Search

This section presents abstracts of several studies on human resources (HR). "Family Ties and International Mobility," investigates relationships between family ties and willingness to accept an international assignment amongst a sample of dual-earner respondents. Another study, "The Impact of HR Involvement and Commitment HR Systems on HR Effectiveness and Firm Performance," examines the impact of HR involvement on HR effectiveness and firm performance using a sample of 249 listed companies on the Korea Stock Exchange. "Examining the Impact of Human Resources Management on Organizational Performance," develops a valid and reliable model to measure the direct effects of domains of human resource management practices on three measures of organizational performance.

This study seeks to identify the internal search processes that enhance the inventive outcomes of experiential learning - i.e., learning from distributed technological experience accumulated inside organization's boundaries - and, the knowledge structures that facilitate such learning processes. We build upon the argument that learning from experience unfolds through cognitive search, which is based on cognitive representations, and experiential search which is based on feedbacks from prior actions. We further suggest that internal search that builds upon technologically distant knowledge allows firms to effectively combine these two search logics and attenuate their pitfalls, thus, enhancing inventive impact. Moreover, the impact of inventions generated through such search is higher when firm's knowledge structure is highly decomposable. Using a longitudinal dataset from global photographic equipment and supplies industry covering 89 firms from 1975 to 2008 we find statistical support for our arguments. Our study contributes to literature on experiential learning by specifying technological characteristics of built-upon knowledge and organizational factors that improve organization's ability to leverage its technological experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms often establish knowledge linkages to geographically dispersed locations in order to source diversified knowledge. The involvement into global knowledge networks is particularly useful for actors from emerging countries, which may seek to offset the relative backwardness of their domestic knowledge base by accessing distant and diverse technology. Yet, not all locations offer the same opportunities for knowledge sourcing. This study investigates the relationship between global city locations and the spatial distribution of knowledge networks linked to China. Building on previous literature suggesting that global cities exhibit both properties of local clustering and global bridging, we investigate whether the leverage of global city locations is associated with lower or higher spatial distribution of knowledge networks. Using data on the full sample of USPTO pharmaceutical patents granted between 1975 and 2010 and linked to China, our results show that, consistent with the idea of a prevailing agglomeration mechanism, global city locations are associated with a lower geographical dispersion of inventor networks. However, this relationship is contingent on both the global city profile and the characteristics of the innovative organization that coordinates the knowledge network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific and professional conferences represent unique opportunities to search for new knowledge: representatives from leading universities, high- tech firms and other organizations from all over the world come together to discuss topical issues and exchange latest findings. However, prior studies on knowledge- and innovation-related effects of conferences consider such events as if they were isolated entities, whereas in reality the value of a conference depends on what other events its participants attended before and whom they had met previously. Our study aims to relax this assumption and account for the interconnected nature of conferences and its implications for knowledge outcomes of participating firms. We build on the notion that knowledge processes are embedded in the structure of co-participation networks and investigate how different positions of firms in such networks relate to subsequent new knowledge creation of these firms, using the sample of 470 small firms from electronic industry. Our findings suggest that some positions in conference co-participation networks are more beneficial for knowledge creation, while the other are less beneficial for that. In particular, we found that having a central position in such a network as well as being well-connected to other highly central firms have negative relationship with subsequent knowledge creation. At the same time, being a broker in the co-participation network has a positive relationship with subsequent knowledge creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although bio-pharmaceutical companies engage intensely in collaboration as well as in scientific publications it is not well understood how and why the choice of distinct partner types affects the quality of companies' scientific publications. We contribute to this gap in the existing literature by analyzing whether collaboration with particular types of partners and whether network embeddedness influences the quality of publications in cancer research, and specifically of the scientific publications of biotech and of pharmaceutical companies. Our empirical analysis employs two different measures for scientific quality, publication in top-tier journals and the number of forward citations. The results suggest that publication in top-tier journals may depend on different factors and collaboration patterns compared to the number of citations an article receives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research provides little insight into knowledge recombination capacities of open innovation communities and the entanglement of these capacities with social mobility of contributors. Extending the literature on network-level determinants of knowledge diffusion and reuse we examine the interrelation between technical ties and social ties connecting open source projects to find out whether social mobility is significantly related to knowledge reuse in communities that are virtually unaffected by legal, economic and social barriers to reuse. We test our hypotheses using the entire population of 61,834 reusable Ruby projects contributed to RubyGems. Org within a period of ten years from the advent of Ruby language in 2003. Our results suggest that developer coaffiliations among projects are likely to coincide with knowledge reuse in form of function calls between projects. A deeper investigation into the temporal ordering of social and technical ties hints at a bi-directional relationship between the two phenomena, whereby new technical ties are more likely to arise in existence of prior social ties and vice versa. This sets our findings apart from the bulk of previous empirical studies that uniquely emphasize the role of social networks as determinants of knowledge diffusion and reuse. These results, on the other hand, corroborate the more recent accounts that underscore the impact of knowledge exchange on social networks, or describe the relation between social ties and knowledge ties as co-evolutionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores antecedents of knowledge creation in a globalized business school industry. We focus on linguistic socialization of researchers as a contingency factor which influences the ability of academics to extract value from the quality of their professional socialization and from social capital embedded in their knowledge network. We analyze the career paths of 550 academics from 30 business schools in the Financial Times Global Top 100 MBA/Masters in Management rankings and use a multilevel approach to individual research productivity. Our findings confirm the long-term impact of early- career linguistic socialization on the ability of management researchers to produce knowledge in the form of peer-reviewed journal publications. The value of centrality in knowledge network is subject to diminishing returns where the value of social capital brought by additional co-authors is dependent upon quality and language of an academic's professional socialization. Linguistic socialization has an impact on network utilization, reducing the carrying capacity of networks for academics socialized in non-English speaking countries. The findings of our study provide academic administrators with insights on how to create a beneficial environment for knowledge production which would facilitate attraction, retention and motivation of rare and hard to imitate human capital on a global market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irrespective of the path(s) an incumbent firm takes to adapt to the competence-destroying radical technological change, the radical technology needs to be diffused among firm inventors for the incumbent firm to develop R&D capability in the radical technology. In this paper, we explore which inventors in the incumbent firm are likely to adopt radical technology in their innovation activities sooner than others. Using heterogeneous diffusion model, we find that the social proximity of an incumbent inventor to the inventors who already adopted radical technology increased the speed of adoption. We also found that incumbent inventors who were highly central in the intra-firm prevailing technology inventor network were less susceptible to the influence of information about radical technology while inventors spanning many structural holes were highly susceptible. Our findings have theoretical implications for research on radical technological change, intra-firm inventor networks and intra-firm organizational learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]