Publication database

A study involving a Global 500 company finds that frontline employees’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can contribute to their customer orientation (self-rated) and objective job performance (supervisor-rated) by activating social identification processes. Employees identify with the organization based in part on the extent to which CSR is supported by salient and job-relevant others both internal and external to the organization. Looking internally, employees identify with the organization to the extent that they perceive management to support CSR. Looking externally, employees can identify with customers (called employee-customer identification) to the extent they perceive customers to support the company’s CSR. Both effects are enhanced when employees feel CSR is an important (versus non-important) part of their self-concept. Organizational identification directly drives job performance while employee-customer identification contributes to job performance through its effects on organizational identification and customer orientation.

With the permission of the American Marketing Association

The case study shows the development of Chinese technology company ZPMC, which entered the container crane market in 1992 and, in the space of 15 years, achieved a global market share of over 70 percent. The case gives particular insights into the strategic decisions that led to ZPMC’s competitors being pushed aside in a market previously dominated by Western providers. It also clearly illustrates the risks and limitations facing companies that are strongly focused on growth.

The case study is designed to give insights into how technology companies from emerging and developing countries can establish themselves over the long term in a market dominated by Western companies. The aim is for students to gain important knowledge about approaches to competitive strategy in the market entry phase, during the growth period to market leader, and in diversification in new markets. Non-Chinese students in particular will gain increased awareness of developments in Chinese companies. Chinese students in particular will become more familiar with the pitfalls associated with the rapid growth of Chinese companies.

The case focuses on three primary objectives. Firstly, students should identify the interests of the parties involved in a company acquisition and gain insights into the financial perspectives of the seller, the political and strategic perspectives of the buyer and, the competitive strategic perspectives of the managers in charge of operations. Secondly, students should gain an understanding of corporate thinking in Western and Chinese technology companies. Thirdly, they should use this mutual understanding as the foundation for future profitable co-operations.
This case is withdrawn and no longer available.

The ‘variance hypothesis’ predicts that external search breadth will lead to innovation outcomes, but time for search is fixed and cultivating breadth takes time. How does individuals’ external search breadth affect innovation outcomes? We match survey data with complete patent records, to examine the search behaviors of elite experts at one of the world’s most innovative firms. Counter to expectations, individuals who spent more time inside the firm were more likely to be innovative. Individuals with high external search breadth were more innovative only when they allocated more attention to those sources. Our research identifies limits to the ‘variance hypothesis’ and reveals two successful approaches to innovation search: ‘cosmopolitans’ who cultivate and attend to external sources and ‘locals’ who draw upon internal sources.

With permission of the Academy of Management

In this note you will find a summary and an overview of the principles of branding, as well as an illustration of application of these principles to build personal brands. We will review the principles of branding, apply these concepts, and generate a tangible and useful outcome – your personal brand plan.

The integration of systems for pricing and revenue management must trade off potential revenue gains against significant practical and technical challenges. This dilemma motivates us to investigate the value of coordinating decisions on prices and capacity allocation in a stylized setting. We propose two pairs of sequential policies for making static decisions—on pricing and revenue management—that differ in their degree of integration (hierarchical versus coordinated) and their pricing inputs (deterministic versus stochastic). For a large class of stochastic, price-dependent demand models, we prove that these four heuristics admit tractable solutions satisfying intuitive sensitivity properties. We further evaluate numerically the performance of these policies relative to a fully coordinated model, which is generally intractable. We find it interesting that near-optimal performance is usually achieved by a simple hierarchical policy which sets prices first, based on a non-nested stochastic model, and then uses these prices to optimize nested capacity allocation. This tractable policy largely outperforms its counterpart based on a deterministic pricing model. Jointly optimizing price and allocation decisions for the high-end segment improves performance, but the largest revenue benefits stem from adjusting prices to account for demand risk.

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