Title: Navigating the Storm: Toward a Theory of IT Portfolio Diversity, Leadership Power, and Organizational Resilience to Major Shocks

中文标题：穿越风暴：IT组合多样性、领导权力与组织韧性

Speaker: 王新成 同济大学经济与管理学院 助理教授

Time: 2025年6月23日，上午9:00

Place：管理科研楼第二教室

Abstract：

Understanding how information technologies (ITs) influence firms’ organizational resilience is of significant importance, as firms increasingly face major shocks to their business environment due to factors beyond their control. Prior information systems and organizational resilience literature has predominantly assumed that there is a linear relationship between IT and organizational resilience; this literature has not considered the diversity of digital resources and the coordinating role of IT leaders in the context of such major shocks. To address this gap, anchoring our study in strategic flexibility framework, we investigate (a) how a firm’s IT portfolio diversity (ITPD) affects the firm’s organizational resilience to major shocks (ORMS), (b) how the structural power of IT leaders (SPT) and ITPD jointly impact firms’ ORMS, and (c) how the crisis-induced industry turbulence (CTU) contingently influences the joint impact of ITPD and SPT. We analyze a unique dataset of 2,926 public Chinese firms covering the periods before, during, and after the acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in mainland China, and find that (1) ITPD has an inverted U-shaped impact on ORMS, which means that increasing ITPD will benefit ORMS but only to a certain point—and importantly, the curvilinear impact is more pronounced during a major shock than before or after the major shock; (2) SPT facilitates a firm’s use of more types of IT to build ORMS during a major shock; and (3) the joint effect of ITPD and SPT is more salient in industries that have been more severely impaired by the major shock. Implications for theory and practice are further discussed.

Bio:

王新成，同济大学经济与管理学院助理教授，博士生导师，专注项目治理、数字创新、组织韧性、供应链管理等领域。研究成果发表于MIS Quarterly、Journal of Operations Management (JOM)、Information System Research、IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management、Technovation、Technological Forecasting and Social Change、《中国软科学》、《研究与发展管理》、《科技进步与对策》等国内外知名学术期刊，获得2024年度JOM Jack Meredith最佳论文提名奖、优秀博士论文等奖项。