M@n@gement

Faultlines in Family SMEs: The U-Shape Effect of Family Control on Innovativeness and Performance

Naeem Ashraf — 2023-09-15

Studies on innovation have yielded contradictory results regarding the influence of family control, giving rise to competing perspectives that either emphasize the stewardship role of family managers or the agency problems that their presence creates. Recent research integrates both perspectives, theorizing an inverted U-shaped relationship between family control and innovativeness. However, scholars typically focus on the family agenda, neglecting the dynamics of family–non-family members, particularly in SMEs, which may also influence innovation and performance. Drawing from faultline theory and based on the Spanish Innovation Survey panel data, the present paper examines family control’s direct U-shape effect on firm innovativeness and its indirect effect on firm performance. By demonstrating a U-shaped relationship between family control and firm innovativeness, we highlight the relevance of ‘faultlines’ between family – non-family organizational members.

Couple’s Entrepreneurship: Who Loves Me Follows Me

Amélie Villéger — 2023-09-15

By mobilizing the theoretical field of decision-making and the empirical study of 15 cases, this article highlights and analyzes the recurrence of conjugal interactions leading to the decision to undertake as a couple. The results show that the spouse who initiates the project becomes the ‘leader’, while the other positions himself, more or less voluntarily, as a ‘follower’. This decision-making configuration induces a renunciation on the part of the follower, a follower who remains, still today, overwhelmingly the woman. The discussion considers the potential impact of this specific decision-making process on the future governance of the company, in terms of the distribution of roles and powers, the satisfaction of spouses, but also the choice of partner. The movement of the reflexive cursor in a period prior to the copreneurial installation enriches the field of research, almost unexplored, of the decision to undertake as a couple, opens the way to the study of problems of copreneurship through the innovative prism of events that have occurred before its implementation and offers practitioners new keys to understanding the complex dynamics within which they evolve.

Visibility Management: New Managerial Work in Digitalized Organizations

Lise Justesen — 2023-09-15

Visibility management is becoming an important task in organizations as work is increasingly made visible by digital technologies, but the consequences of increased visibility for management are still underexplored. Based on a qualitative study in heavily digitalized public organizations, the paper investigates managers’ experiences with visibility and control. New concerns arise relating to the risk of employee prying, increase in visualizations of workflow deviations, and the explosion in performance indications. These concerns entail new types of managerial work that we refer to as visibility management, consisting of technological mediation work, relation work, and compensation work. By identifying these types of work, the study challenges the assumption that more visibility, understood as increased ease of access to information, automatically eases control tasks for managers. The paper offers a vocabulary that can help practitioners describe and better understand new types of otherwise often invisible managerial work in digitalized organizations.

‘Breaking the Mirror’ to Face Digital Convergence: The Role of Selective Mirroring in the Trade-Off between Value Creation and Capture Mechanisms

Alexandre Azoulay — 2023-09-15

This research questions the mirroring hypothesis in the context of digital convergence. The mirroring hypothesis suggests that the organization of innovation activities tends to mirror the technical architecture of products. When the architecture is modular, such mirroring optimizes the management of innovation activities. But it can also limit the ability of incumbent firms to adapt to technological discontinuities. Digital convergence is a source of discontinuities that transform the conditions of value creation and capture within industries. It leads to new complementarities that push incumbents to collaborate with firms coming from other industries within emerging ecosystems. How does the mirroring between product architecture and organization evolve in the face of the new challenges of value creation and capture brought by digital convergence? This question is addressed through a qualitative case study of the organization of innovation activities between Renault and its partners in the field of embedded automotive electronics. The results show that the automaker ‘breaks the mirror’ through a strategy of selective mirroring that allows it to collaborate with new complementors and to reconfigure its mechanisms of value creation and capture.