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Research Summary: Although most theories of growth presume that growth varies with the focus and limits of managerial attention, the actual role played by attention has remained largely implicit. In contrast, this article explicitly considers attention structure and the processes that place sustained focus on growth issues. We explain how attention structure—specialized attention within a particular unit and integrated attention between units—affects both bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (schema-driven) attentional processing of new issues. We also examine the relationship between attention structure and divisional interdependencies, identifying conditions under which different attentional patterns generate organizational tensions that lead to architectural elaboration: the delineation of new organizational units. This logic is illustrated with examples from Motorola, a large telecommunications equipment provider, during a period of sustained growth. In linking theories of growth with the attention-based view (ABV), we augment both perspectives and offer an approach that provides a better understand growth's cognitive underpinnings. Managerial Summary: We examine how, within a multidivisional firm, the pattern of organizational attention affects firm growth. We highlight the attention focus within and between divisions and the corporate office and specific processes that shape the intensity and direction of attention in the firm's constituent units. In particular, we examine how corporate interventions, appointment of managerial resources, prototyping, and corporate charters direct managerial attention and the identification and advancement new opportunities in support of growth. Our approach also considers how attention patterns and formal organizational structure interact to cause tensions between managers, and when these tensions lead to the delineation of new subunits. To illustrate our logic, we use examples drawn from Motorola, a large telecommunications equipment provider, during a period of sustained growth. Our approach offers managers insights into attentional design of the multidivisional firm.

Research highlights the role of external knowledge sources in the recognition of strategic opportunities but is less forthcoming with respect to the role of such sources during the process of exploiting or realizing opportunities. We build on the knowledge-based view to propose that realizing opportunities often involves significant interactions with external knowledge sources. Organizational design can facilitate a firm's interactions with these sources, while achieving coordination among organizational members engaged in opportunity exploitation. Our analysis of a double-respondent survey involving 536 Danish firms shows that the use of external knowledge sources is positively associated with opportunity exploitation, but the strength of this association is significantly influenced by organizational designs that enable the firm to access external knowledge during the process of exploiting opportunities.

The link between organizational structure and innovation has been a longstanding interest of organizational scholars, yet the exact nature of the relationship has not been clearly established. Drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm, we take a process view and examine how hierarchy of authority—a fundamental element of organizational structure reflecting degree of managerial oversight—differentially influences behavior and performance in the idea generation versus idea selection phases of the innovation process. Using a multimethod approach that includes a field study and a lab experiment, we find that hierarchy of authority is detrimental to the idea generation phase of innovation, but that hierarchy can be beneficial during the screening or selection phase of innovation. We also identify a behavioral mechanism underlying the effect of hierarchy of authority on selection performance and propose that selection is a critical organizational capability that can be strategically developed and managed through organizational design. Our investigation helps clarify the theoretical relationship between structure and innovation performance and demonstrates the behavioral and economic consequences of organizational design choice. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1142 .

The study proposes an organizational design framework that impacts innovation in corporate firms. In an emerging economy like Oman, innovation helps to reduce the dependence on oil revenues and enhance its international competitiveness. However, the corporate organizations in emerging economies are unable to innovate effectively because they are not designed for innovation. Further, scarcity of resources undermines their readiness for innovation. This study empirically validates measures of an entrepreneurial organizational design framework in Omani corporate sector. In order to explain how a corporate organizational design promotes innovation and clarify the missing links between corporate entrepreneurial activity and innovation, the mediating role of readiness for innovation (RFI) is tested. Using a quantitative research approach, data is collected from 401 corporate firms in Oman and analysed using structural equation modelling. The findings support the proposition that entrepreneurial organizational design promotes both radical and incremental innovation degree and frequency, while RFI partially mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial inputs and innovation outputs. The study contributes to the understanding of innovation in emerging economies as it explains that RFI helps firms to enhance its innovation potential by optimizing its resources, capabilities and processes for innovation. These measures are essential for organizations, particularly in emerging economies focused on low cost innovation. The findings of the study will inform managerial decision-making in terms of designing organizations for innovation and implementation of measures related to readiness for innovation.

According to the literature on ambidexterity, organizations can use structural or contextual approaches to simultaneously explore novel opportunities and exploit existing ones. So far, however, we know very little about what induces organizations to focus on structural versus contextual ambidexterity, or how they combine the two approaches to maximize organizational learning. To shed more light on these questions, we investigate how the environment shapes a firm’s use of structural and contextual ambidexterity. Drawing on a comparative, longitudinal case study of the four largest electric utility companies in Germany, we show that firms focused on structural ambidexterity whenever they perceived emerging opportunities in the environment as requiring organizational culture and capabilities fundamentally different from their own. Contextual ambidexterity, on the other hand, became particularly important when opportunities in the environment were both numerous and uncertain, requiring the organization to leverage the distributed attention and expertise of its frontline employees. We show that environments characterized by opportunities that are numerous/uncertain and require novel culture and capabilities lead organizations to invest in initiatives that combine elements of both structural and contextual ambidexterity—an approach we label hybrid ambidexterity . Our theory framework synthesizes and complements existing work that has started to investigate the antecedents of structural versus contextual ambidexterity. We challenge the prevailing understanding of contextual and structural ambidexterity as dichotomous categories and reconceptualize them as two ends of a continuum. In addition, we provide initial evidence that firms’ ambidexterity approaches are influenced by managers’ perceptions of capabilities and opportunities.

While sustainable high performance requires the capacity to simultaneously explore and exploit, the management literature is divided on the most feasible and efficient route toward this end. We review two proposed approaches for achieving simultaneously high levels of exploration and exploitation: organizational ambidexterity and organizational vacillation. To facilitate comparison, we map these approaches onto a common performance landscape, making precise the empirical question of which delivers superior long run performance. We then analyze canonical cases from both literatures, examining patterns of decision making and corresponding performance over time. These cases suggest that vacillation may offer higher long run performance than ambidexterity, while ambidexterity enhances performance on the margin when utilized within larger epochs of vacillation. We conclude that ambidexterity and vacillation are complements with respect to performance, albeit through different mechanisms.

Research summary: We investigate how organizational adaptation to interdependence shifts is influenced by \"integrators. \" These are formally mandated managerial roles meant to promote coordination across specialized but interdependent organizational subunits, yet they do so without relying on formal authority. While much has been learned about how integrators promote steady-state coordination within a known pattern of interdependence, less is known about their impact on organizational adaptation when the pattern of interdependence itself is unknown. We discuss mechanisms by which integrators may nonetheless aid organizational adaptation and learning processes in such situations, and test our hypotheses in the context of a regulatory change that affected the in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics sector in the United Kingdom using a differences-in-differences design. Managerial summary: Organizational structure can influence how an organization adapts to change. We investigate how a regulatory change in the provision of fertility treatments in the United Kingdom forced clinics to change their workflows, and whether the presence of integrator roles enabled clinics to adapt to these changes. It is well known that integrator roles in general are valuable in coordinating across specialized organizational units, but this research points to the surprising implication that their value may persist even when the workflow being coordinated changes suddenly, in ways that nobody necessarily comprehends. Our research highlights the fact that even in an intensively science-based work context, the u technology of organizing\" can have a significant role in shaping organizational performance.

Technology has been an important theme in the study of organizational form and function since the 1950s. However, organization science's interest in this relationship has declined significantly over the past 30 years, a period during which information technologies have become pervasive in organizations and brought about significant changes in them. Organizing no longer needs to take place around hierarchy and the collection, storage, and distribution of information as was the case with \"command and control\" bureaucracies in the past. The adoption of innovations in information technology (IT) and organizational practices since the 1990s now make it possible to organize around what can be done with information. These changes are not the result of information technologies per se, but of the combination of their features with organizational arrangements and practices that support their use. Yet concepts and theories of organizational form and function remain remarkably silent about these changes. Our analysis offers five affordances-visualizing entire work processes, real-time/flexible product and service innovation, virtual collaboration, mass collaboration, and simulation/synthetic reality-that can result from the intersection of technology and organizational features. We explore how these affordances can result in new forms of organizing. Examples from the articles in this special issue \"Information Technology and Organizational Form and Function\" are used to show the kinds of opportunities that are created in our understanding of organizations when the \"black boxes\" of technology and organization are simultaneously unpacked.

This study examines the effects of organizational structure and performance feedback on termination decisions—in particular, product phaseout. Using quarterly product-level data on the major mobile handset manufacturers for the period 2004–2009, we analyze how product-level feedback affects product phaseout and how these decisions are conditioned by organizational structure—the extent to which decision making is centralized. We argue that such structure affects termination in two ways: directly, through coordination, and indirectly, by shaping the interpretation of performance feedback. Our baseline models indicate that as performance increases above aspirations, the rate of phaseout decreases. We find that as performance declines below aspirations, the rate of phaseout decreases, but then increases when the product falls below a certain sales threshold. We also find evidence that centralization amplifies the feedback effect above aspirations but attenuates it below aspirations. This study links two pillars of the Carnegie school, aspiration levels and hierarchy, to explain the complexity of phaseout following perceived success or failure. We thereby augment the growing scholarship on performance feedback by considering some important conditional effects imposed by a centralized structure. Our focus on centralization expands the scope of theory concerning organization design by linking structure and cognition to explain firm behavior, especially termination decisions.

Organizations, as is true with social systems more generally, tend to be nearly, not fully, decomposable. However, analyses of nearly decomposable systems have tended to be at a single level of analysis and have generally neglected the vertical element of nearly decomposable systems. Critical to the notion of nearly decomposable systems is the property that the details of a particular subproblem may be encapsulated and captured by more aggregate parameters and that those subproblems interact in an aggregate way. We explore these issues in reference to the role of three canonical organizational structures in facilitating adaptation in the presence of near decomposability: a traditional hierarchy in which a subordinate reports to a single boss, an autonomous form in which the subordinate does not have a direct reporting relationship, and a multiauthority structure in which the subordinate reports to multiple bosses. Despite the ubiquity and potential benefits of multiauthority structures in coordinating highly interdependent tasks, our understanding of the mechanisms that determine the performance of those structures is still relatively modest. Scholars have noted conflicting empirical findings and have called for a more rigorous approach to study these organizational forms. To help address these issues, we develop an agent-based computational model that compares the performance of these three canonical types of organizational forms in settings characterized by different degrees of complexity and near decomposability. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1177 .