Organizational ambidexterity refers to the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit—to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement ...are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed. In the past 15 years there has been an explosion of interest and research on this topic. We briefly review the current state of the research, highlighting what we know and don't know about the topic. We close with a point of view on promising areas for ongoing research.
Transformational leaders challenge the status quo, provide a vision of a promising future, and motivate and inspire their followers to join in the pursuit of a better world. But many of these leaders ...also fit the American Psychiatric Association classification for narcissistic personality disorder. They are grandiose, entitled, self-confident, risk seeking, manipulative, and hostile. This article reviews the literature on narcissism and shows how what we think of as transformational leadership overlaps substantially with grandiose narcissism. As grandiose narcissists can appear as transformational leaders, it is important to distinguish between what leadership scholars have characterized as “transformational” and these “pseudo-transformational” candidates.
In this study we propose that norms of fairness are salient to top decision makers and show that over- or underpayment of the CEO cascades down to lower organizational levels. Moreover, it appears ...that CEOs use their own power not only to increase their own salaries, but also those of their subordinates. One implication of such a process may be that the overpayment of a top executive has higher costs than have previously been realized. We also find evidence suggesting that CEOs serve as a key referent for employees in determining whether their own situation is "fair," and this influences their reactions to their own compensation. More specifically, we find that when lower-level managers are underpaid relative to the CEO-that is, underpaid more than the CEO or overpaid less-they are more likely to leave the organization. Results obtained from testing our hypotheses on a sample of more than 120 firms over a five-year period demonstrates the importance of considering fairness in the setting of CEO pay. Implications for the design of executive compensation packages are discussed.
Dynamic capabilities have been proposed as a useful way to understand how organizations are able to adapt to changes in technology and markets. Organizational ambidexterity the ability of senior ...managers to seize opportunities through the orchestration and integration of existing assets to overcome inertia and path dependence, is a core dynamic capability. While promising, research on dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity has not yet been able to specify the specific mechanisms through which senior managers are actually able to reallocate resources and reconfigure assets to simultaneously explore and exploit. Using interviews and qualitative case studies from thirteen organizations, this article explores the actions senior managers took to implement ambidextrous designs and identify which ones helped or hindered them in their attempts. A set of interrelated choices of organization design and senior team process determine which attempts to build ambidextrous organizations are successful.
In spite of the importance of organizational culture, scholarly advances in our understanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of culture research and argue that the ...ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how to study it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring culture. This ambiguity has constrained progress in both developing a coherent theory of organizational culture and accreting replicable and valid findings. To make progress we argue that future research should focus on conceptualizing and assessing organizational culture as the norms that characterize a group or organization that if widely shared and strongly held, act as a social control system to shape members’ attitudes and behaviors. We further argue that to accomplish this, researchers need to recognize that norms can be parsed into three distinct dimensions: (1) the content or what is deemed important (e.g., teamwork, accountability, innovation), (2) the consensus or how widely shared norms are held across people, and (3) the intensity of feelings about the importance of the norm (e.g., are people willing to sanction others). From this perspective we suggest how future research might be able to clarify some of the current conflicts and confusion that characterize the current state of the field.
This article uses UK data to examine issues regarding the scarcity of women in boardroom positions. The article examines appointments, pay and any associated productivity effects deriving from ...increased diversity. Evidence of gender-bias in the appointment of women as non-executive directors is found together with mixed evidence of discrimination in wages or fees paid. However, the article finds no support for the argument that gender diverse boards enhance corporate performance. Proposals in favour of greater board diversity may be best structured around the moral value of diversity, rather than with reference to an expectation of improved company performance.
A substantial body of research has documented that grandiose narcissists are characterized by high self-esteem, a sense of personal superiority and entitlement, overconfidence, a willingness to ...exploit others for self-gain, and hostility and aggression when challenged. We report two studies (N = 452) that explore how these dispositions affect their decision making. We show that grandiose narcissists' overconfidence, impulsivity, and a willingness to ignore expert advice results in a higher likelihood of making a bad decision. In addition, after getting the wrong answer, grandiose narcissists are more likely to blame others and remain self-confident in their judgment.
•Grandiose narcissists are overconfident and often rely on their own intuition to make decisions.•This can lead them to make less accurate decisions.•They remain confident in their decisions and externalize blame.•They also often assume leadership positions in organizations.•These tendencies can put the organizations they lead at risk.
Although some researchers have suggested that narcissistic CEOs may have a positive influence on organizational performance (e.g., Maccoby, 2007; Patel & Cooper, 2014), a growing body of evidence ...suggests that organizations led by narcissistic CEOs experience considerable downsides, including evidence of increased risk taking, overpaying for acquisitions, manipulating accounting data, and even fraud. In the current study we show that narcissistic CEO's subject their organizations to undue legal risk because they are overconfident about their ability to win and less sensitive to the costs to their organizations of such litigation. Using a sample of 32 firms, we find that those led by narcissistic CEOs are more likely to be involved in litigation and that these lawsuits are more protracted. In two follow-up experimental studies, we examine the mechanism underlying the relationship between narcissism and lawsuits and find that narcissists are less sensitive to objective assessments of risk when making decisions about whether to settle a lawsuit and less willing to take advice from experts. We discuss the implications of our research for advancing theories of narcissism and CEO influence on organizational performance.
How do organizations survive in the face of change? Underlying this question is a rich debate about whether organizations can adapt—and if so how. One perspective, organizational ecology, presents ...evidence suggesting that most organizations are largely inert and ultimately fail. A second perspective argues that some firms do learn and adapt to shifting environmental contexts. Recently, this latter view has coalesced around two themes. The first, based on research in strategy suggests that dynamic capabilities, the ability of a firm to reconfigure assets and existing capabilities, explains long-term competitive advantage. The second, based on organizational design, argues that ambidexterity, the ability of a firm to simultaneously explore and exploit, enables a firm to adapt over time. In this paper, we review and integrate these comparatively new research streams and identify a set of propositions that suggest how ambidexterity acts as a dynamic capability. We suggest that efficiency and innovation need not be strategic tradeoffs and highlight the substantive role of senior teams in building dynamic capabilities.
The personality of leaders has been shown to have important effects on their followers. Recently, organizational researchers have become increasingly concerned with the potentially destructive ...consequences of narcissistic leadership. Evidence indicates that grandiose narcissists both aspire to and frequently achieve leadership roles in organizations. However, because narcissists are principally motivated to pursue their own interests, have lower ethical standards, and are willing to transgress social norms, they can put the institutions they lead at risk. We report three studies showing that individuals who are more narcissistic are more willing to lie, cheat, and steal than those who are less narcissistic. We discuss the implications of these results for organizations.
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