We explore the impact of gender, individualism–collectivism on individual’s propensity to trust. The study draws on data from three groups of individuals in the United Arab Emirates: students; (n=370); small business owners/operators (n=324), and employed individuals (n=376). Three main hypotheses are tested. We develop and explore three main hypotheses. Statistical results reveal that females are generally more collectivist and less trusting than their males counterparts. Further analysis revealed that small business/operators are generally more trusting than the other cohorts of respondents. Propensity to trust was also found to be strongly associated with collectivist (rather than individualist) aspirations. Implications for future research and management practice are discussed.

This paper explores the concept of knowledge networks in order to disclose how firms are able to increase innovative performance as a result of network structure and network content, which concern how firms connect with network partners (network structure), what the essence of exchange is for firms to acquire knowledge in the network (knowledge heterogeneity), and why firms need to cooperate with others (knowledge cognition). By using a sample of 144 high-technology firms in Taiwan’s science parks to test the hypotheses, the results of this study show that, while network structures do impact on a firm’s innovative performance, access to heterogeneous knowledge and increasing a firm’s knowledge in terms of defining and recognizing novel knowledge should be considered, since both play critical roles in facilitating innovative performance. These findings suggest that knowledge flow through a firm’s relationships must be understood in terms of network structure and content.

In this paper we look at how managers perceive and manage meetings between different institutional logics in three types of hybrid organisations; a savings bank, a municipality and a hospital. The paper contributes to our understanding of organisational hybridity in two ways: First, drawing on Scott’s three institutional pillars, the paper shows how meetings between different institutional logics involve not just the cultural–cognitive pillar, usually highlighted in work on hybrid organisations, but all of them, including the regulative and the normative pillars. Second, the paper suggests a hierarchical relationship between meetings and responses, ranging from less elaborate responses that primarily involve the regulative pillar to more complex and all-encompassing responses that include not only the regulative and the normative but also the cultural–cognitive pillar, triggering questions and issues about identity and purpose.

This study estimated and specified a model of corporate reputation, its social performance, and firm-level variables in the context of an emerging country. Corporate reputation is the overall estimation of a firm by its stakeholders expressed by the demonstrative behaviors to its customers, employees, investors, business partners, and general public. The social performance of the firm has been conceptualized in terms of its demonstrative responsible behavior toward community, environment, and employees. Organizational variability has been captured in this study through the representation of firms from various industries as the relationship between corporate reputation and firm’s social performance was contingent on the type of industry and expectation of industry-specific stakeholders relevant to the firm. Data were collected from 220 organizations representing 11 different industry verticals. The findings supported that corporate reputation is determined by the conjoint influence of a host of firm specific as well as its social performance factors. In addition, the reputational effect of firm’s social performance was found to vary both across and within sectors, according to the various types of social performance activities the firm was engaged in. This study demonstrated the comprehensive measures of the firm’s reputation, social performance, and the associative relationship between them conditioned by firm-specific attributes and nature of the industry. The study has far reaching implications in terms of managing the firm’s boundary spanning activities and relationships in the perspective of emerging markets.

Mentoring and coaching practices are helping businesses grow by supporting the development of their human capital. Family businesses have a unique atmosphere and distinctive features that make it especially important to discover whether mentoring and coaching affect their performance. We have used a resource-based vision and knowledge-based vision to analyse this relationship using structural equation methodology in a sample of 630 companies. The results show that there is a direct relationship between mentoring and coaching and the performance of family businesses.

Firms managed by women present some differences in organizational conditions in terms of type of business and manager profile. The aim of this study is to check if those differences persist in family firms where the presence of female managers is higher, especially in second or subsequent generation family firms, than in non-family firms. The results reveal that family firms run by women are not smaller, but are concentrated in the services sector like non-family firms. Regarding the manager profile there are no differences either in the level of training or the age of female managers. They possess, however, less management experience but only in first generation family firms. In sum, gender differences in the type of business and in the manager profile found in the management literature disappear in family firms, only a sectoral gender effect persists.

This paper advances the resource dependence and social networks literature by investigating a board's structural social capital created as a consequence of interlocking directorates. Using approaches and measures developed by social network analysis we compare the interpersonal directorship networks of the top 250 companies in the United States and Australia. We find that the smaller, sparser Australian network is only marginally less compact and connected than the larger US network at the firm level of analysis. However, at the director level of analysis the US network is much larger and more connected than its Australian counterpart. As a result, we argue that scholars studying the resource dependence role of boards should consider using measures of interpersonal links as well as traditional measures of inter-firm links.

This research aims to complement resource-based view with a cluster approach in identifying which elements, both internal to the firm and locally available, improve firms’ export performance. While in the resource-based view exporting firms are contingent upon the development of intangible resources, from a cluster approach exporters exploit local externalities, mainly related to local information, knowledge and resource spillovers. We present empirical evidence from the Iberian ham cluster in Spain, which confirms the relevance of intangibles such as R&D and marketing promotion, but also of cluster linkages with local institutions – technological centres, universities and use of Designation of Origins – in improving export performance. Contrary to expectations, employee education, organizational experience, and information and knowledge-based spillovers from proximate exporters have no significant effect. These findings suggest that an augmented framework may improve the predictive elements of export performance in clusters.

The paper contributes to debates on non-profit strategy, first by arguing that intellectual capital (IC) can be utilised as a non-profit strategic management conceptual framework and second by highlighting nuances in the meaning and significance of IC. In responding to the public management agendas of government, non-profit organisations (NPOs) have had to commercialise their strategies. On the basis of data from in-depth interviews with 35 senior non-profit managers across 22 large Australian social service non-profit organisations (SSNPOs), the analysis confirms that IC assists SSNPOs in managing the social–commercial divide, but that managers' understandings of the IC concept are often different to those contained in the IC literature. IC scholars suggest that IC is synergetic with its components being inter-dependent. The managers perceived that very few inter-relationships existed between IC components. Implications of the theory—practice divide for non-profit strategy are discussed. Research limitations and future research direction are presented in the paper.

As a concept stemming from practice, business development has received scarce academic attention. In this paper, we explore core business development activities of micro-firms and the challenges they perceive in conducting them. Based on interviews with 30 micro-firms, we identify three core business development activities that leverage the firm’s resource base, complemented by three support activities that secure and organize the firm’s resources. We find the business development activities to be tightly related to the three practices of leveraging, securing and organizing resources. We also identify three important contextual influences on business development in micro-firms: industry, age and if the firm is in an incubator. Our findings contribute to developing a conceptualization and theorization of business development for micro-firms, which is relevant as the vast majority of companies worldwide are micro-firms, but many never embark on a growth path. Based on our results, we outline practical implications, for example, how companies could overcome their perceived lack of time and an agenda for future research encouraging further studies comprising micro-firms with different qualities.

Psychological capital (PsyCap) is a higher-order construct reflecting the psychological resources of hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism. This study adopted a multilevel approach to investigate relationships between team-level PsyCap and team- and individual-level outcomes. We also compared two compositional models of aggregation to represent team-level PsyCap. Findings revealed significant associations between team-level PsyCap and team- (performance and satisfaction) and individual-level (job satisfaction, turnover intent) outcomes, particularly when a referent-shift model of aggregation was employed. We also investigated PsyCap strength to explore the degree to which team member consensus regarding PsyCap perceptions may moderate these relationships. We found that team PsyCap strength had a significant influence in the prediction of most outcomes. Our findings emphasize the importance of fostering team-level positivity, as the benefits of team-level PsyCap can operate at both the individual and team level. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed, along with avenues for future research.

Future time orientation is essential if an employee is to be motivated to conduct activities that generate long-term rather than immediate gain, and which may involve risk. Given that feedback seeking requires the employee to slow down and seek input, it is surprising that little is known about the relationship between future time orientation and feedback seeking. Drawing upon psychological ownership theory and construal-level theory, we hypothesized a positive influence of future time orientation on feedback seeking from various sources (i.e., supervisors and co-workers). We also hypothesized job-based psychological ownership as a newly identified motive of feedback seeking and employed it to explain how future time orientation exerts influences. Tested with data from a sample of 228 subordinate–supervisor dyads from China, the results revealed that (1) future time orientation was positively related to feedback seeking from supervisors and co-workers and (2) job-based psychology ownership mediated the relationship between future time orientation and feedback seeking.

The interplay of the board of directors (BOD) and the chief executive officer (CEO) in strategy-making has been the subject of some debate in the literature. Some experts argue the BOD should take a strong role in strategy-making while the alternative point of view is that the CEO is the key man or woman. In a qualitative study with 16 interviews of leading Australian industry figures, the CEO is found to be the key player in modern strategy-making. The findings identify how the BOD, individual directors and the CEO can combine to add value to the organization, in particular how these organization members can team up and interact to achieve a faster, more flexible strategy cycle. The modern organization focus needs to be on giving more emphasis to the empowerment, interaction and creativity of the CEO and top management team. The BOD should focus on questioning, criticizing, refining and enabling the strategy proposed by the professional managers. However, the study indicates these findings are subject to exception and variation in relation to factors including specialist knowledge, track record of performance, personality attributes, personal power, and political and influencing skills. The major focus of attention of the BOD and CEO is the strategic-thinking related activities in strategy-making. Strategic planning still has an important role in formalizing strategy content, usually in a regular cycle.

Although organizational learning types like adaptive and generative learning are considered to follow different processes, a general framework of organizational learning that includes them has remained elusive. In order to do so, we propose a framework that embraces them and incorporates facets such as consciousness and emotions, which are strongly related to organizational learning but had not been included in any model. These facets are essential in the framework as they bind the process together and represent a sequence and progression through the learning process.

In recognition of middle managers as influential strategists we collected 654 responses from South African middle managers detailing their spontaneous and unguided descriptions of their strategic roles in the organisation they represent. The results show that middle managers generally associate their strategic role strongly with the traditional perspectives on the roles as implementers of strategies and communicators linking their subordinates and higher levels of management. We add the roles of ‘advocacy’ and ‘improving operational performance’ to the conventional elements of strategy implementation, and the roles of ‘managing performance’ and ‘driving compliance’ to the role of downward influence. Focus group discussions contextualised and authenticated these roles within the South African private and public sectors.

This study contributes to our understanding of the mediating and moderating processes through which satisfaction with developmental human resources practices are linked with organizational citizenship behaviour. Our model posits that the effect of satisfaction with developmental human resources practices on organizational citizenship behaviour is mediated by perceived organizational support and is moderated by job breadth. The methodology consisted of collecting data from 331 nurses who were surveyed about their satisfaction with developmental human resources practices, perceived organizational support, organizational citizenship behaviours and job breadth. Results support this model.

This paper examines office design as a spatial context of organizations. Organizations increasingly invest in designing workspaces to support employee creativity, foster company innovation and communicate a positive company image. This paper takes a critical view of this ‘hype’ by describing and analysing images of the headquarters of allegedly ‘creative workspaces’ published on the internet across a broad range of industries and corporations. Our analysis shows how their design follows standardized or stereotypical approaches to nurturing creativity: playfully or artistically designed open spaces, environments reminiscent of home, sports and play, nature, past/future technologies, or culturally aligned symbols. We discern underlying connections between office spaces and creativity, suggesting that creativity flourishes in happy, relaxed and playful communities within close-knit teams. We then identify three contradictions in relation to the existing literature on creativity and workspaces: individually versus collectively produced creativity; professionally designed workspaces versus workspaces created through participation; and planned versus emerging creativity.

Research investigating Karasek's (1979) Demand–Control Model (D-CM) has produced mixed results relating to the stress-buffering effects of job decision latitude, or job control, on employee adjustment. Cited reasons for these mixed results include the way control is operationalised and also the potential effects of secondary moderators in the relationship among job demand, job control, and employee adjustment. Towards addressing these issues, the present study assessed the secondary moderating effects of subjective fit with organisational culture and values in the D-CM. Participation in decision-making was used as the measure of job control. Moderated multiple regression analyses revealed three significant interactions in a sample of 119 employees. The results revealed a three-way interaction between role overload, participative control, and subjective fit on physiological symptoms and psychological health. Further analyses demonstrated a significant interaction between role conflict, participative control, and subjective fit on intentions to leave. In all interactions, participative control buffered the negative effects of the stressors on levels of employee adjustment only when employees' subjective fit with the organisational values was high. The theoretical importance and practical implications of the results are discussed.

The paper advances into a new field of multi-disciplinary inquiry called scandal scholarship. The general thrust of this scholarship should be to understand what factors are determinative to the management of scandals in organizations. The specific focus of this paper is to address the question: what options do organizations have in the immediate period following public exposure? First, a typology gleaned from relevant literatures, attempts to classify the variable ways troubled organizations attempt to extricate themselves from scandal. The typology, in its naïve form, was then applied to a recent case of corporate wrongdoing of international significance. As a result the framework was refined to achieve stronger congruence between case realities and classification. With more development this typology may be able to forecast the scandal management strategies of troubled organizations through an identification of the remedial responses they deploy. This would be great assistance to those who must engage with the troubled organization such as regulators and stakeholders.

Trust is frequently espoused as being critical to effective team processes and performance. Yet, few studies have investigated the relationship between trust and team processes, or team effectiveness. There is currently a need to locate propensity to trust (a personality composition variable) and intragroup trust (an emergent state) within mainstream team effectiveness models, not only to provide much-needed theoretical and empirical support for trust's central role in team effectiveness, but also to increase our understanding of how trust influences team effectiveness. This paper argues that trust is a neglected variable within team effectiveness research that requires further empirical investigation.