Devaki Rau

Organizational Learning: Subprocess Identification, Construct Validation, and an Empirical Test of Cultural Antecedents

Organizational learning is key to an organization’s capability for continuous change and renewal. As a result, scholarly interest in identifying the antecedents of organizational learning has greatly increased over the past couple of decades. This study focuses on (1) identifying and measuring the distinct subprocesses that make up the organizational learning construct to obtain a more detailed understanding of the construct and (2) exploring the effect that organizational culture and, more particularly, four dimensions of culture—participative decision making, openness, learning orientation, and transformational leadership—have on each of the organizational learning subprocesses. The authors use two samples of subject matter experts and the responses of 631 managers to test their propositions. Their results yielded five independent but interrelated subprocesses—information acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, knowledge integration, and organizational memory. Furthermore, their results indicate that the four different cultural antecedents studied have different kinds of significant relationships with each of the organizational learning subprocesses. This study contributes to the literature on organizational learning by identifying and validating the organizational learning subprocesses, and by offering a detailed picture of the relationship between key organizational antecedents to learning and the individual subprocesses of learning. In addition, since they use systematic and thorough methodological techniques to develop an instrument to test, measure, and validate those subprocesses of learning that constitute a common body of knowledge in this area, the authors’ instrument could prove to be a valuable tool for future research.

Social, Behavioral, and Cognitive Influences on Upper Echelons During Strategy Process A Literature Review

This study reviews research on the social, behavioral, and cognitive influences on CEOs, top management teams (TMTs), and the CEO-TMT interface during strategic decision making. We identify the key issues examined in this research over the past 10 years and relate developments in the field to previous knowledge in this area. We also attempt to identify what constitutes an established body of knowledge in the field and, therefore, areas that need additional examination. Our review indicates that while there has been an explosion of research on the influence of CEO personality and TMT social processes on strategy process, much remains to be done in terms of examining CEO and TMT cognition, particularly at the level of the CEO-TMT interface.

Strategic decision making

Strategic decisions are decisions that critically influence the performance and survival of a firm. …

Applying an organizational learning perspective to new technology deployment by technological gatekeepers: A theoretical model and key issues for future research

Organizations often under-utilize expensive information technology (IT) enabled work processes that automate routines or processes that were previously carried out manually. One reason for this phenomenon may lie in the types of decisions made by technological gatekeepers, who are key individuals charged with deploying new technologies in organizations. From an organizational learning perspective, technological gatekeepers are more likely to perform successfully when they make appropriate decisions about exploring or exploiting the routines associated with a new technology. The factors that influence gatekeepers’ decisions about exploration or exploitation, however, are still largely unexplored. In this study, we present a model based on the basic technology acceptance model (TAM) to examine this issue. We use concepts from the literatures on organizational learning, expertise, and cognitive styles to elaborate on the constructs in our model, and examine how these literatures can inform our understanding of technological gatekeepers’ decisions. The goal of this paper is to accelerate micro-level research on new technology deployment in organizations by identifying some key issues and propositions for future studies.

Missing the point of the practice-based view

In this article, we address Jarzabkowski et al.’s strategy-as-practice criticism of Bromiley and Rau’s practice-based view as ignoring the “who” and “how” of practice implementation. Bromiley and Rau explicitly note that any statistical model under the practice-based view should consider mediating and moderating variables that depend on the specific practice and context but that the article would not attempt to identify such variables. Strategy-as-practice’s focus on the “who” and “how” of a practice are two of many such potential mediating or moderating variables. More fundamentally, strategy-as-practice scholars’ discomfort with the practice-based view may arise both from their different definitions of practice and their different approaches to strategy research. Without diminishing the strategy-as-practice’s contribution to strategy research, we argue for the additional value in the practice-based view’s call for systematic, large-scale, quantitative studies that establish the performance impact of specific practices across populations of organizations.

Guest editorial for the special section on Technology acceptance, usage, and competitive advantage

A central question in the strategic management literature is one of how organizations achieve and maintain sustainable competitive advantage. While scholars in this area have explored this issue from many different perspectives, our understanding of the relationship between technology acceptance, usage, and competitive advantage is still incomplete. The papers in this special section (some of which were originally presented in a session on this topic in INFORMS 2008) focus on this issue. They present studies situated in an international context, underscoring the importance of technology to competitive advantage across different national contexts. They examine a rich array of technologies or technological infrastructures that have a bearing on the success of individuals and organizations, pointing to the complex relationship between technology and business outcomes. We present a brief summary of the papers below. The study “From IT deployment capabilities to competitive advantage: An exploratory study in China” by Jun Tian, Kanliang Wang, Yan Chen, and Bjorn Johansson uses a survey of Chinese firms to examine how organizations can deploy acquired information technologies to support and shape business strategies and value chain activities. The paper identifies three building blocks of IT deployment, namely strategic IT flexibility, business—IT partnership, and business—IT alignment, and empirically examines how these three constructs directly or indirectly influence competitive advantage. The study “ICT infrastructure for innovation” by Bendik Bygstad builds on a case study of the Norwegian company, Norwegian Corp., to examine how the concept of an enterprise service bus, applied at different levels, can provide insights into the innovation process both within and across different business units of an organization. The study illustrates how technologies can influence the development of organizational structures. The study “Knowledge management technology for organized crime assessment” by Petter Gottschalk presents a knowledge management technology stage model. This study examines how police organizations use information and communication technologies in intelligence and investigative work, and highlights the challenges these organizations face in applying and using new technologies to improve their functioning. The study “Successful and unsuccessful multicommunication episodes: Engaging in dialogue or juggling messages?” by JeanineW. Turner and N. L. Reinsch uses a critical incident technique to explore multicommunicating by individuals. Turner and Reinsch define multicommunicating as the act of engaging in more than one conversation at a time, and find that some technology pairings appear more conducive to multicommunicating than others. The respondents in their study provide a number of reasons why some episodes of multicommunicating are successful while others are not. D. Rau (*) :W. Zheng Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA e-mail: drau@niu.edu

The Influence of Centralization and Extent of Cross-Functional Team Usage on Senior Managers’ Risk-Related Perceptions

Despite the importance of managing risk taking in organizations, we know relatively little about how organizational design influences the risk-related perceptions of key organizational decision makers such as senior managers. This study examines how two basic organizational design variables—the extent to which organizations use cross-functional teams (CFTs) and the centralization of decision-making authority—interact to influence senior managers’ perceptions of the extent to which risk taking is supported within their organizations, in a new product development context. Regression results from a survey of 102 senior managers of various organizations in the United States and Norway find that extent of CFT use positively influences senior managers’ perceptions of organizational support for risk taking at low to moderate levels of decision-making authority. At high levels of senior manager authority, risk-related perceptions are not only more positive but also largely independent of the extent of CFT use.

More or less accurate: An analysis of group forecasting accuracy over time.

While we know something about the cognitive bias known as conservatism or adjustment-and-anchoring in the forecasts created by small groups in controlled laboratory conditions, and we know somethin...

Looking under the Lamppost? A Research Agenda for Increasing Enterprise Risk Management’s Usefulness to Practitioners

Enterprise risk management (ERM), a process by which organizations assess, manage and monitor risk from all sources for the corporation as a whole, has drawn increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners. We propose, however, that like the drunken person in the above anecdote, much of ERM research looks at issues somewhat distant from the reality experienced by managers. Focusing on ERM for non-financial companies, this paper explores the reasons for this distance, and lays out an agenda for future ERM research.