Phanish Puranam - Research

Corporate Strategy & Organization Design

The central issues in corporate strategy 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, organisation design and corporate strategy are intimately linked, and many of the central phenomena in corporate strategy pertain to designing collaboration between distinct but interdependent organizational units -inter-divisional initiatives, strategic partnerships, re-organizations, outsourcing and M&A integration. I have analysed each of these kinds of relationships in my research- both empirically as well as through formal models (please go to http://ssrn.com/author=370849 to download papers). A list of published papers can be found at the bottom of this page.

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 and can occur independently of cooperation failures, which arise when the interests of interacting individuals are not aligned.

The "Foundations of Organization Design" Project

I am currently working on a large multi-year, multi-part project relating to fundamental concepts in the theory of organizational design. The project secured funding on a competitive basis from the European Research Council ("Grant Award Announcement"). My plans for the next few years centre around this project, in which my goal is to extend what I have learnt about how coordination takes place within organizations in order to revisit some of the basic issues in organization design. While the individual sub-projects are distinct enough to merit separate papers, they share certain common themes:

Exploring how organization structures can help economize on the need for shared knowledge, as well as create sufficient shared knowledge to generate coordinated action
Understanding how incentive and coordination ("information processing") mechanisms interact in organizations
The framing of organization design problems in terms of interactions among a tractable number of agents
An emphasis on formalization of arguments wherever feasible

Published/Working papers from the project (NEW!)

Integrating Distributed Work (Forthcoming in Strategic Management Journal)

Organization Design: The Epistemic Interdependence Perspective

Expeditions without Maps: Why faulty initial representations may help in joint discovery processes

Interdependence & Organization Design, Chapter in forthcoming HANDBOOK of ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION (edited by Anna Grandori)

Collaborators on these projects include Marlo Goetting, Thorbjorn Knudsen, Madan Pillutla, Massimo Warglien, Eucman Lee and Murali Swamy. Early versions of reports from these projects (and related material) will be uploaded to this page.

Selected papers

(please see http://papers.ssrn.com/author=370849 for a full list)

1. "Integrating distributed work: Comparing task design, communication and tacit coordination mechanisms" (with Srikanth, K) (Forthcoming in Strategic Management Journal) (download)

2. "Repeated interactions and contractual detail: Indentifying the learning effort" ( with Bart Vanneste) published in 2010 in Organization Science (download)

3. "Integrating acquired capabilities: When structual integration in (un)necessary" (with Harbir Singh and Saikat Chaudhuri) published in 2009 in Organization Science (download)

4. "Renewal through Reorganization: The Value of Inconsistencies Formal and Informal Organization" (with Ranjay Gulati) published in 2009 in Organization Science (download)

5. "Trust and Governance: Untangling a tangled web" (Bart Vanneste) published in 2009 Academy of Management Review (download)

6. "Value appropriation as an Organizational capability: The case of IP protection through patents" (with Markus Reitzig) published in 2009 in Strategic Management Journal (download)

7. "Integration through Incentives in Differentiated Organizations" (with Tobias Kretschmer, published in 2008 in Organization Science) (download)

8. "What they know vs. What they do: How acquirers leverage technology acquistions" (with Kannan Srikanth, published in 2007 in the Strategic Management Journal) (download)

9. "Organizing for Innovation: Managing the coordination autonomy dilemma in technology acquisitions" (with Harbir Singh and Maurizio Zollo, published in 2006 in the Academy of Management Journal) (download)

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

11. "Adaptation in vertical relationships: Beyond incentive conflict" (with Ranjay Gulati and Paul Laurence, published in Strategic Management Journal in 2005) (download)

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

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

Interesting links for Organization Structure & Design researchers

Call for papers for SMJ Special issue - Strategy and the Design of Organizational Architecture