Organizations and Markets

Two New Papers …

24 July 2011 at 10:10 am Nicolai Foss 1 comment

| Nicolai Foss |

… by Yours Truly. The Academy of Management Review just published my paper with Siegwart Lindenberg, “Managing Joint Production Motivation: The Role of Goal Framing and Governance Mechanisms,” and Organization Science just published “Linking Customer Interaction and Innovation: The Mediating Role of New Organizational Practices,” by me, Keld Laursen and Torben Pedersen.  Here are the abstracts:

“Managing Joint Production Motivation: The Role of Goal Framing and Governance Mechanisms”

We contribute to the microfoundations of organizational performance by proffering the construct of joint production motivation. Under such motivational conditions individuals see themselves as part of a joint endeavor, each with their own roles and responsibilities, generate shared representations of actions and tasks, cognitively coordinate cooperation, and choose their own behaviors in terms of joint goals. Using goal-framing theory, we explain how motivation for joint production can be managed by cognitive/symbolic management and organizational design.

“Linking Customer Interaction and Innovation: The Mediating Role of New Organizational Practices”

The notion that firms can improve their innovativeness by tapping users and customers for knowledge has become prominent in innovation studies. Similar arguments have been made in the marketing literature. We argue that neither literatures take sufficient account of firm organization. Specifically, firms that attempt to leverage user and customer knowledge in the context of innovation must design an internal organization appropriate to support it. This can be achieved in particular through the use of new organizational practices, notably, intensive vertical and lateral communication, rewarding employees for sharing and acquiring knowledge, and high levels of delegation of decision rights. In this paper, six hypotheses were developed and tested on a data set of 169 Danish firms drawn from a 2001 survey of the 1,000 largest firms in Denmark. A key result is that the link from customer knowledge to innovation is completely mediated by organizational practices.

Entry filed under: - Foss -, Management Theory, Papers, Recommended Reading.