Oliver Baumann

Evaluating the New: The Contingent Value of a Pro-Innovation Bias

It is a central tenet in the literature on organizational change that firms need to explore novel courses of action in order to adapt and survive. Should firms thus exhibit a “pro-innovation bias” when evaluating novel decision alternatives? Or should firms rather assess new opportunities as objectively as possible? Our analysis of a simulation model suggests that a pro-innovation bias can have exploration-enhancing effects that increase long-run performance in complex and stable environments, but can also decrease performance substantially if the bias becomes too pronounced. However, under most other conditions, an unbiased, objective evaluation of novel opportunities is most effective. We also identify a set of contingency factors that strongly affect the value of a pro-innovation bias, which may explain why it is that we see so few firms with such a bias.

Colleagues and Competitors: How Internal Social Comparisons Shape Organizational Search and Adaptation

Intra-organizational comparisons—managers and units benchmarking their performance against each other—can turn colleagues into competitors. To better understand when organizations should allow or even encourage internal social comparisons, we study their implications for organizational adaptation and performance. We conceptualize internal social comparisons as an upstream competitive process that shapes performance aspirations and creates interdependencies in search behavior. We distinguish this from downstream, product market competition or complementarities where performance is interdependent across units. Integrating both aspects into a computational model, we show how internal social comparisons affect adaptation and performance through two mechanisms: a balancing effect whereby the organization is guaranteed to contain both exploring and exploiting units, and a stabilizing effect whereby internal social comparisons protect against abandoning existing technologies too early. The benefits of upstream comparisons are accentuated when units are downstream complements, helping synchronize search. When units are downstream competitors, these benefits disappear, suggesting substitutive effects. We highlight empirical implications and discuss theoretical links to work on intra-organizational competition, social comparisons and aspiration-driven search, diversification and performance, and the adaptation of multi-business firms.