Content and process: organizational conflict and decision making

The foundational work in the Carnegie perspective established conflict as endemic to organizations and a driver of organizing behavior and decision making. Organizations as a system of coordinated action among interdependent individuals and groups with different preferences, interests, information, or knowledge create the potential for pervasive and ongoing latent goal conflict. At the same time, extant psychology research has devoted considerable attention to identifying the content and intensity of conflict, focusing on the relationship between different types of conflict and their impact on group outcomes. The Carnegie perspective also assumes that the need for joint decision-making and the differences in goals or perception of reality are never fully resolved. As a result, it has paid attention to the processes through which conflict is addressed - by attending sequentially to goals, decentralizing information, accumulating excess resources, and forming coalitions rather than formal mediating procedures. The assessment of the psychology and organizational theory research also suggests that future work focusing on organizational conflict as latent, situated, and dynamic would enable greater clarity on how organizations make decisions.

External Interfaces or Internal Processes? Market Positioning and Divergent Professionalization Paths in Young Ventures

We explore how the initial market positioning of entrepreneurial ventures shapes how they professionalize over time, focusing specifically on the development of functional roles. In contrast to existing literature, which presumes a uniform march toward professionalization as ventures scale and complete developmental milestones, we advance a contingent perspective, distinguishing between the development of external interface functions (marketing & sales and customer development) and internal process functions (accounting, human resources, and finance). Specifically, we argue that positioning in an unconventional market space raises demand for external engagement that focuses ventures’ attention and resources toward developing external interface roles. At the same time, such unconventional ventures are less apt to elaborate their internal process roles relative to more conventional peers. We test these predictions using a novel longitudinal data set on the internal organizations of 3,748 U.S.-based entrepreneurial ventures. In contrast to common assumptions of convergent professionalization, our theory and findings advance the perspective that ventures pursue divergent professionalization paths based on their initial market positioning as they scale up.

Beyond Spatial Proximity: The Impact of Enhanced Spatial Connectedness from New Bridges on Entrepreneurship

Various strands of work have explored how spatial proximity helps (metaphorically) bridge barriers to resource mobilization and foster knowledge transfer. However, much of that work takes spatial connectedness as a given. We argue that spatial connectedness is a distinct construct that affects the extent to which spaces are not just proximate but are actually able to link people, ideas, resources, and knowledge together. We explore one such source of connectedness—physical (not metaphorical) bridges. We find that the opening of newly built bridges enhances startup founding in the local geographic community. Beyond their impact on startup founding, newly built bridges also influence the organizing process for such ventures. This includes a positive impact on the entry of prospective founders into entrepreneurship and an increase in the number of early-stage investors. The subsequently founded ventures are also more likely to engage in recombination and to cross industry boundaries. We explore scope conditions around industry and connective heterogeneity. We also test for robustness to various modeling approaches. The discussion highlights contributions of these findings to the study of entrepreneurship, as well as of organizations and the institutional fields in which they operate.