FROM COMMON TO UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE SOCIO-COGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS OF INTER-FIRM HETEROGENEITY IN THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE AS A RESOURCE
Open Access
- Author:
- Nag, Rajiv
- Graduate Program:
- Business Administration
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 25, 2006
- Committee Members:
- Dennis Arnold Gioia, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Donald C Hambrick, Committee Member
Wenpin Tsai, Committee Member
Robert Carl Voigt, Committee Member - Keywords:
- HETEROGENEITY
EXECUTIVE COGNITION
KNOWLEDGE - Abstract:
- A series of recent academic as well as practitioner oriented ideas and movements such as the “Resource Based View”, “Absorptive Capacity”, “Organizational Learning”, “Knowledge Management”, etc., have sought to view knowledge as the key strategic resource that leads to sustained competitive advantage. All these movements, however, implicitly assume that firms differ in the ways they understand, create, access, and use knowledge as a resource. Little has been done to explore the fundamental origins of these differences. In this dissertation, I explore the roots of these elemental differences in the socio-cognitive schemas, “executive knowledge schemes”, of top managers of firms competing in a largely similar objective environment, that is, a single mature industry- the U.S. Metalcasting Industry. The essential thesis on which I base this dissertation is that the primary drivers of interfirm heterogeneity are differences between top managers of competing firms in their fundamental beliefs about knowledge and knowledge related processes in their respective organizations. To further develop and test this thesis, I adopt a two-stage (divided into four distinct phases) study, with the first stage involving an interpretive study aimed at exploring the cogent dimensions and relationships through which executive knowledge schemes function, and the second involving a large sample investigation of the emergent relationships. I find that senior executives of incumbent firms, operating within the same industry, show remarkable variation in their interpretations and evaluations of knowledge, especially in its strategic context. The structure of the executive knowledge schemes that emerged from the study comprises three primary dimensions – the Competitive Dimension, the Personal Dimension, and the Control Dimension. These three dimensions have five elements or sub-dimensions that together form the pertinent areas of managerial beliefs about knowledge. First, I find that executive knowledge schemes significantly influence the amount and nature of scanning behaviors that a focal executive engages in. I develop a new approach to conceptualize executive scanning by developing a grounded concept called “Scanning Proactiveness”, which entails the specific behaviors that characterize a form of aggressive search for information in a given domain. I also find that executive knowledge schemes and executive scanning behaviors influence the ways in which a firm adapts and enhances knowledge in its situated practices while facing a problematic situation. These behavioral tendencies, that I term “Knowledgeable Practice” provide a novel approach to conceptualize and empirically measure the specific practices by which knowledge is transformed to create competitive advantage. I find that the nature of knowledgeable practice mediates the relationship between a firm’s human, social, and technological capital (i.e. its tangible knowledge assets) and its innovation capacity. This dissertation serves to expand the current theoretical frameworks of the resource based and knowledge based views of competitive advantage by clarifying the role of executive leadership in the definition, interpretation, and firm level application of knowledge as a strategic resource.