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Intra-organizational comparisons--managers and units benchmarking their performance against each other--can turn colleagues into competitors. To better understand when organizations should allow or even encourage internal social comparisons, we study their implications for organizational adaptation and performance. We conceptualize internal social comparisons as an upstream competitive process that shapes performance aspirations and creates interdependencies in search behavior. We distinguish this from downstream, product market competition or complementarities where performance is interdependent across units. Integrating both aspects into a computational model, we show how internal social comparisons affect adaptation and performance through two mechanisms: a balancing effect whereby the organization is guaranteed to contain both exploring and exploiting units, and a stabilizing effect whereby internal social comparisons protect against abandoning existing technologies too early. The benefits of upstream comparisons are accentuated when units are downstream complements, helping synchronize search. When units are downstream competitors, these benefits disappear, suggesting substitutive effects. We highlight empirical implications and discuss theoretical links to work on intra-organizational competition, social comparisons and aspiration-driven search, diversification and performance, and the adaptation of multi-business firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We extend strategy-as-practice and strategy process studies of strategic planning by detailing empirically how its execution can take on an inter-unit coordination role in multi-business, multi-unit firms. In our case study of a firm in Bangkok, Thailand, we show how practitioners in diverse business and functional units coordinate their respective internal planning processes in a differentiated network of inter-unit strategic planning links. We specify four types of inter-unit planning link according to relative hierarchical level and function of the interacting units. Based on interviews covering 125 of these links, we analyse interactions between managers during the planning process, focusing on the practices they adopt including a newly identified practice we refer to as facilitating. We articulate patterns of interaction by link type, and ultimately show how managers combined these practices in four generic interaction patterns: bilateral, cohesive facilitation, ambassadorial coordination, and supervisory. These interaction patterns vary in the degree of horizontal and vertical inter-unit coordination they contribute to the business. We analyse how usage of the patterns varied across the firm, and hence set out more fully than prior literature how interactions driven by individual managers enable strategic planning to enrich inter-unit coordination through and across a business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: This paper investigates the corporate parenting advantage, the extent to which corporate parents improve the performance of their subsidiaries. Despite the importance of this concept for corporate strategy, researchers have yet to quantify it empirically. I measure the corporate parenting advantage by comparing the performance of utilities that were legally classified into one of two types of holding companies: regulated holding companies, which faced limits on their ability to parent, and exempt holding companies, which did not. I find that observationally similar utilities that were owned by exempt holding companies outperform utilities that were owned by regulated holding companies, and that this performance differential attenuates once the legal restrictions on parenting were lifted. These results provide the first large‐scale empirical evidence of the corporate parenting advantage. Managerial Summary By how much do corporate parents improve the performance of their subsidiaries? Despite the importance of this question of the "corporate parenting advantage," it does not yet have a clear answer. In this paper, I measure the corporate parenting advantage by comparing the performance of utilities that were legally grouped into one of two types of holding companies: regulated holding companies, which faced limits on their ability to parent, and exempt holding companies, which did not. I find that comparable utilities that were owned by regulated holding companies have lower return on assets than utilities that were owned by exempt holding companies, and that this performance difference disappears once the legal restrictions on parenting were lifted. These results provide evidence of the corporate parenting advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we evaluate selected multi-business utilities in the European energy market with regard to synergy potentials. To this end, we survey the development of the energy market in Europe and the performance of integrated versus focused utilities regarding their capital market performance measured by their corporate surplus (or deficit). The analysis is restricted to true business integration, in contrast to horizontal or vertical cooperation among separate firms. The German utility company RWE is analyzed in more detail. We find that, over the last 10–15 years, most of the multi-business utilities investigated underperformed compared to more focused utilities, and that they were even below the STOXX Europe 600 utilities index. Furthermore, synergy potentials need to be evaluated continuously, especially when influencing factors, with the potential to act as “game changers”, are either emerging on the horizon or are already present. We conclude that operating an integrated business model is not necessarily outdated in today’s energy markets, and offers a number of advantages.

Building on the idea of managerial relatedness among businesses, the concept of 'Dominant Logic' (DL) was developed to provide insights into what the determinants for successful diversification and organizational adaptation may be. Since Prahalad and Bettis' seminal article (Strateg Manag J 7(6):485-450, ), management scholars have drawn on the concept of DL for almost 25 years and applied it to various strategic management contexts. However, the lack of a systematic review that integrates the past decades' fragmented research on DL and resolves its conceptual inconsistencies hinders the purposeful application of the concept and its further development. Hence, we seek to contribute to the literature by addressing this substantial gap. Developing an integrated framework, we provide an overview of DL research concentrating on (1) the antecedents of DL formation and adaptation, (2) the DL commonality- performance linkage, and (3) the dynamics of DL. By introducing the distinction between absolute and relative dominance, we offer a more precise definition of DL that clarifies and theoretically distinguishes the concept. We conclude by highlighting salient research gaps and identifying promising areas for future research efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The major purpose of this paper is the development of a theoretical framework that can be used by corporate practitioners to understand the implicit parenting strategy of their company, assess its performance, and adjust it for improving the net corporate value creation.Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, a three-dimensional framework is developed that accounts for corporate-to-business and business-to-business interactions, value-adding and value-destroying activities, and strategic and operational levers. The framework is operationalized by assigning a broad set of individual activities to these levers.Findings – The paper delivers a robust, systematic, and operational framework to assess the net benefits to a given business of being part of a corporate portfolio, and to identify and evaluate implicit parenting strategies in corporate practice. While previous studies mainly focused on broad parenting approaches with low granularity this framework now allows earlier observations to be substantiated, finer distinctions between the applied strategies to be drawn, and the core of superior value added approaches to be investigated.Practical implications – The introduced framework can be used to analyze the origin and underlying drivers of conglomerate discounts and premia and thus enhance understanding of capital market valuation of multi-business companies. The developed framework can also be the basis for the derivation of a typology of corporate parenting strategies. In this way, it can support practitioners in portfolio management – which was also the explicit motivation for the development of the original parenting advantage concept.Originality/value – The outlined framework will facilitate the investigation of structural, strategic, and organizational roots of superior parenting strategies in corporate practice. It may be used to analyze performance differences of multi-business companies that go beyond the degree of diversification and may finally contribute to solving the puzzle of the conglomerate discount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we evaluate selected multi-business utilities in the European energy market with regard to synergy potentials. To this end, we survey the development of the energy market in Europe and the performance of integrated versus focused utilities regarding their capital market performance measured by their corporate surplus (or deficit). The analysis is restricted to true business integration, in contrast to horizontal or vertical cooperation among separate firms. The German utility company RWE is analyzed in more detail. We find that, over the last 10–15 years, most of the multi-business utilities investigated underperformed compared to more focused utilities, and that they were even below the STOXX Europe 600 utilities index. Furthermore, synergy potentials need to be evaluated continuously, especially when influencing factors, with the potential to act as "game changers", are either emerging on the horizon or are already present. We conclude that operating an integrated business model is not necessarily outdated in today's energy markets, and offers a number of advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]