Businesses today face intense international competition, a heightened pace of development and shortened product life cycles. As a result, many researchers recommend firms collaborate and partner with other firms to succeed. With over a decade of research examining alliances and inter-firm collaboration, we know a great deal about the benefits and outcomes firms realize through collaboration. An important gap exists, however, in our understanding of the effect of partnering firms on collaborative outputs. This study attempts to address this gap by examining the success of collaborative new product development outputs. The study was a quasi-experimental study using archival, time-series data. Hypotheses were tested at the project level, defined as the product output from the collaborative development effort. Predictors were developed at both the firm and dyadic levels. Several findings emerged from this research. The primary finding is that roles of alliance partners impact which capability and capital benefits accrue. Firms functioning as a publisher benefit from increases in relevant experience. Firms functioning as a developer benefit from working in areas in which they have experience, but largely to the extent that the developer also generalizes their capabilities. One implication emerging from the capability findings suggests a need for configurational capability …

This work collected four years of financial data from an employee-owned firm and a traditionally-owned firm from the same industry. The data were then organized to provide measures of three dimensions of corporate performance: (1) employee turnover, (2) productivity, and (3) profitability. Based upon a review of the literature, employee stock ownership plans (ESOP) are reported to enhance corporate performance after their adoption. Additionally, ESOPs are purported to perform better than traditionally-owned companies. This dissertation developed hypotheses to ascertain whether or not the particular ESOP used in this study conformed to these expectations. The first set of three hypotheses was tested using multiple regression techniques to determine if the ESOP experienced a reduction in turnover, an improvement in productivity, and an increase in profitability following its conversion to employee-ownership. The results of the regressions found that there was no incremental significance. There was no improvement noted in the performance of the ESOP firm. Another component of this investigation was to determine whether improvements in corporate performance were temporary or permanent phenomena. This portion of the research was rendered superfluous when no improvements were available for analysis. The final question that was examined was whether the ESOP would demonstrate better performance …

Prior research has examined entrepreneurial businesses spatially located in the physical or offline context; however, recent radical information and technological breakthroughs allow entrepreneurs to launch their businesses completely online. The growth of the online business industry has been phenomenal. Predictions for worldwide online sales estimate it to reach $2 trillion in 2016. Virtual entrepreneurship refers to the pursuit and exploitation of opportunities via virtual platforms. Web 2.0 cybermediaries offer web-based platforms that function similarly to traditional intermediaries in a virtual setting and minimize barriers to entry for virtual entrepreneurial firms. The use of such cybermediaries with increasing success suggests an implicit shift in the dominant logic that typically underpins the functioning of entrepreneurial firms operating in the physical world. In this relatively uncharted territory, marked by a focus on profit, cooperation, collaboration and community, three ideal-type institutional logics i.e. Market, Corporation and Community, blend together. It is posited that a Virtual Entrepreneurial Logic guides the norms, behaviors, and practices of entrepreneurial firms operating via these virtual platforms. This raises the question whether the blending of three ideal-type logics leads to the existence of different antecedents of performance. A business model antecedent addressing the economic dimension, a community antecedent addressing the …

Leadership has attracted a significant amount of scholarly attention in the past few decades. However, most research and theory contributions are to a great extent limited to accounting for leadership practices in the West (Littrell, 2002). This study is designed to develop an effective leadership model that works in the Chinese context. Paternalistic leadership, a dominant leadership style in an Eastern business environment, is compared with transformational leadership, a dominant leadership style in a Western business environment. The notion of transformational leadership was developed under the tutelage of Bernard Bass (1998). Transformational leadership is found to be compatible with collectivistic values (Walumbwa & Lwwler, 2003) and is believed to be appealing and generalizable to Chinese leadership situations (Chen & Farh, 1999). Other researchers have found that within Chinese organizations, leader behaviors are quite distinct from transformational leadership, referring to this leader style as paternalistic leadership (Redding, 1990; Cheng, 1995). The questions are asked, “Transformational or paternalistic leadership, which one is more effective in Chinese organizations? Is one type of leadership superior to the other one in the Chinese culture?” To answer these questions, a model is proposed to clarify the mediating effects of trust and harmony on the relationship between …

Since their introduction to the United States from Japan in the 1980s, inter-organizational cooperation practices between buyers and suppliers have provided lower costs, shorter development and production cycles, and higher levels of quality and productivity. Many studies of interorganizational cooperation have relied on transaction cost economicsframeworks,which ignore cultural differences. Few studies have analyzed inter-organizational cooperation in Mexico, a less-developed country (LDC) with a cultural and industrial environment differentfromthe U.S. This study is concerned with the influence of interorganizational trust, individualism and collectivism (indcol), and the superordinate goal ofjust-in-time/total quality management (JIT/TQM) on inter-organizational cooperation.