Dear colleagues,

As the year nears a close, we wanted to extend our gratitude to the COR community for your engagement in our center’s activities, and send our very best wishes to you and your families for 2018.

Looking ahead, please join us for the first COR event in 2018…

COR Faculty Development Paper Workshop with Prof. John Joseph (Merage)

Discussants: Martha Feldman (Social Ecology) and Jone Pearce (Merage)

Friday, January 12

SBSG 1321

12:00-1:30pm

RSVP by Jan 2

Lunch will be provided

LEARNING WITHIN HIERARCHIES: ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE, LEARNING AND INNOVATION IN THE MULTI-UNIT FIRM

In this study, we provide an extension and the first empirical test of March’s Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning (1991). Theoretically, we qualify and extend March’s conclusions by examining the possibility that learning varies within the corporate hierarchy of a multidivisional (M-form) firm.  To do so, we consider the impact of turnover at the corporate level and at the subunit level and their impact on the exploration-exploitation tradeoff.  We also unpack the different effects of arrivals and departures.  Empirically, we use company directories from Motorola over a 24-year period, to construct membership turnover measures for the corporate office as well as for the firm’s subunits.  We pair this data with patenting behavior over the same period to test our conjectures and better understand the exploration-exploitation impact of learning within hierarchies.   Our results indicate that corporate departures matter for for learning than either corporate departures or subunit arrivals/departures.  Our theory contributes to perspectives of organizational learning and organizational design.