Michael Lubatkin

Ambidexterity and Performance in Small-to Medium-Sized Firms: The Pivotal Role of Top Management Team Behavioral Integration:

While a firm’s ability to jointly pursue both an exploitative and exploratory orientation has been posited as having positive performance effects, little is currently known about the antecedents and consequences of such ambidexterity in small-to medium-sized firms (SMEs). To that end, this study focuses on the pivotal role of top management team (TMT) behavioral integration in facilitating the processing of disparate demands essential to attaining ambidexterity in SMEs. Then, to address the bottom-line importance of an ambidextrous orientation, the study hypothesizes its association with relative firm performance. Multisource survey data, including CEOs and TMT members from 139 SMEs, provide support for both hypotheses.

EXPLORING THE AGENCY CONSEQUENCES OF OWNERSHIP DISPERSION AMONG THE DIRECTORS OF PRIVATE FAMILY FIRMS

Using an agency-theoretic lens and insights drawn from the behavioral economics and family business literatures, we developed hypotheses concerning the effect of dispersion of ownership on the use ...

A Social Capital Model of High-Growth Ventures

We Use social capital theory to explain how human and social capital affect a ventures ability to accumulate financial capital during its growth stages (before an initial public offering) and its ...

Succession as A Sociopolitical Process: Internal Impediments to Outsider Selection

Although traditional adaptive theory implies that poor organizational performance will directly increase the likelihood that an outsider will be selected to succeed a firms chief executive, we dev...

Proposing and Testing an Intellectual Capital-Based View of the Firm

This study examines one specific aspect of the resource-based view, intellectual capital, and its three knowledge components human, organizational, and social capital. We hypothesize that the impact of each component on financial performance is contingent upon the values of the other components, and that these leveraging effects are themselves contingent upon the industry conditions in which a business operates. Our hypotheses are supported using line-of-business survey and FDIC data (within-industry/within-geographic region) from two non-competing resource niches of the banking industry (personal and commercial banking).

Achieving Acculturation in Mergers and Acquisitions: An International Case Survey

Various explanations have been suggested concerning the causes of ‘cultural clashes’ and prescriptions for harmoniously integrating the beliefs and values of merging firms. Using a form of meta-analysis known as a case survey design, which combines the ideographic richness of case studies with the statistical generalizability of larger samples, and a sample consisting of 50 mergers and acquisitions (23 US domestic, 15 Swedish domestic and 12 Swedish cross-border), we found that acculturation is best achieved when the buying firms rely on social controls. That is, by participating in such activities as introduction programs, training, cross-visits, retreats, celebrations and similar socialization rituals, employees will create, of their own volition, a joint organizational culture regardless of expectations of synergies, the relative organization size and differences in nationalities and cultures. A post hoc analysis of a proposed integration control typology further suggests that social controls also indirectly influence acculturation by acting in concert with formal integrative efforts.

Extending Modern Portfolio Theory into the Domain of Corporate Diversification: Does it Apply?

It is widely held that diversification lowers a firms unsystematic (business-specific) risk but does not affect its systematic (systemwide) risk. We tested each notion while controlling for other ...

Top Management Turnover M Related M&A’s: An Additional Test of the Theory of Relative Standing

To date, the most promising attempt to explain departure rates of executives of acquired firms examined the conditions that create perceptions of relative standing, but did not gauge the perceptions themselves. This study extends this line of research by surveying the post-merger perceptions of the top managers of firms acquired in friendly, related deals. We used a two-stage data collection design with the attempt to explain turnover in the first three years following the acquisition, and also predict it in the fourth year.

Control Mechanisms in Cross-border Acquisitions: An International Comparison

This paper analyzes the influence of national culture on the integration mechan isms exercised in international acquisitions. The study of 75 international acquisi tions in Europe (France and the United Kingdom) shows that firms are influenced by their national administrative heritage when they acquire companies abroad. For instance, the French exercise higher formal control of the strategy and the operations, and lower informal control through teamwork than the Americans when they buy firms in the United Kingdom. The Americans exercise higher formal control through procedures than the British when they buy firms in France. As some of these aspects of control were found to be linked with the attitudinal and/or economic performance of the acquired company, we argue that being conscious of the influence of a national administrative heritage should help anticipate cultural problems in the integration process following international acquisitions.

Learning together and apart: A model of reciprocal interfirm learning

This article reviews the processes involved in interfirm learning and identifies an alternative form of alliance in which the objective is knowledge creation, not knowledge acquisition or transfer. Grounded on theories from sociology (relational governance) and educational psychology (jigsaw), the article develops an evolutionary model in which successive learning cycles of convergence, divergence, and reorientation facilitate knowledge creation and innovation.