Search results

Performance feedback theory (PFT) has informed analyses in numerous national contexts and has been used to explain various business and management activities of firms. Stemming from behavioral theory and grounded in a cognitive perspective, which views organizational actions as being the results of decisions produced by groups of individual decision-makers, PFT research has mostly assumed the universal nature of cognition and decision-making processes. However, PFT also presumes that individual decision-makers bring with them different backgrounds and experiences. Hence, this paper offers propositions on how cultural differences in individualism-collectivism influence the major components of PFT, including the formation and revision of performance goals (aspiration levels), and search behaviors and risk preferences in response to gaps between goals and actual performance. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

This paper offers theoretical propositions for the above purpose.

This is not an empirical analysis.

By integrating the individualism-collectivism differences framework into the PFT model, the authors answer previous calls to integrate concepts and frameworks from other theories into PFT while considering the role of cultural differences in aspiration-consequence relationships. Additionally, much of PFT research has focused on outcomes, while actual internal processes have remained unobserved. By focusing on how cultural differences influence various PFT processes, this conceptual analysis sheds light on the unobserved bounds of decision-makers' cognitions.

This study examines how executive directors of family business centers deploy sensemaking to create psychologically safe environments while engaging members in peer group activities.

A qualitative case study approach was employed, involving semi-structured interviews with five executive directors from four different family business centers in the USA. The study also draws on document analysis.

The findings reveal that these directors navigate a complex and uncertain environment where the need for member engagement and the need for a safe environment sometimes contradict each other. Their sensemaking draws on both cognitive and social processes to accomplish meaning-making, often involving a cyclical process of noticing, discernment and enactment. This effort is, at times, constrained by the directors’ inability to gather cues due to their commitment to maintaining confidentiality and privacy within peer groups, limiting their ability to directly observe discussions. Despite this constraint, sensemaking enhances the directors’ capability to foster safe and engaging environments, though the challenge of balancing members’ needs for confidentiality with a safe and productive engagement environment remains a continuous reality.

This study highlights the crucial role of sensemaking leadership in family business networks, requiring directors to balance individual and group needs. Leadership development should focus on enhancing this sensemaking ability. Family business centers must be designed with flexibility and adaptability to accommodate evolving needs. This involves attentive observation, balanced programs, psychological safety and continuous learning. These findings extend to any peer group requiring high trust, emphasizing the leader’s role in creating a safe and engaging environment that balances individual needs with collective goals.

This study makes several original contributions to the literature. First, it extends existing knowledge on sensemaking by exploring its application in a previously under-researched context: how executive directors navigate complexity and uncertainty within family business networks. Second, it examines how sensemaking informs the ongoing challenge of balancing peer groups’ need for a safe engagement environment with the need for productive engagement, an area that has not been explicitly addressed in prior research. By shedding light on these under-explored aspects of sensemaking, this study offers valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners involved in family business networks and peer group management.

Showing that the contribution of innovation spaces to the development of collaborative innovation projects remains ambiguous for both independent innovation spaces and those run by large organizations, this research proposes to highlight the essential role of boundary spanners to make such projects emerge from innovation spaces.

This research is based on a multicase study of four innovation spaces in French healthcare ecosystems. Distinguishing between independent innovation spaces and innovation spaces run by large organizations, this research provides an in-depth analysis of the emergence of collaborative innovation thanks to the presence of boundary spanners.

Through a qualitative study, this research shows that managers of innovation spaces are the keystone to understanding how new collaborative practices are experimented in innovation spaces. It also shows that boundary spanners can be a team rather than a single individual. They endorse network builder, mediator, and entrepreneur roles and their actions go beyond the innovation spaces boundaries. They mobilize the innovation space dimension to enhance collaborations that are resilient over time and take also place outside innovation space. The boundary spanners’ role exists as much in independent innovation spaces as in innovation spaces managed by large organizations, but in somewhat different ways.

This article clarifies how innovation space support collaborative innovation by explaining the contribution of individuals who act as boundary spanners in this process. The contributions are threefold. First, the managers of the IS endorse the role of boundary spanner, but they do not act alone. Other actors contribute as boundary spanners for the emergence and/or the experimentation of new collaborative practices. Second, they mobilize IS to encourage collaborative projects among people coming from different organizations, but the modalities vary between independent IS and those run by large organization. However, both contribute to the development of new resilient capabilities thanks to the action of boundary spanners. Third, the network-building function of the boundary spanners goes beyond the development of connections within the physical space of the innovation space.

Exploring the “How?” and “Why?” of children’s agency through the employment of strategies to listen and to participate within parent interviews, this chapter addresses various “agency routes” children used in the effort to contribute their voices to adult conversations. The generational relationship between children and parents is tempered by children’s ownership claims to shared spaces within the home, which allowed them the room to defy parents’ directives to “Go Away!” Children utilized three different tactics of defiance (overt, quiet, and covert) in the attempt to listen and be heard, and in the process were motivated to participate in five distinct ways, which included: (1) informative, (2) corrective, (3) instructive, (4) investigative, and (5) expressive participation. Concluding with a call to recognize children’s voices as more than merely “background noise” when transcribing interviews, I encourage researchers in childhood studies to potentially revisit data collected in the effort to further theorize children’s agency as situated within generationality, contributing to a recontextualized framework of analysis.

Health care ecosystems instantiate different innovation trajectories, driven either by science-/techno-push or user-centric rationales. This article focuses on organization intermediaries (OIs), respectively, active in health care ecosystems driven by science- and techno-push versus user-centric innovation processes; it aims at characterizing their operation and intervention modes. The analysis elaborates on network and content brokerage. Innovation also needs to consider various challenges associated with physical vicinity. The authors check whether territorial anchoring plays a role in brokerage, depending on the innovation model.

The article offers an investigation of eight French organizations matching the definition of OIs and active in different areas of health care-related innovation. It follows a qualitative and abductive research protocol adhering to the precepts of grounded theory.

First, the authors show that content and network brokerage specialize in specific activities in each innovation model. On network brokerage, the authors show that OIs foster the development of communities of practice in the science-/techno-push model, while they nurture communities of innovation in the user-centric model. Services materializing content brokerage are typical consequences of activities performed in each model. The second contribution deals with physical vicinity. In the science-/techno-push model, OIs install a physical space (the “internal” dimension) to support the development of communities of practice, while the “external” dimension copes with agglomeration effects. In the user-centric model, OIs deliver services thanks to the “internal” space; communities of innovation create a leverage effect on the physical space to operate their activities that are supported by “external” network effects.

The originality of the article lies in the description of the alternative roles plaid by organization intermediaries in the science-/techno-push versus user-centric approaches of innovation. In these two approaches, (contents and network) brokerage and physical vicinity play different roles.