Browsing by Subject "Organizational adaptation"
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Item Organizational exploration and exploitation in high-tech industries: Magnitude, balance and strategic consistency(2011-08) Moss, Todd; Payne, Tyge; Short, Jeremy C.; Brigham, Keith H.; Wan, William P.; Wilcox, James B.There is wide-spread scholarly agreement that exploration and exploitation (E/E) have emerged as the foundational strategic perspective in organizational adaptation research. The growth in interest in this research stream has been accompanied by multiple theoretical perspectives that provide different explanations about how these phenomena impact firm performance. Drawing from research on dominant logic, strategic orientations, and upper echelon theory, I explicitly integrate time into the logics that relate E/E to firm performance through the use of strategic consistency. I propose that strategic consistency is a key dimension of E/E that complements the previously-studied dimensions of magnitude and balance. To advance knowledge regarding E/E, I examine these two dimensions in four different industries, each representing high and low levels of environmental munificence and dynamism. I utilize organizational narratives to assess a firm’s strategic emphasis on E/E over time, namely management discussion and analysis sections from 10(k) reports. I analyze these narratives using computer-assisted textual analysis and panel regression over distinct blocks of time, rather than yearly cross-sections, to gauge the consistency of a firm’s E/E strategy, and its effect on firm performance. I make five distinct contributions in this dissertation. First, through a comprehensive literature review I underscore specific areas that are underrepresented in E/E research through an analysis of how this research stream has developed over time. I also highlight future research opportunities relevant to the strategy and entrepreneurship literatures by suggesting specific management theories that have yet to be fully utilized in exploration and exploitation research. Second, I examine the role of consistency of a firm’s E/E strategy to assess how firm strategy evolves over time. Third, I extend recent work on E/E by examining how strategic consistency interacts with a firm’s E/E magnitude and balance. Fourth, I examine how the relationship between E/E dimensions is affected by environmental factors such as munificence and dynamism, thereby providing the first study which shows how these moderators affect the relationship of strategic consistency in E/E, and performance over time. Finally, I examine the effects of E/E magnitude, balance, and strategic consistency, and their environmental moderators, on multiple measures of firm performance. Doing so provides a level of granularity to the results that is unique to this research stream, because it shows how the results are similar or different across these multiple performance variables for each hypothesis. The results from this dissertation generally supported the hypothesized relationships for the four industries as a whole. The main effects of balance, magnitude, and strategic consistency were all positively related to performance. Interactions of these variables were frequently opposite the hypothesized direction, while interactions of the main effects with munificence and dynamism supported the hypotheses more often than not. Post hoc analyses revealed that some findings were robust to the time period sampled, as well as to individual industries.