New customers and emerging markets are continuously appearing in the marketplace, firms' efforts to search for creative/innovative ideas are critical to adapt to new market conditions. For survival in an intensely competitive market, organizations need to have competitive market strategies that assist in capturing current and future consumer trends quickly and appropriate management strategies to enhance employee search of creative and/or new market information and learning. In this dissertation, we focused on investigating the differential effects of market orientation (MO) and entrepreneurship orientation (EO) strategies on employee information search and information learning. Further we examined the moderating effects of empowered employees, who are motivated to assume enhanced job responsibilities and are given autonomy with their scope of work, are more likely to freely express their ideas and take risks which are viewed as the foundation of creativity and innovation. Despite that both MO and EO are widely studied, little is known about how each strategy influences the way firms integrate the information, once it is collected. Thus, employing on the social network theory, this research explained MO/EO's group network ties and its impact on information search behaviors. Organizations' risk seeking and risk attenuated behaviors were also examined drawing on the image theory perspective. Information search behavior and organizational learning environment typologies were studied in relationship with market and management strategies. Specifically, we developed scales to measure the three types of information search behaviors based on Grant's (1996a) conceptual constructs of knowledge integration types (efficiency, flexibility, and scope) by conducting qualitative interviews with retail buyers. Our study results revealed that employees with a strong market orientation not only search for updates to existing information (efficient knowledge integration), they also extend their search by configuring and refining old information and adding some new information (flexible knowledge integration). Entrepreneurship oriented employees tended to engage in flexible information search behavior but not in innovatively new information (scope knowledge integration). Surprisingly, our study found that more empowered employees are less likely to use flexibility and scope information search behaviors, which is contrary to previous studies. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed and recommendations for future studies were provided.
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