Interest has been growing in understanding how organizations' aspiration levels affect their planning for future organizational change. Previous research has not specified whether organizations use direct competitors or other comparable organizations as referents for forming their aspirations. In this study, it is argued that organizations form their social aspirations based on two types of interorganizational comparisons: competitive and striving. In competitive comparisons, an organization compares its current performance against that of its current direct competitors. When relative performance is poor, these organizations plan more extensive and more radical change. However, the study shows that organizations that are performing well relative to competitors do not necessarily become inertial, as theory suggests. Rather, organizations engage in striving comparisons by comparing their current performance against the performance of organizations to which they strive to be like in the future. The analyses show that organizations with large striving discrepancies are driven to more extensive and more radical change, even if they are performing well compared to current competitors. The study examined this interplay between competitive and striving discrepancy in explaining organizational change on a sample of 131 AACSB accredited business schools.

Research has found that employee suggestion systems are a useful way to obtain and utilize employees' creative ideas. To be effective, employees must be motivated to think creatively and to participate in the suggestion system. Unfortunately, motivating employees to participate is a common weakness of suggestion systems. Motivating employees involves more than simply offering rewards to submitters if their suggestions are put to use. According to expectancy theory, rewards will only motivate behaviour if the rewards are valued, if they are closely linked to successful performance, and if employees believe that they can perform successfully. This paper applies expectancy theory to the problem of motivating employees to participate in a suggestion system. We describe suggestion system technology that will increase employees' motivation to think creatively and participate in the system.

This study seeks to expand our understanding of interorganizational emulation decisions made by top administrators in a broad sample of American colleges and universities. We analyze their emulation choices and show that these decision makers tend to emulate universities similar to their own. Our findings suggest, however, that the choice of emulation target within one's industry is not simply a matter of choosing the most structurally similar organization, but rather that identity-related attributes, such as reputation, organizational image, and organizational identity, also play a significant role in the emulation decision. The data also show that industry subgroups based on emulation decisions (strategic reference groups) differ in both structural and identity-related attributes. Further, interorganizational emulation decisions based on tactics of upward comparison (e.g., emulating universities with better reputations) are associated with greater strategic change, while downward comparisons are associated with greater perceived external threat. Finally, the data show that top management's perceptions of the university's level of environmental threat are related to their choice of a more coarse-grained or fine-grained set of attributes when determining the emulation target. We discuss some of these findings’implications for theory and practice.

This paper reviews some critical issues associated with measuring and testing change and then reports on how strategy researchers have addressed those matters. We first discuss three key methodological requirements: reliability assumptions of change variables, correlations between the change variable and its initial measure, and selection of unbiased measurement alternatives. Next, we present data from a content analysis of 126 change studies which suggest that strategy researchers tend not to recognize those requirements. Indeed, the typical approach used to measure and test change (as a simple difference between two measures of the same variable) is usually inappropriate and could lead to inaccurate findings and flawed conclusions. We conclude by offering suggestions for how change can be studied more rigorously. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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