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This paper identifies and explains a potential tension between a firm's emphasis on customer orientation (CO) and the extent to which employees value CO as a success factor for individual performance. Based on self-determination theory and CO implementation research, the authors propose that firm CO may represent both autonomous and controlled motivations for CO, but that employees’ CO is more strongly linked to individual performance when employees experience solely autonomous motivation. Hence, the authors expect a substitution effect whereby the link between employees’ CO and their performance is weaker when firm CO is high. Furthermore, the authors examine a boundary condition for the previous hypothesis and propose that performance-contingent rewards have a positive effect on the internalization of the extrinsic motivation stemming from firm CO. Two multilevel studies with 979 employees and 201 top management team members from 132 firms support these hypotheses. Against previous research, these findings offer a new perspective on the effectiveness of CO initiatives, propose employees’ motivational states as the theoretical explanation for the heterogeneity in the link between employee CO and performance, and reappraise the role of performance-contingent rewards in CO research. Managerial implications for the effective implementation of customer-oriented initiatives within firms are provided.

Lévi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage has been used widely in a variety of management and organizational studies to highlight creative ‘situational tinkering’. Yet, we know little about ‘the bricoleur’ beyond the assumption of a functional agent responding to conditions of resource scarcity or environmental complexity. As such, studies offer limited possibilities in explaining the occurrence of bricolage in the absence of external demands, or much about who the bricoleur is. Drawing on 136 in-depth interviews with management consultants, this study argues for a richer understanding of bricolage by exploring the identity of the bricoleur. In doing so, the paper achieves three outcomes. First, it uses the original symbolic and cultural insights of bricolage made by Lévi-Strauss to detail how bricoleur identities are constructed; Second, it highlights how different organizational strategies enable and constrain the pursuit of bricoleur identities; Finally, it emphasizes the bricoleur's status as primarily an aspirational elite identity in the context of consultancy work, in contrast to its usual treatment as a ‘low status’ activity.

This paper advances the concepts of knowledge accession and knowledge acquisition in strategic alliances by identifying supplementary and complementary dimensions to these knowledge transfer modes. Complementary knowledge transfer reflects the similarity of knowledge that the partners have and is conducted in pursuit of higher efficiency and productivity to enhance partner firms' existing competitiveness. Supplementary knowledge transfer occurs when partners each possess distinctive core competences and the information that is acquired or accessed increases the business scope of partners. As knowledge accession entails knowledge amalgamation that does not involve organizational learning, costs associated with the transfer process are lower and trust is easier to establish than in the case of knowledge acquisition. The paper reviews the implications of these transfer modes on trust building in alliances and their costs implications and presents a number of propositions for further exploration. © 2008 British Academy of Management.

Media and telecommunications companies face the problem of how to integrate diametrically opposite radical internet firms after acquisition. Extant mergers and acquisitions (M&A) studies report that differences in the organizational culture are important in the cultural integration process. Frequently, M&A research assumes organizational cultures to be homogeneous and unified, but a large body of organizational literature suggests that organizations should be understood as heterogeneous living worlds in which employees construct their own subcultures. The paper focuses on the question of how such subcultures affect the long-term cultural integration of merged firms. A 12-year longitudinal field study in the Netherlands examined the integration of iPioneer into Telcom. The findings of the study show how three subcultures in iPioneer influenced the cultural integration process. The paper makes a contribution to the academic debate on cultural integration in domestic M&A by acknowledging that the numerous coexisting subcultures influence cultural integration in the complex process of post-acquisition integration. British Journal of Management

Based on a social identity analysis, the authors argue that people are attracted to teams and organizations with positive features. Such features can refer to the competence and achievements of the organization, or to its moral values and ethical conduct. However, in work contexts, ethics and achievements do not necessarily go together. The paper reports three studies that examine the relative and combined impact of perceived competence vs morality of a team or organization on its attractiveness to individuals. Study 1 (n=44) reveals that students prefer to seek employment in a moral rather than a competent organization, when forced to choose between these organizational features on a bipolar scale. Study 2 (n=100) replicates these findings in a design where the competence and morality of a fictitious organization were manipulated orthogonally. Study 3 (n=89) examines responses to experimental task teams that systematically differed from each other in their competence and morality. Results of all three studies converge to demonstrate that the perceived morality of the team or organization has a greater impact on its attractiveness to individuals than its perceived competence. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

This study draws on an active audience perspective to develop a better understanding of mass audiences' attraction towards popular management ideas. It focuses on audience members' own experiences and, in particular, what audience activities actually play a role in shaping mass attraction, and how the deployment of these activities may vary. Analysing 65 in-depth interviews with management practitioners in their role as audience members of guru seminars, the authors identify different key consumption activities, and explain how individual management practitioners may shift in consumption orientation throughout the communication process. This paper argues that such a broader and more dynamic understanding of consumption activity is essential in understanding the success and impact of management ideas, and opens several fruitful research directions.

As part of the debate about globalization and regionalization, this paper adds a perspective that has so far remained underexposed, that of (formerly state‐owned) firms in (previously) regulated industries, in order to better understand the (changing) role of the home country/region in internationalization processes in the context of regional market liberalization. We explore the global/regional orientations of the seven major European Union electric utilities from five different home countries, which are active in both fossil‐fuel and renewable energy generation. Using a multiple case study design, we collected internationalization/regionalization data from firms' annual reports for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010, supplemented with an analysis of secondary sources. Firms show a clear pattern of increasing internationalization away from the home‐country market, coupled with a home‐region orientation for traditional generation activities which differs from the more international, wider and often multiple regional presences in the newer renewables business for some firms. Institutional factors are argued to play an important role in both processes. Findings suggest distinct regionalization patterns for business units and different firm‐specific advantages, with strategic opportunities related to asset positions. Home‐country effects may be linked to a heterogeneous firm‐specific home‐region liability of foreignness, resulting in incomplete home‐region internationalization in most cases.

The gap between theory and practice is a persistent problem in management and organization research. In this respect, several scholars have suggested that ‘design’ is an ideal-typical form of mode 2 knowledge production. Design research develops knowledge in the service of action and problem solving in organizational settings. In this paper, we connect two perspectives on design that can be considered to be largely complementary but have hardly been combined and integrated in practice: science-based design drawing on design propositions grounded in research and human-centred design emphasizing an active and systematic participation by users and other stakeholders. An integrated approach that builds on both perspectives is developed and subsequently applied to designing and developing a portal for mapping competencies in an information technology cluster. This project involves creating problem awareness and articulating design propositions as well as developing scenarios of use, experimenting with prototypes, and organizational transformation. As such, this methodology addresses the dual challenge of rigour and relevance by producing both scientific and practical knowledge.

This paper explores how founders’ blueprints affect the dynamism of organizational practices, and in particular the capability to sustain as well as change practices. First, a theoretical argument is developed on the critical role of founders’ blueprints of the employment model, which are difficult to alter and mark firms’ future paths by affecting the dynamism of organizational practices over an extended period of time. Subsequently, case studies of several organizational practices in three management consulting firms in the USA, the Netherlands and the UK illustrate how founders’ conceptions of the employment relationship (i.e. their employment model) affect the way in which competing demands of continuity and renewal are addressed. Moreover, engineering- or commitment-oriented blueprints appear to facilitate the capability to adapt, while autocratic blueprints do not.

Organizational memory is not just the stock of knowledge about how to do things, but also of expectations of organizational members vis-à-vis each other and the organization as a whole. The central argument of this paper is that this second type of organizational memory -organizational expectations memory- is a necessary precondition for successfully creating and maintaining organizational procedural memory, which is at the basis of organizational performance. If members of organizations have fewer expectations of being rewarded beyond what is stipulated in formal contracts, these individuals are less likely to risk investing in collective tacit and firm-specific knowledge resources and more likely to focus on building individual and mobile knowledge resources that have value outside the boundaries of the organization. A case study of latent organizations in the Dutch film industry is presented to support the central argument and suggests further avenues of research, in particular concerning the effects of labour mobility on organizational expectations memory.