Daniel W. Greening

Corporate social performance as a competitive advantage in attracting a quality workforce

Several researchers have suggested that a talented, quality workforce will become a more important source of competitive advantage for firms in the future. Drawing on social identity theory and signaling theory, the authors hypothesize that firms can use their corporate social performance (CSP) activities to attract job applicants. Specifically, signaling theory suggests that a firm’s CSP sends signals to prospective job applicants about what it would be like to work for a firm. Social identity theory suggests that job applicants have higher self-images whenworking for socially responsive firms over their less responsive counterparts. The authors conducted an experiment in which they manipulated CSP and found that prospective job applicants are more likely to pursue jobs from socially responsible firms than from firms with poor social performance reputations. The implications of these findings for academicians and practitioners alike are discussed.

Testing a Model of Organizational Response to Social and Political Issues

This study developed and tested a conceptual model explaining variability in the organizational structures firms develop to identify, analyze, and respond to their social and political environments...

Small business growth through geographic expansion: A comparative case study

Abstract Although the small business sector as a whole is achieving phenomenal growth, an important concern in the field has been identifying the problems, challenges, and success characteristics associated with the prudent growth of individual firms. A strategy utilized by many small firms to achieve their growth objectives is one of geographic expansion. This approach involves expanding a firm’s business from its original location to one or more additional geographic sites, and is particularly well suited for firms that cannot expand in their present location but believe that their products or services may be appealing to consumers in other markets. Surprisingly, despite the prevalence of geographic expansion as a means of small firm growth, this is a neglected area of small business research. Although researchers have examined the common challenges associated with small firm growth, a small business that expands from one location to several locations is subject to a number of potentially unique challenges. For example, during the course of opening a new geographic site, a small business manager will be confronted with the task of managing an existing business and a start-up at the same time. The challenge created by this undertaking, along with the other challenges associated with geographic expansion, have not been specifically identified. An improved understanding of these challenges may help small firm managers maximize their changes of leading successful expansion efforts. As a result of the lack of research in this area, this study used a comparative case study methodology to develop a theoretical model of the antecedents of effective small business geographic expansion. The model was developed in two steps. First, a preliminary model of the antecedents of effective small business geographic expansion was developed from the existing small business growth literature. Second, using analytic induction, the preliminary model was compared with the experiences of five small businesses that have engaged in a growth strategy of geographic expansion for the purpose of developing a more thorough and more valid theoretical model. A unique attribute of the sample is that not all of the businesses have been successful in their expansion efforts. Two of the five small businesses included in the study have had failed expansions, providing us the rare opportunity to contrast failed expansion efforts against successful ones. The model that emerged from this approach supports the notion that geographic expansion involves a unique set of managerial challenges. The consistent evidence across the five case studies indicated that effective small business geographic expansion involves the following six major areas of concern: planning for growth, managing growth, reasons for growth, expansion site characteristics, a set of moderator variables, and expansion performance. Among the implications of the study is that the unique nature of the geographic expansion process adds a layer of complexity to firm growth that exacerbates the need for planning. Along with the normal challenges involved with adding structure to accommodate growth, a firm that engages in geographic expansion must do this in an unfamiliar location, where the market potential and legitimacy of the firm’s business concept is untested. The consistent evidence that emerged from the cases is that planning helps attenuate these challenges. In addition, the recruitment and selection of qualified personnel to staff expansion sites is a critical activity, along with networking in the expansion site locations to establish organizational legitimacy. Three variables were found to moderate the relationship between managing growth and expansion performance. Learning and flexibility were found to have a positive influence on the managing growth expansion performance relationship, whereas environmental turbulence was found to have the opposite impact. Finally, a complex set of relationships emerged from the study pertaining to expansion site characteristics. For instance, the evidence generated across the cases suggested that planning helps a firm develop a set of heuristics for expansion site selection, which helps a firm avoid placing a site in an undesirable location.

A qualitative study of managerial challenges facing small business geographic expansion

Abstract Geographic expansion is a common growth strategy used by small, entrepreneurial firms. Yet, despite the importance of geographic expansion as a growth strategy, it is a neglected area of small business research. To date, research in the area of small business growth has focused on broad issues, such as the common “obstacles” to firm growth and the relationship between firm growth and firm profitability. Whereas this literature is suggestive, it does not provide specific prescriptive advice to small business managers pursuing geographic expansion as a growth strategy. As a first step in generating prescriptive advice in this area, this study examined the managerial challenges that faced one small firm during the early stages of its efforts to expand geographically. The subject organization, referred to as the Local Advertising Company (LAC), operated in a single location from 1968 to 1990. As a means to initiate firm growth, the owners of the company opened eight new locations in 1991 and eight more in 1992. However, problems ensued. This study used a qualitative research methodology to conduct an assessment of the managerial challenges facing the LAC during its geographic expansion effort. Seventeen key employees of LAC were interviewed for the study. The qualitative case study methodology used provided an opportunity to gather in-depth information from informants regarding their individual assessment of the managerial challenges encountered by LAC during its geographic expansion. Collectively, the respondents identified a number of specific management issues that became problematic during LACs geographic expansion effort. Through a content analysis technique, these issues were organized into 15 thematic categories including training, recruitment and selection, the relationship between the field staff and the original owners, and 12 others. Each of these categories represents the separate managerial challenges faced by the company during its geographic expansion. The study provides a descriptive analysis of each of the 15 categories of managerial challenges that emerged. The research results suggest that the successful management of a geographic expansion growth strategy requires managers to deal with a unique set of issues. For example, the training of new employees may become problematic when the most experienced personnel in the firm reside in the home office and the new trainees are located in widely dispersed geographic locations. In addition, the results of the study provide an extension to both practical and theoretical knowledge in three distinct areas: planning for growth, managing growth, and the reasons for growth. First, the results of the study support the importance of planning for growth, but suggest that planning must be complemented by learning and a willingness to evolve ones plan as growth progresses. In terms of the management of growth, the case shows that running a small business and growing a small business do not include the same skill set. The owners of LAC had been quite successful managing their single location for 22 years. However, this ability to run a business did not complement the need to anticipate start-up problems in new, remote sites, which is inherent in a strategy of geographic expansion. In addition, the case demonstrated that the management of growth requires a cognizance on the part of the original owners of a firm to delegate control. Finally, with regard to the reasons for growth, researchers generally characterize firm growth as being motivated by either economic (e.g., economies of scale) or emotional reasons (e.g., employing family members). The owners of LAC initiated firm growth for the purpose of wealth creation to fund their retirements. This illustrates that firm growth can be motivated by a combination of both economic (e.g., wealth creation) and personal (e.g., retirement security) reasons.

Dynamic creation: extending the radical Austrian approach to entrepreneurship

We develop a new perspective on entrepreneurship as a dynamic, complex, subjective process of creative organizing. Our approach, which we call ‘dynamic creation’, synthesizes core ideas from Austrian ‘radical subjectivism’ with complementary ideas from psychology (empathy), strategy and organization theory (modularity), and complexity theory (self-organization). We articulate conjectures at multiple levels about how such dynamic creative processes as empathizing, modularizing, and self-organizing help organize subjectively imagined novel ideas in entrepreneurs’ minds, heterogeneous resources in their firms, and disequilibrium markets in their environments. In our most provocative claim, we argue that entrepreneurs, by imagining divergent futures and (re)combining heterogeneous resources to create novel products, drive far-from-equilibrium market processes to create not market anarchy but market order. We conclude our exposition of each dynamic creative process by offering one possible direction for future research and articulating additional conjectures that help point the way. Throughout, we draw examples from CareerBuilder—a firm that has played a major role in creating and shaping the online model in the job search/recruiting industry—and its industry rivals (e.g. Monster, Yahoo’s HotJobs) to illustrate selected concepts and relationships in dynamic entrepreneurial creation.

The Philosophical Foundations of a Radical Austrian Approach to Entrepreneurship

The equilibrium-based approaches that dominate entrepreneurship research offer useful insights into some aspects of entrepreneurship, but they ignore or downplay many fundamental entrepreneurial phenomena such as individuals’ creative imaginations, firms’ resource (re)combinations, and markets’ disequilibrating tendencies—and the genuine uncertainty and widespread heterogeneity these imply. To overcome these limitations, scholars have recently introduced a nonequilibrium approach to entrepreneurship based on Ludwig Lachmann’s “radical subjectivist” brand of Austrian economics. Here, this radical Austrian approach is extended beyond Lachmann to include the work of radical subjectivism’s other noted theorist: George Shackle. More important, the article extends entrepreneurship research by systematically comparing and contrasting the nascent, radical Austrian approach to entrepreneurship with three dominant equilibrium-based approaches: neoclassical, Kirznerian, and Schumpeterian economics. Specifically, the article (a) explicates the paradigmatic philosophical assumptions about the nature of individuals, firms, and markets that underlie these approaches; (b) demonstrates how metaphor is employed as a device to concretize these assumptions; (c) examines the research questions that arise from the assumptions these metaphors reflect; and (d) uses the Japanese “beer wars” of the 1980s and 1990s to illustrate one methodological approach (hermeneutics) researchers can adopt to apply these assumptions, metaphors, and questions to study entrepreneurial phenomena from a radical subjectivist perspective.

Managing Industrial and Environmental Crises The Role of Heterogeneous Top Management Teams

This study examines firms that have experienced an industrial and/or environ-mental crisis and proposes that top management team (TMT) characteristics will affect a firms ability to minimize the severity of these crisis events. Specifically, heterogeneity in the TMT will exhibit a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship with the severity of firm crises. Our results suggest that a moderate level of age and tenure heterogeneity are positively related to a firms ability to successfully minimize the severity of crises. Variance in educational backgrounds was unrelated to crisis severity. Functional background heterogeneity exhibited a curvilinear relationship with crisis severity but was not U-shaped as hypothesized.

AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF THE EFFECTS OF BOARD/MANAGERIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND FIRM GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES ON THE INCIDENCE AND SEVERITY OF ORGANIZATION CRISES.

Grounded in agency theory and upper echelon theory, this study investigates the relationship between firm governance, top management team characteristics, and the subsequent severity of organizatio...