Falling Short with Participation - Different Effects of Ideation, Commenting, and Evaluating Behavior on Open Strategizing

Drawing on community research, we advance our understanding on open strategy (OS) by examining the forms of participation behaviors and their effects on organizational and virtual senses of community. Using data from a Siemen's company-wide online initiative, we find that mere participation in open strategizing does not directly engender organizational sense of community (OSOC) - an employee's perceived belongingness to the organization - but indirectly drives OSOC via a sense of virtual community (SOVC) - a feeling of virtual belongingness to other participants of the open strategy platform. Our findings further show that different forms of participation (submitting ideas, commenting, and evaluating ideas) generate divergent effects. For instance, while “commenting” and “evaluating” show a positive effect on SOVC, “submission of ideas” alone produces a negative effect on SOVC. Thus, submission of ideas may just be a way to dump one's thoughts without necessarily being interested in the strategy or getting a better understanding of it; whereas, commenting and evaluating behaviors clearly contribute to a sense of virtual community and intellectual engagement. Furthermore, our findings indicate that a certain threshold of perceived ease of use (EoU) of the OS platform is an absolute basic requirement for participants, leading to frustration if not fulfilled. Overall, our study demonstrates that OS indeed may add to the development of better strategies, a better understanding and implementation of those strategies and enhanced organizational learning due to employees' increased sense of community and stronger organizational commitment. However, literature has to be aware of the different effects of participation so that managers can control for them.