Innovating Beyond the Horizon: CEO Career Horizon, Top Management Composition, and R&D Intensity

Abstract

Decreasing research and development (R&D)

Rethinking ‘Top‐Down’ and ‘Bottom‐Up’ Roles of Top and Middle Managers in Organizational Change: Implications for Employee Support

“…Our theory and findings support the view that change agents can be found at many levels in organizations (Denis et al, 2001;Plowman et al, 2007). Although studies focusing on TMs have made commendable calls for inclusion of MMs (Carpenter et al, 2004;Menz, 2012), even recent efforts embracing these calls by co-theorizing the roles of both TM and MMs tend to assume that change initiation cascades downwards (see Heyden et al, 2015b;Knight and Paroutis, 2016;Thomas et al, 2011) with less emphasis on how change may also spring upwards. We have introduced the notion of TM-MM change role configurations as one vantage point for interpreting and consolidating these complementary streams of thought, embracing insights from both.…”

“…TMs and MMs are expected to be centrally involved in initiating and executing change (Balogun, 2007;Heyden et al, 2015b;Knight and Paroutis, 2016). The theoretical origins of top-down approaches to studying organizational change can be traced back to Chandler (1962) who interpreted change as a TM activity (see also Child, 1972).…”

“…When MMs initiate change they may be better positioned than TMs to create a strong conviction among employees that change is needed and to engender trust in individual and organizational capacities to undertake it (Armenakis et al, 1993). As MMs tend to be more directly affected by change themselves, given that they incur sunk and learning costs (Heyden et al, 2015b), employees may believe that change initiated by MMs must be truly necessary. This may suggest fairness of the change and fairness of how employees will be treated during or after the change (Rodell and Colquitt, 2009).…”

“…MMs may feel forced to execute and do strictly what is expected of them. As a result, MMs may fail to engage in extra role behaviours necessary to actively 'think along' and inspire employees (Heyden et al, 2015b). This may translate into a more 'clinical' interpretation of the change process at lower levels and reduce support among employees.…”

A temporal perspective on the relationship between top management team internationalization and firms' innovativeness

“…Additionally, the so called "horizon problem" postulates that CEOs tend to become more short-term focused the closer they approach retirement (Heyden, Reimer, & van Doorn, 2015;Matta & Beamish, 2008). This phenomenon becomes apparent, for instance, by fewer investments that entail greater risk and a long time span to realize potential returns, for example, R&D (Ahuja et al, 2008) or the pursuance of lower growth strategies (Child, 1974).…”