Sebastian Fourné

Strategic agility in MNEs: : Managing tensions to capture opportunities across emerging and established markets

Traditional sources of sustainable competitive advantages are very rare in todays heterogeneous and hyper-competitive global business environment. This article identifies and illustrates three dynamic capabilities—sensing local opportunities, enacting global complementarities, and appropriating local value—by which MNEs are able to operate successfully across emerging and established markets. For MNEs in these markets, strategic agility is a meta-capability that enables them to create and deploy these three capabilities in a dynamic balance over time. Doing so demands embracing the tensions between these capabilities effectively.

Rethinking ‘Top‐Down’ and ‘Bottom‐Up’ Roles of Top and Middle Managers in Organizational Change: Implications for Employee Support

In this study we integrate insights from ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ traditions in organizational change research to understand employees’ varying dispositions to support change. We distinguish between change initiation and change execution roles and identify four possible role configurations in which top managers (TMs) and middle managers (MMs) can feature in change. We contend that both TMs and MMs can play change initiation and/or change execution roles, TMs and MMs have different strengths and limitations for taking on different change roles, and their relative strengths and limitations are compounded or attenuated based on the specific configuration of change roles. We subsequently hypothesize employee support for change in relation to different TM-MM change role configurations. Our findings show that change initiated by TMs does not engender above-average level of employee support. However, change initiated by MMs engenders above-average level of employee support, and even more so, if TMs handle the change execution.

When Brokerage is not enough: A multilevel investigation of middle managers' initiative

Entrepreneurial behavior of middle managers (MMs) constitutes a key driver of corporate entrepreneurship but its antecedents remain poorly understood. Drawing on the corporate entrepreneurship and ...