Focus? Or Span? A Meta-Analytic Approach to Category Spanning

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to unveil the existing complexities in the relationship between organizations’ category spanning behavior and their performance. In our study, we find two major gaps in prior studies. First, category spanning research has somewhat undervalued the importance of differentiating the role of audiences’ perceptions towards spanning activities from measures of organizational performance. Second, past research mostly focused on one single industry at a time, which limits our knowledge of how industry-level characteristics shape an audience’s evaluation of spanning activities. Our meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) shows that mixed results are partly due to the failure to differentiate perception-based performance such as customer ratings or reviews from outcome-based performance (e.g. sales, revenues, market share, and so forth). that the relationship between spanning and performance is weak but positive in industries such as law firms, technology, academia, and finance, where quality assessment is relatively standardized and clear than others such as wine, film, or restaurants. Our results imply that audience evaluative perceptions should be treated as a mediating path to organizational performance rather than the performance outcome itself.