Timo Vuori

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.

Meaningfulness-making at work

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the ways workers can actively make their own work experiences more meaningful.Design/methodology/approach – The data consist of 29 interviews with people from three professions. The authors analyzed the interviews by coding the statements into first‐ and second‐order categories, and then aggregating them into theoretical constructs; and by recognizing relations between the constructs.Findings – Workers try to increase the proportion of positive cues extracted from work to make their work more meaningful. The three main tactics for increasing the proportion of positive cues are cognitively emphasizing the positive qualities of work, developing competencies to be better able to produce positive outcomes and positive reactions from others, and influencing the work content.Research limitations/implications – This model provides a preliminary understanding of meaningfulness‐making, based on cross‐sectional interview data. Future research shoul...

The co-evolution of academic research and industry practice: evidence from the US car industry

It has been argued that scholars have forgotten what really matters in the society, that management research is faddish, and that we do not know how our research influences industry practice. To fill in this gap, we investigate the co-evolution of the US car industry and academic writings about the industry. We find that rather than reacting to the industry practice, academics seem to keep writing about their individual favourite topics, while the group of most cited articles reflects the trends in the industry. This means that the academia constantly provides a large set of variance in ideas, from which the practitioners can choose those that support their prevailing purposes. Thus, academic writings have an idea-amplifying and legitimating role in the industry practice.

Strategic sense-giving at the micro-level: facilitating and triggering coordinated action

Collective, coordinated action allows a group to achieve results that are beyond the sum of individual efforts. How do executives help people to take coordinated actions? How do they influence the sense-making of the people to ensure that the group is able to act as a collective? To answer these questions, I carried out an in-depth study of a CIO’s sense-giving tactics and identified how his sense-giving facilitates and triggers collective, coordinated action. Accordingly, this sense-giver creates both shared understanding and shared faith through specific micro-tactics, to increase ‘collective action potential’, which he then transforms to action by using specific triggering tactics. I abstract the sense-giving tactics used by the CIO and explain their theoretical mechanisms. Thus, I extend research on sense-giving and coordinated action.

Decoupling Compensation Practices from Human Resource Management

Organizations have two main types of reasons for adopting compensation systems: internal, effectiveness-related reasons and external, legitimacy-related reasons. This study examines if external motives decouple compensation practices from human resource (HR) management and how decoupling is related to internal and external outcomes for organizations. In an empirical test of Finnish companies based on survey responses from 137 HR managers, we find that decoupling takes place in organizations. There is no evidence of detrimental effects of decoupling on the internal effectiveness of compensation and mixed results considering the effect of decoupling on a firms reputation. We conclude that researchers should not underestimate the prevalence and effects of symbolic motives in compensation development.

Why Do Some Firms Struggle to Learn from Their Acquisition Experiences: Deep vs. Surface Reflection

Puzzled by the diversity of the learning paths followed by firms when trying to transfer the lessons learned from their prior acquisitions to the new ones, we studied learning processes in the five serial acquirers. We show that in addition to the existence of a sufficient pool of diverse acquisition experiences, the effectiveness of learning is moderated by the depth of reflection by the managers involved and how the deeper level causal knowledge is stored and transferred to the persons involved in the subsequent acquisitions. Our analysis revealed that managers differ in terms of the depth of reflection that they engage in regarding their acquisition experiences. We find that deep reflection tends to lead to complex causal cognitive models that describe how different elements in a system influence each other, whereas a more superficial reflection tends to result in strip maps that lay out a simple set of rules “do’s and don’t’s”. While the latter are easier to infer from past experience and share in the...

How closed groups can drift away from reality: the story of a knocked out Kiai Master

This paper investigates extreme biases in group sensemaking through a longitudinal field study in a martial arts community. It is observed that an incremental, self-reinforcing process can cause a group’s mental model to drift away from reality. This causes significant problems when the group members interact with people who do not share the biased mental model. More specifically, as the outsiders do not react according to the biased model, the biased insider’s actions will result in undesired, harmful outcomes. Specific mechanisms, which together constitute the bias producing process are identified. Key elements include verbal persuasion by believers, social proof bias, placebo effects, and retrospective sensemaking. It is discussed how analogical dynamics can be present in business settings and argued that constant reality checks with outsiders can help groups to avoid this self-harming tendency and, therefore, foster survival and success.

WHEN PEOPLE AGREE WHILST DISAGREEING: IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MENTAL MODELS IN GROUP COGNITION

Cognitive diversity and the related notion of shared cognition are two of the most influential concepts in research on group processes and performance. In this article, we develop a more nuanced view of cognitive diversity/sharedness that distinguishes between cognitions held at implicit and explicit levels. The central argument is that because individuals posses independent implicit and explicit beliefs relating to a task, group members can hold similar explicit mental models while simultaneously possessing dissimilar implicit representations. Drawing on a contemporary dual system view of cognition, we theorize the consequences for group process and performance when: (i) members hold similar explicit mental models but dissimilar implicit beliefs (illusory concordance), and (ii) when members hold similar implicit beliefs but divergent explicit mental models (surface discordance). The analysis yields various propositions concerning the effects of illusory concordance and surface discordance on group decisi...