http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/14024/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/35005/ 2012-07-09T00:00:00Z AB Despite the clear importance of team creativity for organizations, the conditions that foster it are not very well understood. Even though diversity, especially diversity of perspectives and knowledge, is frequently argued to stimulate higher creativity in teams, empirical findings on this relationship remain inconsistent. We have developed a theoretical model in which the effect of a team's diversity on its creativity is moderated by the degree to which team members engage in perspective taking. We propose that perspective taking helps realize the creative benefits of diversity of perspectives by fostering information elaboration. Results of a laboratory experiment support the hypothesized interaction between diversity and perspective taking on team creativity. Diverse teams performed more creatively than homogeneous teams when they engaged in perspective taking, but not when they were not instructed to take their team members' perspectives. Team information elaboration was found to mediate this moderated effect and was associated with a stronger indirect effect than mere information sharing or task conflict. Our results point to perspective taking as an important mechanism to unlock diversity's potential for team creativity. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/13560/ 2008-08-01T00:00:00Z Building on behavioral theory, we study when and how firms unlock synergy from acquisitions over extended periods of time. We argue that initial integration is inevitably suboptimal and that, as a result, acquisitive growth decreases an acquirer's performance, eventually forcing it to engage in organizational restructuring to more fully unlock the synergistic potential. Hence, we conceptualize organizational restructuring as a second stage in the integration process. Moreover, we theorize about how acquisition-restructuring cycles evolve as firms gain acquisition and restructuring experience. We tested our theory using panel data on firms undertaking almost 1,600 acquisitions over four decades. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/13559/ 2008-06-01T00:00:00Z How do firms learn to successfully acquire other firms? The authors first review early work, mostly from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, testing the learning curve perspective on acquisitions and exploring some contingencies. They then discuss three more recent streams of research on negative experience transfer, deliberate learning mechanisms, and learning from others, which provide deeper insight into the contingencies and mechanisms of organizational learning in strategic settings such as acquisitions. The article concludes with an agenda for future research. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12836/ 2007-12-01T00:00:00Z We argue that companies may enter foreign environments either incrementally, as suggested by long-established theory, or by taking larger steps that may result in lower initial performance but, through learning and experience, lead to increased performance in future expansions. This idea is corroborated by the experience of Dutch companies entering into Central and Eastern Europe. We also find that expansion steps may be too large, thereby limiting the exploration of foreign environments. Our study suggests that sequential internationalisation strategies do still matter, and that companies have to balance exploitation and exploration in internationalisation. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12837/ 2007-12-01T00:00:00Z We argue that firms engaged in international acquisitions can benefit from foreign acquisition, domestic acquisition, and international joint venture experiences, but that their learning process is prone to biases. Only once companies learn what part of their knowledge about national cultures and entry modes can successfully be applied to new settings will they become truly successful abroad, in terms of both the rate and the frequency of their foreign acquisitions. The hypotheses were tested using negative binomial regression and hazard rate models on data on 1038 foreign acquisitions of 25 firms over a period of more than three decades. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12835/ 2007-07-01T00:00:00Z Prior research suggests that top management team (TMT) diversity increases strategic innovation. We extended this argument to the case of entering new geographic areas. In addition to exploring the cognitive implications of TMT diversity, as done in prior research, we explored when diversity may lead to the formation of subgroups within TMTs hampering communication and the propensity to enter new geographic areas. We also examined how these positive cognitive and negative social implications change over time as TMT members interact over the years. The hypotheses were tested using ordinal probit analysis and data on 2,159 expansions of 25 companies over a period of more than three decades. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12819/ 2002-07-01T00:00:00Z Many potential benefits of foreign expansion have been identified in the literature, yet empirical support that multinational firms perform better than domestic firms is mixed. This paper takes a longitudinal perspective and argues that how much a firm benefits from having foreign subsidiaries depends on its process of internationalization. We argue that a firm's capacity to absorb expansion is subject to constraints: some expansion patterns increase profitability less than others, owing to diseconomies of time compression. We hypothesize that the speed of internationalization, the spread of the geographical and product markets entered, and the irregularity of the expansion pattern negatively moderate a firm's increase in profitability resulting from international expansion. Model estimations based on panel data raised strong support for these predictions. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12818/ 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z As the year 2000 approached, so too did the years 5760, 2544, and 1420, according to the Jewish, Buddhist, and Moslem dating systems, respectively. Still, the coming of the year 2000 held meaning for most Western societies, serving as an opportunity for broader speculation about the new millennium and the 21st century. In the field of management, cycles of boom and bust in Asia had called into question new ways of organizing hailed in the 1980s, and questions and concerns mounted about inadequacies of 20th century views of business firms. Opinions were astonishingly diverse and often contradictory, but the central theme was change--dramatic change--and the idea that, to cope with it, managers ought to strategize anew and shape and reshape their firms. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12821/ 2001-01-01T00:00:00Z Research on acquisitions has typically focused on acquisitions per se, examining issues such as performance and implementation problems. This study moves beyond that perspective and studies the influence on a firm's later expansions. The authors argue that exploitation of a firm's knowledge base through 'greenfields' eventually makes a firm simple and inert. In contrast, acquisitions may broaden a firm's knowledge base and decrease inertia, enhancing the viability of its later ventures. Over time, firms strike a balance between the use of greenfields and acquisitions. Various implications of this theory--tested with survival analysis and 'logit' models--were strongly corroborated. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12822/ 1998-01-01T00:00:00Z The objective of this article is to assess the influence of variables over which suppliers have control (supply-side variables) on the adoption of innovations in addition to adopter-side variables. The empirical study focused on the adoption of electronic banking in the Dutch business market. A quantitative study was conducted to test hypotheses. The results show that the extent to which a supplier has pursued a strategy aimed at positioning the innovation in the marketplace or has focused on reducing the risk of adoption has a positive and significant effect on the probability of innovation adoption. The evidence corroborates that not only adopter-side variables significantly influence innovation, but supply-side variables as well. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12824/ 1998-01-01T00:00:00Z This study brings a fresh approach--a learning perspective--to the literature examining whether firms expand internationally through start-ups or acquisitions. Hypotheses concern how this strategic choice is influenced by a firm's multinational diversity and product diversity. The results show that multinational diversity leads to foreign start-ups rather than acquisitions. Product diversity has a curvilinear effect on the tendency to use start-ups. The curvilinear effect becomes weaker at higher levels of multinational diversity. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12825/ 1998-01-01T00:00:00Z A tremendous amount of research has explored the relationship between managerial pay and firm performance. The authors argue that this research has generally been limited because it ignores other criteria that can be used to determine managerial pay, as well as the influence of a firm's governance structure and various contingencies. The authors' analysis leads to a general framework for research on executive pay. This framework is used to evaluate the present state of research in this field and the contribution of the six papers in this special research forum, and to identify directions for further research. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12828/ 1998-01-01T00:00:00Z Examines variations in executive pay as a function of chief executive officer (CEO) power. Assumption that CEO optimize their pay conditional upon their ability to shape decisions that favor their interests; Inference of power from overt manifestations and covert sources; Variables that magnify or moderate the effect of equity holdings on compensation. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12829/ 1997-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12830/ 1997-01-01T00:00:00Z An international joint venture implies that a firm has to cooperate with a partner with a different cultural background. In this study, hypotheses about which differences in national culture are most disruptive for international joint ventures were developed and tested using Hofstede's five dimensions. The study focused on how these dimensions affect the survival of international joint ventures, as well as their incidence relative to wholly owned subsidiaries. The hypotheses were tested on longitudinal data about 828 foreign entries of twenty-five Dutch multinationals in seventy-two countries between 1966 and 1994. The database, which spans almost three decades, was also used to provide new evidence on a key assumption of Hofstede's work: that cultural values are stable over time. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12832/ 1997-01-01T00:00:00Z Successful international joint ventures entail both learning to operate across national boundaries and learning to cooperate. Hypotheses grounded in organizational learning theory were tested with event-history analysis and data on 1,493 expansions of 25 large Dutch firms between 1966 and 1994. Experience with domestic joint ventures and with international wholly owned subsidiaries contributed to the longevity of international joint ventures, but prior experience with international joint ventures did not. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12833/ 1996-01-01T00:00:00Z This paper examines the longevity of foreign entries. Hypotheses are developed on the mode (start-ups vs. acquisitions) and ownership structure (wholly owned vs. joint ventures) in relation to cultural distance. The hypotheses are tested within a framework of organizational learning, using data on 225 entries that 13 Dutch firms carried out from 1966 onwards. Results show that the presence of cultural barriers punctuates an organization's learning. Cultural distance is a prominent factor in foreign entry whenever this involves another firm, requiring the firm to engage in double layered acculturation. We also identify locational paths of learning. The longevity of acquisitions is positively influenced by prior entries of the firm in the same country. Similarly, the longevity of foreign entries, in which the firm has a majority stake, improves whenever the expanding firm engaged in prior entries in the same country and in other countries in the same cultural block. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12846/ 1995-01-01T00:00:00Z Explores whether eclectic theory leads to better predictions about internal control systems in corporations than does principal-agency theory. Ability of eclectic theory to explain various puzzles for principal-agent theory; Test of hypotheses on the use and effects of monitoring in hierarchies; Study of whether top managers work harder when they are monitored. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12847/ 1995-01-01T00:00:00Z De agency-theorie kan vele eigenschappen van de interne organisatie van ondernemingen goed voorspellen. Toch gebrniken grote ondernemingen minder financiële prikkels om hun managers te motiveren, dan volgens deze theorie is aan te bevelen. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12834/ 1994-01-01T00:00:00Z Employing concepts of lateral and longitudinal learning, we examined the dissolution of 462 expansions of Dutch firms, both acquisitions and new ventures. We interpreted the endurance of an expansion as reflecting success. Results show that expansions were more persistent when related to a firm's core skills, fully owned, and the result of acquisition rather than internal development. Expansions were also likely to last longer if a firm's prior diversification activity level was high. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12848/ 1993-01-01T00:00:00Z De samenstelling van de beloningsmix is een van de weinige instrumenten waarmee de Raad van Commissarissen topmanagers kan sturen in de richting van een gewenste ondernemingsstrategie. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12850/ 1992-01-01T00:00:00Z De fusie tussen Nationale Nederlanden en de NMB-Postbank Groep, die vorigjaar zijn beslag kreeg, heeftper saldo geen waarde gecreeerd. Een analyse van de aandelenkoersen leert dat de beleggers in Nationale Nederlanden f 1 mrd. hebben verloren, terwijl de beleggers in de NMB Postbank Groep f 1 mrd. hebben gewonnen. De liberalisering van bet zogenaamde structuurbeleidper 1 januari 1990, waardoorfusies tussen banken en verzekeringsmaatschappijen mogelijk werden, heeft in bet specifieke geval van de fusie NN-NMBPG niet tot welvaartsverhoging geleid. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/12866/ 1984-01-01T00:00:00Z In het enkele maanden geleden verschenen rapport Zelfbeheer worden mogelijkheden besproken om te komen tot een meer bedrijfsmatige organisatie van de rijksdienst. Een van de mogelijkheden die worden geopperd, behelst wijziging van de beloningsstructuur van ambtenaren. Een andere aanbeveling betreft het concentreren van specifieke overheidstaken binnen meer zelfstandig opererende organisatorische eenheden. In dit artikel worden deze voorstellen besproken aan de hand van de z.g. ,,agency"-theorie, een betrekkelijk nieuwe ontwikkeling binnen de economische wetenschap. Deze theorie levert belangrijke inzichten in de problematiek van de optimale organisatieen beloningsstructuur. Daardoor biedt zij een goed kader voor het beoordelen van de genoemde voorstellen uit het rapport Zelfbeheer.