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The aim of this paper is to address both the socio-moral climate and how teams process debate and decision comprehensiveness as pre-conditions for team innovation.

A total of 67 teams comprising 413 participants were surveyed. Data were analyzed with a multiple-step multiple-mediation procedure.

The socio-moral climate was positively related to innovation. The positive relation between the socio-moral climate and innovation was mediated stepwise through debate and decision comprehensiveness.

To overcome the limitations of a cross-sectional design, future research opportunities exist in the longitudinal evaluation of participatory socio-moral climates and comparisons between organizations. Debate and decision comprehensiveness can be further studied using behavior-based methodological designs, such as observation.

From this study, practitioners can learn of the needs and opportunities for participative approaches when managing innovation in teams. Promoting a socio-moral climate of cooperation, communication, openness, appreciation, trust and respect and leaving open the possibility that debating can help integrative decision comprehensiveness and thus innovation.

This paper expands the literature on organizational climate, debate, decision comprehensiveness, and innovation. On the one hand, the results empirically linked the socio-moral climate, a theoretically well-founded climate construct, to process variables. On the other hand, the literature on debate and decision comprehensiveness was expanded by adding the socio-moral climate as a pre-condition of debate and decision comprehensiveness. Furthermore, both were linked to a crucial outcome variable, innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to present the state-of-the-art in empirical research on constructive controversy in the context of business organizations and to outline strategic implications both for research and practical application.

Literature search on constructive controversy in relevant databases identified 33 empirical publications from 1980 to 2009. The paper analyzes and summarizes characteristics of the studies, methodological approaches, and empirical findings.

The literature review reveals that most studies are conducted in the industrial and service sector. Authors mostly apply a quantitative approach using interviews, experiments, and surveys. Empirical findings show that constructive controversy supports decision making, learning, interpersonal relationships, and productivity. In most cases goal interdependence is taken as independent variable.

There is a need for further consolidating the findings either by experimental verification or by field studies. A processual and longitudinal approach should be emphasized and the methodical repertory should be expanded by applying qualitative methods like observation. There is a need for expanding the scope of constructs and analyzing post-modern collaboration forms. Linking controversy to organizational processes like organizational learning would lead to a deeper understanding of innovation processes in organizations.

The implementation of the controversy procedure can support organizational processes like decision making, problem solving, learning, and innovation. This offers opportunities to expand the research field.

This article provides a systematic review on constructive controversy in the business context for the first time.

The pivotal role of knowledge management (KM) and its extensive implications have been debated in the academic literature with insufficient focus on its link to particular organizational control mechanisms such as performance measurement systems (PMS). To bridge this gap and building on resource orchestration theory, this paper aims to investigate the relationships between KM factors, PMS and corporate performance.

Based on a survey data set of 92 listed companies in Iran, the framework and hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) based on partial least squares (PLS).

The SEM-PLS results indicate that knowledge assets are significantly associated with both PMS and corporate performance while knowledge process capabilities (KPC) are not significantly associated with PMS and corporate performance. This study also shows that PMS mediates the relationship between knowledge assets and corporate performance.

The results suggest that the use of appropriate management control systems plays an effective role in synchronizing, aligning and orchestrating a company’s various knowledge resources, which, in turn, can lead to superior overall performance.

Building on a unique synthesis of resource orchestration theory and the knowledge-based view of the firm, the results of this study provide the first empirical evidence on how PMS intervenes in the relationship between knowledge resources (knowledge assets and KPC) and corporate performance.