Quy Nguyen Huy

How Entrepreneurs Use Symbolic Management to Acquire Resources

Results of a two-year inductive field study of British ventures show that entrepreneurs are more likely to acquire resources for new ventures if they perform symbolic actions—actions in which the actor displays or tries to draw other peoples attention to the meaning of an object or action that goes beyond the objects or actions intrinsic content or functional use. We identify four symbolic action categories that facilitate resource acquisition: conveying the entrepreneurs personal credibility, professional organizing, organizational achievement, and the quality of stakeholder relationships. Our data show that entrepreneurs who perform a variety of symbolic actions from these categories skillfully and frequently obtain more resources than those who do not. Our data also suggest three factors—structural similarity, intrinsic quality, and uncertainty—that moderate the relationship between symbolic management and resource acquisition. We theorize how the various symbolic action categories shape different forms of legitimacy that help entrepreneurs acquire resources.

WHERE ARE THE NEW THEORIES OF ORGANIZATION

This Special Topic Forum was inspired by the observation that most of the theories of organization used by contemporary management researchers were formulated several decades ago, largely in the 1960s and 1970s, and that these theories have persisted, largely intact, since that time. This is so, in spite of massive growth and change in the size, prevalence and influence of organizations in modern society. Organizational theory, as Davis (2010: 691) has observed, can sometimes appear like a “living museum of the 1970s.” Where, we asked, are the new theories of organization?

Distributed Attention and Shared Emotions in the Innovation Process How Nokia Lost the Smartphone Battle

We conducted a qualitative study of Nokia to understand its rapid downfall over the 2005–2010 period from its position as a world-dominant and innovative technology organization. We found that top and middle managers’ shared emotions during the smartphone innovation process caused cycles of behaviors that harmed both the process and its outcome. Together, organizational attention structures and historical factors generated various types of shared fear among top and middle managers. Top managers were afraid of external competitors and shareholders, while middle managers were mainly afraid of internal groups, including superiors and peers. Top managers’ externally focused fear led them to exert pressure on middle managers without fully revealing the severity of the external threats and to interpret middle managers’ communications in biased ways. Middle managers’ internally focused fear reduced their tendency to share negative information with top managers, leading top managers to develop an overly optimistic perception of their organization’s technological capabilities and neglect long-term investments in developing innovation. Our study contributes to the attention-based view of the firm by describing how distributed attention structures influence shared emotions and how such shared emotions can hinder the subsequent integration of attention, influencing innovation processes and outcomes and resulting in temporal myopia—a focus on short-term product innovation at the expense of long-term innovation development.

Emotions in Strategic Organization: Opportunities for Impactful Research

Following the emergence of the behavioral movement in economics and finance, there have been mounting calls for strategy scholars to expand and deepen what is called as the field of behavioral strategy, in which cognitive and social psychology will be merged with strategic management theory and practice (Powell, Lovallo, & Fox, 2011). The goal is to bring realistic assumptions about human cognition, emotion, and social behavior to the strategic management of organizations and thus to enrich strategy theory, empirical research, and real world practice. Thanks to advancing research in social psychology and neuroscience, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in connecting micro psychological phenomena to strategic outcomes (e.g., Hodgkinson & Healey, 2011; Huy, 2011; Powell et al., 2011). Levinthal (2011) noted that many strategic management challenges involve ill-specified alternatives and coarse-grained representations of strategic issues with a high level of uncertainty and ambiguity. Dealing adequately with these issues escapes neat optimizing algorithms, which has been the focus of the literature on judgment and decision making. One type of psychological phenomenon, human emotion, has barely been integrated to strategy research, although mushrooming research on emotion has shown that emotion can have a potent influence on cognition and behavior, especially under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity (see Elfenbein, 2007).

An Emotion-Based View of Strategic Renewal

This paper challenges the dominantly pessimistic view of emotion held by many strategy scholars and elaborates on the various ways in which emotion can help organizations achieve renewal and growth. I discuss how appropriate emotion management can increase the ability of organizations to realize continuous or radical change to exploit the shifting conditions of their environments. This ability is rooted in developing emotion-based dynamic capabilities that facilitate organizational innovation and change. These emotion-based dynamic capabilities express or arouse distinct emotional states such as authenticity, sympathy, hope, fun, and attachment to achieve specific organizational goals important to strategic renewal, such as receptivity to change, the sharing of knowledge, collective action, creativity, and retention of key personnel.

Improving the Odds of Publishing Inductive Qualitative Research in Premier Academic Journals

The objective of this commentary is to explore the challenges scholars face in developing qualitative work to the standards required for publication in top international journals. Over the past decade, qualitative research has achieved increased acceptance in the academic community (Bansal & Corley, 2011) because research on impact has found that although published qualitative studies represent a relatively small proportion in premier journals, they account for a “disproportionate” portion of works considered by the general community of scholars as the most interesting (Bartunek, Rynes, & Ireland, 2006). First, I discuss the common confusion between qualitative and quantitative research, and the related expectations for each genre. Second, I discuss some of the more common mistakes made by inductive qualitative (IQ) researchers that lead to rejection by premier journals. Third, I present some of the deeper causes that may produce these mistakes. Fourth, I propose some advice that can help improve the odds of publishing IQ studies. Finally, I lay out other benefits of doing qualitative research, even if publishing it in premier journals fails.

Assessing collective affect recognition via the Emotional Aperture Measure

Curiosity about collective affect is undergoing a revival in many fields. This literature, tracing back to Le Bons seminal work on crowd psychology, has established the veracity of collective affect and demonstrated its influence on a wide range of group dynamics. More recently, an interest in the perception of collective affect has emerged, revealing a need for a methodological approach for assessing collective emotion recognition to complement measures of individual emotion recognition. This article addresses this need by introducing the Emotional Aperture Measure (EAM). Three studies provide evidence that collective affect recognition requires a processing style distinct from individual emotion recognition and establishes the validity and reliability of the EAM. A sample of working managers further shows how the EAM provides unique insights into how individuals interact with collectives. We discuss how the EAM can advance several lines of research on collective affect.

Reconsidering Middle Managers’ Strategic Role in Modern Organizations

Middle managers have a long legacy in strategy, organizational development, and management research. Uniquely positioned as ‘linking pins’ between strategic and operational interfaces, middle manag...

Leading Strategic Change Under Uncertainty

As firms increasingly face fast changing and uncertain environments and need to modify their strategic direction to enhance performance, we challenge a number of questionable assumptions in the lit...

Paul Osterman: The Truth about Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, and Why They Matter.:

The Truth about Middle Managers describes how middle managers in U.S. companies perceive their work roles, top executives, and their organizations in general. According to Paul Osterman, the goal of his book is to understand what has happened to middle managers as fi rms have restructured. This restructuring—associated with process reengineering and greater use of ad hoc and project teams—shapes a context in which middle managers feel insecure about their jobs, are resigned to low upward mobility, and resent the perceived disproportionate benefi ts that top executives receive. As a result, although middle managers take craft pride in their work and feel loyal to their colleagues, they become alienated from their organizations and feel more removed from top management.