Research

YOU CAN FIND DOWNLOADABLE VERSIONS OF MY PAPERS AT:

http://ssrn.com/author=370849

Corporations that comprise multiple businesses ultimately compete with actors in the capital markets who can put together similar portfolios of businesses through stock ownership.  The central issues in corporate strategy therefore pertain to how managers can create the most value from the portfolio of businesses they control by managing the organizational and governance linkages between them.  Thus, many of the central phenomena in corporate strategy pertain to collaboration between distinct but interdependent organizational units - for instance in the contexts of inter-divisional collaboration, strategic partnerships, outsourcing or M&A integration.

In studying these different forms of inter-organizational collaboration both within and between firms, my research has sought to develop and refine the implications of one central idea:  collaboration problems arise not only from incentive conflict ("cooperation failures"), but also coordination failures. Coordination failures occur when interacting individuals are unable to anticipate each other's actions and adjust their own accordingly (Schelling, 1960; Simon, 1945), and are distinct from cooperation failures, which arise when the interests of interacting individuals are not aligned. Successful collaboration requires both cooperation and coordination.  Coordination is successful when there is sufficient common knowledge among interacting individuals such that they can adequately anticipate each other's actions, and adjust their own accordingly.  

In this stream of work, I study the substitution and complementarity relationships between different mechanisms that promote collaboration- through their effects on enhancing cooperation and/or coordination- and the resulting implications for the choice of organizational and governance forms. 

Selected Papers in this stream of research

1."Integrating acquired capabilities: When structural integration is (un)necessary" (with Harbir Singh and Saikat Chaudhuri),to be published in 2008 in Organization Science (download)

2. "Renewal through Reorganization: The Value of Inconsistencies between Formal and Informal Organization" (with Ranjay Gulati) to be published in 2008 in Organization Science (download)

3. "Trust and Governance: Untangling a tangled web" (with Bart Vanneste) Forthcoming in Academy of Management Review (download)

4. "Repeated interactions and contractual detail: Identifying the learning effect" (with Bart Vanneste) forthcoming in Organization Science (download)
 

III. Analysis of Coordination Mechanisms

In this research, I focus on understanding how specific mechanisms of coordination work. In particular, I focus on tacit coordination mechanisms that do not entail communication.

1. "Copresence not Communication: How ICT's really enable distributed coordination" (with Kannan Srikanth) Working paper (download)

2. "Coordination in vertical relationships: the unimportance of information flows" (with Ranjay Gulati), Working Paper (download)

3. "Expeditions without maps: Coordination without shared representations" (with Murali Swamy), Working Paper (download)

IV. Other Research on Corporate Strategy

While my research has primarily focused on coordination in inter-organizational contexts, I have occasionally also published papers on broader corporate strategy topics:

Papers

1.  "Does Leadership matter? CEO attributes and profitability under conditions of perceived environmental uncertainty", (with Waldman D, Ramirez G, House RJ) Academy of Management Journal, 2001

2.  "The distribution of R&D efforts in systemic industries: Implications for competitive advantage" (with S. Ethiraj), in Advances in Strategic Management, 2004 (download)

3. "Due diligence as a signal detection problem" (with Powell, B and Singh, H) Strategic Organization, November, 2006 (download)

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