Gokhan Ertug

What's in It for Them? Advantages of Higher-Status Partners in Exchange Relationships

This article explores the motivations that high-status firms have to enter exchange relationships with lower-status partners. We argue that high-status firms can secure greater effort from lower-st...

The Dark Side of Trust

Gargiulo identifies three behavioural consequences of trust. First, trust is associated with lower levels of monitoring, vigilance and safeguards towards the behaviour of the trusted party. Second, trust is associated with higher levels of commitment to the relationship with the person or party being trusted. Finally, trust is associated with an expansion of the scale and scope of the exchange between the parties.

Who shall get more? How intangible assets and aspiration levels affect the valuation of resource providers

In this study, we identify the effects of reputation and status by determining how they are differently valued by organizations that are concurrently pursuing different goals. Building on research on intangible assets and on aspiration levels, we develop a framework to explain organizations’ valuation of resource providers. We expect organizations to value resource providers who possess a specific type of intangible asset higher as their performance, relative to aspirations, decreases on the outcome more closely tied to that particular asset. We also expect to observe this sensitivity primarily when the organization has a low level of the intangible asset in question. Based on this framework, we derive specific hypotheses using the differential relationships between reputation and status, as two types of intangible assets, and product quality and revenues, as two types of goals. We find support for our hypotheses using a longitudinal dataset on National Basketball Association teams and players.

Mobility, retention and productivity of genomics scientists in the United States

The United States appears to have an increasingly weakening ability to attract and retain genomics scientists.

The capacity to innovate: A meta analysis of absorptive capacity

Abstract For nearly 30 years, ACAP has been the bedrock of theories of innovation. A meta-analysis is timely to glean insights from the rich empirical evidence to date and guide future work on the topic. Our meta-analysis of 241 studies reveals that ACAP is a strong predictor of innovation and knowledge transfer, and that its effects on financial performance are fully mediated by these two outcomes. As different from most theoretical discourse, we also find that the firm size-ACAP relationship is positive for small firms but negative for larger firms and that the firm age-ACAP relationship is negative for mature firms and not significant for young firms. Our findings present a clearer picture of the performance implications of ACAP and also suggest the need to revisit traditional theoretical arguments on innovation, especially regarding the causal arguments underlying age and size. These results provoke scholars to revisit traditional assumptions of organizations and their patterns of innovation. Finally, we also take this opportunity to investigate factors that have been commonly considered to be relevant for the ACAP-innovation relationship, as we detail in our additional analysis.

New Blood as an Elixir of Youth: Effects of Human Capital Tenure on the Explorative Capability of Aging Firms

The relationship between firm age and innovation has been an enduring topic of interest. We contribute to this research by studying how the effect of firm age on the quality of explorative and exploitative innovations is affected by the firm-specific and industry tenure of the talent resources (employees) that the firm utilizes. We start with the baseline predictions that firm age is related to the development of better exploitative innovations and worse explorative innovations. However, the tenure of employees intervenes in these relationships, by way of bringing in new knowledge, mental models, and beliefs. We predict that longer firm-specific and industry tenure of employees enhances the positive effect of firm age on the quality of exploitative innovations, while amplifying the negative effect of firm age on the quality of explorative innovations. In addition, for both the baseline and the moderating effect, we also formulate a prediction comparing the quality of explorative innovations with those of exploitative innovations. We find support for the moderating effects of human capital tenure for the quality of explorative innovations, but not for the quality of exploitative innovations. We reason that the latter may be due to the need for some level of exploration even in exploitative innovations, at least in the setting we study—the video game industry. Our results suggest that the negative effects of firm age on the quality of explorative innovations can be mitigated by talent resources (employees) the firm uses who have lower firm-specific and industrywide tenure.

The Power of the Weak

Abstract Weak organizational actors can overcome the consequences of their dependence by securing the control of valuable resources or by embedding dependence relationships into social networks. While these strategies may not eliminate the underlying dependence, they can curtail the ability or the willingness of the stronger party to use power. Embedding strategies, however, can also have unintended consequences. Because the network structures that confer power to the weak are inherently more stable, they can persist beyond the point of being beneficial, trapping weak actors into unsuitable network structures. The power of the weak can thus become the weakness of the strong.

Homophily and Individual Performance

We study the relationship between choice homophily in instrumental relationships and individual performance in knowledge-intensive organizations. Although homophily should make it easier for people to get access to some colleagues, it may also lead to neglecting relationships with other colleagues, reducing the diversity of information people access through their network. Using data on instrumental ties between bonus-eligible employees in the equity sales and trading division of a global investment bank, we show that the relationship between an employee’s choice of similar colleagues and the employee’s performance is contingent on the position this employee occupies in the formal and informal hierarchy of the bank. More specifically, homophily is negatively associated with performance for bankers in the higher levels of the formal and informal hierarchy whereas the association is either positive or nonexistent for lower hierarchical levels.

ADDING VALUE TO OTHERS: THE POSITIVE EXTERNALITIES OF SOCIAL CAPITAL.

In this paper, we ask whether social structure can help explain why some employees are better able than others to add value to their peers, as rated by their peers. Our theoretical contribution concerns the distinct influences of two orders of social capital: first-order and second-order. First-order social capital is conceptualized as the social structure of the focal actor. Second-order social is conceptualized as the social structure of the actors boss, a central figure in the life of most managers. Using network sparseness to capture social capital, we find that not only first-order but also second-order social capital has significant effects on peer-to-peer value-added.

How Do Prior Ties Affect Learning by Hiring

Research has shown that hiring R&D scientists from competitors fosters organizational learning. We examine whether hiring scientists who have many collaborative ties with the hiring firm prior to the mobility event produces different learning outcomes than hiring scientists who have few or no such ties. We theorize that prior ties reduce explorative learning and increase exploitative learning. Namely, we posit that prior ties lead the hiring firm to focus on that part of a new hire’s knowledge with which they are already familiar and that they help appropriate the new hire’s newly generated knowledge. At the same time, prior ties induce new hires to search locally within the hiring firm’s knowledge base and to produce more incremental, lower-impact innovations. Using data on R&D scientists’ mobility in the Electronics and Electrical Goods industry, we find broad support for our hypotheses. Our results extend our theoretical understanding of learning-by-hiring processes and bear practical managerial implications.