Top Management Style Research Articles

Enablers of the successful implementation of the strategy of technological innovation in higher education

Technological innovation has emerged as a formidable challenge for higher education institutions in the contemporary landscape. The present study explores the enablers of the successful implementation of technological innovation in Saudi Arabian higher education. We based this study’s conceptual framework on a rigorous literature review like Wu et al. (2002), Kihn (2010), and Packendorff et al. (2014). The study applied quantitative methods and collected 220 valid samples from employees of higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia through personal visits and online questionnaires. Employing structural equation modeling (SEM), the results of the study found a negative effect of project leadership (PL) on the implementation effectiveness of technological innovation (IETE). Further, the results demonstrate a positive significant impact of financial resources (FR) and top management style (TMS) on IETE. The study findings would provide valuable insights and evidence-based recommendations to practitioners and scholars in innovation management and organizational leadership. This study can inform strategic decisions, resource allocation, and leadership development within organizations, ultimately enhancing their ability to adapt to technological changes and leverage innovation for sustainable success.

Successful Organizational Business Communication and its Impact on Business Performance: An Intra- and Inter-Organizational Perspective

Intra-firm communication is critical for building synergy amongst the internal business units of a firm, enabling employees from various functional departments and ranks to incorporate their decision-making, understanding of organizational objectives, and common norms and culture to achieve increased organizational effectiveness. This study builds on and assesses a framework of the causes and consequences of effective communication in business interactions between customer and supplier firms, as well as the path for efficient communication within a firm. The proposed study’s structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis based on 352 responses collected from firm representatives in different job positions, ranging from marketing to logistics operations, revealed that in terms of intra-organizational communication, organization characteristics and shared values, top management support and style of leadership, and information technology were all significantly related to communication effectiveness. Furthermore, the frequency and variety of interactions enhanced communication outcomes, thus improving company performance. The results revealed that cultural factors were significantly related to communication effectiveness, as well as shared beliefs and goals. The organizational factors of leadership style, top management support, and information technology were significant determinants of effective communication. Among the contextual factors, interaction frequency and diversity were found to be significant. The study also tested the relationship between supplier and supplier firm performance in the context of communication effectiveness and found that they were closely related when trust and commitment were built between business partners.

Administrators’ Conflict Management Styles and the Schools’ Climate among the Secondary Schools of Davao Occidental

The study was conducted to determine the relationship between the school administrators’ conflict management styles and the schools’ climate. Descriptive-correlational method was employed to describe the conflict management styles of the schools’ administrators and the school climate. Simple-random sampling design was used on determining the respondents.
 Results of the study showed that the poor communication, differences in personality and different values were always observed as sources of conflict in the secondary schools and the often observed was competition. It was also found that the top conflict management style of the school heads was on dominating style. Based on data acquired in the school climate, school working environment and students’ involvements were excellent and teachers’ work satisfaction was above average.
 All conflict management styles significantly affect the school climate of the secondary schools in Davao Occidental. This implies that school heads have effectively applied all conflict management styles because it significantly resulted in an excellent and positive school climate in terms of school working environment, teachers’ job satisfaction and students’ engagement.
 Thus, school heads should mostly apply the dominating style of managing conflict for effective school leadership.

Entrepreneurial orientation and SMEs success factors

Purpose. Drawing on the concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and the aspect of top management style, this study attempts to find the factors that lead small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to success in business. Methodology. In this study, a survey of 110 Latvian and Swedish forestry contracting companies’ top managers was conducted. Quantitative and qualitative research methods are applied to assess the companies’ performance and the factors driving the companies’ success. A questionnaire with a five-point Likert scale, principal component analysis, the Mann–Whitney U test and text coding were used to test the hypotheses and answer the research questions. Findings. EO-inherent SMEs, compared to their conservative counterparts, have a significantly higher number of employees, turnover, profit and return on asset rate. The differentiating success factors for EO-inherent SMEs are (a) employees’ contribution, treatment of employees and teamwork, (b) quality of manufacturing services and efficiency of company internal processes, (c) activity in improving collaboration processes with the buyer, (d) control of company operations, (e) the use of new technologies and machinery in manufacturing, and (f) high demands of manufacturing service buyers. Meanwhile, unfair competition, difficulties in raising funds and overall political instability in the country are considered as hindering factors for the success of EO-inherent SMEs. Value. The findings of this study contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial orientation in the SME context, characterising the success factors and differentiating style of SMEs’ top managers in creating a growing and high-performing company. Keywords: entrepreneurial orientation, success factors, performance, forestry SMEs. Paper category: research paper.

Entrepreneurial orientation: The necessity of a multilevel conceptualization

AbstractResearch SummaryAn original and clarifying conceptualization of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is advanced based upon three fundamental ways in which entrepreneurship can be manifest as an organizational attribute: as top management style, organizational configuration, and new entry initiatives. We leverage this conceptualization to examine the presumed state of irreconcilable differences between the Miller (1983)/Covin and Slevin (1989) and Lumpkin and Dess (1996) conceptualizations of EO. This research proposes that these conceptualizations are reconcilable when the problem is reframed to consider how EO is manifest as an organizational attribute at and across multiple levels of analysis. Like the blind men and the elephant, these works have drawn attention to different aspects of a broader phenomenon. How EO as a multifaceted organizational attribute shapes future scholarly dialogue is discussed.Managerial SummaryThe concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been proposed as a way of envisioning what it means for organizations to “be entrepreneurial.” There is more than one answer to this question. This paper describes three principal ways entrepreneurship‐as‐an‐organizational attribute has been discussed, including illustrative examples from real‐world businesses. One perspective recognizes the entrepreneurial aspect of organizations by considering top management style; a second perspective recognizes that organizations manifest entrepreneurship through a configuration of key organizational elements; and a third perspective looks to evidence of the organization's entry into new offerings and domains of operation as indicative of entrepreneurship. All three manifestations of “being entrepreneurial” are part of the current conversation on EO. This paper recognizes the conceptual legitimacy and practical interdependence of these distinct perspectives.

IDENTIFICATION OF THE INTERNAL FACTORS INFLUENCING AN ORGANIZATION’S ABILITY TO IMPLEMENT OPEN INNOVATION

Urgency of the research. In today’s dynamic economic environment organizations are not able to innovate efficiently alone and being forced to revise their innovation strategies. In this context, open innovation is considered as a more effective approach to managing innovation processes that can provide external competencies and competitive advantages for companies operating in a modern marketplace. Target setting. Empirical studies demonstrate a wide variety of firm-level factors influencing an organization’s ability to implement open innovation model, however the relationships among these factors as well as the impact they have on a company’s innovation performance are not fully explained. Actual scientific research and issues analysis. Following researchers have made an important contribution to the development of an open innovation concept: G. Chesbrough, A.K. Crowther, E. Enkel, O. Gassmann, K. Laursen, A. Solter and others. Uninvestigated parts of general matters defining. Although an exploring of organizational determinants that support implementation of the open innovation model is an area of growing interest among both academics and practitioners, the current understanding of these firm-level factors and their interrelationships is still fragmented. The research objective. The aim of the paper is to provide a view of the critical internal factors which influence an organization’s ability to implement open innovation. An analytical framework of the study strengthens a theoretical basis for a thorough analysis of the relationships among the main factors that have impact on a company’s open innovation practice. The statement of basic materials. Based on the literature review on open innovation management key internal factors have been identified that have impact on a firm’s ability to implement open innovation: an organizational mission and value system, a top management style and leadership, an organizational structure, a corporate culture, employees’ skills and competencies and an appropriate incentive system, as well as technological and knowledge management capabilities. Conclusions. As a result of the research a set of firm-level internal factors is defined that should be primarily taken into account in order to increase a company’s ability to implement efficiently open innovation.

海外子会社の現地化とマネジメント・コントロール : 日系グローバル企業のケーススタディ

海外子会社の現地化とマネジメント・コントロール : 日系グローバル企業のケーススタディ

Ranking Organizational Factors Influencing the Success of Information Systems using AHP

Decisions in today's competitive and turbulent environments without access to information can confuse managers. The information system, which is planning, design and deployment as efficient and effective way, can help to improve the organization and create competitive advantages. One of the success factors and effectiveness of information systems in organizations is the organizational factors. In this research, organizational factors such as top management support, resource allocation, decision-making structure, management style and alignment of goals and knowledge of IT management, that affects the success factors of information systems (System quality, user satisfaction, perceived usefulness and quality of information), were analyzed and prioritized by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in Industries and Mines Organization of Isfahan Province. After gathering information and analysis them by using the Expert Choice, it was found that among success factors of information systems, and user satisfaction is the most important factor and the most important factor affecting success of organizational information system is the top management support.

Determinants of Management Control at Responsibility Centre Level: Software Industry as a Case

Current body of knowledge primarily focuses on variations in and determinants of management control systems at organizational level and, to some extent, at Strategic Business Unit (SBU) level. This study proposes that the level of analysis be extended to Responsibility Center (RC) level. Further, the extant studies focus on limited contingent variables like size, top management style, strategy, structure, etc. This paper makes a departure by extending the control system determinants at RC level to also include its own environmental variables in terms of its product market characteristics, client characteristics, and profitability of unit and project. The study is set in the software industry wherein activities are homogenous across divisions and RCs; but operate in different environments which provides ideal research site for study of intra-organizational control variations. An online survey was conducted on two of the leading Indian software firms at the levels of Project Manager and Project Lead. The survey confirmed the hypotheses that control variations at RC level can be explained through strategic determinants specific to their environments. In summary, this study explored the variations in and determinants of control systems at RC level. These variations and determinants are extendable to organizational and SBU levels also.

Exploitation and exploration learning and the development of organizational capabilities: A cross-case analysis of the Russian oil industry

We use a cross-case analysis of four Russian oil majors to develop a framework explaining the relationship between exploitation and exploration learning, and the development of organizational capabilities in transition economies. Our research explains how the changing top management style influences organizational learning over time. In the first stage of organizational transformation an authoritarian management style initiates a break with the administrative heritage of the organization to facilitate exploitation learning and the development of operational capabilities. These are required for survival in the new conditions of a market economy. In the second stage a more participatory management style fosters exploration learning and the development of strategic flexibility, required for sustainable competitive advantage. We demonstrate that exploitation and exploration learning do not coexist in the initial stages of transformation but are sequential. We found that the western-derived constructs of organizational learning add to our understanding of the process of organizational transformation in a transition context. Our study of the Russian oil industry also provides new ways to think about the processes of organizational learning in western companies, particularly large bureaucratic ones, anchored in their administrative heritage and needing to undergo organizational transformation.

Management Accounting Systems Adoption Decisions: Evidence and Performance Implications from Early-Stage/Startup Companies

Adopting management accounting systems are important events in the life of young and growing companies. Using a sample of 78 startup companies, we document cross-sectional differences in the adoption of operating budgets as well as seven other management accounting systems. We find that our proxies for agency costs, perceived benefits and costs, company scale, and top management style explain cross-sectional differences in the time-to-adoption of budgets. In particular, the presence of venture capital, CEO experience, presence of a financial manager, number of employees, and the CEO beliefs about management planning systems are associated with this adoption decision. We further investigate the effect of hiring a financial manager as an endogenous variable. In the first stage of a two-stage model, we find that CEO experience, the presence of venture capital funds, CEO beliefs about management accounting systems, and number of employees are associated with crosssectional variation in this hiring decision. When treating this decision as endogenous, time-to-hiring a financial manager is unrelated to operating budget adoption. The paper also examines the association between the time-to-adoption of operating budgets and company performance. We find a significant increase in the number of employees of the company around the adoption of operating budgets; moreover, faster adoption of operating budgets is associated with faster growing companies. We extend the findings to additional management accounting systems including: cash budgets, variance analysis, operating expense approval policies, capital expenditure approval policies, product profitability, customer profitability, and customer acquisition costs. The influence of industry (biotechnology, information technology, or non-tech) is examined in each stage of the research.

Design of Corporate Creativity

Globalization has created immense competitive pressures on corporates. In order to survive and prosper, organizations in the Third World need to redesign themselves for corporate creativity, i.e., for high rates of sustained and successful technological as well as non-technological innovations. This paper provides several examples of how deregulation of the West's airlines industry in the decade of the 1980s stimulated its corporate creativity. It then reviews the literature on the organizational design for corporate creativity to derive a model of the corporate's organizational design requirements for copious and successful innovations. The model proposes that, for superior corporate creativity in a regime of intensifying environmental pressures, the organization needs to choose the following: i) innovation-friendly business strategies; ii) organizational structure; iii) top management style; iv) middle management practices; and v) effective modes of managing innovations. These choices would lead to innovational success, which, in turn, would confer competitive excellence on the organization. This paper reports a test of the model through questionnaire-based data on 65 Indian corporates collected from late 1999 to early 2003. Data were gathered from an average of five top and senior level executives from each corporate on 6-point scales, and each scale was anchored by a statement at each extreme. All the responses from each organization were averaged for each rated scale and converted into a percentage score for the organization. The scales were grouped for aggregation into: i) environmental pressure; ii) innovations-supportive strategic management; iii) innovations-supportive top management style; iv) innovations-supportive organizational structure; v) innovations- supportive managerial practices and culture; vi) effective management of innovations; vii) corporate innovational success; and viii) corporate competitive excellence. The data were secured for the situation ‘now’ and three years earlier and this enabled the computing of changes in each study variable. The data indicated that change in effective mangement of innovations was the strongest predictor of change in innovational success which, in turn, was the greatest predictor of change in competitive corporate excellence. In order to identify the major strategic choices in the face of high versus low environmental pressure, cluster analysis was performed on the data from the 30 highest scoring corporates on environmental pressure and the 30 lowest scoring corporates on environmental pressure. It revealed that, regardless of environmental pressure, organizations that chose to adopt an organizational design compatible with high corporate creativity outscored those organizations that did not choose such a design in terms of both innovational success and competitive excellence. The data also indicated that organizational design for corporate creativity may yield far better performance when change in environmental pressure is modest than when it is large. The reason may lie in differential rates of the diffusion of innovations in high versus low pressure environments. High pressure environments may induce a more rapid diffusion of innovations. The faster the institution-alization of innovations in an industry, the lower, or less durable, may be the competitive advantage conferred on the innovating organization. This paper strongly recommends the following: Managers should redesign their organizations for higher corporate creativity. The core curriculum of MBA programmes needs to incorporate values, competencies, and management concepts that can nurture organizational creativity. Specifically, this paper provides suggestions to practising managers for enhancing corporate creativity which are as follows: Conduct a diagnosis of the design of your organization and identify the items where the gaps with the model are large. Form a cross-functional team to tackle each major gap area. Review the recommendations of the team and identify action points for implementation. Institutionalize a culture of brainstorming for novel and effective solutions and a number of specific innovation-friendly practices.

THE INFLUENCE OF ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE ON THE UTILITY OF AN ENTREPRENEURIAL TOP MANAGEMENT STYLE

ABSTRACTThis study examined the influence of organization structure on the relationship between top management's entrepreneurial orientation and financial performance. Moderated regression analysis was used to analyse data collected from 80 business organizations. the findings suggest that an entrepreneurial top management style has a positive effect on the performance of organically‐structured firms and a negative effect on the performance of mechanistically‐structured firms.

The Design of Effective Top Management Style

The performance of eight commonly utilized styles of top management are evaluated in various environmental situations. The eight styles are: entrepreneurial, professional management, professional bureaucratic, professional entrepreneurial, conservative traditional, colleaguial, bureaucratic, and middle‐of‐the‐road. Utilizing data from the author's study of over a hundred Canadian corporations, the paper deals with four organizational decision situations: 1) What top management style to choose if information about the environment is not available, 2) what environment to get into if the style of top management is not yet decided upon, 3) what environment to pick if the top management style is decided upon, and 4) what top management style to pick if the environment is decided upon. The implications of the results for Indian management are described. The various paths by which an organization can move from an undesirable style to a desirable style are indicated, and some suggestions are made on the way the change strategy could be implemented.