Browsing by Author "Joseph, John"

This dissertation explores the complex process of organizational change, applying a behavioral lens to understand change in processes, products, and search behaviors. Chapter 1 examines new practice adoption, exploring factors that predict the extent to which routines are adopted “as designed” within the organization. Using medical record data obtained from the hospital’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system I develop a novel measure of the “gap” between routine “as designed” and routine “as realized.” I link this to a survey administered to the hospital’s professional staff following the adoption of a new EHR system and find that beliefs about the expected impact of the change shape fidelity of the adopted practice to its design. This relationship is more pronounced in care units with experienced professionals and less pronounced when the care unit includes departmental leadership. This research offers new insights into the determinants of routine change in organizations, in particular suggesting the beliefs held by rank-and-file members of an organization are critical in new routine adoption. Chapter 2 explores changes to products, specifically examining culling behaviors in the mobile device industry. Using a panel of quarterly mobile device sales in Germany from 2004-2009, this chapter suggests that the organization’s response to performance feedback is conditional upon the degree to which decisions are centralized. While much of the research on product exit has pointed to economic drivers or prior experience, these central finding of this chapter—that performance below aspirations decreases the rate of phase-out—suggests that firms seek local solutions when doing poorly, which is consistent with behavioral explanations of organizational action. Chapter 3 uses a novel text analysis approach to examine how the allocation of attention within organizational subunits shapes adaptation in the form of search behaviors in Motorola from 1974-1997. It develops a theory that links organizational attention to search, and the results suggest a trade-off between both attentional specialization and coupling on search scope and depth. Specifically, specialized unit attention to a more narrow set of problems increases search scope but reduces search depth; increased attentional coupling also increases search scope at the cost of depth. This novel approach and these findings help clarify extant research on the behavioral outcomes of attention allocation, which have offered mixed results.

This dissertation studies how organizations, when solving a specific problem, identify a set of potential solutions which we call "Search Space." By drawing from evolutionary theory and related literatures on strategic change, scholars have demonstrated differences in search mechanisms that explain how organizations choose solutions. However, we still face unanswered questions in understanding how organizations decide where to search, including how organizations identify a set of potential solutions or Search Space. This dissertation defines the concept of Search Space and identifies three factors - uncertainty, prior top managerial attention, and prior experience -that drive differences in Search Space. Additionally, this dissertation starts to disentangle why some firms' top managers are predisposed to paying more attention to new strategic areas by investigating the relationship between uncertainty and top managerial attention. Hypotheses first testing the effect of uncertainty, prior top managerial attention, and prior experience on size of Search Space, and second testing the effect of uncertainty on changes in top managerial attention are tested using data describing the U.S. renewable electricity sector from 2000 to 2010. We conduct both a cross-sectional analysis using data collected though a multiple respondent survey and a panel data analysis by tracking firms' memberships in renewable electricity trade groups. We find that uncertainty and prior top managerial attention increase size of Search Space, but related prior experience reduces size of Search Space. Additionally, uncertainty positively changes attention of top managers at headquarter units, but not at subsidiary units, towards renewable electricity. These results contribute to our understanding of how organizations start solving problems by deciding where to search; how the boundaries of top managerial attention direct Search Space; and how different types of top managers interpret uncertainty. Empirically, these results have important implications for how renewable policies should be structured and how firms develop new projects in the U.S. renewable electricity sector.