Publication database

We examine how crisis conditions affect the link between structural holes and organizational performance. Since brokerage offers early access to diverse perspectives and autonomy in exchange relations, the benefits of brokerage should rise when crises erupt. However, evidence on the subject has been inconclusive, raising the question of whether crisis actually imposes a boundary condition on structural hole theory. Using longitudinal data on investment banks, and exploiting the 2000 dot.com crisis as well as the 2008 financial crisis, we explore whether crises moderate the favorable effect of brokerage on performance. Our results reveal that only exclusive, and not shared, structural holes are advantageous for performance, as they facilitate ambidextrous responses to crisis. Implications for brokerage theory and for new research on crisis are discussed.

© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Using unique data from the LEGO Ideas platform and a novel approach of algorithm-based abduction, we combine multiple methods to provide new insights into crowd selection. Through qualitative content-coding, interviews, and prior literature, we derive an initial set of variables. We then use machine learning for feature selection and to identify the most important factors for crowd selection. The findings are used to build theory on crowd selection, which we test on a hold-out sample. Our key finding is that ideator and idea characteristics suggested by prior research can predict crowd selection only at early stages. More specifically, crowds rely on ideator status, prior success, and a carefully crafted idea presentation with many images to weed out bad ideas in early stages. However, these characteristics have little bearing in predicting winners at later stages. We explain this with signaling theory, where these ideator and idea characteristics represent strong, costly signals for idea quality and value only in early stages but fade as new signals (such as social signals of popularity and gaining fact traction) emerge. Our study provides two main contributions to research on crowd selection and idea evaluation. First, our approach enables us to prune explanations for crowd selection and guide attention to the factors which matter most. Second, we extend prior work by considering multi-stage crowd selection and highlighting its dynamic nature.

Scholars have suggested that autonomy can lead to better entrepreneurial team performance. Yet, there are different types of autonomy and they come at a cost. We shed light on whether two fundamental organizational design choices—granting teams autonomy to (1) choose project ideas to work on and (2) choose team members to work with—affect performance. We run a natural field experiment involving 939 students in a lean startup entrepreneurship course over 11 weeks. The aim is to disentangle the separate and joint effects of granting autonomy over choosing teams and choosing ideas compared to a baseline treatment with pre-assigned ideas and team members. We find that teams with autonomy over choosing either ideas or team members outperform teams in the baseline treatment as measured by pitch deck performance. The effect of choosing ideas is significantly stronger than the effect of choosing teams. However, the performance gains vanish for teams that are granted full autonomy over choosing both ideas and teams. This suggests the two forms of autonomy are substitutes. Causal mediation analysis reveals that the main effects of choosing ideas or teams can be partly explained by a better match of ideas with team members’ interests and prior network contacts among team members, respectively. While homophily and lack of team diversity cannot explain the performance drop among teams with full autonomy, our results suggest that self-selected teams fall prey to overconfidence and complacency too early to fully exploit the potential of their chosen idea. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on organizational design, autonomy, and innovation.

© 2021, INFORMS