BOLTON, MICHELE KREMEN; PHD
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, 1990
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, GENERAL (0310); BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, MANAGEMENT
(0454)
Casual observation of many industries indicates pervasive imitative behavior
among competitors. In
contrast to the widespread belief that innovators outperform imitators, this
research borrows insights from
agency and institutional theory to argue that imitation is a risk-shifting strategy
in which early adopting
pioneers absorb uncertainty for followers. Thus, imitation, rather than innovation,
may be an effective
organizational strategy. This imitative response to uncertainty is termed 'organizational
miming' to reflect
the difficulty of copying practices of other organizations. The study's hypotheses
test (1) the value of
imitation strategies (as opposed to pioneering strategies) for organizational
performance, contingent
upon type of innovation; (2) whether early adoption of new practices by elite
organizations stimulates
imitation by other firms and (3) whether more imitation is observed in manager-controlled
organizations
than in owner-controlled organizations, due to poor incentive alignments for
decision-makers. A survey
of northern California radio stations provides data to test these hypotheses.
The results suggest that
first-mover-advantages accompany marketing and technological leaders, but that
administrative pioneers
underperform laggards who 'wait and watch', allowing other organizations to
absorb the risks associated
with administrative pioneering. On average, the early adoption of new practices
by consensually agreed
upon elite organizations helps to stimulate the diffusion rate of innovations.
Manager-controlled
organizations in this sample are generally earlier adopters of technological
innovations than are
owner-controlled firms. No statistically different differences in adoption rates
of marketing and
administrative innovations were found between owner and manager-controlled stations.
Social
Systems Simulation Group
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