Browsing by Author "Xia, Jun"
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Item Effects of Performance Shortfalls on Organizational Decisions and Outcomes(2022-08-01T05:00:00.000Z) Balaji, Pavithra; Tsang, Eric; Zhang, Yuan; Qian, Cuili; Markóczy, Lívia; Xia, JunThe performance context of an organization is an important factor in determining its strategy and outcomes following the strategic choices made. Specifically, negative performance contexts affect organizations more intensely, reducing the resources it has access to, changing how stakeholders are impacted, increasing scrutiny from the media, analysts and shareholders among others, and inviting evaluation and judgment of the decision-making of the CEO and other managers. In this dissertation, the multifaceted nature of performance shortfalls is explored across three essays covering different types of negative performance contexts, to provide a more complete understanding of how performance affect organizations. In the first essay, the focus is on the firm’s lifecycle stage of organizational decline, that presents a critical shortage of resources. We explore how organizations modify their CSR practices in such a context, as there could be both benefits and costs to engaging in CSR during decline. By distinguishing between different types of CSR, we show that firms navigate decline in a manner that incorporates both perspectives on CSR. In the second essay, we highlight the effect of a firm’s proximity to bankruptcy on CEOs’ decision-making based on different temporal perspectives. We suggest that a CEO’s career horizon (or time to retirement) is positively related to firm strategic change, and this effect decreases when a CEO past focus is higher. We further suggest that the dominating effect of objective time (CEO career horizon) versus subjective time (CEO past focus) depends on the firm’s closeness to bankruptcy, a situation that increases the salience of the CEO’s legacy in their decision-making. Finally, the third essay adds a social dimension to performance, looking at performance below social aspirations as a contextual condition. In this study, we show that CEOs’ social class backgrounds affect the characteristics of competitive repertoires they use in terms of complexity and non-conformity. As social comparison is an important aspect of competing in the market, we further study how performance below those of peers in the industry modifies these effects. Overall, this dissertation provides a bird’s eye view of performance shortfalls by exploring different types of negative performance contexts and how these affect different aspects of firm strategy including market, non-market and competitive strategy.Item Essays on Entrepreneurship: Initial Public Offerings and Venture Capital Financing(December 2021) Bai, Xiaoou; Dai, Zhonglan; Tsang, Eric; Xia, Jun; Qian, Cuili; Park, H. DennisThis dissertation investigates initial public offerings (IPOs) and venture capital financing, two widely studied topics in the entrepreneurship domain. In each of the three chapters, I delve into each topic by exploring a relatively unique aspect of a phenomenon. In Chapter 1, I explore the case when investing in a distant industry, an agent in a network consisting of directional ties may suffer a decline in performance due to its lack of industry-specific knowledge. Empirically testing a population of venture capital (VC) firms spanning the entirety of Chinese VC history from 1991 to 2017, supplemented by qualitative interviews with VC partners, Chapter 1 finds that not every contact in such a network is able to advise the agent (the focal lead VC) equally well, because contacts connected by different tie types possess different industry-specific knowledge and tie directionality affects the likelihood of having contacts that possess needed knowledge. Specifically, the focal lead VC benefits more from contacts connected by outward ties than inward ties, while contacts connected by reciprocal ties provide the most informational benefits.Item Learning Through Observation or Through Acquisition? Innovation Performance as an Outcome of Internal and External Knowledge Combination(Springer New York LLC, 2019-06-08) Jiang, M. S.; Jiao, J.; Lin, Z.; Xia, Jun; Xia, JunAlthough the importance of external and internal knowledge combination for innovation is well recognized, the effectiveness of different patterns of combination requires further investigation. We consider spillovers of foreign direct investment (FDI) and external research and development (R&D) as two sources of external knowledge to domestic firms and argue that the effectiveness of incorporating the two external sources of knowledge varies conditional upon different levels of internal knowledge development (internal R&D). We argue that learning through observation and learning through acquisition are important mechanisms making such difference. Using a sample of manufacturing firms in China from 2002 to 2007, we find that rhythmic FDI spillover and external R&D positively affect innovation performance. However, the effect of rhythmic FDI spillover is stronger, whereas the effect of external R&D is weaker for firms with a moderate level of internal R&D than firms with a low or high level of internal R&D. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.Item Lifeworlds of Organizations and Entrepreneurship: Perspectives on Institutional Dynamics and "Becoming"(May 2023) Li, Jianan; Tsang, Eric; Xia, Jun; Stecke, Kathryn; Park, H. Dennis; Markoczy, LiviaThe starting point for my reflections is the insight that both institutions and human beings are always situated in a lifeworld. Lifeworld means everything that exists around us insofar as it is directly, immediately experienced in everyday life. A lifeworld could imprint on individuals’ mindsets, mark institutional and cultural legacies, and evolve along with the interactions between actors and institutions. My dissertation work has approached the overarching questions of how organizational strategies come to be deeply rooted in culture and institutions as well as how institutional actors (i.e., entrepreneurs in my study) refashion institutions. In the opening chapter, I apply an imprinting lens to examine the effect of macro-institutional events on CEO decisionmaking. Specifically, I focus on a lifeworld marked by famine (i.e., China’s Great Famine of 1959- 61) and examine how such resource-scarcity experience influences CEOs’ resource allocation in firm innovation. In the second chapter, I take a historical embeddedness view of institutions to explain the contemporary widespread firm corruption in various regions of Africa by tracing the issue back to the injustice legacies left by the lifeworld of the slave trade (c.1400s-1900s). In the third chapter, I take a processual view of institutions to explore the situated entrepreneurial dynamics in refreshing regional institutional outlooks. Two representative case studies (i.e., New England Concord Circle during the19th century and Texas oil and gas industry in the 20th century) demonstrate a hermeneutical cycle between actors and structures, and show how this cycle’s catalyst lies in the technology-culture nexus. My fourth and final chapter evolves from the third, focusing on the individuals/collectives’ subjective experience of time within a given lifeworld. I explore the interactions between entrepreneurs’ temporal orientation and the institutions’ temporal ambience and identify a four-part taxonomy of institutional work based on the basic possibilities of imaginative novelty (The Wizard of Oz), imaginative replication (Castle in the Air), nostalgic replication (Golden Age), or nostalgic novelty (Seeking Roots). Correspondingly, I offer representative cases that demonstrate the movements of regional institutional trajectory over time on a temporal compass of entrepreneurs and their institutions. Overall, in this dissertation work, I apply interdisciplinary approachesfrom sociology, history, and philosophy to bear on social issues, including resource-scarcity experience/firm innovation, injustice legacy/firm corruption, generational units/institutional reconstruction, and temporality/institutional image. I hope my dissertation inspires dialogues with other scholars who may ponder, challenge, and resonate with my work.