Organizational change: a review of theoretical conceptions that explain how and why young firms change

Abstract

Change in new ventures is a vibrant research topic. Scholars can draw on a number of theories that emerged as a result of decades of research in organizational and social sciences focused on large and established firms. A review on organizational change theories that address young firms is still missing. We aim to contribute to the academic debate by (1) providing a systematic analysis and classification of theoretical conceptions on organizational change in terms of main assumptions, nature and reason of change, and by (2) discussing their applicability in the context of young firms. This article may aid researchers to select appropriate theoretical conceptions to study change in young firms.

Shifting back and forth: How does the temporal cycling between exploratory and exploitative R&D influence firm performance?

“…In the context of organizational learning, time compression diseconomies kick in when firms try to learn new routines within a short timeframe. Learning that is compressed in time makes firms liable to their newness (Rajagopalan & Spreitzer, 1997;Parastuty, Schwarz, Breitenecker & Harms, 2015;Wang et al, 2019) and increases the difficulty of establishing and reproducing routines in a reliable manner (Hannan & Freeman, 1984;Lavie et al, 2011).…”

“…Thirdly, we show that while speed is beneficial in R&D-intensive contexts, firms that possess large R&D departments cannot easily cope with quick changes. As a result, the adverse effects of speed are greater for firms with large scale R&D operations (Parastuty et al, 2015;Amburgey et al, 1990;Lavie et al, 2011). Although large-scale R&D operations benefit from resource munificence, they increase bureaucracy and make coordination more difficult (Baker & Cullen, 1993).…”

Investigating the process of entrepreneurial team member exits: a systematic review and future research directions

“…This review applies a systematic approach, which is characterized by transparency and reproducibility to reduce subjectivity and bias in data collection (Tranfield et al 2003). Thus, this review approach contributes to enforcing scientific rigor and limits the application of simple heuristics (Crossan and Apaydin 2010;Nabi et al 2017) and has been used with great success in current literature reviews (Parastuty et al 2015;de Mol et al 2015;Bouncken et al 2015;Sageder et al 2018;Pret and Cogan 2018). The systematic review includes the specification of the research objective, conceptual boundaries, search boundaries, potential search terms, and covered period as well as the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the articles which were defined.…”

Do start-ups benefit from coworking spaces? An empirical analysis of accelerators’ programs

“…In the exploration of such activities, previous research has investigated the effect of the use of external knowledge on a firm's innovative performance (Katila and Ahuja 2002;Laursen and Salter 2006) and on the relationship between a particular knowledge sourcing method and innovative performance (Radic and Pugh 2017). Scholars within this vein agree that through the utilization of external sourcing methods, firms in general and start-ups and SMEs in particular can compensate for the scarcity of internal knowledge and competencies (Parastuty et al 2015), fostering their innovation performance (Love et al 2014;Neyens et al 2010;Parida et al 2012).…”