Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

What kind of person is likely to emerge as an informal leader in the workplace? Experimental research shows that high self-monitors—who tend to adjust their attitudes and behaviors to the demands of different situations—emerge as informal leaders in temporary groups. By contrast, low self-monitors—who tend to be true to themselves in terms of consistency in attitudes and behaviors across different situations—are less likely to emerge as leaders. But this prior research does not address the criticism that the emergence of high self-monitors as leaders represents ephemeral impression management in the context of laboratory experiments. To address this issue, we collected and analyzed data from a 116-member high-technology firm. Our results show that self-monitoring is related not only to leadership emergence, but also to the provision of advice to co-workers. Further, people who occupied brokerage positions (being trusted by those who did not trust each other) tended to be seen as leaders if they were high rather than low self-monitors. From these results, we build a picture of the high self-monitoring emergent leader as someone who notices problems and ameliorates them through the provision of advice and the brokerage of relationships across social divides. The occupation of a structurally advantageous position may well be more advantageous for some (i.e., high self-monitors) relative to others (i.e., low self-monitors).

Novelty is an essential feature of creative ideas, yet the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge. From this perspective, balancing atypical knowledge with conventional knowledge may be critical to the link between innovativeness and impact. The authors’ analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern: The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work, yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations. Papers of this type were twice as likely to be highly cited works. Novel combinations of prior work are rare, yet teams are 37.7 % more likely than solo authors to insert novel combinations into familiar knowledge domains.

Imitation is a key learning mechanism for inventions. What are the conditions that favor learning by imitation? A perspective of social networks focuses on the effect of connectivity on knowledge outcomes. A geographical perspective focuses on the spatial dimension of social relations and the role that physical contiguity plays in knowledge creation. These perspectives have largely been used separately. This chapter’s authors investigate the interactive effect of connectivity and spatial proximity on mechanisms of learning, arguing that connectivity among firms facilitates purposive collaboration and forms of friendly imitation, whereas spatial proximity also enhances mutual visibility among even disconnected firms, raising the incentives for unfriendly forms of rival imitation. The case study demonstrates that the co-occurrence of connectivity and colocation facilitates both friendly and unfriendly practices of imitation. The social tensions that emerge from unfriendly imitation are mitigated by social conventions and sanctions and thus help realize individual long-term collective opportunities.

The authors offer an explorative perspective on the importance of gatekeepers for the expansion and renewal of U.S. cities’ knowledge base. They propose and test a number of indicators accounting for the role of gatekeepers in mediating knowledge flows across cities. Findings indicate that external direct relations are the key mechanism to inject fresh knowledge into a city and to amplify technological recombination opportunities; conversely, the greater the reliance on external relations governed by gatekeepers the lower the impact on a city knowledge base expansion and renewal.

Distributed, networked learning processes are widely touted as a basis for superior performance. Yet we know relatively little about how learning networks operate in the aggregate. We explore this issue by utilizing a unique data set on learning among Swedish municipalities. The data indicate that geographic proximity and county are the basic structuring properties of the global network. Municipalities learn from their near neighbors, especially from neighbors in the same county, and these two principles produce a high degree of local clustering in the municipal learning networks. At the same time, we also find evidence that Swedish municipalities are a linked together on a national basis. Two mechanisms knit the Swedish municipalities together. First, county seats serve as hubs that link local clusters together. Second, local clusters aggregate into regional clusters. Despite a high degree of local clustering, hubs and regions provide a structural basis for the national diffusion of policy ideas and practices among Swedish municipalities.

Different dimensions of proximity have been identified as crucial factors for the formation of innovative alliances providing for efficient knowledge flows therein. However, the determinants that keep these linkages alive are yet to be explored. The authors take a dynamic approach to investigating the coevolution of cooperation ties and various dimensions of proximity between potential collaboration partners. Specifically, they highlight the predominant role of cognitive proximity for the continuity of innovation-oriented alliances and take into account that this proximity changes over time. They find partner-switching more often than the repetition of collaboration. Neither knowledge transfer nor mutual experience with cooperation shows significant effects on repeated cooperation. Instead, cooperation is found to be favored by similarity (overlap) between the firms’ knowledge bases, an imbalance in the reciprocal potential for knowledge exchange, the general experience the partners have with collaboration, and similarity in the degree of popularity of collaboration partners.