Christina Matz Carnes

Familiness and Innovation: : Resource Bundling as the Missing Link

Using resource–based logic, we integrate and extend theory and research on familiness and innovation in family firms. Supporting our efforts to do this is the suggestion that recent mixed results regarding the ability of family firms to innovate are at least partially accounted for by the failure to fully consider the importance of resource bundling processes as a mediator of the relationship between familiness as a unique organizational resource and innovation. Specifically, we suggest that the individual components of the resource bundling process—stabilizing, enriching, and pioneering—each mediate the relationship between familiness and innovation, and that these mediation effects account for at least part of the previously reported inconsistent results. Using theory and by integrating insights about familiness, innovation, and resource bundling, we seek to provide a more complete model of conditions affecting family firms’ ability to innovate.

How Competitive Action Mediates the Resource Slack-Performance Relationship: A Meta-Analytic Approach: How Competitive Action Mediates Resource Slack-Performance

The fungibility of organizational slack provides firms significant latitude in addressing both internal and market pressures. A vast literature suggests that slack influences firm performance; however, the empirical record is mixed, and the underlying mechanism linking slack to performance remains ambiguous. We address these issues by theoretically expanding the slack–performance model to include mediation. Specifically, we develop and test a model in which a firm’s competitive behaviours direct the utilization of slack toward the realization of firm performance. Our meta‐analytic‐based structural equation model supports partial mediation, showing that competitive behaviours provide some resolution to the conflicted understanding of how slack affects performance. Further, we provide value to the slack literature by consolidating the evidence for the effects of various types and forms of organizational slack. Beyond providing robustness to our theoretical model, doing so offers a more complete understanding of how operationalizations of slack and performance outcomes matter.