PHD Publications

Thesis Summary The main objective of this dissertation is to explain why coordinative efficiency,creative efficiency, together with static efficiency are all critical goals of governance design in digital age, and to explore innovative governance arrangements, beyond the one-dimensional line defined by “market” and “hierarchy”, that can facilitate the processes of integrative coordination, and collective creation in organizations.The dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1 is a theory paper that provides the overall theoretical arguments about why transaction cost economics (Williamson 1979, 1991, 1996, 2002) is no longer a satisfactory theoretical framework for governance design in the digital age, and offers a normative model which suggest possibilities of much more nuanced, complicated and pluralistic governance choices than suggested by transaction cost economics. It is argued that potential governance choices are not solely situated on a one-dimensional line between hierarchy and market, as transaction cost economics asserts. The rich connotations of socially constructed agency (Giddens, 1985; Greenwood et al. 2011) provide diverse possibilities of governance arrangements, which spread across a triangular plane in a three-dimensional space defined by static efficiency, coordinative efficiency and creative efficiency (see Figure 1). This paperprovides both graphic and mathematical presentations of this three-dimensional model for governance design, which can be applied to different levels of organizing.Essay 2 and 3 are two empirical papers that endeavor to extend Essay 1 by finding out the exact relationship between certain innovative governance arrangements with organizations’ performance in coordinative and creative efficiencies. Essay 2 focuses on the realization of integrative coordination in organizations. It found out that layered distributed organizational structure (Simon, 1962), broad-brushed ex ante plan (Edmondson, Bohmer and Pisano, 2001), and semi-structures (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997) are beneficial in facilitating an ongoing coordination process when interdependencies are complex and uncertain. Essay 3 focuses on organizations’ performance in collective creativity (Shalley et al., 2004; George, 2007), especiallyon what governance arrangements can best allow collective creativity to emerge without overly sacrificing organizational stability and efficiency. It is discovered that “ordered disruption”, including ordered spatial disruption, ordered temporal disruption and ordered affective disruption, have positive effects on the emergence of collective creativity. Both Essay 2 and Essay 3 use collaborative organizations on smart city projects as the empirical setting. The findings of these two empirical papers are grounded on multiple case studies on those collaborative organizations.

Thesis Summary This dissertation explores the construct, prior scientific inquiry, and market implications of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), and it is based upon one conceptual and two empirical papers. In the first essay, I provide conceptual clarity by dimensionalizing the construct according to five aspects (the Who, What, Where, When, and How of eWOM). In the second essay, the resulting organizing framework is followed up with a historical analysis of eWOM dimensions, aliases, theories, and methodologies used in prior research. Additionally, I employ citation network analysis in order to identify gaps in scholarly communication and facilitate progressive knowledge building in this area. Finally, in the third essay, I use meta-analysis to empirically test the moderating impact of four of the five eWOM dimensions on sales effectiveness. I find that eWOM is positively correlated with sales (.091), but its effectiveness differs across platform, product, and metric factors. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for further research are discussed.

Thesis Summary Climate change and global temperature rise has made environmentallegislations a focal point of discussion. This dissertation is devoted to the study ofenvironmental legislations and their effect on supply chain practices. More precisely, ourcenter of interest is the product recovery based legislation along with compliance basedregulations. We explore the reuse potential and the environmental and economical aspects of different product recovery based legislation schemes by modeling a stackelberg game between a social welfare maximizing policy maker and a profit maximizing monopolistic firm and find that a combination of existing recoverypolicies i.e., a recovery target in combination with incentive structure such as taxation/subsidy may lead to better outcomes not only from environmental perspective but also from economical aspects. In Chapter 2, we extend the discussion comparative performance of the recovery legislation based schemes in presence of innovation and product design issues and show how unintended environmental outcomes may appear if the policy framework is not adequately designed. In Chapter 3, we capture the effect of recovery legislations and compliance based legislations on productselection when a firm serves a number of markets. We incorporate the effects ofuncertainty associated with market demands and recovery cost parameters and present a robust optimization based method for product selection and allocation decisions.

Thesis Summary In the face of increased product commoditization and growing global competition, many B2B firms transition to services to obtain competitive advantages and combat margin pressures. Yet despite their growing emphasis on services, many manufacturers still fail to understand the performance ramifications of adding service offerings to their portfolios. In three essays, I examine the performance effects of service transition strategies and investigate the reasons behind the increased relevance of B2B services and whether or not investing in these offerings is truly beneficial for B2B manufacturers over the long term. In particular, in the first essay, I test a comprehensive framework that disentangles the roles of sales growth, profitability, and earnings volatility in driving the effect of services on firm value over different stages of the transition. In the second essay, I examine the relationship between service transition strategies and the components of stock returns risk, including overall and downside systematic and idiosyncratic risk. I also explore the role of earnings volatility in delivering the effect of moving into services on firm’s risk. In the third essay, I investigate the performance effect of B2B service innovations through estimating the abnormal stock market returns to launch of new industrial services, while accounting for differences across types of services, stages of a firm’s service transition, and industry- and firm- level factors.

Thesis Summary In the light of the growing societal pressure to deal with the climate change and somerelevant environmental issues, there has been a trend to mitigate the negative environmentalimpacts, either through enforcing the environmental legislations or through advocating some greenbusiness models. Against this situation, it is widely acknowledged that when decision makers(either business executives or policy makers) are typically in a position to implement some actionsto deal with sustainability challenges, they are often lack the theoretical underpinning to appreciatewhether these actions are optimal or not. Thus, besides its academic relevance, advancing thefrontier of theoretical research is the necessary condition to help decision makers achievesustainability goals. The hi-tech industry and the transportation sector are both responsible forgenerating serious environmental concerns: the former as a result of electronic waste generated byrapid obsolescence of many electronic products; the latter because of its massive reliance on fossilfuels. In response to the environmental challenges, this Ph.D. thesis studies these two sectors withan aim to provide decision makers with guidance in the two specific areas: waste reduction andpromotion of low carbon transportation means. The results have implications for firms and policymakers alike.

Thesis Summary This dissertation examines how horizontal pay inequalities in sales organizations impact salespeople’s performance. More specifically, I explore costs that arise through social comparisons with salient targets within sales organizations. I use compensation and performance data of more than 34,000 salespeople as well as data pertaining to the brands they sell, to show that brand power can substitute for pay and counteract the detrimental effect of pay inequality on performance. Moreover, my results suggest that job challenge can also act as a surrogate for pay, thereby affecting the relationship between pay gaps and performance. Further, I describe the effect of organizational ownership structure on salespeople’s performance management. Given that many sales organizations reward better performers by heightening pay dispersion, decision makers should carefully leverage their brand portfolio and sales team job assignments to soften the impact of pay gaps on salespeople’s performance.

Thesis Summary This dissertation is composed of the three essays, each contributing to address part of the puzzle regarding how different types of political connections affect firms’ international expansion strategies and performance. The first essay examines how political connections moderate the relationship between host country attributes and international strategy in a sample of greenfield investments in manufacturing during the 2003-2010 period. The second and third essays examine how political connections directly impact a firm’s international expansion strategies and performance. The second essay investigates the role of different types of political connections on a firm’s international investments amount and risk profile. Finally, the third essay analyzes the role of political connections as an explanatory factor of firms’ ability to accelerate the provision of funding and development of their project finance-based investments. Both the latter two essays rely on an original dataset on various political connections enjoyed by the largest French firms during the 2003-2012 period.

Thesis Summary This dissertation explores the role of career age in shaping creativity over time. In the first paper, I challenge the commonly-held view that career age has a curvilinear effect on creativity, suggesting instead that career age does not have any clear effect on creativity. I argue that this happens because career age affects individuals’ cognitive complexity, flexibility and intrinsic motivation, which have opposite effects on creativity. I propose that these opposite effects engender different cognitive and motivational needs at different stages of the career, and these needs have to be attended to in order to maximize creativity. Consequently, career age acts as an important moderator of the relationship between creativity and some of its antecedents. In the second paper, I empirically test this idea by looking at the differential effect of two knowledge dimension, depth and breadth, on creativity over the career. I find that the effect of knowledge depth becomes more and more negative as career age progresses, while the effect of knowledge breadth becomes more and more positive. Finally, in the third paper I test these ideas at the team level of analysis, by looking at the effect of resources on team creativity. I find that the resources have a stronger effect when career age and repeated collaboration are high.

Thesis Summary The main goal of this dissertation is to study the potential factors that may hamper or accelerate the diffusion of environmental energy systems (e.g: renewable energies). To this end, using different methods such as game theory, survey data analysis, and time series data analysis we observe the diffusion of these technologies from different perspectives such as policy makers, manufacturers, and customers. This dissertation consists of five chapters. The first chapter provides introduction and background of the research.Second chapter investigates the role of policy makers and technology manufacturers on the diffusion of the environmental energy systems. Chapter three is dedicated to studying the impact of different information dimensions on the different stages of environmental technology adoption process. Chapter four examines effect of the penetration of the environmental energy systems into the electricity market by studying theelectricity spot price and electricity supply-demand imbalance. Lastly, chapter five concludes the results of this study and provides directions for future researches. The results reported in this dissertation offer valuable managerial insights to policy makers, technology manufacturers and to firms operating in the energy sector.