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Although research on open collaboration for innovation has generally focused on the voluntary participation of individuals who are not strictly governed by formal authority concentrated at higher levels of organizational hierarchy, more recent studies highlight the importance of exploring how their tasks should be organized to enhance performance outcomes. This study extends this line of work by conceptualizing polyarchy as a decentralized decision-making structure that directs how core members of a project team screen a large collection of novel ideas generated by team members, and empirically examining whether and how polyarchy affects task completion time. In the context of online projects for open-source software development at GitHub, we find that a polyarchical decision-making structure reduces task completion time. Closer examination also shows that this positive effect on decision-making speed becomes stronger when tasks are explorative rather than exploitative in nature. Implications for open, distributed models of innovation and nontraditional forms of decision-making structures are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the literature on resource reconfiguration theory, we formulate a new theoretical framework that explains how executive redeployment within a diversified firm transfers different types of human capital embodied in executives to different units facing specific business challenges. In the empirical context of Korean business groups, we find that executives with unit-specific human capital, like turnaround experience, competitive experience, and international expansion experience, are redeployed to units with corresponding business challenges like financial difficulties, intensifying competition, and early-stage international expansion, respectively. We also show that executives with unit-generic human capital, like corporate management practices and interunit coordination experiences, are redeployed to younger units seeking to establish corporate-level policies and practices. Additional analyses also show that the value of firm-specific human capital in driving the redeployment of executives is contingent on their functional orientation and seniority. Funding: S.-J. Chang appreciates financial support from the Lim Kim San Chair Professorship from National University of Singapore and Techno SK Chair Professorship from KAIST. Y.-C. Kim is also grateful for financial support from the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2022S1A5A2A01044597]. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.14525. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]