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Activity report
(2015)
Activity report
(2015)
Activity Report
(2014)
Any innovation process naturally goes hand in hand with a strong potential for failure. Up to as many as 90% of all innovation projects fall to termination before their successful completion, with even higher termination rates in the pharmaceutical industry. Such terminations can have detrimental effects on the project members involved. Yet, surprisingly, as project members make up the most important reason for the success of innovations, research has hitherto scarcely noted the human side of innovation project terminations. Consequently, this study aims to analyze how to retain the innovative functioning of project members after such setbacks.
This dissertation develops a framework to study the processes involved and analyze the influence of termination characteristics on project members. Resilience, or positive adaptation despite adversity, serves as the dissertation’s underlying framework and is adapted to the innovation context. To measure the resilience of project members after termination and to analyze the influence of termination characteristics on resilience, this dissertation develops the resilience construct innovator resilience potential (IRP), embedded in the innovator resilience (IR) framework. Herein, IRP stands for the potential in individuals for future innovative functioning and coping with future setbacks. The IRP construct consists of six malleable facets: self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, hope, optimism, self-esteem, and risk propensity.
This dissertation theoretically develops and tests this definition and operationalization of IRP in a qualitative and a quantitative study. The qualitative study was conducted in a world-wide operating hospitality company that underwent a large-scale innovation project termination. The quantitative field study took place as an online questionnaire that 238 innovators completed entirely (180 innovators had experienced an innovation project termination). A total of 326 innovators completed the first part of the questionnaire regarding IRP. After developing IRP in the qualitative study, it became operationalized, tested, and validated in the quantitative study. Furthermore, the quantitative field study tested the relationship of IRP with future innovative functioning, which has great importance for the success of future innovation projects. A second step identifies factors influencing IRP.
The outcomes of the quantitative field study show that IRP strongly relates to project commitment, which represents future innovative functioning of project members, as project commitment is important for the success of innovation projects. The strong relationship hinges on having experienced a termination beforehand. Therefore, IRP is important in the ongoing work of innovators following an innovation project termination. It is thus important to strengthen IRP after a termination, as this has a strong relationship with project commitment and as such future innovative functioning. Furthermore, this dissertation identifies social support as an influencing factor on IRP. More precisely, emotional support of the leader and organizational support provided through a climate of psychological safety strongly relate to IRP. In contrast, the support from family and friends does not relate to IRP. The dissertation found only work-related social support to strongly influence IRP. These findings result in theoretical and practical implications on how best to support project members during and after an innovation project termination.
In addition, the general practical discussion of this dissertation presents five steps leading to IRP and guidelines for a post termination debriefing to provide leaders with practical advice. The theoretical findings suggest that IRP can be used to measure the influence of innovation project terminations on project members and that IRP is important for future innovative functioning and for future coping of project members. The findings build the basis for future research in this nascent research field.
Innovators' careers
(2013)
The success or failure of most organizations is heavily dependent on innovation. However, this innovation is only possible through a special group of employees: the socalled innovators. These scientists, researchers, and developers are vital for the innovativeness of the organization. In my dissertation, I examine innovators’ careers from their organization’s point of view. In particular, my objective is to develop a more balanced approach to innovators’ careers than is offered in the contemporary career management literature. Some researchers argue that organizational career management has become more important because of the war for talent, whereas others postulate that organizations withdraw from career management because of the changing definitions of a career. These contrasting viewpoints leave organizations without a clear guideline for managing their key players’ careers. In order to provide such a guideline, in this thesis I address three central research questions by drawing on a cross-level sample of 625 innovators and 37 HR (human resources) managers from 37 organizations.
First, I analyze why some innovators leave their technical field of specialization to become managers. The results reveal that new career attitudes and organizational culture have an influence. More specifically, innovators with a self-directed career attitude, a boundaryless mindset, and a preference for organizational mobility often have a high managerial orientation, whereas the opposite is the case for innovators with a more valuesoriented career attitude. Furthermore, it is more likely in organizations with a supportive and collaborative culture that innovators will want to advance their career in a management position than in organizations with a culture in favor of innovativeness, power sharing, and
learning and development.
Second, I investigate whether organizational career management can still influence innovators’ careers. My results reveal that this is the case. In particular, they show that organizations should apply their organizational career management intensively, but should refrain from using too many practices and from further diversifying an already intensively applied organizational career management. Moreover, my study indicates that organizations profit from increasing innovators’ perceived career management support because it boosts the match between individual and organizational career plans.
Third, I examine how organizations can use dual ladders to raise innovators’ organizational commitment and career satisfaction. I identify the perceived recognition and transparency of the dual ladder as factors integral to the success of this career management instrument. My analyses illustrate that both are positively related to innovators’ organizational commitment and career satisfaction. In addition, my results reveal that selfdirected career management weakens the positive relationships between the perceived recognition of the dual ladder and organizational commitment and career satisfaction. Based on the conceptual arguments and empirical results, I provide recommendations for organizations on how to handle innovators’ careers in the era of the new career. Therefore, I provide easy-to-use guidelines on how to keep innovators in their technical
positions and roles, how to use organizational career management, and how to make dual ladders work. Last, but not least, I focus on the limitations of my study and point to future research possibilities.
Dispersed innovation teams rely upon team members who share leadership responsibilities to attain high levels of team performance. Although this concept of team shared leadership is receiving increasing attention, this dissertation shows that especially research on team-level antecedents of shared leadership has major deficits regarding a basic framework for analyzing antecedents, depth of theory, context-specific arguments, and empirical validation. This dissertation tries to fill these research gaps, thus shedding light on the question: How can we foster the important process of shared leadership in dispersed innovation teams?
This dissertation introduces a theoretical framework into shared leadership literature to structure the antecedents of shared leadership according to their mode of functioning. As such, this dissertation argues for the first time that to establish high levels of team shared leadership the basic dimensions of motivation, opportunity, and ability for shared leadership should be addressed (motivation-opportunity-ability framework or MOA framework). Based on this notion team-level antecedents providing motivation, opportunity, and ability for shared leadership are operationalized and hypothesized as antecedents of shared leadership in dispersed innovation teams using acknowledged theories. Moreover, all discussed hypotheses are verified in a sample of 96 dispersed real work teams with innovative software tasks. Thereby, empirical results are drawn from 96 team leader responses (used to assess team-level antecedents of team shared leadership) and 337 team member responses (used to assess team shared leadership).
Motivation for Team Shared Leadership. Based on the perspective of shared leadership as a risk-taking behavior for team members in dispersed innovation teams, trustworthiness is argued as a facilitator of the willingness, thus motivation to engage in risky shared leadership actions with others. This argumentation based on trust theory was supported by empirical results showing that team member trustworthiness in terms of benevolence and integrity was positively related to team shared leadership. Surprisingly, the proposed positive relationship between ability-based trustworthiness and shared leadership could not be confirmed, thus ability-based trustworthiness could not be validated as a facilitator of shared leadership in dispersed innovation teams.
Opportunity for Team Shared Leadership. Opportunity for team shared leadership is addressed by discussing team reflexivity as an antecedent of shared leadership in dispersed
innovation teams. Team reflexivity is argued as opportunity providing antecedent of shared leadership as it gives team members a clear information basis in the complex and constantly changing environment of dispersed innovation teams, thus making leadership needs identifiable. In support of this argumentation based on goal setting theory and shared mental model theory team reflexivity was positively related to team shared leadership. Thereby, the relationship between team reflexivity and shared leadership could be shown as even stronger under conditions of high team role breadth self-efficacy and high team empowerment.
Ability for Team Shared Leadership. Ability for shared leadership is addressed in terms of social and project management skills. These two skills are argued as basic and
complementary skills needed for shared leadership in dispersed innovation teams based on socio-technical systems theory. Underscoring the importance of interpersonal competence
the empirical analysis showed that social skills were strongly positively related to team shared leadership. Contrary to the hypothesis of this study project management skills were not related to team shared leadership.
Structural Team Properties and Team Shared Leadership. Moreover, several structural team properties are discussed as team-level antecedents of shared leadership, namely female ratio, mean age, age diversity, and national diversity. Thereby, structural team properties are argued as potentially affecting team shared leadership through several
MOA dimensions. In the empirical analyses female ratio was positively related to shared leadership in dispersed innovation teams, while mean age was negatively related. Age
diversity showed no significant relationship and national diversity was marginally positively related to shared leadership in dispersed innovation teams. Based on these findings, important implications for practice, related to the three stages of a project team (establishment, forming, and performing stage), are provided. As such, team leaders of dispersed innovation teams is given a check-list of how to foster shared leadership in dispersed innovation teams based on the results of this dissertation. Future research is especially suggested regarding the “non-findings” of this dissertation, interaction effects, additional team-level antecedents, the vertical team leader’s role within shared leadership evolvement, antecedents of shared leadership in other contexts, and other levels of antecedents (e.g., organizational-level antecedents).
Innovations have become essential drivers of success for companies in most industries. However, innovative efforts often fail due to a lack of internal support. Past research has shown that internal resistance arises when employees perceive innovations as threatening the core of the organization, its identity. How employees can be led to identify with much innovations has remained largely unsolved. Drawing on organizational psychology, this study proposes a new conceptual framework which includes an in-depth understanding of employee identification with innovations, its identity-related antecedents and its consequences. The framework is tested by means of large-scale empirical studies among more than 150 members of a leading healthcare organization. Results indicate that the proposed framework has high explanatory power for employee identification with innovations, employee behaviours and the innovations’ success in the market. Based on these results, an innovation-identity toolkit is derived which enables executives to systematically pursue identification management and integrate it into their innovation management practice. Accordingly, the present book is relevant for both academics and managers in the fields of organizational behaviour and innovation management.
Past research has identified innovation portfolio management as a key success factor for a firm’s new product development process. However, the relevant literature falls short in considering the strategic scope of innovation portfolio decision-making. To take a first step in this direction, Marcel Coulon defines the construct of ‘portfolio orientation’ as a strategic orientation. He develops a conceptual framework to identify performance effects of portfolio-oriented decision-making for new product development programs. Based on data of more than 200 German companies, he presents three papers. First, he addresses contingencies for portfolio orientation effectiveness to help understand interactions of formal innovation management with new product development issues inside and outside firm boundaries. Second, he identifies best performing portfolio types for specific levels of portfolio management formalization. Third, a variety of antecedents and their impact on a firm’s portfolio orientation are presented. Accordingly, the book is equally relevant for practitioners and academics in the fields of research and development management and innovation management, as well as strategic marketing management.
Supply chain risk management
(2012)