This article develops a PERVAL-for-Strategy framework that embeds evolutionary psychology into strategic planning. The framework links life-stage motives—status and self-expression in youth, parenting in midlife, and legacy/kin care in later life—to firm initiatives evaluated on PERVAL’s four value dimensions: emotional, social, performance/quality, and price/value. We demonstrate the approach with a qualitative case comparison of Kodak and Canon during the film-to-digital transition. We segment consumers (18–35; 36–50; 50+) and score each firm’s initiatives on PERVAL (1–5 per dimension; totals out of 20). Canon’s digital strategy achieves very high totals across segments (typically 17–19/20) by delivering strong emotional and social value to younger users and high performance and emotional value to older users. Kodak’s film-centric portfolio scores low for youth and only moderate for older consumers (generally ≤12/20). Results show how psychological alignment explains divergent outcomes beyond industry structure or resource endowments. The framework operationalizes the demand side of the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities by specifying motive-centered sensing targets and a replicable scoring procedure. For managers, it provides a diagnostic and prioritization tool for portfolio reviews; high-scoring initiatives merit investment and low-scoring initiatives require redesign.
Organizations facing severe external challenges must respond quickly without compromising their core identity and mission. We advance strategic organizational essence as a new theoretical lens, an alignment of strategic intent and organizational capabilities that guides crisis decision-making while preserving identity. Building on research in organizational identity, dynamic capabilities, and resilience, we propose strategic organizational essence as a unifying interpretive framework that helps explain how institutions preserve purpose while navigating acute punctuated external disruption. We illustrate the construct through a single case demonstration of the United States Air Force Academy's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and other operational crises, highlighting how leaders employed essence-based reasoning to balance mission continuity, student development, and operational pressures. This framework offers a grounded, practical approach for understanding identity-preserving crisis management and provides actionable insight for organizations seeking to make deliberate, mission-anchored choices under uncertainty.
Institutional logics are a type of central logic that is understood and expressed through explicit and implicit rules, values, and assumptions, influencing how actors within a particular institutional context understand and interpret reality, determine the best course of action, and ultimately define success. This theoretical framework has been used to study a wide range of business phenomena, and is used here to examine NCAA basketball. The thirty-one conferences of Division I NCAA basketball, both men’s and women’s, were tested for competitive balance, using five different measures of competitive balance: Standard Deviation of winning percentage, Gini Coefficient, the Ratio of the Standard Deviation in winning percentage to the ``Idealized'' Standard Deviation in winning percentage, the Competitive Balance Ratio, and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. On all five measures, both the women’s and men’s conferences had competitive balance at a level comparable to women’s and men’s professional basketball leagues, the WNBA and the NBA. However, the women’s NCAA basketball conferences were found to have less competitive balance than the men’s NCAA basketball conferences on both within-season and across-season measures. The paper suggests that this may be changing because of the growth in popularity and viewership of NCAA women’s basketball, driven by shifting institutional logics.
The last two decades have brought about rapid and significant changes for the modern-day U.S. workplace. Advancements in and increased use of technology, changes in the economy, changes in employee safety strategies due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and shifting expectations from new generations of workers have culminated in an inhibited ability for businesses and their leaders to meet the needs of their employees and retain top-tier talent. Complicating this matter further is the ambiguity of organizational workplace culture. Today’s employees are consistently demanding a positive, supportive workplace culture; yet it is difficult to define or assess workplace culture in order to make needed improvements. To de-mystify organizational workplace culture, 12 distinct components of workplace culture have been identified and defined. These components, labeled as domains, have varying degrees of weight and interdependency that paint a clear picture of what organizational elements derive workplace culture. Using quantitative, qualitative, and subjective assessments, these domains of workplace culture can be investigated and analyzed, leading to an improved ability for organizations and their leaders in identifying and implementing targeted workplace culture improvement strategies.
In this experiential exercise, students collaborated in groups to develop a retention plan for a local business in Huntsville, TX. The activity was scaffolded into three interdependent deliverables carefully overviewing the job design, recruitment strategies, and other human resource management recommendations to (a) engage; (b) retain the existing employees at the client organizations. The findings were shared in the form of final presentations – all attended by the client. This activity was slightly revised between Fall of 2023 and Fall of 2024 based on the feedback received from the students and the clients. In addition to experiencing enhanced exposure to real-world business issues, students reported developing a range of skillsets from this project.
Nostalgia, a longing for the past, has been used successfully by marketers via nostalgia marketing or retro-marketing, including retro-branding, of goods and/or services. The nostalgia market has stereotypically been of interest to older consumers so it is surprising that a significant number of Generation Y (Millennials) and Generation Z consumers have taken an interest in nostalgia and retro brands. Moreover, an emerging market segment dominated by younger consumers is “kidults,” younger adults who prefer media or items from their childhood which helps them escape to a simpler, earlier time in their lives. These trends have impacted the two levels of nostalgia: historical and personal. This study attempted to empirically determine if younger consumers are engaged in nostalgia to a greater degree than older consumers. Scale items for historical nostalgia, personal nostalgia, and kidult scales were developed. A hard copy questionnaire was distributed among older and younger consumers. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the data. The study provided evidence that the stereotypical, traditional assumption that older consumers are more nostalgic does not necessarily apply in today’s marketplace. Theoretical and practical implications for marketers are offered based on the results.
Students in a Small Business Management class created a business plan for a community partner in the automotive collision repair industry.
While prior literature suggests that family firms with a positive corporate image are associated with superior financial performance, their effectiveness in creating firm brand value is not well understood. In this paper, we use Interbrand's global brand value data published between 2001 and 2017 to examine the effect of family ownership and family-named firms on brand value creation. Our findings indicate that within the sample of large global firms, family firms exhibit lower brand value compared to nonfamily firms. Moreover, after controlling for agency cost variables, effective corporate governance does not improve brand value for family firms. Cross-sectional analyses reveal that the difference in brand value between family and nonfamily firms is attributable to those family firms whose founders do not hold significant power. Furthermore, we observe that family firms, whether they have a family name as part of their company name, tend to have lower brand value than nonfamily firms.
This study examines the cover design of 1,113 video games. Based on cue utilization theory, it is argued that video game covers represent important product cues that should affect sales as consumers evaluate them before purchasing. Analysis of the data shows that the depiction of male and female characters along with the illustration of violence on the covers has no statistical impact on sales. However, sexualized depictions are associated with a negative sales impact in key genres and market segments when controlling for publication year, publisher and platform type. But there is evidence that the use of sexualized images as a sales strategy works in less significant market segments such as puzzles, miscellaneous, simulation, and strategy games. The results of the study therefore indicate that the advertising strategy with sexualized covers is not effective in all segments of the video game market. The implications of this result are discussed in detail.
Although open innovation (OI) has been characterized as one key driver for business model innovation (BMI), the literature lacks an in-depth understanding of how OI influences the business models (BM) of new ventures. However, such an understanding is crucial for improving the value creation and value capture for technological innovations in inbound OI settings. Based upon a unique dataset of 19 new ventures from 7 countries, which participated in Europe’s largest OI platform, this study finds that OI leads to an expansion in the customer segment, a greater focus in the value proposition, a shorter (but deeper) value chain, and challenges to the revenue model. The paper highlights important theoretical contributions for the BMI and OI literature, and derives tangible managerial guidance for entering OI partnerships.
By relying on upper echelons theory and agency theory, this study explores how CEO characteristics impact firms’ engagement in corporate political strategy (CPS). The current study proposes that depending on their CEOs’ tenure, firms have different interests and incentives to make CPS investments. In addition, this study suggests that CEOs’ personal involvement in political activity affects their firms’ CPS investments. CEOs’ personal involvement in political activity could indicate agency problems between shareholders and CEOs. To explore this agency problem further, this study also examines how CEO duality moderates the relationship between CEO characteristics and CPS. This study uses a sample of 416 pharmaceutical firms in the U.S. from the year 2000 – 2010. The results show that CEO tenure positively affects CPS. Furthermore, CEOs’ personal involvement in political activity also positively influences CPS. The results also reveal that CEO duality weakens the relationship between CEO tenure and CPS.
Fortune magazine published an article in February 2020 titled, “Boeing’s Long Descent”, regarding Boeing’s focus on paying high dividends to its shareholders at the expense of R&D. If Boeing had not been paying high dividends to its shareholders, it could have invested on R&D which would have been much more beneficial to Boeing in the long run. Is this phenomenon limited just to Boeing or do other firms who pay high dividends to their shareholders do it at the expense of R&D and Marketing which may give them a competitive advantage over other firms (their competitors) in the marketplace. This author thinks that the same principle applies to firms who are involved in share buybacks, i.e., firms who buy back their shares also do so at the expense of R&D and Marketing, thus risking the long-term competitive advantage of the firm.
This study expands the exploration of a consumer behavior concept that has received considerable attention recently: the fear of missing out (FoMO). Several variables were analyzed in terms of their potential influence on FoMO: social media usage, self-concept, social identity, smartphone usage, innovativeness, and gender. The study builds upon the premise that the construct has two distinct components: a personal dimension and a social dimension. The importance of these results is discussed in terms of advancing FoMO theory as well as assisting practitioners in directing their promotional efforts.
Dynamic organizations constantly search for new ways to improve the quality of their processes. A core element of these efforts is the integration of informal learning into daily workflows. Interdisciplinary research is required to accomplish this challenging task and make informal learning manageable. In this study, we propose a novel combination of organizational theory and operational research using a quantitative project scheduling approach to create efficient workflows, including systematized informal learning. The concept of integrating the informal learning activities of knowledge sharing, reflection, and self-organization is presented based on a multi-objective, multi-resource constrained project scheduling problem with limited renewable resources, activity splitting, and preemption. Additional simulation studies demonstrate the calculation of informal learning ratios, together with further discussion of strategic management options.
We develop an integrated set of propositions describing the relationships among CEO characteristics, the perceived trustworthiness of the CEO, and the board of directors’ decisions concerning the governance structure of the firm. In particular, we propose that CEO education, tenure, experience, board memberships and founder status affect the board’s perception of the CEO’s ability, benevolence, and integrity (the three key trustworthiness dimensions), and that these trustworthiness perceptions then affect the board’s choice of governance mechanisms with regard to CEO compensation mix, CEO/board chair duality, board size, and outsider representation on the board. Our theoretical development suggests that agency theory’s difficulties in explaining corporate governance may be the result of researchers’ failure to incorporate CEO trustworthiness into their models.
This article examines the effects of perceived negative brand publicity on employee emotions, attitudes and brand supporting behaviors. Drawing on Affective-Events-Theory (AET), it attempts to identify underlying affective and cognitive processes leading to behavioral change. Using data gathered from a large-scale survey of employees in Germany, our results show that perceived negative brand publicity affects emotional and attitudinal corporate brand pride of employees. In addition, higher levels of perceived negative brand publicity were negatively associated with brand-supporting behavior, such as employee referrals and word- of-mouth (WOM). We show that corporate brand experience through internal communications can be an effective tool in mitigating harmful effects of perceived negative brand publicity.
Companies understand they need to innovate to stay competitive, but innovation is not as simple as thinking of a great idea and then implementing it. Successful innovation requires supportive actions from leaders and the firm especially when the innovation is complex. In order to foster complex technological innovations, such as robotic process automation (“RPA”), we propose that firms benefit from having (1) humble leadership actions and (2) a humble organizational culture. We share what we learned about our propositions after reviewing the Finance Controllership division within a major multinational technology organization that develops hardware and other computer-related support items.
Dynamic capabilities have typically been conceptualized as sensing, seizing, and transforming. This article explores the interplay of these procedural dimensions employing a longitudinal case study of Axel Springer, a leading media corporation that has exercised dynamic capabilities to convert from a print publisher to an internet company. Insightful evidence is produced from interviews with current and former top managers. The case study shows iterations, overlaps, and interconnections between sensing, seizing, and transforming. Sensing-by-seizing is introduced as a dynamic capability to seize concrete opportunities while concurrently sensing them. A conceptual model furnishes implications and recommendations for managerial decision-making.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the touchstone for millennials when looking at the means for making their world a better place. Higher education’s focus on CSR has allowed millennials to focus their decision-making using a CSR/stakeholder approach to financial management decisions. Millennials’ support for a CSR/stakeholder approach has grown as they have been completing college. The CSR/stakeholder approach has increased partly due to social awareness created by curricula that highlights areas of social and environmental inequality. This CSR/stakeholder approach has recently emerged as a bona fide strategic management option globally. This paper extends CSR research by evaluating millennial financial decisions and the resulting competitive company performance in a widely used business simulation. Proactive university equality initiatives, resulting in curriculum changes, reinforce millennials’ ethos of social and environmental sustainability. As millennials will soon take the reins of industry, the results of their ethos will significantly influence society.
