In the recent years, the pervasive use of digital technologies has remarkably changed our society. Realizing its huge potential for transforming a society, many emerging markets worldwide have widely adopted digital technologies aiming at poverty reduction, rapid socio-economic development and sustainability through a better connected society. However, despite its large scale adoption, a major percentage of digital technology-based projects in these markets have failed completely or partially. Considering the unique characteristics of emerging markets, it is now well acknowledged that the canonical set of methods used for innovation in developed economies do not work in the emerging markets and need doing things differently. As these projects are often led by entrepreneurs who lack in local knowledge, the projects suffer in contextualization of innovation leading to failure. This doctoral thesis examines dynamics of digital innovation in emerging markets focusing on digital entrepreneurship, digital technology driven enterprise transformation and co-creation of IT value for the firms engaged in such digital ventures. This thesis adopts three paper format and is grounded in concepts and theories from wide range of related and intertwined academic literatures: those of digital innovation in emerging markets, digital innovation and entrepreneurship, liminality, enterprise transformation, path creation, co-creation of IT value and social-commercial alliance. As methodologies, I have adopted interpretive cases studies and conducted three case studies in an emerging market, Bangladesh to collect empirical data. One of the papers is based on single case while two others are drawn on two cases. The first paper investigates two digital innovation projects in emerging markets drawing on liminality to explore how contexts and entrepreneurial agency in emerging markets co-evolve through digital technologies. Drawing on a single case, the second paper examines the transformation of an organization that adopts ICT. And finally, the third paper explores the process of co-creation and emanation IT value in two social-commercial alliances that embeds IT as their key resources for innovation. Overall, the thesis has several contributions to the theories and for practice. Specifically, the key theoretical contributions of the thesis are: 1) illustrating that digital innovations in emerging markets offer liminal space for entrepreneurs, 2) conceptualizing digital entrepreneurship and innovation as a constitutive process, 3) developing a process framework for digital innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging markets, 4) offering three practices for digital innovation in emerging markets, 5) conceptualizing ICT-based enterprise transformation in emerging market as a process of path creation, 6) offering ‘mindful deviation’ as a key practice for enterprise transformation, 7) developing a theoretical model for co-creation of IT value in social-commercial alliances and 8) building theoretical propositions related to firms‘ motivations for co-creation through IT. Further to that, I discuss several practical implications of the findings and also offer few implications for future research.

The importance of innovation for organizational competitive advantage and effectiveness is widely accepted (Love et al., 2011). Because of its potential to increase innovation, knowledge sharing (KS) has been of growing interest to researchers and managers (Kamaşak & Bulutlar, 2010). It is suggested that knowledge sharing is more likely to occur in supportive conditions when individuals have high-quality relationships with their leaders and co-workers (Carmeli et al., 2013). The purpose of the present study is to examine the association between the workplace relationships in teams and knowledge sharing, and how the pattern of knowledge sharing in teams is associated with team innovation and team performance. Social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity served as the theoretical foundation of the present study. A cross-sectional survey was utilized for data collection. The sample consisted of 223 members and 51 leaders from 51 teams which were collected from ten primary and middle schools as well as an aircraft corporation in Southern China. The results of the study demonstrated that both Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and Team-Member Exchange (TMX) are positively associated with knowledge sharing at the individual and team levels. Furthermore, the results suggested a mediating effect of TMX between LMX and team-level knowledge sharing (team KS). In Addition, the result of the comparison of an individual’s own LMX with the average LMXs in the team (RLMX) was found to moderate the relationship between LMX and TMX. However, the expected negative relationship between the variation in LMX relationships in a team (LMX differentiation) and TMX was not statistically significant. Finally, the study also found that the pattern of knowledge sharing in teams is positively related to team innovation and team performance, such that teams with more people sharing knowledge have better innovation and performance than teams with only a few people sharing knowledge. The overall findings indicate that both LMX and TMX have a unique influence on knowledge sharing, and our understanding of how supportive social relationships influence wok outcomes should be expanded from looking at the vertical leader-follower relationship and the horizontal relationship with a team in isolation. Rather, the multi-level interactions of these two types of relationships should be considered together.

The global security concerns combined with the emergence of firms operating at international level have intensified the competition among companies in the aerospace and defense sector. In this challenging business environment, the adoption of organizational ambidexterity could provide a company with the key advantage in dealing with the increasing competitive forces. Organizational ambidexterity, which denotes the simultaneous use of exploration and exploitation in organizations, ensures both short-term profitable operation through the exploitation of successful current products and long-term survival through the exploration of innovative solutions for future customer needs. According to ambidexterity and leadership literatures, transformational and transactional leadership styles, which constitute ambidextrous leadership behaviors, promote ambidexterity across multiple levels of the organization’s structure and become key elements for the successful implementation of organizational ambidexterity. This enactment of ambidexterity across levels constitutes ambidexterity penetration, a term first introduced in this study. In this context, this study attempts to address research gaps in the ambidextrous leadership research by linking the micro-level leadership styles with the macro-level corporate structure and environment by investigating: (a) how ambidexterity penetrates across multiple levels vertically and horizontally, (b) which tensions emerge from ambidexterity penetration and how they are managed, and finally (c) whether the type and size of the particular organizational setting is related to this ambidexterity penetration. To address these research questions, a dual case study research framework was used by analyzing data collected from: (a) a governmental organization with multiple business units dispersed throughout Europe, and (b) three aerospace and defense companies of different sizes with multiple business units in Europe and the United States. Data from 44 confidential, face-to-face and e-mail interviews, along with published archival information, was collected, compiled, and analyzed in the course of two years. The diversity of the studied business units in terms of type and size, and the compilation of data across multiple corporate levels (CEO to employee) provided a unique setting to uncover key findings that highlight the challenges and accomplishments of ambidextrous leadership in corporate and governmental organizational structures. The systematic, multi-level analysis of the collected data revealed variations in ambidexterity penetration across multiple levels of management in different types of organizations as a result of corporate culture and environmental constraints. However, in most cases, the analysis also uncovered: (a) similar characteristics of low horizontal, but high vertical penetration of ambidexterity, mainly due to their inflexible organizational structure, (b) prevailing transactional (exploitative) leadership style, as their leaders appear to act mostly as ambidextrous managers, (c) ambidexterity penetration across multiple levels via similar processes irrespective of type and size of each organization, and finally (d) the key role of middle management as a cohesive link within the firm’s structure that enables the ambidexterity penetration across management levels. In conclusion, this study contributes at the intersections of ambidexterity and leadership research in the context of the aerospace and defense sector and offers a timely empirical investigation of the competing challenges that these firms are called upon to face in the light of the emerging global security challenges and the subsequent vast investment in resources and capital.

Management control (MC) is a behavioural issue. Senior managers seek to align managerial endeavours with the organisation’s objectives. Traditionally, alignment has focused on seeking to ensure that managers support organisational aims by motivating, rewarding, and even monitoring, the achievement of assigned targets. MC was originally mainly about financial targets, before broadening to include nonfinancial performance measures. However, there is evidence to suggest that organisations may also seek to align managerial “values” with those of the organisation. Organisational attempts to influence managerial mindsets through the MC process raise non-trivial questions regarding the procedures and systems involved, the reasons for apparently expanding into attempts to influence thinking, and the possible consequences of such attempts. These questions form the basis of the present study. This thesis reports on a case study of Compartamos Bank, a Mexican organisation with a religious ethos, selected through theoretical sampling. Compartamos claims to have the “person” at the centre of its philosophy. The thesis contributes to the MC literature by broadening the scope of value systems. The findings suggest that value systems are not just a means of boosting performance and accomplishing organisational aims; they may also be used to foster managers’ development on various personal dimensions. Evidence from the case study suggests that frequent reinforcement of the organisation’s philosophy through its value system, along with a boundary system, may enhance “value congruence”. However, using these MC mechanisms may also cause various unintended side-effects. In detailing the implementation process of a value system, the study fills a gap identified in the MC literature regarding whether and, if so, why organisations may implement “softer” approaches involving the encouragement of shared values, and what may be the possible consequences of doing so.

Digital infrastructures characteristically expand and evolve. Their propensity for growth can be attributed to the self-reinforcing mechanism of positive network externalities, in which the value and attractiveness of any digital infrastructure to users, is generated from and sustained as a function of the size of its existing user community. The expansion of any digital infrastructure, though, is ultimately underpinned by an inherent architectural capacity to support unanticipated change, that may include changes to architecture itself. However, as digital infrastructures scale, their usage grows, and they encounter and become entangled with other digital infrastructures. As such, the capacity of digital infrastructure architecture to accommodate change, under conditions of positive network externalities that attract users, conversely leads to intensified social and technical dependencies that eventually resist certain kinds of change. That is, it leads to sociotechnical ossifications. Changing underlying architecture in existing digital infrastructures, thus, becomes increasingly prohibitive over time. Information Systems (IS) research suggests that architectural change or evolution in digital infrastructures occurs primarily via a process of replacement through two means. An existing digital infrastructure is either completely replaced with one that has an evolved architecture, or intermediary transitory gateways are used to facilitate interoperability between digital infrastructures of incompatible architectures. Recognising the sociotechnical ossifications that resist architectural evolution, this literature has also tended to focus more on social activities of cultivating change of which the outcome is architectural evolution in digital infrastructures, than directly on architectural evolution itself. In doing so it has provided only a partial account of underlying architectural evolution in digital infrastructures. The findings of this research come from an embedded case study in which changes to underlying architecture in existing networking infrastructures were made. Networking infrastructures are a prime instance of sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures. The case’s primary data sources included interviews with 39 senior networking and infrastructure virtualisation experts from large Internet and Cloud Service Providers, Standards Development Organisations, Network Equipment Vendors, Network Systems Integrators, Virtualisation Software Technology Organisations, Research Institutes, and as well technical documents. A critical realist analysis was used to uncover generative mechanisms that promote underlying architectural evolution in sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures. This thesis extends IS understanding of architectural evolution in digital infrastructures with the complementary finding of, architectural evolution through softwarisation. In architectural evolution through softwarisation, the architecture of sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures, is evolved via the exploitation of features inherent to digital entities, which have been overlooked in extant research on architecture in digital infrastructures.

Purpose/objectives: This research deals with the development of a consensus construction to understand and to optimize factors affecting service technicians response time in corrective maintenance processes for stationary equipment, i.e. equipment that can generally not be re-located for maintenance and repair, in different business areas, i.e. elevator, mining equipment and IT hardware. In this context, the goal of this research is to identify competitive objectives with respect to corrective maintenance, factors that are perceived to influence service technicians in this process as well as perceived improvement opportunities. Based on this, a consensus construction to be utilized in the researched community has been developed in order to optimize the according response times. The construct may also be used as a baseline for further research in this context. Design/methodology/approach: The empirical part of the research conducted has been targeted with an abductive, qualitative, multiple case study approach. The need for this research has been identified through an in-depth and iterative literature review and the methodology chosen, i.e. multiple case study research, has been justified. The empirical part to contribute to closing the research gap has thereby been divided into four parts: 1. Preparation of research and pilot 2. Case studies and result documentation 3. Analysis, interpretation and consensus construction development 4. Conclusions, limitations, outlook and recommendations Findings: The findings represent a significant contribution both for knowledge as well as business practice. In addition to the identification of further gaps in research, the literature review thereby isolated a specific need with regards to understanding and improving factors affecting service technicians in stationary equipment corrective maintenance response time. In this con-text, numerous concepts, such as PSS, servitization, competitive objectives/priorities, correc-tive maintenance, response time reduction, etc. have been reviewed, put into context, dis-played in a structured way and contributed to by this research. Furthermore, a set of 57 per-ceived factors influencing the corrective maintenance process and 87 perceived improvement opportunities has been identified. The consensus construction structures and prioritizes these, gives action recommendations and makes the findings available for application in business practice in the community studied. Last but not least, the research conducted has risen the awareness for the importance of this topic.

This dissertation explores the value of disclosure in sustainability reports. Sustainability reports are part of the information provided publicly by companies and may reveal information about the type of sustainability practices adopted by the company and extent of implementation. To this end, we explore (1) developed constructs using sustainability reporting, and (2) consistency with established sustainability performance measures. Till now, limited research has been conducted pertaining to the specific operational practices that companies are reporting on for the sake of developing a new measure of social and environmental sustainability out of them. Finally, (3) using the proposed measure, we explore links to financial performance and firm size. To meet these three research objectives, we first synthesize and obtain from the literature and relevant guidelines a list of operational practices for environmental and social sustainability. Next, content analysis of 331 sustainability reports is implemented. In particular, scoring is carried out on the identified environmental and social practices to see which of those are prioritized in companies’ sustainability reports. Based on the prevailing practices, we develop two constructs for social sustainability and three constructs for environmental sustainability. These constructs allow us to identify ‘leader’ and ‘laggard’ companies in four industrial sectors for comparison and provide illustrative text from their sustainability reports to demonstrate our scoring methodology. Second, we check consistency of our developed measure with existing measures of sustainability that are considered valuable. Specifically, we correlate our measure with Dow Jones Sustainability Index and Environmental Social and Governance data and find that all three measures are positively and significantly correlated with each other at the same level. Given the consistency between the three measures, we argue that our measure for sustainability performance is valuable and thus sustainability reporting appears to have some value. Finally, we explore the link between our developed measure with financial performance and firm size. Existing literature has extensively studied this relationship using established measures of sustainability performance, thus the results remain inconclusive. We revisit this relation by investigating whether our developed measure can shed light on that relationship. Structural equation modeling is performed, which indicates that there is not a significant relationship between our developed measure and financial performance, at least in the short term, as is consistent with similar research using ESG or other established measures. Thus, some aspects of sustainability but not all appear to be positively linked to financial performance. Also, to account for the industry effect, we are performing cluster analysis in four industrial sectors and identify upper and lower clusters, based on companies’ total sustainability disclosure score. Our analysis indicates sector specificity as regards the relationship between sustainability disclosure and financial performance based on the proposed instrument. Also, size expressed by revenues does not affect the measure we developed, as suggested by some of the literature.

This thesis explores an important yet underexplored aspect of management studies, which is that some individuals and organisations in business gain a cultural significance and popularity in society, which goes beyond simply being known as being high quality. Specifically, I explore how business actors garner celebrity value and explore consequences it can have for themselves and those around them. In paper 1, co-authored with my thesis supervisors, I explore how the press construct entrepreneurs as celebrities and this study provides new knowledge about how certain individuals in business become celebrities and how the press create their personas. In the second paper, under the guidance of Michael Pfarrer and Daniel Gamache while a visiting scholar at the University of Georgia, I theorise the formation and consequences of hubris developing at a collective level in an organization. In my third paper, I explore a celebrity spillover effect from a focal celebrity actor to those that they compete with.

This research approaches the personalities of luxury brands as understood and voiced by consumers. In an attempt to address the criticisms on the appropriateness and applicability of the generic brand personality typology to luxury brands, this work pursuits a new examination of the concept. Drawing on the experience of human personality trait framework development methodology, an “a posteriori” approach is grounded in consumers’ natural language to examine luxury brands’ personality disparateness from other brands. A combined methodology using online text mining and in-depth interviews was used to capture consumer vernacular for luxury brands. After separating brand personality traits from other brand descriptors, analysis of semantic similarity was performed. Based on the semantic distances of the cropped up traits, a new typology of luxury brand personality was developed. The new measure was purified and calibrated using two separate luxury consumer samples. This process led to the identification of six salient dimensions of luxury brand personality specific to the luxury domain and distinct from the existing frameworks. In addition, the new scale was employed to show that: a) member group fit positively influences self-congruence; b) self-congruence positively affects a number of consumer outcomes directly (purchase loyalty) as well as indirectly (purchase loyalty, purchase intention, and word-of-mouth communication outcomes) through emotional brand attachment, brand attitude, and brand personality appeal (purchase intention outcome only).

The employee-organisation relationship (EOR) has received considerable attention in the organisational behaviour literature. This line of research has heavily emphasised positive relationships, or has examined negative events within an overall positive or neutral relationship. Influenced by the tenets of social exchange theory (Blau, 1964) and the norm of reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960), this strand of research assumes that positive and negative relationships are mirror opposites, rather than discrete forms of interaction. In an attempt to expand negative EOR research, this thesis focuses on exploitation, which has been under-researched in the organisational behaviour literature. This thesis presents a multi-study investigation of a new construct termed perceived exploitative employee-organisation relationships (PERs), employing five independent samples. First, a new measure was developed and evaluated using four samples. PERs were found to be distinct from related constructs, explaining additional variance in negative emotions above and beyond other established constructs. The new scale was then used to examine a hypothesised model of the antecedents and outcomes of such exploitative relationships in a longitudinal study of medical doctors in training. Findings indicate that an effort-reward imbalance which favours the organisation is a pre-condition for the development of PERs, supporting the distributive nature of this phenomenon. Contrary to expectations, however, abusive supervision was not found to predict exploitation perceptions among employees. PERs predicted several attitudinal and behavioural outcomes, and this relationship was partially mediated by the emotions of anger, hostility, shame and guilt. The findings appear to support a thesis of negative asymmetric relationships viewing negative and positive relationships as discrete phenomena that develop differently and have divergent impact on outcomes. The contributions and implications of this thesis as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.