Julien Clement

Biography

I study the impact of intra-organizational and inter-organizational relationships on firms’ performance and adaptation to changing environments. I’m especially interested in how this impact is shaped by the interplay between formal organizational structure and informal social relationships. My work highlights the different facets of this interplay: formal structure is both a guiding influence on the evolution of informal interactions, and a contingency factor affecting how these interactions translate into organizational outcomes.

I adopt a distinctive micro-analytic approach to this topic, by observing social relationships among individuals and using those micro-level observations to explain how an organization’s formal and informal structures translate into its competitive advantage. I have conducted theoretical work in this area by relying on agent-based models, and empirical studies by drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from the television game-show industry, professional video gaming (e-Sports) and mobile healthcare in Africa.

Before joining INSEAD, I worked in the renewable energy industry in Germany (Vestas Wind Systems). I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Management from University Paris-Dauphine and two Masters’ degrees in Strategic Management from Erasmus University and International Management from CEMS/Vienna University (WU).

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DISSERTATION

Brokerage as a Public Good: The Externalities of Network Hubs for Different Formal Roles in Creative Organizations
Julien Clement, Andrew Shipilov, Charles Galunic
Forthcoming at Administrative Science Quarterly

Although much is known about how brokerage positions help individuals improve their own performance, we know little about brokerage as a public good, i.e. the impact of brokers on those around them. We focus on the positive and negative externalities of specific kinds of brokers: “hubs”. We argue that network neighbors experience different externalities from hubs depending on their own formal role in projects. The positive externalities of hubs help their network neighbors contribute to the success of projects when these neighbors hold creativity-focused roles; yet the negative externalities of hubs hinder their neighbors’ contributions when they hold efficiency-focused roles. We use insights from our fieldwork in the French television game-show industry to illustrate the mechanisms at play, and test our model with longitudinal data on the determinants of shows’ success.


Searching for Structure: Formal Organization Design as a Guide to Network Evolution
Julien Clement, Phanish Puranam
Forthcoming at Management Science

Formal organization designs are often limited in their accuracy and enforcement. This does not however imply that they serve a purely symbolic role, decoupled from the reality of emergent social structure within organizations. We propose a theory of formal organization design as a framework that shapes how interactions within the organization evolve through a bottom-up “search for structure” by its members. We embed this theory in a novel agent-based computational platform which allows us to rigorously analyze the dynamic interactions between a specified formal structure and the emergent networks of interaction between the agents who inhabit the structure. Our analysis yields a coherent new theoretical explanation for why formal structure may aid organizational adaptation despite limits to its accuracy and enforcement: a lightly enforced formal structure can regenerate interactions between agents, who can learn which interactions to keep or discard. We call this the “network regeneration effect” of formal structure.


Routine Exploration Following Environmental Change: Large-sample Micro Evidence in e-Sports
Julien Clement
Working paper

This paper probes the intuition that environmental change should make organizations increase their exploration for new routines. I argue that organizations may in fact explore less following a change in their environment than they explore in periods of stability. The reason is that environmental change may affect not only the relative fitness of different routines, but also the pattern of interdependence between agents who execute the routines. Changing patterns of interdependence reduce the ability of organizations to infer the true value of their own routines in the new environment. Hence organizations may need to reduce their level of exploration in order to ‘re-learn’ how to execute their prior routines in the changed environment. I test my predictions in a longitudinal dataset of competitive gaming (‘e-sports’) teams, which allows me to observe routines as collective sequences of actions during professional matches. Results support my main argument, and provide additional insights into the role of formal and informal coordination mechanisms in facilitating exploration for new routines in the face of change.

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OTHER PROJECTS

Bridges across Chasms: How Talent Mobility across Geographic and Status Boundaries Affects the Creative Performance of Organizations
Andrew Shipilov, Frederic Godart, Julien Clement
Forthcoming at Strategic Management Journal

The Link between Intra-organizational Coordination and Inter-organizational Alliances: Evidence from Mobile Health Clinics in Africa
Aline Gatignon, Julien Clement, Luk van Wassenhove
Ongoing data collection

Organizational Change as a Network Diffusion Process
Julien Clement, Vibha Gaba, Phanish Puranam
Early stage