T his study explores whether the negative impact of "groupthink concurrence-seeking behavior" (GTB) on business process reengineering (BPR) projects is affected by group members personal traits and interpersonal ties within the group. To this purpose we conduct and present the results of a longitudinal controlled field experiment over 18 BPR projects lasting 3 months and involving 18 teams comprising 71 first-year MBA students. The main contribution of this study is twofold. First, we explicitly consider and measure the core construct of groupthink phenomenon: that is, GTB. Existing organizational behavior literature has, contrarily, considered only its causes, symptoms, and outcomes. Second, we show evidence that GTB does have a negative impact on group performance in BPR project settings. In this regards, results also indicate that while perceived control, conscientiousness and interpersonal evaluation mitigate the negative impact of GTB on group project performance, confidence, and previous relationships amplify this negative impact, even if they have a direct positive effect on performance. Thanks to the findings of this study, we are able to provide valuable suggestions to managers in charge of BPR projects for ensuring effective performance of project teams and controlling for potential obstacles due to GTB.

This study focuses on decision-making within operational teams. Grounding our argumentation on group decision-making literature, we argue that adverse behavior patterns may affect the way in which consensus is achieved within the team, and that team performance has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the level of consensus. Then, by relying on leadership literature, we pose the hypothesis that the level of shared leadership inside the group moderates this U-shaped relationship. To empirically test our literature-based argumentation, we use longitudinal data collected in the years 2014 and 2015 from business process reengineering projects, each lasting three months, conducted by 141 master of science students grouped in 34 teams. We conclude by emphasizing that it is important to control for the occurrence of behaviors which lead to "fake" consensus within operational teams, by observing the individuals' satisfaction with respect to the group decision as well as their active participation in the decision-making process.

This paper investigates how internal and external factors affect the choice between alliances and joint ventures (A&JVs) and mergers and acquisitions (M&As) for the external sourcing of research and development (R&D) activities, and whether or not such a choice is really con- tingent, that is, is it the best choice in terms of its impact on firms’ innovative performance under those circumstances? We build a set of hypotheses based on both the transaction-cost theory and the resource-based view, and test them through a secondary data source analy- sis. We found that companies adopt either R&D M&A or A&JV depending on internal (e.g. resources and capabilities, innovation experience) and external (e.g. degree of industry spe- cialisation) factors. Surprisingly, this contingent choice turns to be effective on innovative performance only for the internal factors, rather than the external. This paper contributes to inter-firm relationships literature by presenting the real advantages of using integrated and contingency theoretical models to understand contingent decisions

Purpose - Many research studies in operations management (OM) and strategic management (SM) investigate how different kinds of firm decisions regarding business relationships can positively affect firm’s operations performance, resources endowment, and competitive position. Very few studies exist, however, trying to illuminate the actual behavior of managers when making strategic decisions about their company relationships with other companies, as opposed to normative theory. The purpose of this paper is to explore linkages between the “set” of strategic objectives that managers are willing to pursue, the “set” of networking decisions they make, and the “set” of business agreements they sign.\ud Design/methodology/approach – In order to investigate and explore actual manager behaviours about networking strategy, we adopt multiple-case study-based field research. We collect data on 13 business agreements from 3 manufacturing firms in the mechatronic industry in Italy. Within-case and cross-case analyses are mainly used for theory building purposes.\ud Findings – Empirical data allow us to identify four different archetypes of networking strategy. The archetypes capture different connections between “set” of strategic objectives that managers are willing to pursue, “set” of networking decisions that they consider, and “set” of strategic agreements that they actually adopt. Specifically, the identified archetypes are named Multi-alignment, Multi-agreement (Diversification), Multi-objective, and Mono-alignment (Focus) and are related to different association multiplicities among objectives, decisions, and agreements. The implications related to these archetypes are three-fold. First, the Multi-alignment archetype suggests to focus not just on one kind of agreement but on the firm overall portfolio of agreements to understand how different kinds of agreements and networking decisions can play a complementary role in achieving firm’s pre-fixed business objective/s. Second, the Multi-agreement archetype suggests that managers can minimize the risk of loosing the potentiality of networking collaboration by undertaking different kinds of agreements for the same strategic objective. Third, the Mono-alignment (Focus) and Multi-objective archetypes suggest that also just one agreement can potentially pursues one or multiple strategic objectives and thus can allow managers to minimize the cost of managing several networking relationships. \ud Originality/value – The originality of this study consists in exploring linkages between objectives, decisions and networking agreements without specifically focusing on: 1) either vertical or horizontal relationships as, contrarily and respectively, most of the OM and SM papers on business relationships usually do, 2) either operations performance (positioning school) or resource endowment (resource based view school) strategic objectives as, contrarily, most of the OM and SM papers on strategic alignment usually do; 3) any specific kind of agreement contract (outsourcing, alliance, joi...

The goal of this study is to explain the complex effect of management by objective practices on employees' innovative behavior. Instead of considering individual goal orientation and/or formal creativeness‐related goal assignment (as in the recent literature), the focus of this paper is on exploring whether the official adoption of management by objective practices may foster employee innovative behavior. Basing on the results of 2 exploratory interviews with 2 senior managers of 2 global consulting companies, we build our conceptual model. We use a goal‐based view to this purpose. Then, we test the model by using data collected by surveying 80 consultants employed in 17 different management consulting companies. We find that a conscious motivational path links goal‐setting strategy to employee innovative behavior through smart goals, whereas an unconscious motivational path links leader–follower relationship quality to employee innovative behavior through an appropriate performance appraisal strategy.