In the face of increasing competition, an organization's capacity to acquire knowledge from the outside has become fundamental for new product development. Pertinent extant literature has stressed how an organization should practice social product development, allowing for the inclusion of all types of stakeholders in idea generation, selection, validation, and commercialization. This article investigates how organizations can acquire, maintain, and use different sources of knowledge via ambidextrous habits of exploitation and exploration to sustain social product development. A case study based on 27 semistructured interviews and field observations at a leading, large-size, Dutch food-service company has been carried out. The findings illustrate the organizational processes and mechanisms that the company has adopted to address and combine practice- A nd research-based knowledge, as well as the main barriers limiting the accumulation and usage of this knowledge inside organizational boundaries.

The development of social norms, as well as how and under which conditions social norms impact behavior, are determined by the social influence process. By leveraging the influence process we can create and handle change in self-managing teams in order to foster growth and steer team members in a positive direction, away from negative habits. At the same time, if poorly managed the developed social norms can inhibit change, and in the worst case result in conflict and resentment within the team.

If team members feel part of a group and consider that group membership is relevant for them, they will adapt their behavior to align to the group's norms and standards, which in turn will dictate context-specific attitudes and behaviors that are appropriate for the team.

This chapter focuses on teams’ social norms, distinguishing between descriptive- (what most others do) and injunctive (what most others approve or disapprove of) norms, investigating important moderators in the relationships between descriptive norms and behaviors, discussing the role of the social environment on the changes to and inculcation of injunctive social norms, and describing how individual team members' attributes refine the susceptibility of individuals to normative influences.

In this study we investigate organizational control systems as the underpinnings of large organizations’ ability to perform after transition to a flattened and decentralized structure. We consider horizontal social control mechanisms on team level (concertive control induced by high team identification) and vertical bureaucratic managerial control mechanisms on organization level (interactive and diagnostic management control systems), and examine their combined influence on the innovativeness of self-managing product development teams in a large company. We utilize a rich empirical data set including a multilevel multi-source survey of the members of 97 organizational teams, their internal team managers, and their higher-level managers. In contrast to some prior research findings, we find a negative effect of team’s concertive control on team’s innovativeness . In addition, managerial interactive control systems fostering a more prestigious team’s organizational image seem to strengthen the negative effect of concertive control on team’s innovativeness, while in combination with diagnostic control systems, legitimizing current external organizational team’s image, the effect of concertive control becomes positive. Interestingly, our analysis suggests that as team’s concertive control increases, managerial control systems show a converse relationship in such a way that the diagnostic control reduces and the interactive control increases the negative influence of concertive control.

Open Source Software (OSS) has become a strategic asset for a number of reasons, such as short time-to-market software delivery, reduced development and maintenance costs, and its customization capabilities. Therefore, organizations are increasingly becoming OSS adopters, either as a result of a strategic decision or because it is almost unavoidable nowadays, given the fact that most commercial software also relies at some extent in OSS infrastructure. The way in which organizations adopt OSS affects and shapes their businesses. Therefore, knowing the impact of different OSS adoption strategies in the context of an organization may help improving the processes undertaken inside this organization and ultimately pave the road to strategic moves. In this paper, we propose to model OSS adoption strategies using a goal-oriented notation, in which different actors state their objectives and dependencies on each other. These models describe the consequences of adopting one such strategy or another: which are the strategic and operational goals that are supported, which are the resources that emerge, etc. The models rely on an OSS ontology, built upon a systematic literature review, which comprises the activities and resources that characterize these strategies. Different OSS adoption strategy models arrange these ontology elements in diverse ways. In order to assess which is the OSS adoption strategy that better fits the organization needs, the notion of model coverage is introduced, which allows to measure the degree of concordance among every strategy with the model of the organization by comparing the respective models. The approach is illustrated with an example of application in a big telecommunications company.

Agile methodologies have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their responsiveness. However, few studies have empirically analysed the effect of Agile on long-term organizational goals such as learning and innovation. Using an abductive approach, this study examines the relationships between self-regulated teams’ social conduct and their resulting learning and innovation. Results indicate that the perceived time pressure to get the job done greatly impedes team engagement in learning and innovation activities. Time pressure is affected by the various control strategies deriving from the implementation of Agile, which constitute its dark side: concertive, belief, diagnostic and boundary controls.