Researchers have advocated various perspectives on the relationship between strategic consistency and organizational performance. This inconclusive debate has created an inadequate theoretical foundation in strategic consistency literature. Therefore, the present study uses strategic planning, strategic change, upper echelons theory, and other literature as the theoretical foundation to empirically examine the moderating roles of organizational slack, environmental dynamism, and top management team attributes in the relationship between strategic consistency and organizational performance. Using 439 electronics companies in the Taiwanese stock market as sample data, the empirical results show that organizational slack, environmental dynamism, top management team tenure, and top management team tenure heterogeneity moderate the relationship between strategic consistency and organizational performance.

This paper explores whether top management teams’ (TMTs) knowledge and experience are significant predictors of a firm’s strategic decisions and organization outcomes. The existing research throws little light on how firms with limited resources embedded in TMTs, particularly in emerging markets, innovate and achieve success in foreign countries. We focus on the impact of TMTs’ functional background heterogeneity and international experience on innovation and internationalization, as well as examine the relationship between innovation, internationalization and performance. The proposed relationships are empirically investigated in a sample of Taiwanese-listed companies operating in the electronics industry. The results demonstrate a positive association between a TMT’s functional background heterogeneity and a firm’s innovation. Moreover, a TMT’s international experience relates positively to a firm’s innovation and internationalization, therefore firms with a higher level of innovation achieve a higher level of internationalization.

Firms not only combine resources within firm boundaries but tap into, acquire, or consolidate resources outside firm boundaries. Alliances and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are distinct vehicles for governing inter-firm resource combinations. Prior studies on the governance choice between them have relied on firm- or dyad-level attributes to explicate the choice firms make about the governance. However, any firm or dyad is a micro-structure embedded in networks that shape the flow of information and resources to the focal firm or dyad. In addition, although alliances and mergers and acquisitions involve either horizontal or vertical resource combinations, the vertical dimension of resource relatedness has been largely neglected in prior research. This study examines the impact of structural embeddedness and vertical resource relatedness on governance choice. We find that structural embeddedness is an important driver of governance choice and that a significant portion of resource combinations occurs along the vertical dimension of relatedness.

This study estimated and specified a model of corporate reputation, its social performance, and firm-level variables in the context of an emerging country. Corporate reputation is the overall estimation of a firm by its stakeholders expressed by the demonstrative behaviors to its customers, employees, investors, business partners, and general public. The social performance of the firm has been conceptualized in terms of its demonstrative responsible behavior toward community, environment, and employees. Organizational variability has been captured in this study through the representation of firms from various industries as the relationship between corporate reputation and firm’s social performance was contingent on the type of industry and expectation of industry-specific stakeholders relevant to the firm. Data were collected from 220 organizations representing 11 different industry verticals. The findings supported that corporate reputation is determined by the conjoint influence of a host of firm specific as well as its social performance factors. In addition, the reputational effect of firm’s social performance was found to vary both across and within sectors, according to the various types of social performance activities the firm was engaged in. This study demonstrated the comprehensive measures of the firm’s reputation, social performance, and the associative relationship between them conditioned by firm-specific attributes and nature of the industry. The study has far reaching implications in terms of managing the firm’s boundary spanning activities and relationships in the perspective of emerging markets.

This article reports on a case study of a decade-long organizing forms response to the need for groundbreaking innovation while maintaining existing operational performance – the explore–exploit conundrum. Employing ‘grounded research,’ data were collected on the experiences of the Asia-Pacific arm of a multinational professional service firm’s key decision-makers, innovators and entrepreneurs. The findings reveal a three-tiered organizing forms response to the explore–exploit paradox, characterized by a novel combination of heavy exploitation-driven actions alongside deep exploration projects. This case suggests that one successful approach to delivering on both explore and exploit focuses on a productive tension that emerges by enacting innovative organizing forms with contextual awareness. This productive tension was sufficiently powerful to impel individuals to innovate, but also sufficiently contained to avoid interfering with commercial outcomes. An explore–exploit framework conceptualizes organizational changes incorporating complexity and contradiction, without the implicit emphasis on removing or denying the existing tension.

Firms are continually trying to identify innovation sources in order to improve organizational performance, but the identification of such origins is a complex and poorly understood issue, particularly as far as nonprofit firms are concerned. The social and cooperative agrifood arrangement has become one of the main and newest types of nonprofit organization in China since the implementation of the law related to specialized cooperatives, on July 1, 2007. In this research, a conceptual model is proposed to show that the characteristics of innovative sources can determine a firm’s absorptive capacity, which in turn can impact its performance. Therefore, absorptive capacity can be expected to enable the mediation of the relationships of innovative sources with the performance of firms. By means of theoretical analysis and practical investigation, this paper provides an assessment of the use of innovation sources and finds critical factors that may foster competitive and sustainable advantages.