The Whole Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts— Or Is It? A Review of the Empirical Literature on Complementarities in Organizations

By Edgar Ennen, A. Richter. 2010

432 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Safety Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f69f0c595b753268e68984a7c53c3c095e2f5d3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Safety Research

1. Tatiana Andreeva
2. Keld Laursen
3. Andy Neely
4. G. Shirokova
5. Clint Chadwick
6. Frank Wiengarten
7. Robert E. Ployhart
8. W. Wales

In Strategy and Management

1. Nabil Amara
2. Réjean Landry
3. Robert E. Ployhart
4. N. J. Foss
5. Tatiana Andreeva
6. Keld Laursen
7. Marjo‐Riitta Diehl
8. H. Seeck

Citations in the corpus

• Human Capital Is Dead; Long Live Human Capital Resources! (2014, background): “Strategy research has extensively addressed combinations of complementary resources (Adegbesan, 2009; Denrell et al., 2003; Ennen & Richter, 2010).”
• Only the Brave: Product Innovation, Service Business Model Innovation, and Their Impact on Performance (2016, methodology): “We apply the demand-based view on value creation (Priem 2007; Priem et al. 2012; Ye et al. 2012) and the complementarity perspective (Cassiman and Veugelers 2006; Ennen and Richter 2010; Milgrom and Roberts 1995) to derive hypotheses.”
• Benefiting from economic crisis? Strategic orientation effects, trade-offs, and configurations with resource availability on SME performance (2020, background): “Moreover, it is difficult to argue for factors whose relationship would always be complementary, which signifies the critical role of contextuality when investigating resource combinations (Ennen and Richter 2010).”
• Substitutes or Complements? A Configurational Examination of Corporate Governance Mechanisms (2014, background): “Thus, the notion of complementarity here is a synergistic rather than an additive one (cf. Ennen & Richter, 2010)—it builds on the idea that “the gain from increasing every component . . . is more than the sum of gains from the separate individual increases” (Milgrom & Roberts, 1992: 5).”
• Human Resource Management Practices and Innovation (2012, background): “The empirical literature on organizational complementarities suggests two approaches: an interaction and a systems approach (cf. Ennen and Richter, 2010).”
• A literature review on HRM and innovation – taking stock and future directions (2017, background): “Supporting the growing literature on complementarities (see Ennen & Richter, 2010), the most definitive finding concerns the impact of bundled HRM practices, which can be more firmly linked than individual HRM practices to innovations of different types.”
• Technology transfer organizations: Services and business models (2013, background): “(2008), and Ennen and Richter (2010), complementarities generate system effects such as that “the whole becomes more (or less) than the sum of its parts”.”