Whereas innovative work behaviour (IWB) is regarded as a desired positive behaviour for all organizational members, existing research has predominantly focused on employees, while only sparingly scrutinizing the IWB among managerial levels. To address this gap, we draw on upper echelons and positive organizational behaviour perspectives to examine how hope, self-efficacy, resilience, optimism and organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) influence managers' IWB activities, namely, idea generation, promotion and realization. The relationships are tested using a sample of 201 managers from various managerial levels, sectors and company sizes. Regression-based and necessary condition analyses estimate the effects and necessity of personal resources on IWB activities. Study findings suggest that managers' personal resources are important for IWB, but the impact differs by intrapreneurial activity. Hope, self-efficacy and OBSE positively influence idea generation; self-efficacy and resilience foster idea promotion; and self-efficacy, OBSE, resilience and optimism foster idea realization. Supplementary analyses align with the upper echelons literature, revealing that managerial level matters; personal resources are unevenly distributed across managerial levels, partly explaining variations in managers' IWB. This study contributes to the growing research on managerial innovation. Our findings suggest that personal resources drive managerial IWB, with top managers scoring higher on both personal resources and IWB activities. Second, by disentangling IWB activities, our study demonstrates that idea generation, promotion and realization involve distinct challenges requiring different personal resources to be successfully mastered.

When an organization implements practices within the context of new work, individual actors must translate and adapt them to their local context. These change agents thereby often encounter the paradox of being both translators and targets of change. However, how they react to such a situation, which strategies they use, and whether their reactions legitimize the implementation of new work attempts in their organization have hardly been considered so far. We filled this gap by studying middle managers translating organizational change toward more self-managing structures and other procedures that empower employees. At the same time, however, these changes make the institution of middle management redundant. Findings of a qualitative 32-month single-case study at a medium-sized firm showed that middle managers reacted with five distinct reactions. Informed by translation and institutional theory, we showed that middle managers’ intraorganizational social positions determined their reactions over time, making them either victims or phoenixes of the change process toward new forms of work. Our findings contribute to contemporary research on the implementation of self-managing organizations and help to better understand how such concepts are translated within an organization.

Drawing on job-demands resources and self-consistency theories, this study investigates individual and contextual factors influencing managers' intrapreneurial intention (INI). We focus on the role of personal resources (organization-based self-esteem and proactivity) related to INI. Further, we analyze job resources (top management support and role clarity) shaping INI, and their interaction with proactivity. Our data comprises 193 Kosovan managers employed in companies varying in size and industry. The results show that organization-based self-esteem and proactivity are positively related to INI. Additionally, proactivity serves as the underlying mechanism, mediating organization-based self-esteem-INI relationship. Furthermore, job resources - top management support and role clarity - strengthen the likelihood of INI among proactive employees, suggesting a moderated mediation model.By jointly examining individual and contextual antecedents of INI, this study contributes to the debate of who the intrapreneur is and what nurtures his/her inclinations. Furthermore, this is among the few studies to examine INI using a managerial sample and in an emerging economy context.

Changes in organizational structure affect the intra-organizational communication network. However, despite an increasing relevance of less hierarchical and less bureaucratic forms of organizing, the question of how self-managing forms of organization influence employees' communication behavior has received only scant attention yet. In our study, we analyze the case of a medium-sized firm that experiences organizational change from rigid bureaucratic structures to a more self-managing organization model and question how employees' centrality in the communication network is affected by this reorganization. Following an explorative research approach informed by prior research on self-managing forms of organizations and communication networks, our findings show that after the change process communication generally is less dependent on formal hierarchy. However, while employees who held a higher rank before the change process loose in centrality, their centrality at the end of the change process is still higher than that of other employees. Moreover, employees who experience a promotion become more central in the communication network while demotions do not have an effect. By discussing these findings in the context of organizational change and the persistence of organizational structures, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the implementation process of self-managing organizations.

This paper elaborates on how design rules emerge and evolve as firms’ micro-level choices of product and organization architectures coevolve with changes in product markets and an industry’s competitive and cooperative dynamics. We suggest that the design rules a firm adopts will vary according to firms’ strategic choices of product and organization architectures that they believe are or may become feasible in a given industry. Building on the mirroring hypothesis that product designs a firm adopts will influence the organization designs it uses, we develop a model that identifies key relationships that influence firms’ strategic choices of product and organization architectures and associated design rules. We then elaborate on key interactions between firm-level architectural choices and the architecture-enabled competitive and cooperative dynamics that obtain in an industry. Our model identifies strategically important aspects of open- and closed-system architectures and modular and nonmodular architectures that impact industry structures, interfirm interactions, and resulting industry dynamics. Drawing on these analyses, we suggest how firms’ strategic choices of architectures are influenced by their assessments of (i) the potential for capturing value through both gains from specialization and gains from trade that firms believe will be enabled by their architectural choices and (ii) both ex ante and ex post transaction costs implied by their architecture decisions. We conclude by suggesting how the perspective on firm’s strategic architectural decisions we develop here enables new approaches to understanding evolutions of both product markets and industry structures for serving product markets.

This paper analyzes plural governance, namely concurrent sourcing (upstream) and dual distribution (downstream), as safeguard mechanisms against opportunistic behavior. We show that depending on their initial or historical governance mode choice firms bear inherently different risks of opportunistic behavior by different actors. Based on the analysis of these different transaction environments in upstream and downstream transactions we suggest a two-stage model of governance mode choice based on traditional transaction cost economics concepts. Our conceptual model suggests that plural governance reduces information asymmetry for initial pure mode choices both make and buy, and thereby mitigates the risks of cheating suppliers (concurrent sourcing) and shirking employees (dual distribution). By surfacing fundamental differences in upstream vs. downstream transaction environments and explaining the safeguarding function of the respective plural governance modes our model also helps to resolve some supposedly contradictory empirical findings in the plural governance forms literature.

Working-from-home arrangements have become increasingly important for firms' work organization. In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to teams that previously did not work virtually being forced to interact and communicate virtually. In this study, we analyze changes in intra-team communication of four teams in a German medium-sized enterprise. Quantitative network analyses of email communication and qualitative analyses of interviews before and during the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020 show that flat hierarchies and self-managing processes helped team members to mitigate negative effects due to spatial and temporal dispersion in forced working-from-home arrangements. Moreover, analysis of the teams' communication networks shows that forced remote work can trigger faultlines to become salient but that team cohesion, identification with the team, and individuals taking on broker roles prevent negative effects of faultlines on team performance. In discussing these findings, our study contributes to the research on coordination and communication in virtual teams by analyzing contextual, organizational, team-related as well as individual factors that explain how and why teams differ in successfully implementing working-from-home arrangements.

Despite the economic relevance of services research on entrepreneurial activities to internationalise services is comparably rare. One aspect that requires more attention is the question which barriers hinder service providers to benefit from business opportunities in other countries. In order to investigate specific barriers to the internationalisation of services this paper addresses service type and uncertainty avoidance to explore barriers for sourcing services from abroad. In line with prior research, the paper differentiates between capital-intensive and knowledge-intensive services. In lack of existing empirical studies, this paper employs secondary data on service transactions across European countries. Findings suggest that uncertainty avoidance can hamper purchasing international services. Furthermore, findings support our assumption that uncertainty avoidance is more relevant for knowledge-intensive than for capital-intensive services. The paper concludes on implications and future research directions and an epilogue on sourcing services internationally from a buyer perspective during the corona 2020 lockdown in Germany.

The rise in popularity of post-bureaucratic organizational models challenges the role and relevance of middle management. Consequently, middle managers frequently find themselves in the paradoxical situation of being responsible for implementing structures and procedures that aim to make the institution of middle management redundant. We study middle managers’ behavior in such a situation and ask why they choose particular reactions. Findings of a qualitative 32-month process study in a medium-sized family business show that middle managers react to change aiming to make them redundant with five distinct reactions. Inspired by theory on institutional entrepreneurship, we show that middle managers’ intra-organizational social position determines their reactions over time, making them either victims or institutional entrepreneurs of the change process. Our findings contribute to a better understanding how new models of organization are implemented and legitimized as well as to research on the changing role and function of middle managers.

Success and survival of firms largely depend on their adaptability to changing environments. This is particularly relevant in situations of crisis. In our study we analyze crisis management by a family firm in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic focusing on the implementation and the use of a post-bureaucratic organizational model. Findings show that already the efforts to implement such an organizational model can have a positive effect on the agility of family firms and thereby their success in mastering the crisis. At the same time situations of crisis promote employees' willingness to implement post-bureaucratic organizational models. Our study contributes to research and practice by analyzing how successful crisis management of family firms can be enabled and how the support of organizational change by employees is affected by economic crisis.

The mirroring hypothesis highlights the correspondence of design characteristics across different architectural levels and in this paper, we consider how mirroring may impact the distribution of national and international innovation activities of firms. We identify incremental and modular innovations (as product architecture reinforcing innovations) along with architectural and radical innovations (as innovations that overturn the existing product architecture) to consider how and when innovation activities may adopt an international dimension. Our study of the bicycle industry highlights that international collaboration is most likely to occur in respect of incremental and modular innovation on the basis of the embedded coordination that modular designs offer. However, even in these circumstances, international collaboration was limited, on the basis that cross-national collaboration created higher levels of complexity and uncertainty; thereby being an attractive option only when the capabilities of the international partner far exceeded what was available either internally, or within national boundaries.

Who controls a product architecture and the rate at which this architecture changes, impacts the type of outcomes a firm can expect to derive from utilizing a modular product architecture? Advantages such as increased levels of innovation, quick determination of consumer preferences and lower production costs have been linked to modular product architectures. However, such architectures have also been linked to detrimental outcomes such as high levels of competition and commoditization along with higher development costs. It is via the introduction of two key moderating variables that we improve our understanding of the impact that a modular product architecture has upon different firm‐level outcomes.

Individual CEO characteristics may affect architectural choices through the application of managerial discretion. Systems such as organizations and their products are not purely driven toward modularity because of external forces. Individual CEO characteristics may constitute an additional dimension to established mirroring considerations that impacts both the choice of architecture and the correspondence between product and organization architectures.

Theoretical explanations for the positioning of firm boundaries have developed from a range of literatures including transaction cost economics, firm-level capabilities, organizational theory and the knowledge based view. To date, these perspectives have provided explanations concerning firm boundaries at a specific point in time. To build a more dynamic understanding of how firm boundaries alter over time and the triggers that drive such changes (the ‘adaptation problem’) we present the case of the UK Pension Industry (1985-2014). Adopting an inductive epistemology and relying upon template and matrix analysis of the qualitative data, we build a dynamic model of firm boundary choices that incorporates feedback loops and a recognition of both firm-level and industry-level determinants. We observe that as the industry moves from being entirely vertically integrated, to eventual disaggregation and then starting to in-source activities again as technologies and regulations change, firms alter their architectures to engage more or less with the market and vary their investment in capabilities according to the potential for gains from specialization and gains from trade. The final dynamic model integrates theoretical concepts from transaction cost economics, firm-level capabilities and organizational design in respect of modular versus integrated architectures.