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The resource availability explanation of organizational adaptation and performance hinges upon the idea of buffering the technical core against uncertainty through the strategic management of financial and human resources to create a cushion of slack. Our paper complements those explanations by investigating the concept of employee slack — resources in excess of current consumption needs — and its influence on organizational adaptation and performance. Using the population of Norwegian residents and for-profit firms from 2010-2017 and leveraging the repeal of inheritance tax as a quasi-natural experiment, we assess to extent to which employee slack contributes to organizational adaptation and its successful execution. Our findings reveal that employee slack a) is a critical resource that affects both the willingness of employees to engage in and successfully execute adaptive actions and b) amends and complements our understanding of the relations between organizational slack and organizational adaptation and performance. Collectively, our findings highlight the importance of individual-level resources in shaping organizational outcomes. We advance our knowledge of various forms of organizational slack, the antecedents of organizational adaptation and performance and the little-explored wealth dynamics within organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-business firms redeploy resources, specifically human capital, internally to manage the establishment and termination of business units. Prior work has not investigated different human capital redeployment (HCR) strategies and their outcomes. We identify three generic HCR strategies and explore their respective impact on unit exit. We find that HCR in general decreases the likelihood of unit exit. However, full HCR -- employees work full-time at the receiving unit -- and partitioned HCR in which the sending parent remains the main employer drive these results. Partitioned HCR in which the receiving unit becomes the main employer does not affect exit. We attribute the differing impact on exit to strategies' idiosyncratic capacity availability, adjustment costs specifically multiple jobholding costs, and interfirm ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural holes is a rich theoretical program with a burgeoning contingency literature required to explain its extensive empirical inconsistencies. Formally decomposing aggregate constraint reveals that constraint combines five distinct network properties. These properties are interdependent, negatively correlated by construction, and of different scale. Because of these measurement issues, constraint is incapable of testing structural holes theory. Applying the formal decomposition to simulated networks, we demonstrate that the widely referenced structural effect on performance is almost completely attributable to dyadic dependence. Constraint cannot measure holes, brokerage, or any theory beyond the dyad. Recognizing that structural holes theory remains untested, the paper suggests a fundamental revision of the research program's conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancements in information technology (IT) can have profound impacts on the development and management of human capital. Extant research has examined how human capital in markets and organizations are shaped by increased digitization and the deployment of strategies relying on collection and analysis of big data, cloud computing, social media, Internet of Things (IoT), and the like. In knowledge-intensive settings, however, IT-enabled mechanisms have heterogenous impacts on issues related to human capital. Although IT potentially expands capacity for collection, storage, and utilization of knowledge, some firms and individuals successfully leverage technology and information systems while others do not--or are even possibly left worse off. This symposium contributes to examining why such discrepancies may exist by shedding light on the market and organizational processes that underlie the intersection of IT and knowledge-based processes, networks, and outcomes as they relate to issues in strategic human capital. * Can Social Media Alleviate Inequality? Evidence from Venture Capital Financing * Presenter: Gavin Wang; Wharton OPIM * Presenter: Lynn Wu; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania * Presenter: Lorin Hitt; U. of Pennsylvania * Are Knowledge Sharing and Learning Tradeoffs? Linking Performance Incentives with KMS Usage * Presenter: Sae-Seul Park; Carnegie Mellon U. -Tepper School of Business * Cloud Adoption and Strategic Human Capital: Evidence from Norway * Presenter: Derrick Choe; -* Presenter: Amir Sasson; BI Norwegian Business School * Presenter: Robert Channing Seamans; NYU Stern * Hunting For Talent: Firm-Driven Labor Market Search in the United States * Presenter: Ines Black; -* Presenter: Sharique Hasan; Fuqua School of Business, Duke U. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established firms use spinouts as corporate venturing strategy to build-up novel businesses. For that end, they redeploy resources such as equity and human capital to the newly founded entities. Prior studies analyze the effect of resource redeployment on spinout performance with parent-spinout relatedness as a proxy, however come to conflicting results. Using unique microdata of the population of firms and employees in Norway from 2005 to 2015, we disaggregate the relationship between knowledge relatedness, human capital redeployment and spinout performance. Relying on resource-based theory and the knowledge-based view of the firm, we find that there is a positive and direct effect between relatedness and redeployment, as well as between redeployment and spinout performance. However, we do not find evidence for a direct effect of relatedness on performance. We further find that parents' majority ownership of the spinout moderates the likelihood of human capital redeployment negatively and redeployment's effect on performance positively. Similarly, moderate parent-spinout social ties the effect of human capital redeployment on spinout performance positively. Our results contribute to resource redeployment theory by testing novel boundary conditions of human capital redeployment and to research on spinout performance elucidating the link between relatedness, resource redeployment and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural holes is a rich theoretical program with a burgeoning contingency literature required to explain its extensive inconclusive and contradictory results. We propose that the literature's contradictions derive from subtly problematic measures and imprecise mappings to the theory's propositions. Formally decomposing aggregate constraint, this paper reveals that the measure combines five potentially conflicting network properties, suggests that the widely referenced structural effect on performance is almost completely attributable to dyadic activity dependence, identifies those network properties that can test structural holes, and disconfirms structural holes. The clarity we add by decomposing constraint provides a path forward for reconciling previously recognized conflicting findings and the new insight that structural holes probably explains very little, if any, of the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we look at individuals who exit entrepreneurship for paid employment. We ask whether they experience mean (median) positive differentials in remuneration in paid employment compared to individuals who did not experience entrepreneurship. We find positive mean (median) differentials. These are smaller (and more variable) for former entrepreneurs in knowledge intensive firms. We also find that, while employees in knowledge intensive firms earn significantly higher remunerations in general, former entrepreneurs in knowledge intensive firms will experience reduced remunerations differentials with respect to former entrepreneurs in less knowledge intensive firms. Finally, we find that firm performance of the former entrepreneur is a strong predictor of remuneration in subsequent paid employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of research suggests that alliance networks enhance firm performance. In this study, we utilize a multilevel approach to decompose firm returns and test the extent to which alliance networks account for its variation. We incorporate alliance network effects along with the fundamental industry, corporate, and business segment effects and find that alliance network effects systematically and significantly contribute to the variation in firm performance. In particular, we find a consistent evidence that the relative importance of alliance networks on firm performance is accountable for nearly 7 percent. Alliance network effects are very similar to industry effects and are much lower than business segments effects. Further, as the structural complexity of alliance network decreases, from triads to dyads to isolates, alliance networks account for an increasing portion of variation in firm performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the effects of network service innovations, such as new telecommunication services, social media, and other internet-based communication services on organizational internal and external structure and organization performance. We argue that such innovations enhance organizational performance directly by improving the efficiency of coordination and indirectly by improving the structure of the organization's internal and external networks. We test the argument in the context of the adoption of mobile broadband by a sample of 245 Norwegian business organizations collected over three years (2008-2010). We find support for the hypothesized direct effect of network service innovation on organization performance and a mediating effect through the effects of the clustering of internal relationships but not for a mediating effect of the external network. The findings contribute the understanding of the effects of network service innovations on organizational structure and performance and have important implications for organizational design and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]