Received: 31 October 2019 Revised: 10 November 2020 Accepted: 20 November 2020 DOI: 10.1002/joom.1130 RESEARCH ARTICLE Commitment follows beliefs: A configurational perspective on operations managers' commitment to practice adoption Maricela C. Arellano1 | Johannes Meuer2 | Torbjørn H. Netland3 1Department of Logistics and Operations Management, HEC Montréal, Montreal, Abstract Quebec, Canada Companies that seek to improve their operational performance by adopting 2Group for Sustainability and Technology, new practices often report disappointing adoption rates. The literature con- ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland cerning practice adoption has tended to focus on efficacy and legitimacy 3Chair of Production and Operations drivers at the organizational level. However, there exists convincing evidence Management, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland that practice adoption largely depends on the commitment of those managers involved in the adoption of a given practice. Thus, we investigate what pro- Correspondence Maricela C. Arellano, Department of mpts operations managers to commit to practice adoption. We draw on the Logistics and Operations Management, theory of planned behavior to explore the cognitive foundations of 76 opera- HEC Montréal, 3000, Côte-Sainte- tions managers' commitment to new operational practices. Using fuzzy-set Catherine Road, Montreal, QC H3T 2A7, Canada. qualitative comparative analysis, we identify three belief configurations associ- Email: maricela-connie.arellano-caro@ ated with high levels of commitment—“the Follower,”“the Pragmatist,” and hec.ca “the Reformer.” We contribute a behavioral operations perspective to the liter- Handling editor: Gopesh Anand ature on practice adoption by providing an individual-level and configura- tional view of managerial commitment to change. KEYWORDS behavioral operations, beliefs, managerial commitment, operations managers, qualitative comparative analysis 1 | INTRODUCTION Historically, the majority of scholars have examined practice adoption at the organizational level, concerned In pursuit of competitiveness, firms adopt practices that with explaining why and under what conditions compa- they consider to be superior to, or more legitimate than, nies successfully adopt certain practices. They have other practices (Ketokivi & Schroeder, 2004; Leseure largely focused on two primary drivers of practice adop- et al., 2004; Voss, 2005). It is well established that the tion: efficacy and legitimacy (Leseure et al., 2004; commitment of managers is essential to the success of Voss, 2005). Efficacy drivers dominate when companies practice adoption (e.g., Done et al., 2011; Herold set out to adopt practices intended to increase their oper- et al., 2007; Kostova & Roth, 2002; Netland et al., 2015). ational performance, while legitimacy drivers dominate Ultimately, the practice adoption process is a result of when companies set out to adopt practices intended to the behaviors of individuals, which in turn are driven by increase their validity in the eyes of key stakeholders. their commitment to the practice (Kostova & However, the results at the organizational level provide Roth, 2002). However, only limited scientific research mixed evidence of the implications of efficacy and legiti- has studied the individual-level conditions that drive the macy drivers in practice adoptions (Huang et al., 2010; commitment of operations managers to a new opera- Ketokivi & Schroeder, 2004). Moreover, the focus of prior tional practice. research on the drivers of adoption at the organizational J Oper Manag. 2020;1–26. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joom © 2020 Association for Supply Chain Management, Inc. 1 2 ARELLANO ET AL. level has inadvertently led scholars to ignore the role 2 | DRIVERS OF PRACTICE played by individuals. In these studies, operations man- ADOPTION agers are usually portrayed as hyper-rational agents who reactively respond to the dominant pressures on them by 2.1 | Efficacy and legitimacy as adopting certain practices (Croson et al., 2013; Donohue organizational-level drivers of practice et al., 2020). adoption Nevertheless, several recent individual-level studies reject the assumption that managers mechanically imple- Both the efficacy and legitimacy perspective have domi- ment practices that are deemed to be effective or legiti- nated scholarly explanations of why and with what level mate. In this view, a few authors maintain that practice of success organizations adopt new operational practices adoption is not the result of legitimacy and efficacy fac- (Jacqueminet, 2020; Ketokivi & Schroeder, 2004; tors in their own right but rather of people's evaluations Leseure et al., 2004). According to the efficacy perspec- of these factors (e.g., Bendoly & Cotteleer, 2008; tive, adoption depends on the fit between the practice Braunscheidel et al., 2011; Jacqueminet, 2020; Rogers and a range of internal and external contextual factors. et al., 2007). These studies suggest that managers, Most studies on practice adoption employ this perspec- through complex cognitive processes, base their decisions tive, as exemplified by the following three highly cited and actions on their beliefs regarding the practice and the articles in the current journal.1 Flynn et al. (2010) study context (e.g., Croson et al., 2013; Eggers & Kaplan, 2013; how different configurations of supply chain integra- Helfat & Peteraf, 2015; Kennedy & Fiss, 2009; Nadkarni & tions affect performance. Zhu and Sarkis (2004) investi- Barr, 2008). Yet, it remains unclear how operations man- gate how lean and quality practices moderate the agers' beliefs influence their commitment to the adoption relationship between green supply chain management of operational practices. practices and organizational performance. Shah and To address this gap, we study the beliefs that under- Ward (2003) report how combinations of lean practice pin managerial commitment and, hence, shift the conver- bundles and contextual variables affect performance sation on practice adoption away from the organizational outcomes. These three studies indirectly assume the effi- level to the specific dynamics at the individual level. We cacy perspective, portraying firms as rent-seeking orga- argue that operations managers' beliefs regarding the nizations that would proactively adopt expectedly adoption of a new operational practice establish their effective practices. commitment to it. Our theoretical arguments are drawn In contrast, the legitimacy perspective portrays firms from Ajzen's (1985, 1991) theory of planned behavior, as responding passively and reactively to exogenous pres- which explains how the behaviors of individuals are sures in search of compliance (Burns & Wholey, 1993; driven by three types of salient beliefs—namely, behav- Kostova et al., 2008). The legitimacy perspective draws ioral beliefs, control beliefs, and normative beliefs. We on the neo-institutional theory and suggests that institu- maintain that these three types of beliefs collectively rep- tional pressures explain the behavior of firms—for exam- resent an individual's actual disposition and, therefore, ple, adopting certain practices (DiMaggio & interact in complex ways to shape individuals' commit- Powell, 1983). From this perspective, adopting practices ment. Because managers activate their salient beliefs makes firms “look good,” which helps them attain simultaneously rather than in isolation (Piderit, 2000; legitimacy. Straatmann et al., 2018), we adopt a configurational per- Certain studies have juxtaposed the efficacy and legit- spective and ask the following question: What configura- imacy perspectives in an effort to investigate whether tions of beliefs commit managers to a new operational they compete or complement each other in terms of driv- practice? ing the adoption of operational practices (e.g., Bansal & To answer this question, we survey 76 operations man- Roth, 2000; Barreto & Baden-Fuller, 2006; Huang agers who implemented an operational practice within et al., 2010; Rogers et al., 2007). A few studies even sug- their organization. We ask about their beliefs regarding gest that the efficacy and legitimacy drivers co-exist, practice adoption and analyze their responses using fuzzy- regardless of contextual variables such as timing and set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) (Ragin, 2000), maturity (Kennedy & Fiss, 2009; Liu et al., 2010). Overall, a method for configurational analysis. In doing this, we researchers have provided evidence of both the efficacy contribute to the literature on practice adoption by provid- and legitimacy explanations of firms' decisions to adopt a ing a detailed account of how the interdependencies practice—either because a firm considers adoption to be between operations managers' efficacy- and legitimacy- necessary (the efficacy argument), expected (the legiti- related beliefs drive their commitment. macy argument), or both. ARELLANO ET AL. 3 2.2 | Individual-level drivers of practice understanding of individual-level mechanisms, they nei- adoption ther explain operations managers' cognitive interpreta- tions of efficacy and legitimacy drivers nor the cognitive Organizational-level studies have been criticized for underpinnings of high levels of managerial commitment. ignoring cognitive factors at the individual level that may provide further insights into why practice adoption occurs. For example, Kostova and Roth (2002: 229) reflect 3 | A CONFIGURATIONAL MODEL on how practice adoption “is not necessarily driven by