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Gives a basic understanding of what could be done to increase teamwork to benefit an organization. In researching the significance of teamwork and the problems teams confront in the business arena, provides a better understanding of how team building fits into the future of successful businesses. By focusing on different tools and techniques, develops an insight on the approaches that can be taken to reach this important cohesion. Through corporate examples, examines the results of the variety of approaches discussed. Through these day‐to‐day business events, provides a visual perception of the important contribution that increased teamwork can provide. Contends that, as we move through the present business climate, efficient and effective teamwork is the recommended approach to achieve and maintain a successful business.

This study of a market-leader in a turbulent hostile telecommunications market uncovers how the competitive context influences strategy-making and cultivates central control that opposes autonomous initiatives. It shows how a highly competitive industry context reduces organizational slack that inhibits autonomy and drives central actions. Strategic initiatives primarily arise as deliberate actions induced by top management. This creates an information gap between ongoing experiences gained by employees operating in the periphery of the organization and the perceptions of decision-makers at the corporate center. In this organizational setting, the authors observe maverick behavior among entrepreneurial individuals that deliberately circumvent the formal rules to turn autonomous initiatives into viable strategic ventures in the best interest of the firm. Where conventional views presume that power delegation and organizational slack are necessary for autonomous strategic initiatives to emerge, the authors find that central control can provoke autonomous rule-breaking maverick behavior among resource-deprived entrepreneurial individuals inside the organization.

Strategy scholars have long argued that breakthrough innovation is generated by recombining knowledge from distant domains. Even if firms have the ability to access and absorb knowledge from distant domains, however, they may fail to pay attention to such knowledge because it is seemingly irrelevant to their tasks. We draw attention to this problem of knowledge relevance and develop a theoretical model to illuminate how ideas from seemingly irrelevant (i.e., peripheral) domains can generate breakthrough innovation through the cognitive process of analogical reasoning, as well as the conditions under which this is more likely to occur. We situate our theoretical model in the context of teams in order to develop insight into the microfoundations of knowledge recombination within firms. Our model reveals paradoxical requirements for teams that help to explain why breakthrough innovation is so difficult.

To date, the validity of the empirical tests that employ the mean‐variance approach for testing the risk‐return relationship in the research stream named Bowman’s paradox is inherently unverifiable, and the results cannot be generalized. However, this problem can be solved by developing an econometric model with two fundamental characteristics: first, the use of a time‐series model for each firm, avoiding the traditional cross‐sectional analysis; and, second, the estimation of a model with a single variable (firm’s rate of return), whose expectation and variance are mathematically related according to behavioral theories, forming a heteroskedastic model similar to GARCH (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity). The application of this methodology for Bowman’s paradox is new, and its main advantage is that it solves the previous criticism of the lack of identification. With this model, we achieve results that agree with behavioral theories and show that these theories can also be carried out with market measures.

This paper explores the adoption of a relationship marketing paradigm by the National Basketball Association. A contextualist framework was used to explore the context, content and processes of this change that evolved over a 17-year time period. Personal interviews were conducted with leaders of this league and over 80 documents were reviewed and content analyzed. The results of this study provide insights into relationship marketing and organizational change for sport managers.

In a contribution to the emerging research examining Chinese cross-border acquisitions (CBAs), the authors observe experiential learning applications for enhancing M&A completions. By emphasizing knowledge transfer, the authors reveal how target-to-target industry similarity and bidder-to-target cultural distance affect learning outcomes.

Using a binary logistic regression model, the authors examine a sample of CBA attempts announced by Chinese companies from January 2002 to December 2012 to identify the variables that affect the completion of CBAs.

The authors find that foreign acquisition experience but not domestic acquisition experience enhances subsequent acquisition attempts, especially when prior and focal target companies share the dominant industrial logic. Learning transfer is negatively affected when target countries are more culturally distant from China, but learning benefits appear to increase under strong bidder-to-target cultural distance.

By investigating learning in the precompletion stage in Chinese outward CBAs, the authors complement research that uses postacquisition performance to assess learning. The authors’ more fine-grained characterization reveals that acquisition experience increases knowledge transfer through experiential learning. Furthermore, the authors show that dominant industrial logic and cultural distance are underexplored contextual conditions, although they interact with foreign and domestic experience to affect the completion of CBAs.

Narrative criminology has continued to expand as an important theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of crime and justice. However, the vast majority of narrative work focuses on the narrative development of those identified as criminal offenders, and little research has explored the narratives of those employed within the criminal justice system. This chapter examines the importance of police storytelling and the unique narratives vital to the cultural life and institution of policing. Police stories are an important part of the ‘meaning-making structure’ in policing and often convey particular power well beyond the limitations of formal organizational or agency policy. Police stories frequently influence understandings of the nature of social problems; community change and decay; and even understandings of race, class, and gender. Police narratives and stories also offer some unique methodological challenges for narrative scholars. Analysis of police stories must focus on the underlying plot details while still analysing the themes or metaphors provided by the narrative. This may require specific attention to the role the story plays in police culture, training, and development of organizational cohesion. Furthermore, narrative researchers must explore the shared narratives distinctive to the profession, while still examining unique meanings that stories convey to different departments and even specialized units. Finally, access to police organizations and individual officers can represent unique challenge for narrative researchers. By examining police narratives, we gain unique insight into the production and maintenance of police authority and culture accomplished through the storytelling process.

The aim of this study is to explore the drivers of supply and demand for attention in the managerial context, and develop a framework of managerial tools for allocating attention to various competing demands.

Deliberative attention refers to the application of attention to prolonged reflection and consideration of problems where routine approaches are insufficient. Drawing on theories of cognitive and structural constraints to the allocation of attention among competing stimuli, the paper investigates how managers match the strategic demands for deliberative attention and the supply available to individuals in their firms. This is used to develop a model of factors influencing the matching of supply and demand.

The paper uses this model to recommend specific strategies for explicitly managing deliberative attention and to categorize the appropriate application of a range of existing strategic management tools based on the nature and inherent uncertainty of the organizational problem being faced.

The model suggests that a primary strategic task of top managers is the appropriate management of attention within the firm. Understanding attention as a firm resource to be appropriately and deliberately managed helps to advance theoretical understanding of the human side of valuable resources in the firm. Such knowledge may also help practitioners to be more cognizant of their investments of valuable attention resources.

This is one of the first studies to treat attention as a scarce and valuable firm resource to be managed, and to use this as the foundation for more appropriate application of a wide range of current management techniques.

Superstars, or prominent managers who are responsible for strategic external relationships, are a resource for domestic firms and multinational corporations (MNCs). Theory suggests that MNCs employ superstars to manage organizational legitimacy and offer greater compensation and promotion potential. Domestic firms may employ superstars to enhance their organizational identity and offer them status and a supportive organizational environment. Empirical analysis of 411 advertising agencies in the U.S. and 239 superstars in advertising suggests that domestic agencies have a slight but statistically significant advantage in attracting and retaining superstars relative to MNCs. The strategic implications for domestic firms and MNCs are discussed.