https://hdl.handle.net/10419/286418 2026-10-16T20:51:29Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/343337 Title: Turning the tide: Typology of temporary managers in decision-making during crises Authors: Packheiser, Laura Jane; Pröpper, Svenja Abstract: In an increasingly volatile and uncertain business environment, organisations are increasingly confronted with complex crises and rapid change. In response, they increasingly rely on temporary leadership-particularly interim managers-to guide decision-making under time-sensitive and consequential conditions. This study focuses on crisis and turnaround assignments, a particularly demanding subset of interim management. By virtue of their external status and limited tenure, temporary managers can make impartial and, at times, radical decisions without the burden of long-term internal consequences. At the same time, they face distinct challenges in establishing authority, legitimacy, and trust within the organisation. This study explores the forms of human capital that temporary managers contribute in crisis contexts, focusing on their core tasks, decision-making patterns, and proficiency profiles. Drawing on a qualitative research design involving in-depth interviews with 20 temporary managers across Europe, the analysis identifies three distinct types: The Realiser, The Decider, and The Advisor. The typology captures context-specific configurations of human capital shaped by the demands of crisis and turnaround situations, illustrating how interim managers stabilise organisations, enable recovery, and drive renewal. Each type embodies a unique approach-from operational execution and strategic foresight to social mediation-reflecting how temporary leaders mobilise expertise, authority, and decision-making to navigate organisational crises. By uncovering these patterns, the study advances understanding of interim management effectiveness and offers insights for aligning leadership approaches with the demands of crisis and turnaround contexts. It contributes to a broader understanding of how human capital shapes managerial performance and organisational resilience in times of disruption. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/343331 Title: Balancing exploration and exploitation: Designing a staffing tool to leverage ambidextrous team compositions Authors: Rex, Alexander; Pfaff, Hendrik; Lautenschlager, Jonathan; Mütze, Susanna; Urbach, Nils Abstract: In an era of rapid technological disruption, organizations must increasingly balance the exploitation of existing capabilities with the exploration of innovative business models and technologies, a duality known as ambidexterity. While prior research has largely focused on ambidexterity at the organizational and individual levels, its operationalization at the team level, particularly within project contexts, remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by designing and evaluating a decision-support tool that enables structured, ambidexterity-informed staffing of project teams. The tool supports the scoping of business transformation projects, assesses the required balance between exploration and exploitation across different phases, and recommends team compositions aligned with these needs. Following a Design Science Research approach, the artifact was iteratively developed and refined through expert interviews, practitioner workshops, and a scholarly focus group. Additionally, we derive three design principles to guide the effective staffing of ambidextrous project teams and to support the development of information systems in ambidextrous contexts. This study advances ambidexterity research by identifying micro-mechanisms and phase-contingent requirements, linking these to concrete skill profiles through validated measurement, and demonstrating how organizations can embed evidence-based ambidextrous staffing into existing processes. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/343330 Title: Conceptualizing business process management governance: Towards a context-aware understanding Authors: Dechert, Franziska; Friedrich, Franziska; Kreuzer, Thomas; Marcus, Laura; Ritter, Christian; Röglinger, Maximilian Abstract: Business Process Management (BPM) is a pivotal driver of operational excellence and sustained organizational performance. To effectively institutionalize BPM at the enterprise level, organizations must establish a robust BPM governance (BPM-G) that provides structure and guidance for all BPM activities. Despite its recognized importance in industry and academia, there remains a need for a comprehensive conceptualization of BPM-G, particularly concerning its configurational diversity and embedding in the organizational context. In response, we develop a taxonomy of BPM-G based on justificatory knowledge from the literature on BPM and corporate governance, as well as interview data from a diverse set of organizations. We demonstrate and evaluate the taxonomy in three steps, presenting three illustrative cases that showcase the usefulness of the taxonomy for describing and analyzing BPM-G. Based on the evaluated taxonomy as our primary contribution, we then advance a context-aware understanding of BPM-G. We specify the relation between BPM-G and corporate governance as well as process governance, discussing how the design of BPM-G is influenced by the organizational tensions of centralization vs. decentralization and standardization vs. flexibilization. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/10419/343336 Title: Do ETFs undermine takeover success? Evidence from German takeover offer outcomes Authors: Osei, Kwabena Brefo; Schwetzler, Bernhard Abstract: Passive exchange-traded funds (ETFs) mechanically replicate the indices they track and therefore lack discretion in responding to takeover offers. Unlike other shareholders, they cannot weigh the benefits and risks of the offer; their ability to tender shares depends entirely on index providers' decisions during the offer period. Using a large sample of German takeover offers, this study documents that passive ETF ownership has a two-sided effect on offer success. First, when no index adjustments occur, ETFs are unable to tender their holdings, producing a significantly negative baseline effect on offer outcomes. A one-percentage-point increase in pre-offer passive ETF ownership reduces the fraction of shares acquired by 5.93 percentage points in the full sample and by 8.03 points for control-taking offers with a bidder toehold below 30%. Second, when index providers adjust the target's index weight during the acceptance period-either through ordinary or extraordinary revisions to the stock's weight or through its entire removal from the index-ETFs are forced to divest. These downward adjustments positively affect offer success, especially when combined with a positive target management recommendation: For indices maintained by Deutsche Börse AG, downward revisions significantly mitigate the negative baseline effect in the subsample of control-taking offers and fully offset it in the full sample. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z