Fit between Organizational Culture and Innovation Strategy: Implications for Innovation Performance

Abstract

Although prior studies have indicated the interrelationships between specific types of innovation strategy and specific elements of organizational culture, few studies simultaneously evaluate the relationship between the two multi-dimensional constructs in holistic perspective. Based on configuration theory, we conceptualize fit as 'profile deviation', and investigate the fit between an organization's culture and its innovation strategy. Data were collected from 183 Chinese organizations. We examine the hypothesis that greater fit between organizational culture and innovation strategy encourages superior innovation speed and innovation quality. Our results provide evidence that in the group of organizations exhibiting either exploratory or exploitative innovation strategy, the more similar the organizational culture configurations are to those of the top performers, the higher their innovation speed and innovation quality are. In the group of organizations exhibiting ambidextrous innovation strategy, the fit between organizational culture and innovation strategy is insignificantly associated with innovation speed and innovation quality. Implications for applying the culture-strategy fit in innovation management are discussed.

Setting Organisational Culture to Develop Potential and Innovativeness

“…In today's highly competitive environment, continuous and sustained innovation means not only innovation of products and processes, but also the development of human talents and management, as confirmed by the results that have shown the importance of setting the organisational culture in order to support knowledge and experience sharing among employees with a view to strengthening innovation potential of individuals, teams and the entire organisation, as was also evidenced by the research by Geradts and Bocken (2019), Chen et al (2018), and Leopold (2019).…”

“…The cultural context in which an organisation operates influences the level of innovation (Lijauco et al, 2020). Organisations need to adapt to modern trends in management, continual changes in markets and external environment, and these changes must be reflected in an organisational environment setting (Chen et al, 2018;Stankiewicz and Lychmus, 2017). Also, organizational sustainability significantly intervenes in the interaction of organizational culture and innovation (Srisathan, Ketkaew and Naruetharadhol, 2020).…”

Partnership-Based Supply Chain Collaboration: Impact on Commitment, Innovation, and Firm Performance

“…Innovation is represented by incremental or radical changes in product, process, and value activities [54], and the degree of its level was defined by a variety of valuable, rare, inimitable, and differentiated products and services [55]. Innovation generally refers to higher firm performance [56] or is at least expected to result in organizational change, which ultimately affects the overall firm performance [44,57].…”

Why Do Sustainable Mergers Fail to Manage Entrepreneurship?

“…Using case studies as a research strategy, which has been used too by classic scholars as well as relevant authors of management literature [8,19,20], we propose a conceptual model to focus the entrepreneurial conflict as a missed step in a sustainable merger process over time.…”

“…Authors such as Eisenhardt and Graebner [20] hold that theory building from case studies is one of the best bridges from rich qualitative evidence to deductive research. Even more, they published an article in one of the lead journals of management, which has been cited more than 11,630 times.…”