Juggling Act: CEO Cognitive Complexity and Organizational Ambidexterty
By Seung-Hwan Jeong, Ph.D. Candidate in Strategic Management University of Texas at Austin Presented at NTU on 10 October 2017.
Three learning points:
Seung-Hwan operationalised organisational ambidexterity (OA) by using an exploration and exploitation dictionary, as previously used by McKenny, Aguinis, Short & Anglin (Forthcoming). Using the companies’ 10-K management discussion sections, he coded the words and used a combining method (% of exploration words x % of exploitation words) to measure OA. Nevertheless, there are other methods available, such as the balance dimension (no. of exploration words - no. of exploitation words).
The key independent variable of his study is CEO cognitive complexity. In order to measure this construct, Seung-Hwan used CEO utterance in earning calls, specifically the Q&A session. With the transcripts of these cals, he used LIWC dictionary to code for four categories of words - tentative, exclusive, discrepancy, and inclusive.
One CEO-level control that Seung-Hwan included was the Fog Index. This index is a weighted average of the number of words per sentence, and the number of long words per word. The index estimates the years of formal education a person needs to understand the text on the first reading. You can find more info here.
Afterthought:
I record my afterthoughts in another post on presenting papers. Will post it when I have collated learning points from more seminars.
