Publications

Samina’s research has been published in a wide array of top journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Organization Science, Sloan Management Review, and Strategic Management Journal. She currently serves as Deputy Editor at Organization Science, and on the editorial review boards of Journal of Organization Design (where she was Senior Editor 2013-2017), Strategic Management Journal (where she was Associate Editor 2014-2020), Strategic Organization, and Strategy Science.

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Task and resource bottlenecks: Holistic examination of task systems through an organization design lens (2023)

Task and resource bottlenecks: Holistic examination of task systems through an organization design lens (2023)

Eliminating negative bottlenecks can help firms improve performance. This study focuses on two types of bottlenecks: task bottlenecks and resource bottlenecks. Our results show that firms benefit when task system properties of decentralization and complexity are aligned (as more of both or less of both), and when firms' resources are both fungible and available; these characteristics also reinforce each other.

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The Power of Modularity Today: 20 Years of Design Rules (2023)

The Power of Modularity Today: 20 Years of Design Rules (2023)

This is the introductory essay by the co-editors of a special issue celebrating the 20thyear anniversary of the book “Design Rules: The Power of Modularity” (by Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark)published in 2000,a book that introduced new ways of understanding and explaining the architecture of complex systems.We review the impact of the book across numerous fields and offer perspectives on key themes that emerge from contributions in the special issue,including the alignment between organizational and technical designs (“mirroring”), the dynamics of industry evolution, and the role that individuals play in shaping and responding to system designs.

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Examining Alliance Portfolios Beyond the Dyads: The Relevance of Redundancy and Nonuniformity Across and Between Partners (2017)

Examining Alliance Portfolios Beyond the Dyads: The Relevance of Redundancy and Nonuniformity Across and Between Partners (2017)

We use spectral graph partitioning methodology to analyze the architecture of complex systems that contain directed and weighted component interactions, and in which each component is interdependent (directly or indirectly) on every other component. We illustrate this method in the airline industry and how it allows holistic comparison of different system architectures.

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GROUPING INTERDEPENDENT TASKS: USING SPECTRAL GRAPH PARTITIONING TO STUDY COMPLEX SYSTEMS (2016)

GROUPING INTERDEPENDENT TASKS: USING SPECTRAL GRAPH PARTITIONING TO STUDY COMPLEX SYSTEMS (2016)

We describe a method for analyzing the architecture of complex systems that contain directed and weighted component interactions, and in which each component is interdependent on every other component. Using the spectra of a complex
system, the method provides groupings. We illustrate this method using the firm-level production task system of a firm in the U.S. passenger airline sector. The method is useful if the system architecture is hidden, in flux, or both. The method may also permit a holistic comparison of different systems and their architectures.

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