational performance. Despite the inherent goal heterogeneity stemming from individual, departmental, organizational, and initiative levels, research conceptualizes goals as unitary within the team. Our objective is to explore ways to manage goal heterogeneity for the successful

Research on contractual governance has traditionally viewed exchange hazards as having mutual effects on contractual design at the transaction level. To advance our understanding of contracting decisions in interorganizational relationships, I depart from the traditional emphasis on the mutual aspects of interorganizational relationships by examining how exposure to idiosyncratic exchange hazards may

Integration process performance, capturing the extent to which integration teams realize their integration milestones, is significant in absorption acquisitions, because it constitutes an important intermediate step towards eventual M&A performance. Still, we know little about the conditions that motivate and enable integration teams to attain the goals of the post-acquisition integration process.

Although many cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) by emerging-market multinationals (EMMs) are aimed at improving domestic operating performance, the conditions under which such CBAs are the most effective have been underexplored. Drawing on global strategy research on resource recombination and organizational learning, we propose that the effectiveness of domestic-improvement oriented CBAs crucially