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"Development Design Group (Firm)"
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Improving Management with Individual and Group-Based Consulting
Differences in management quality are an important contributor to productivity differences across countries. A key question is how to best improve poor management in developing countries. We test two different approaches to improving management in Colombian auto parts firms. The first uses intensive and expensive one-on-one consulting, while the second draws on agricultural extension approaches to provide consulting to small groups of firms at approximately one-third the cost of the individual approach. Both approaches lead to improvements in management practices of a similar magnitude (8–10 percentage points). The group-based intervention leads to significant increases in firm sales, profits, and labour productivity, while the impacts on firm performance are smaller in magnitude and less robust from the individual consulting. The results point to the potential of group-based approaches as a pathway to scaling up management improvements.
Journal Article
Managing the Repertoire: Stories, Metaphors, Prototypes, and Concept Coherence in Product Innovation
Arecognized challenge in innovation scholarship is how to coordinate the efforts of many minds contributing to the design of a single artifact. Much research shows that product concept representations can help coordinate design tasks, but we know little about the practices that make representations more or less effective. We used an inductive approach to examine how six teams in three industries used concept representations when creating novel products. All six teams crafted three types of representations: stories, metaphors, and prototypes. However, merely using representations did not ensure a shared repertoire and concept coherence—a common understanding of desired product attributes. Teams that failed to consistently engage in three practices—(1) collective scrutiny of representations, (2) linking representations to design constraints, and (3) active editing of representations—produced concept disunity, with disparate understandings of desired product attributes. Teams that maintained concept coherence were better able to coordinate design tasks than teams that experienced concept disunity. Our research explains how the ultimate effect of concept representations on the coordination of innovation is contingent on the practices used to manage a repertoire of representations in use.
Journal Article
Sustainable investment initiatives and the performance of stakeholders involved in multinational technology companies' supply chains: linear or nonlinear effects?
PurposeThis study aims to examine how environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives and ISO 14001, which is an internationally agreed standard to set out the requirements for an environmental management system, affect firm performance in the context of the Industry 4.0 supply chain.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop a new chance-constrained network data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the presence of non-positive data to estimate innovation, operational and profitability performances for three main relation groups (suppliers, partners and customers) in Microsoft's supply chain.FindingsResults of this study show the following: (1) the application of ISO 14001 will reduce profitability but increase overall performance (OP); (2) ESG implementation has a convex U-shaped influence on profitability and OP, which means that firms will benefit when ESG investment goes beyond a particular level; (3) the nonlinear U-shape is presented in the E and G components, but not in the S of the individual ESG initiatives, and (4) only specific subcomponents of S and G in the subcomponent of individual ESG initiatives are nonlinearly connected to OP. Research's results reveal that the customer group has a higher performance value than the other two groups, which suggests that this group will create competitive advantages for Microsoft.Originality/valueOverall, the authors provide an insightful viewpoint into supply chain management by examining the ESG initiatives, ISO 14001 and performances of Microsoft's supply chain.
Journal Article
The Role of High-Value Agriculture in Capability Expansion: Qualitative Insights into Smallholder Cash Crop Production in Nepal, Laos and Rwanda
High-value agriculture contributes to rural incomes, but does it also contribute to expanding “human capabilities” (Sen, Development as freedom, Knopf, New York, 1999) in a durable way? Through long-term qualitative fieldwork in three landlocked LDCs—Nepal, Rwanda and Laos—resulting in over 150 interviews, we found expansions of the three analysed capabilities: paid work, mobility and social relations. Yet, those improvements were characterised by precariousness: they were mostly not resilient in the face of the economic and environmental risks that high-value agriculture entails. The only example of a durable capability expansion was found in Nepal, where women claimed social spaces through collective organisation. All three study sites showed remarkable consistency in that the considerable risk involved in cash crop production was mainly borne by farmers and rural labourers. Research on mechanisms to guard against these risks at household or individual level is warranted.
Journal Article
The Economics of Guilds
Occupational guilds in medieval and early modern Europe offered an effective institutional mechanism whereby two powerful groups, guild members and political elites, could collaborate in capturing a larger slice of the economic pie and redistributing it to themselves at the expense of the rest of the economy. Guilds provided an organizational mechanism for groups of businessmen to negotiate with political elites for exclusive legal privileges that allowed them to reap monopoly rents. Guild members then used their guilds to redirect a share of these rents to political elites in return for support and enforcement. In short, guilds enabled their members and political elites to negotiate a way of extracting rents in the manufacturing and commercial sectors, rents that neither party could have extracted on its own. First, I provide an overview of where and when European guilds arose, what occupations they encompassed, how large they were, and how they varied across time and space. I then examine how guild activities affected market competition, commercial security, contract enforcement, product quality, human capital, and technological innovation. The historical findings on guilds provide strong support for the view that institutions arise and survive for centuries not because they are efficient but because they serve the distributional interests of powerful groups.
Journal Article
For the Sake of the Ingroup: The Double-Edged Effects of Collectivism on Workplace Unethical Behavior
The existing literature provides conflicting evidence of whether a collectivistic value orientation is associated with ethical or unethical behavior. To address this confusion, we integrate collectivism theory and research with prior work on social identity, moral boundedness, group morality, and moral identity to develop a model of the double-edged effects of collectivism on employee conduct. We argue that collectivism is morally bounded depending on who the other is, and thus it inhibits employees’ motivation to engage in unethical pro-self behavior, yet strengthens their motivation to engage in unethical pro-organization behavior. We further predict that these effects are mediated by the psychological mechanism of organizational goal commitment and moderated by a person’s strength of moral identity. Results of three studies conducted in China and the United States and involving both field and experimental data offer strong support for our hypotheses. Theoretical and practical implications of the research are discussed.
Journal Article
The initial assignment effect: Local employer practices and positive career outcomes for work-family program users
One of the great paradoxes of inequality in organizations is that even when organizations introduce new programs designed to help employees in traditionally disadvantaged groups succeed, employees who use these programs often suffer negative career consequences. This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature by investigating how local employer practices can enable employees to successfully use the programs designed to benefit them. Using a research approach that controls for regulatory environment and program design, we analyze unique longitudinal personnel data from a large law firm to demonstrate that assignment to powerful supervisors upon organization entry improves career outcomes for individuals who later use a reduced-hours program. Additionally, we find that initial assignment to powerful supervisors is more important to positive career outcomes—that is, employee retention and performance-based pay—than are factors such as supervisor assignment at the time of program use. Initial assignment affects career outcomes for later program users through the mechanism of improved access to reputation-building work opportunities. These findings have implications for research on work-family programs and other employee-rights programs and for the role of social capital in careers.
Journal Article
Co-production and Voice in Policymaking: Participatory Processes in the European Periphery
Co-production is now the gold standard in policymaking, characterised by national and international actors with different types of knowledge working together to contribute to a collaborative decision-making process. The benefits of co-production in policymaking can include improved knowledge generation that merges practice-centred, political and technical knowledge and incorporates local knowledges to provide complementary information and increase ownership over policymaking processes. Nevertheless, it can also present pitfalls such as multiple and diverging interests, incomplete and asymmetric information, and resource asymmetries and elite capture as highlighted by Bender in (Eur J Dev Res, 2022). By reviewing a case in the European periphery, we document and illustrate situations of collaboration and conflict, benefits and pitfalls resulting from policymaking co-production, throughout recent Portuguese history and in present-day participatory budget initiatives. From competing national actors to influences from the Global North and Global South, the final outcome reflects a learning process in collaboration but also underlying power struggles.
Journal Article
The Influence of Innovativeness on the Financial and Non-Financial Performance of Retail Smes in Tshwane Metropole
SMEs play a crucial role in the economy by creating jobs, alleviating poverty, innovating, and driving economic growth and development. However, they frequently fail due to business challenges such as poor performance. Grounded in the innovation literature and the Resource-Based View Theory (RBV), this study empirically investigates the influence of innovativeness as a dimension of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on retail SMEs' performance indicators (financial and non-financial performance) in Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality. Saunders' research onion model was used to frame the methodology. The study adopted a quantitative research design while following a deductive approach. A survey method was used as a research strategy to collect data from 196 SMEs with the measuring instrument adapted from recent literature and from previously tested instruments. The questionnaire used a five-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = disagree, 5 = strongly agree. The \"neutral\" response was added to assure respondents that they need not feel compelled to answer every question. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for data analysis. The results revealed that innovativeness positively and significantly affects both financial and non-financial SMEs' performance directly and that representatives (managers/owners) of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality retail SMEs believe that if their team is open to new ideas and changes, the implementation of innovation in practice within SMEs will rise. Furthermore, managers recognize and value fresh ideas to encourage staff to \"think outside the box\" and share their creativity, which facilitates and encourages the actual implementation of innovation. Lastly, the study found that the more open SME managers/owners are to innovation, accept new ideas, and support new resources for innovation, the higher the innovation will take place in the organization. Operationalization of the vague term innovativeness is also a contribution to the literature. This research is crucial for developing countries and regions such as the Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, Gauteng province, South Africa, wherein such studies are lacking, despite the retail sector's significant role in this country's economy. SME managers/owners must regard innovation as an intrinsic aspect of their strategy in this line.
Journal Article