Karynne Turner, Cynthia Miree and Addington Coppin
The purpose of this article is to highlight manufacturing challenges faced by firms and present a framework that can be used to guide managers on the benefits and risks of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to highlight manufacturing challenges faced by firms and present a framework that can be used to guide managers on the benefits and risks of balancing between social and human capital to address firm goals and outcomes related to quality or productivity.
Design/methodology/approach
The article provides a brief review of the literature and provides guidance to managers on how to best align human and social capital with the firm's strategic orientation.
Findings
Firms must balance their investments in the development and leveraging of their employees' human and social capital for maximum impact on the firm's strategic goals.
Originality/value
As more manufacturing jobs continue to return to the US, firms will need to learn or re(learn) how to best prepare and leverage their workforce to support the firm's overall strategic goals. This article provides managers with an intuitive conceptual framework for making those decisions.
Details
Keywords
Karynne Turner, Mona Makhija and Cynthia Miree
The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the relationship between individuals’ shared core knowledge within a firm and a collective understanding of management’s…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the relationship between individuals’ shared core knowledge within a firm and a collective understanding of management’s strategic priorities.
Design/methodology/approach
The study develops three sets of competing hypotheses to predict how three different aspects of individuals’ shared core knowledge – extent, diversity and interpretation – are related to their understanding of the organization’s strategic priorities. The hypotheses are tested using a cognitive mapping approach within the context of a manufacturing plant in the USA.
Findings
Organizational members with a lower proportion of shared core knowledge exhibit a greater appreciation of the firm’s strategic priorities. More diversity in this shared knowledge is associated with a greater appreciation of strategic priorities and when members agree on the relative importance of different types of knowledge, whether they actually share this knowledge, they have a better understanding of the firm’s strategic priorities.
Research limitations/implications
The study uses data from a single firm in one industry.
Originality/value
This research helps to highlight and empirically isolate different aspects of shared knowledge that influence individuals’ understanding of organizational priorities. It also demonstrates the varying importance of different aspects of shared knowledge (e.g. extent, diversity and interpretation in explaining individuals’ understanding of the firm’s strategic priorities.
Details
Keywords
Kenneth M. York and Cynthia E. Miree
The purpose of this paper is to measure the effect of the National Hockey League (NHL) collective bargaining agreement (CBA) of 2005 between the NHL owners and the NHL Players…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to measure the effect of the National Hockey League (NHL) collective bargaining agreement (CBA) of 2005 between the NHL owners and the NHL Players Association, to determine whether competitive balance in the NHL increased after the CBA.
Design/methodology/approach
Competitive balance in the NHL was compared between 11 seasons before the NHL Lockout Season in 2004-2005 and 11 seasons after, with a new CBA and a new revenue sharing plan. Competitive balance was measured in multiple ways, within seasons, across multiple seasons, by the margin of victory in individual games, by the concentration of teams winning and playing in the NHL championship, in the correlation of winning percentage of a season with subsequent seasons, and the number of consecutive winning or losing seasons.
Findings
There was greater competitive balance after the Lockout Season and the new CBA than before on all of the measures of competitive balance. The NHL has found a management solution to the effective management of a common pool resource and avoided a tragedy of the commons.
Practical implications
While this research builds on previous work which examines the presence of competitive balance in the NHL, it encourages those engaged in labor policy to consider not only the merit of design when negotiating labor policy, but also to explore the impact of policy on organizational outcomes over time.
Originality/value
This paper combines perspectives and insights from multiple disciplines including economists’ ideas about competitive balance in a sports league, ecologists’ ideas about effective management of a common pool resource, and strategic management ideas about management solutions to a sustainability problem.
Details
Keywords
Jaemin Kim, Michael Greiner and Cynthia Miree
In competitive environments, explicitly seeking institutional changes to adopt a new technology, rather than exploiting current resources, can harm more than help organizations’…
Abstract
Purpose
In competitive environments, explicitly seeking institutional changes to adopt a new technology, rather than exploiting current resources, can harm more than help organizations’ efforts to achieve their performance goals. However, institutionally embedded organizations often respond to the introduction of industry disruptive technology in counterproductive ways. This paper aims to study the paradox of embedded agency in competitive environments and explore the diffusion of new occupations associated with data analytics.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses the context of the Major League Baseball where the digital platform, PITCHf/x, implemented during 2006 and 2007 seasons facilitated the professional baseball clubs to create occupations for data analytics.
Findings
This study found that long-term low performance of organizations resulted in creating occupations for a new technology and deploying professionals to them and the public media’s negative tenor mediated the relationship between the signal of institutional inefficiency and such a boundary work in a competitive environment.
Originality/value
This research enriches our understanding of the early disperse of a new occupation in the times of the emergence of digital platform by exploring the temporal attributes of organizational performance and the role of public media as the antecedents to embedded agency.