Yiannis E. Spanos

The relationship between information and communication technologies adoption and management

This paper examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption on management, praxis. The study, building on the theoretical framework developed by Scott Morton and his colleagues, attempts to identify the dynamic relationships between ICT adoption and management efforts towards modernization and reorganization. Using data from leading Greek firms, we report evidence as to how changes in strategy, organizational structure, management systems, and human skills link with the current and prospective level of use of various types of advanced ICT. Findings generally appear to suggest that Greek firms are in a process of recognizing the potential of ICT to enable and support changes that are necessary for successfully competing in a hyper-competitive environment. In particular, ICT adoption is shown to affect strategy by supporting long-term strategic objectives and the quest for profitability. Indirectly, it also links to strategic planning systems. ICT is found to be related to an internal environment characterized by open organization and flexibility. Finally, the results show that the sample firms recognize the need for multi-skilled personnel to exploit the advantages stemming from ICT adoption.

An Integrated Framework for Managing Change in the New Competitive Landscape

It is not the strongest species that will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Charles Darwin The pace of change experienced by modern businesses is phenomenal. Businesses today have to abandon many of the principles that have guided generations of managers, and develop a new set of objectives and rules that will enable them to successfully manage change and guide them to transform into 21st century corporations. Extensive work has been done recently to develop models and frameworks for addressing a variety of the issues associated with organisational change. This paper integrates and advances some of the models and concepts in an effort to develop an all-encompassing framework to guide managerial action. Using Scott-Mortons framework as a point of departure and integrating the key management imperatives and change-enablers of the new competitive landscape, the paper develops an integrative model of organisational change encompassing all parts of the organisation (i.e. strategy, structure, processes and human capital), that seeks to offer managers guidance as to the fundamental factors that need to be considered when planning and implementing change initiatives.

Understanding organizational capabilities: towards a conceptual framework

Despite the theoretical and managerial importance of the notion of organizational capabilities, it is still not entirely clear what capabilities are and how they are created. With this aim, building on the extant literature, we propose a conceptual framework that accounts for both the constituent elements and the creation of organizational capabilities. Constituent elements refer to the knowledge underlying the firm’s capacity to act, and to human actors as the subjects of knowledge creation and application. Much like a weaving process, the creation of organizational capabilities entails the synthesis and integration of constituent elements within the realm of a behavioral “place” that represents a particular condensation of actors and knowledge flows within the broader organization. The capacity of the firm to build organizational capabilities, by itself a meta‐capability, is affected by the institutional qualities of its socio‐cultural environment. Within the context of this framework, the question of what constitutes a firm’s unique competence, compared to its normal activities, equates with the question whether a particular group of organizational actors exist with the requisite resources (basically the knowledge and skills of its members) and socio‐cultural configuration so as to perform value‐adding activities that cannot be imitated by rivals.

Greek Firms and EMU:: Contrasting SMEs and Large-Sized Enterprises

The primary aim of this study is to contrast and identify differences in the ways by which SMEs and large firms have attempted to change their management practices in order to cope with the formidable challenges associated with competing in the EMU. Using survey data collected from leading Greek firms shortly before Greeces recent accession to the EMU, the study is an attempt to begin empirical work in this area by focusing on changes in competitive strategy, structure and management processes. The results indicate that both SMEs and large firms have initiated changes in all three dimensions. It seems, however, that the degree and direction of these responses depends on size; SMEs appear less able and/or less willing to implement change, perhaps because of size-related disadvantages.

Structure and Function of Team Learning Emergence : A Multilevel Empirical Validation

The aim of this study is to examine how learning emerges in terms of structure and function to transform from an individual to a collective (team) phenomenon. Drawing on learning theory and multilevel thinking, the authors developed and validated measures for the basic team learning processes (i.e., intuition, interpretation, integration, and codification) in three independent field studies of innovation project teams and employed multilevel structural equation modeling to test relationships across the individual and team levels of analysis. Their results confirm the hypothesis that team learning originates in individual intuitions, is amplified through interpretation and integration, and manifests itself at the team level via the codification of collective cognition and action. Across the three studies, team learning was found to significantly affect team performance. The authors’ approach contributes to a conceptualization and measurement of team learning as a multilevel phenomenon.

The impact of information and communication technologies on firm structure: evidence from an economy in transition

The present research attempts to identify the dynamic relationships involved between information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption and management efforts towards modernization and reorganization. Using data from leading Greek firms, we report evidence as to how changes in organizational structure, i.e. number of hierarchical levels, formalization, centralization and extensiveness of middle line management, link with the current and prospective level of use of various types of advanced ICT. The results show that ICT significantly affects important elements in of all these structural dimensions. In particular, ICT adoption is found related with delayering, low formalization, clear delineation of managerial role and, prospectively, with decentralization. More generally the findings suggest that ICT correlates with an internal environment characterized by open organization and flexibility.

Scale and Performance in Publicly Funded Collaborative Research and Development

This paper reports the results of an extensive empirical investigation on the role of project scale (reflected in consortium size and in project budget) on various performance dimensions of publicly funded collaborative research and development (R&D) projects. Recent trends in European research policy are founded on the premise that such scale economies do exist, hence the emphasis placed on the critical mass of R&D projects. We argue that large scale in collaborative R&D confers both positive and negative effects, and thus we hypothesize an inverse U‐shaped relation between scale and performance. We only find an inverse U‐shaped effect of consortium size on networking impacts and a U‐shaped effect of project budget on goal achievement. No other statistically significant relationships were found for the remaining performance dimensions (i.e. scientific outputs, technological outputs, and research capacity impacts). More generally, and consistent with recent work on the relation between quality and quantity in academic research, our analyses offer little evidence to support the idea that increasing scale generally improves collaborative R&D performance. It appears that the simple assumption ‘bigger is better’ in European Union‐financed collaborative R&D may need to be reconsidered.