Firms that source from offshore plants frequently perceive the lack of reliability and flexibility to be among the major drawbacks of their strategy. To mitigate against imminent mismatches of uncertain supply and demand, establishing capacity hedges in the form of responsive backup suppliers is...

Coordination among many interdependent actors in complex product development projects is recognized as a key activity in organizational theory. It is well known that this coordination becomes progressively more difficult with project size, but we do not yet sufficiently understand whether this...

The last decade has seen a growing consensus that manufacturing matters. The factory as the producing unit is the core of the firm's manufacturing activities. However, even now, it is not agreed on or even fully understood what constitutes a well-managed factory. This article attempts to create...

A long-standing debate on incentive and reward schemes has taught us that employees are not motivated by money and resources alone. A fundamental emotional motivator is the seeking for status and recognition. Traditional conceptualizations of status-seeking behavior viewed it as a rational means...

A large body of work on new product development (NPD) has identified a number of general success drivers, which imply 'best practice' approaches in NPD. In particular, a newer market or a newer technology renders a project riskier and, therefore, requires a higher hurdle rate on returns....

Business Process Reengineering has been the most influential management movement of the 1990s, and like the quality movement of the 1980s, it has put management attention squarely on processes and operations. At first glance, however, it is hard to see any relationship between the precepts of...

This article gives a general decision framework for companies outsourcing strategic decisions. The authors argue that a consistent outsourcing strategy, strategic evaluation and searching of external sources, and effective implementation processes are three essential steps toward successful...

Behavioral Operations Management investigates new developments around behavioral components - "people issues" - in operations management (OM). While these "people issues" are not new, OM has not dealt with them in a serious or consistent manner until the last 10 years or so. What is new is the...

We examine emotional algorithms and their role in a fundamental dilemma that confronts human groups-whether actors should take care of 'me' (compete) or take care of 'we' (cooperate). We argue that human emotions, triggered in algorithmic fashion through four common, although culturally...