William R. Sandberg

Experiential Effects of Dialectical Inquiry, Devil's Advocacy and Consensus Approaches to Strategic Decision Making

This longitudinal laboratory study of fast-advancing middle managers involved in strategic planning compared the effectiveness of dialectical inquiry, devils advocacy, and consensus approaches to ...

Friendship within Entrepreneurial Teams and Its Association with Team and Venture Performance

This article explores friendship within the entrepreneurial team with particular attention to its association with the teams behavior and the performance of the venture. Building on a foundation in the literatures on friendship, entrepreneurial teams, and strategic decisions, we propose 13 such relationships. Friendship facilitates the formation of management teams for new ventures, thereby improving their early performance. As the entrepreneurial team continues to function, friendship is conducive to decision-making processes that enhance the teams effectiveness in solving “wicked” problems and ultimately improve the ventures performance. Friendships, under different circumstances, may exert either positive or negative influences on turnover within the entrepreneurial team, and those influences may improve or impair the ventures performance. (At the same time, behavior within the team or events in the ventures development may affect friendships within the team.) Finally we develop and discuss several implications of our propositions for research and practice in entrepreneurship. We point out methodological considerations and directions for future research that would address these implications.

Strategic management's potential contributions to a theory of entrepreneurship

The article offers an overview of strategic management and its various schools of thought, followed by a summary of the field of entrepreneurship and its own disagreements over definition and boundaries. It suggests that strategic management might help resolve such disagreements through its focus on “the entrepreneurial work of the organization,” which is based on variables that describe the organizations industry, resources, processes, and strategy. Finally, the article both describes and proposes contributions of strategic management to entrepreneurship theory, specifically addressing issues of new business creation, innovation, opportunity seeking, risk assumption, top management teams, and group processes in strategic decisions.

A Profile of Entrepreneurship Research Centers: Orientations, Interests, Activities, and Resources

One indication of progress in the field of entrepreneurship is its growing number of research centers. Their potential to hasten and guide the fields development warrants scholars’ attention to their role in entrepreneurship research. We report the results of a survey of entrepreneurship research centers conducted in 1988. Twenty-nine centers provided usable responses to our questionnaire. We report and analyze their ages, affiliations, and principal research constituencies; several dimensions of their research orientations; their research budgets and the types of support they provide; and how their findings are disseminated. Our analyses detect a pattern of associations among larger budgets, applications-based research orientations, and the presence of state or local governments as a principal constituent of a center. Finally we analyze research centers’ topical interests, comparing them to those of researchers.

Drug-Testing Programs and Their Impact on Workplace Accidents: A Time-Series Analysis

Using a time-series design, this study examined the impact of introducing drug-testing programs on a workplace accidents. Using data from three separate hotels, we examined the impact associated with preemployment testing programs and the impact associated with programs that included both preemployment and random testing. The results of interrupted timeseries analysis suggest that the introduction of preemployment testing did not affect the trend line for workplace accidents. However, the introduction of a program including both preemployment and random testing was associated with a significant reduction in workplace accidents resulting from a downward shift in the trend line for accidents. The implications for the design of drug-free workplace programs are discussed, as are the implications for future research. It is well-established that drug abuse by employees exacts a substantial toll upon employers. Estimates suggest that substance abuse by employees cost employers over

The Role of Learning in International Entrepreneurship

100 billion annually because of its effect on absenteeism, workplace accidents, health care costs, and turnover [ 1, 21. These financial estimates are

Improving new venture performance: The role of strategy, industry structure, and the entrepreneur

Learning theory suggests that organizations learn when the activities and experiences of individuals become assimilated into the routines, systems, and policies of the organization (Grant, 1996). A premise of study 1 is that the greater the attention a firm devotes to developing new knowledge and to exploiting existing knowledge, the greater its learning. This premise is consistent with prior theory which holds that the amount of information learned and the ease of its retrieval depend upon the intensity of effort expended in its acquisition (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990), and with the notion that a firms behavior can be envisioned as the pattern of effort and attention devoted to specific activities (Ocasio, 1997). The extent to which firms devote attention to learning in the international as well as domestic marketplace can be considered as critical outcome variables, and an important question pertains to how several factors affect this ‘learning effort.’