Search

This study explores the concept of personal specialization, which is how much organizational members work on the same domain (i.e., high personal specialization) or work on different, narrowly defi...

We develop a theory of organizational growth under conditions of institutional pluralism based on analysis of the 27-year growth trajectory of ALPI, an Italian workforce integration organization. I...

This paper examines the relationship between the autonomous specialization decisions of service professionals and the tacit human capital they develop. As individuals specialize in production in re...

Whether to be a specialist or generalist is a long-standing question for job candidates. The extant literature argues that the excess returns to labor market specialization exists, and the returns ...

The literature on portfolio diversification in venture capital contrasts industry specialization as a strategy that helps venture capital firms leverage accumulated industry expertise to diversific...

Structural complexity has been previously studied in cases where it has been created by specialization, technology or regulation. Complexity is typically considered as a source of causal ambiguity ...

This study develops a multilevel framework examining the relationship between CEO generalist career experience and initial compensation. Drawing on the generalist and specialization views of human ...

The literature on exploration and exploitation stresses the importance of pursuing both activities (i.e., achieve organizational ambidexterity) for enhancing organizational performance. However, fi...

There is a rich literature on the differential returns to specialized vs. generalized careers. This literature has spanned several areas: labor economics, strategy and sociology. While much of the ...

Building on configuration and organizational capability theories, we explore the trade-off between flexibility and specialization in functional capability development in new ventures. Using the lon...

The literature on innovation and learning has emphasized the importance of diversity of ideas or knowledge. To boost or maintain diversity, an organization can establish subunits for specialization...

The nature of work has changed and is continuing to change. Increased knowledge specialization and widespread digitization are two trends that have especially affected work that is done in teams. W...

Is it better to be a specialist or a generalist over one’s career? Specialization has historically been identified as a successful strategy in human capital enhancement and job signaling. However, ...

We contribute to research on knowledge exploration and exploitation by examining how the context of an industry influences the effectiveness of specialization in either exploration or exploitation ...

We examine the financial returns to specialization versus variety in corporate philanthropy. While specialization–donating a lot to a few causes–may allow for greater effectiveness in giving, varie...

This paper contributes to the growing interest in the institutionalization of innovation. Drawing on the work of Barley and Tolbert (1997), the paper develops a processual approach to institutionalization which emphasizes the interplay between local level adoption of innovations, and their field-level diffusion. This interplay is seen linked to the emergence of key mechanisms of institutionalization, including role specialization, boundary-spanning activities and the production of discourse. The paper develops this processual approach through an historical, multi-level account of the evolution and spread of Resource Planning systems innovation, from the 1960's to the present-day culminating in the current generation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. This empirical account allows us explore the coevolution of key institutionalizing mechanisms and relate them to the development of the technologies involved. In particular, the relationship between field-level shifts in technology and the expanding scope, and challenges, of their use at local level are analysed in terms of a process of disembedding and embedding organizational and technological forms of knowledge. The resulting analysis helps us to account for the apparent contradiction between the widespread acceptance of ERP systems innovation and the chronic problems experienced in the use of such innovation. It leads to the view that RP systems innovation has become institutionalized within business practice in part because of, and not despite, the frequent failures associated with its adoption.

This paper investigates the external mobility of women in their early professional careers after graduating from a top-MBA program in the United States. While scholarship in management, sociology, ...

Past research emphasizes that high levels of specialization can decrease creative performance because creative workers end up reusing familiar components in familiar ways. We argue that this view of specialization might be overly pessimistic. At times, knowledge domains evolve fast–i.e., new components become rapidly available. In those situations, deep expertise places specialists in an advantageous position to identify emerging creative opportunities. To test our theory, we exploit the collapse of the Soviet Union as a natural experiment that suddenly moved the frontier in some domains of theoretical mathematics more so than in others. We find that specialists in domains that advanced the most produce not only more publications, but also more breakthroughs than their colleagues who were straddling knowledge domains. Specialists also increase their rate of collaboration dramatically. Thus, under some circumstances, specialization can constitute a superior strategy to brokerage for those seeking high creative performance.

The current economic environment is increasingly populated by interconnected complex product systems, i.e. products that are “made up of a large number of parts that interact in a non-simple way” (...

This study addresses the debate concerning the performance implications of CEO experience variety. Some scholars take the generalist view of human capital to suggest that high CEO experience variety (i.e., generalism) is beneficial. Yet, others adopt the specialist view to highlight the advantages of human capital specialization. Integrating the opposing views, we argue that the relationship between CEO experience variety and firm performance follows an inverted U-shaped form. Initially, the acquisition of breadth of experience from different firms and industries builds human capital generalism – enabling CEOs to cope with the information processing demands of large firms and realize higher firm performance. After a threshold, however, extensive levels of CEO experience variety come in expense of experience depth and human capital specialization – resulting in declining firm performance. Data from 176 CEOs in large firms support the hypothesized relationship. Our results also show that this relationship varies with the firm’s level of internal and external complexity.

The paradox between bureaucracy and entrepreneurship has drawn the interest of scholars from various fields; yet, the precise mechanisms through which bureaucratization shapes individuals’ transition to entrepreneurship remains theoretically ambiguous and empirically inconclusive. Using unique data from a large and established firm in the home appliance industry, I find that workplace specialization, which is an important organizational process of bureaucratization, stifles entrepreneurship, even accounting for individuals’ entrepreneurial capacity, which is measured as individuals’ intra-firm experience diversity. Moreover, I find that individuals’ workplace specialization and their intra-firm experience diversity have a positive interaction effect on individual rates of entrepreneurship, which I suggest reflects that potential synergy of these two processes in affecting individuals’ capacity of orchestrating organizational resources for entrepreneurial activities.

In recent years, CEO succession and career issues have received increasing attention in both the popular business press and in scholarly journals. While researchers from the areas of organization t...

Many organizational learning studies have an implicit assumption that the learning rate is maximized through specialization: the more an individual or organization focuses on a particular task, the...

Utilizing a novel dataset containing full board committee membership for over 6000 firms, we document and analyze board committee structures. We find that committee use (i) is increasing with firm ...

Based on and extending the transactive memory system literature, we take a social network approach to develop a configural framework of knowledge specialization and investigate the dynamic relation...

Today’s complex professional environments increasingly face the challenge of balancing demands for specialization with the subsequent need for coordination. One characteristic of this challenge is ...

Theories from institutional economics, psychology and game theory, among others, seem to have generated great disciplinary diversity in our field. Yet the original thrust of strategy, covering entr...

Despite longstanding research into coordination, it is poorly understood how work is coordinated in teams of collaborating experts. This question is particularly urgent given that modern work entails increasing specialization and more collaboration in diverse teams. This article adds a rigorous examination of how two key drivers of coordination process – difference between specializations and interdependency – impact the coordination process. To sharpen these two drivers, I frame the first as diversity in specialization, and the second as coupling. I then differentiate two categories of activities that experts pursue in their work. The article examines how and why diversity and coupling drive the temporal occurrence of activities over time. It develops a process model that enables an assessment and comparison of coordination processes across teams. The discussion positions the model against theories of team and coordination process. Implications point to the role of the temporal embeddedness and nestedness of activities in organizations.

In this study the concept of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) is fitted into the context of the changing profile of international corporate innovations and the underlying trajectory of national innovation systems. As GPTs are employed as a "bridge" connecting technologically and geographically separate knowledge, the specialization of innovations in GPT fields has important influence on the pattern of geographical distribution of corporate innovations. Based on a USPTO database covering the patents granted in the U.S. to world's largest industrial firms between 1969 and 1995, the empirical findings suggest that GPTs tend to be created across a wide range of countries. Such geographical dispersion is mainly driven by the fact that increasingly more GPTs invented in different countries are generated to support the industry’s core areas. Moreover, the specialization of GPTs tends to promote a further internationalization of corporate innovative activities, especially those in the GPT-based industries. Las...

Many professional service organizations are experiencing increasing levels of specialization. However, with increasing specialization, there arises a growing tension between organizational differen...

New ventures need to choose which capabilities to develop first in order to build legitimacy and thus enhance survival. Building on configuration and organizational capability theories, we explored the trade-off between flexibility and specialization strategies in capability development in new ventures. Using the longitudinal Kauffman Firm Survey of US start-ups we found that building distinctiveness by specializing in specific capabilities early on was better for survival than pursuing flexibility by simultaneously developing R&D, Marketing, and Production capabilities. Simultaneous development of several capabilities exposed start-ups to a higher risk of exit.

A challenge for organizations lies in the fundamental need to differentiate into smaller groups for specialization, while simultaneously integrating into a coherent organization (Lawrence & Lorsch,...

Recent research on concurrent sourcing has identified the preconditions for the simultaneous use of multiple sourcing modes (i.e. make-and-buy). However, little progress has been made to address th...

We formalize firms’ research and development (R&D) diversification decisions during the pre-market phase of an emerging standards setting. Capturing transaction costs, resource-based considerations, and network effects in a two-player model, in which both agents are fully diversifiable and must trade-off the expected benefits from co-operating on a joint standard vs establishing their own, we can show that transactional hazards and knowledge-based complementarities from in-house production lead to expected increases in diversification. Contrary to established wisdom, however, increasing network effects also reduce firms’ co-specialization. We motivate our study and elaborate on our findings from two related perspectives: a corporate strategy perspective on the optimal degree of specialization and the technology scholar’s viewpoint on firms’ anticipation of standard-related bargaining considerations to the pre-market phase.

This study examines when high tech firms are better off specializing in either exploration or exploitation learning strategy. Drawing on the organizational learning literature, we hypothesize that a firmi¯s imbalance between exploration and exploitation (or specialization strategy) has differential impacts on firm performance depending on its structural characteristics and external environment. A survey data of 180 high tech firms in China shows that firm age and scarcity of R&D resources moderate the relationship between specialization and business performance. Moreover, specialization strategy works better when competitive intensity is low.

This study intends to understand the underlying structure and composition of an industrial cluster and explains why certain types of technology appear to blossom and fade in a region over time and ...

Conventional wisdom suggests that when a firm faces technological uncertainty, it responds by becoming less technologically specialized, so as to remain adaptable to subsequent resolution of this u...

This paper develops a conceptual framework discussing architectural change at different levels to understand moderating factors that drive differences in industry modularity. It outlines how modularity increases at the product and organizational level, focusing on codification of standardized interfaces and stabilization of organizational practices. Industry modularity increases when product interfaces and organizational practices disseminate beyond the focal organization. Several moderating factors that influence this dissemination process are highlighted. At the product level I focus, first, on strategic considerations regarding standardization, and second on capability trajectories and firm specialization. At the organizational level I highlight informational mechanisms and convergence of cognitive frames, and the role of technological breakthroughs and its influence on the complexity and interaction of organizational practices. As such, the study presents a contingent perspective toward understanding ...

Existing research on strategic alliances focuses on exploration of technological capabilities through organizational learning and inter-firm knowledge transfer as the main benefit of technology all...

Does the single topic expert outperform the jack-of-all-trades? The notion that specialization is linked to productivity is embedded in foundational economic theory, job design, and career advice. ...

This paper aims to explain firm emergence in the market place, and the role firms play in estab-lishing market structures, using the productive power of specialization. Building on the age-old know...

Health care professionals are concerned with leadership training for supervisors. Some endorse a generic approach for teaching management fundamental; other focus on technical specialization. This ...

We compare organizational structure in terms of formalization, specialization, and centralization in decision making between American and Japanese firms in Taiwan. Our data confirms that American and Japanese firms generally do carry their organizational characteristics along with their production technology when they invest in Taiwan.

It is no part of the purpose of this presentation to quarrel with either Moses or Herzberg―to say nothing of Adam Smith. The principles of specialization as set forth in The Wealth of Nations are n...

The article discusses university management programs. Many firms send their management staff to higher learning institutions to receive training in specialization or refresher courses as well as to...