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Firm growth takes multiple forms, yet the preponderance of firm growth research considers only one form of growth and implicitly treats the various other forms as interchangeable. We merge the firm growth and strategic human resource management (SHRM) literatures to create the HR growth orientation construct, which refers to how a firm grows its employees relative to its sales. We suggest that congruent growth between employees and sales (a "balanced" HR growth orientation) is positively related to firm performance as there are sufficient human resources to exploit opportunities available to the firm. Incongruent growth, however, has a nuanced relationship with firm performance. Growing sales faster than employees (a "lagging" HR growth orientation) could leave a firm lacking the necessary human resources to exploit new opportunities, and therefore is less positively related to firm performance than growing employees faster than sales (a "leading" HR growth orientation). Two contingencies to this relationship are then proposed: the level of human capital risk, which influences the firm's ability to hire and sustain a workforce, and industry dynamism, which may exert sudden, unexpected demands on a firm's human resources. We test our hypotheses on a cohort sample of 399 firms that underwent an IPO. Our findings support the notion that different forms of growth have unique performance implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploitation occurs when firms engage in local search processes that build upon or refine existing competencies. Despite the ubiquity of exploitation within the greater exploration-exploitation literature, there has been surprisingly little development of the exploitation construct. We disentangle two forms of exploitation that vary in terms of risk: resource access activities, which expand a firm's access to new but familiar resources that correspond with current commercialization operations, and resource development activities, which cultivate a firm's existing resource base by moving the resources toward commercialization. Our primary hypothesis is that firms engage in less risky forms of exploitation--resource development activities relative to resources access activities--in the wake of negative media coverage, because the pressure from the media spurs firms to seek short-term returns. However, we further hypothesize that aspiration-relative performance and firm size buffer this relationship, such that firms with strong aspiration-relative performance or large firms are less buffeted by the pressure from negative media coverage. We test these predictions on a sample of firms in the upstream petroleum industry, and find support for our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

External corporate venturing (ECV), which occurs when an established firm forms a tie with an external entrepreneurial venture, has received significant attention in both scholarly journals and business press articles. Despite this attention, there has been little investigation regarding the critical component of behavioral elements that motivate firms to commit to a venturing portfolio. We utilize the behavioral theory of the firm literature to hypothesize that aspiration-relative performance influences commitment to an ECV portfolio, such that performance above aspirations leads to decreased commitment, and performance below aspirations leads to increased commitment. We then incorporate the threat-rigidity literature and propose that managerial risk-taking proclivity and environmental dynamism moderate the relationship between aspiration-relative performance and changes in commitment to an ECV portfolio. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 1,340 firm-year observations between 2000 and 2008, and find support for most of our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational reputation is recognized as a component of a firm's competitive advantage. However, relatively little is known regarding stakeholder reactions to deviance from expected performance outcomes. We draw from the organizational stigma and impression management literatures and introduce the concept of reputation surprise (RS), defined as the extent of divergence between stakeholders' expectations of an entity's performance and the entity's recent performance. Using a sample of 2,518 YouTube videos released by 48 established YouTube channels from 2006 to 2011, we hypothesize and find that negative RS (performance below stakeholder expectations) negatively influences prominence and perceived quality. Contrary to our expectations, positive RS (performance above stakeholder expectations) also has a negative effect on prominence and perceived quality. We also find that innovation rate positively moderates both relationships. Implications for theory and research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates why firms engage in different modes of external corporate venturing (ECV). To examine this issue, we utilize the resource-based view literature to examine how parent firm resource stocks and venture firm resource needs influence ECV activities. We root our story by exploring the relationship between the investing firm's level of R&D intensity and ECV mode. We then consider how the parent firm's human resource slack and the venture firm's resource needs influence the relationship between R&D intensity and ECV mode. Our hypotheses are tested with a sample of over 3,400 external venturing ties formed over a 14 year period. Results suggest that R&D intensity influences external venturing activities, and that both the resource stocks of the parent and the resource needs of the venture moderate this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While external corporate venturing--investing in or creating new businesses outside of the firm's boundaries--is an arguably valuable strategic mechanism, there is little empirical evidence to suggest that venturing is a meaningful driver of firm value. Drawing from the attention based view, we suggest that an increase in firm value from adopting an external corporate venturing strategy is contingent on attentional mechanisms endogenous and exogenous to the firm that frame managerial attention on venturing opportunities that closely compliment the firm's core business. Further, we recast the contingencies into a configurational perspective to demonstrate that maximum value from an external corporate venturing strategy occurs when there is alignment between strategy, organizational structure, and environmental exigencies. We find support for our research model in a longitudinal sample of 358 companies between 1998-2008 across 12 industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]