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The literature on the management of R&D professionals strongly advocates managing R&D projects on a project-by-project basis. This literature suggests that projects should be managed differently depending upon project characteristics such as risk, ambiguity, and nonroutineness. While the primary emphasis of the R&D professional literature has been on project teams, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of organization-wide controls on innovativeness at the firm level. In a sample of 57 pharmaceutical firms, this study investigates the influence of organizational controls on the research and development activities of R&D professionals. This study is one of a handful of studies that simultaneously explores the use of input, behavior, and output controls. Two categories of innovation are considered as dependent variables: incremental innovations in the form of drug enhancements and radical innovations in the form of new drugs. Contrary to existing theory and hypotheses developed in this study, the results show that input, behavior, and output control enhanced radical innovation, and input and output controls enhanced incremental innovation. These results challenge several important features of existing models of R&D management and diverge from common beliefs about R&D management at the project level. While it is commonly accepted that incremental and radical innovation should be managed differently, the results of this study suggest otherwise. In this instance, the management of R&D activities may be considered more similar than previously thought.

Part I. Introduction and history. Control is fundamental / Sim B. Sitkin, Laura B. Cardinal, and Katinka M. Bijlsma-Frankema ; A historical perspective on organizational control / Roger L.M. Dunbar and Matt Statler -- Part II. Conceptions of organizational control. A configurational theory of control / Laura B. Cardinal, Sim B. Sitkin, and Chris P. Long ; Critical perspectives on organizational control : reflections and prospects / Rick Delbridge -- Part III. Identity, attention, and motivation in organizational control. Identity work and control in occupational communities / John Van Maanen ; Organizational identity and control : can the two go together? / Elizabeth George and Ciuli Qian ; Attention and control / William Ocasio and Franz Wohlgezogen ; The role of motivational orientations in formal and informal control / M. Audrey Korsgaard, Bruce M. Meglino, and Sophia S. Jeong -- Part IV. Relational control. Relational networks, strategic advantage : new challenges for collaborative control / John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Mariann Jelinek ; Toward a theory of relational control : how relationship structure influences the choice of control / Laurie J. Kirsch and Vivek Choudhury ; Peer control in organizations / Misty L. Loughry -- Part V. Managerial and strategic control. Control to cooperation : examining the role of managerial authority in portfolios of managerial actions / Chris P. Long ; Consequences and antecedents of managerial and employee legitimacy interpretations of control : a natural open system approach / Katinka M. Bijlsma-Frankema and Ana Cristina Costa ; Managerial objectives of formal control : high motivation control mechanisms / Antoinette Weibel ; Control configurations and strategic initiatives / Markus Kreutzer and Christoph Lechner

This research examines data collected as part of a 10-year case study of the creation and evolution of organizational control during organizational founding. Past research has taken a cross-sectional approach to examining control use in mature, stable organizations. In contrast, this study examines organizational controls during the founding period and takes a longitudinal perspective on organizational control. By examining how organizational controls are created and evolve through specific phases of the founding period, the research also provides new data and insights about what drives shifts in the use of various types of control. Specifically, this research sheds light on the role of imbalance among formal and informal controls as the key driver of shifts in control configurations, and provides a step toward making organizational control theory more dynamic.

Integrating theorizing on situational strength and complementarity with control theory, we investigate the mediating processes that transmit peer control combination effects to team performance. We argue that two critical peer control mechanisms—norm strength and peer pressure—complement each other such that their joint impact on team members becomes stronger than the sum of their parts. In a multiple mediator model, we identify effort and trust as two distinct mediating processes that explain the relationship between peer control combinations and team performance. Multisource, multiwave data from 41 self-managing healthcare teams largely support our model. The pattern of mediation was more complex than we anticipated, revealing an indirect effect of peer controls on effort via trust. Together, our findings offer insight into how controls complement each other and the processes through which they do so.

This study examines how designing for product development influences project performance in distinct technological environments. Drawing on a series of computational experiments and paired-case comparisons of six product development projects, we specifically examine how new product development performance is affected by project design and the technological environment. By triangulating across the computational experiments and case studies, we find the existence of performance trade-offs in product development as well as the importance of performance priorities in influencing project design. These findings permit us to elaborate on existing contingency-based perspectives of new product development and put forward a novel mediating model. In this mediating model of product development, we suggest that the technological environment shapes performance priorities, which in turn influence project design and ultimately the performance outcomes of new product development efforts. This model further highlights that project designs can evolve as a function of performance outcomes, although this process can be inhibited by the presence of design evolution constraints. This research contributes significantly to our understanding of designing projects for new product development.