Purpose The paper aims to study the relationship between executives’ perceptions of environmental threats and innovation strategies and investigate the moderating effect of contextual factor (i.e. organizational slack) on such relations. It proposes a dualistic relationship between executives’ perceptions of environmental threats and innovation strategies, in which different perceptions of environmental threats will lead to corresponding innovation strategies, and dyadic organizational slack can promote such processes. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on a survey with 163 valid questionnaires, which were all completed by executives. Hierarchical ordinary least-squares regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses proposed in this paper. Findings The paper provides empirical insights about that executives tend to choose exploratory innovation when they perceive environmental changes as likely loss threats, yet adopt exploitative innovation when perceiving control-reducing threats. Furthermore, unabsorbed slack (e.g. financial redundancy) positively moderates both relationships, while absorbed slack (e.g. operational redundancy) merely positively influences the relationship between the perception of control-reducing threats and exploitative innovation. Originality/value The paper bridges the gap between organizational innovation and cognitive theory by proposing a dualistic relationship between executives’ perceptions of environmental threats and innovation strategies. The paper further enriches innovation studies by jointly considering both subjective and objective influence factors of innovation and argues that organizational slack can moderate such dualistic relationship.

中文翻译：

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高管对环境威胁和组织松弛的认识对创新战略的影响

目的本文旨在研究高管对环境威胁的看法与创新策略之间的关系，并研究情境因素（即组织松弛）对这种关系的调节作用。它提出了高管对环境威胁的看法与创新战略之间的二元关系，其中对环境威胁的不同看法将导致相应的创新战略，而二进位的组织松弛可以促进这种过程。设计/方法/方法本文基于对163份有效问卷的调查，这些问卷均由主管人员完成。分层普通最小二乘回归分析用于检验本文提出的假设。研究结果本文提供了有关经验，即高管在将环境变化视为可能的损失威胁时倾向于选择探索性创新，而在感知到减少控制的威胁时倾向于采用开发性创新。此外，未吸收的松弛（例如，财务冗余）积极地缓和了两种关系，而吸收的松弛（例如，业务冗余）仅积极地影响了对减少控制的威胁的感知与开发性创新之间的关系。创意/价值本文通过提出高管对环境威胁的感知与创新战略之间的二元关系，弥合了组织创新与认知理论之间的鸿沟。