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The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth
Business firms around the world are experimenting with new organizational designs, changing their formal architectures, their routines and processes, and their corporate cultures as they seek to improve their current performance and their growth…
The Organizational Demography of Racial Employment Segregation
This article examines how workers respond to changes in the racial composition of their workplaces. An analysis of the job histories of new hires into multiple work groups within a single firm reveals path dependence in the effects of group…
The Peter Principle: A Theory of Decline
Some have observed that individuals perform worse after being promoted. The Peter principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, suggests that something is fundamentally misaligned in the promotion process. This…
The Psychology of Leadership
The Psychology of Leadership: New Approaches
In this book, some of the world’s leading scholars come together to describe their thinking and research on the topic of the psychology of leadership. Most of the chapters were originally presented as papers at a research conference held in…
The Red Queen: History-Dependent Competition Among Organizations
We argue that competition among organizations is history-dependent, so that each organization’s competitiveness at a given point in time hinges on the organization’s historical experience leading up to that point. Specifically, we summarize the…
The "Strategy And Action In The Information Processing Industry Course" (S370) At Stanford Business School: Themes, Conceptual Frameworks, Related Tools
This paper provides an overview of the key themes, conceptual frameworks and related tools that are used to examine cases and industry notes in the course Strategy and Action in the Information Processing Industry an applied industry analysis…
The Valuation and Return Dynamics of New Ventures
We develop and analyze a model of a multi-stage investment project that captures many features of R&D ventures and start-up companies. An important feature these problems share is that the firm learns about the potential profitability of the…
The evolution of inertia
This article examines some evolutionary consequences of architectural inertia in organizations. The main theorem holds that selection favors architectural inertia in the sense that the median level of inertia in a closed population of…
A True Expert Knows which Question Should be Asked
We suggest a test for discovering whether a potential expert is informed of the distribution of a stochastic process. In a non-Bayesian non-parametric setting, the expert is asked to make a prediction which is tested against a single realization…
Trust and distrust in physician-patient relationships: Antecedents and consequences
Trust and distrust within organizational contexts
What Determines Corporate Transparency?
When Good Brands Do Bad
This article reports results from a longitudinal field experiment examining the evolution of consumer‐brand relationships. Development patterns differed, whereby relationships with sincere brands deepened over time in line with friendship…
Why Do Some Firms Give Stock Options To All Employees?: An Empirical Examination of Alternative Theories
Many firms issue stock options to all employees. We consider three potential economic justifications for this practice: providing incentives to employees, inducing employees to sort, and helping firms retain employees. We gather data on firms’…
The organizational niche
Although the concept of niche has been extremely useful in sociological theory and research, some aspects of the concept have not been clearly developed. This article advances a theoretical reconstruction of the concept of niche, with…
Managerial Preferences for Strategic Alliance Attributes: Some Global Contrasts
Women in the Workplace - The Unfinished Revolutions
AMONG THE MANY remarkable upheavals of the 20th century, the huge increase in women’s employment stands out. The shift of women to paid labor has led to a widespread transformation of the traditional rules and practices of daily life, not only at…
How much should I help and how often? The effects of generosity and frequency of favor exchange on social status and productivity
Data collected from 161 employees of a large firm suggest that perceived generosity is positively related to individual social status, but maintaining an equitable balance is positively related to individual productivity. Employees may address…
Patent Oppositions
In recent years, patent protection has extended into new areas, giving rise to serious concern about the lack of clear guidelines for patentability. We analyze the effect of introducing a patent opposition process that would allow patent validity…