Salespersons differ from office workers in office time, work pressure and salary structure, thus their perceptions of organizational politics (POPs) and work motivations may also differ. Based on literature review and the expectancy theory of motivation, this study proposes three hypotheses: (1) POPs is positively related to salesperson performance, (2) POPs is positively related to salesperson work motivation and (3) there is mediator effect for work motivation in the relationship between POPs and salesperson performance. A questionnaire survey was conducted on four representative companies from the list of product manufacturers and service providers in Taiwan. The POPs and work motivation questions were answered by the salespersons, whereas the salespersons’ performance questions were assessed by the sales managers. A total of 850 questionnaires were distributed with 510 valid responses returned for hypotheses testing. The results support the three hypotheses, suggesting POPs can lead to improved salesperson performance, and this effect is mediated through work motivation. This new finding disagrees with the orthodox finding within the literature, which states that POPs and job performance for office workers are negatively correlated. The inconsistency may be ascribed to different work motivations between two groups of organizational members.

Research into workplace bullying has only recently begun to investigate preventative measures. This paper continues that emphasis by examining the management of bullying in a sample of New Zealand organisations. In this study, the survey results from 252 occupational health and safety practitioners were analysed to examine how bullying is understood and managed, along with factors that predict preventative efforts. Results indicate that bullying was perceived to impact significantly on organisations, although the organisations had limited preventative measures in place. The findings confirm the importance of leadership and the establishment of an effective bully-free environment as preventative measures.

Although previous studies provide diverse perspectives on subordinate's deviant behavior as a reaction to abusive supervision (ABS), the influence of ABS on subordinates’ inter-personal relations received little attention. Grounded on social exchange theory, this study proposes that subordinates who are being abused by the same supervisor develop a bond among each other. That further provides strength to each of the abused group member to exhibit deviant behaviors against supervisor and non-abused peer group. Data were collected and analyzed through mediation analysis using AMOS. Using a sample of 920 employees from multi-sector organizations it was found that abused employees show citizenship behavior toward other abused peer-group members and counter-productive behavior toward supervisor and non-abused peer-group members. Moreover, citizenship behaviors created among the abused peer-group members partially mediate the relationship of ABS and counter-productive work behavior.

This article investigates the structural characteristics of firms that promote activities involving partners who coordinate with each other to achieve common or individual goals. The article also aims to verify empirically whether these activities generate advantages for companies embedded in relationships by examining the effects of industry, age and size on interfirm network management activities in a sample of Spanish companies operating in several industries and belonging to networks. The results show differences according to the life cycle stage: growth or maturity. Only the relation between interfirm network management activity and performance has been confirmed in both samples. The findings point to the need to consider the industrial environment when analysing firms’ networking decisions because the situations they face differ in mature or growing industries.

As the co-opetition strategy is frequently adopted by small and medium-sized accounting agencies, the main purpose of this study is to discuss the antecedents and impact of the adoption of the co-opetition strategy from the viewpoint of the resource-based theory. This study distributed questionnaires to CPAs (Certified Public Accountant) of small and medium-sized accounting agencies, and recovered 225 valid questionnaires for analysis. This study applied the confirmatory factor analysis to test the intrinsic quality of the measurement model, the structural equation modeling in testing the research hypotheses, and cluster analysis in distinguishing the co-opetition strategy types. The empirical results suggest that expertise heterogeneity positively affects competition strategy, and expertise complementarity positively affects the cooperation strategy. Finally, this study presents the resource and co-opetition strategy relationship matrix in order to provide small and medium-sized accounting agencies with reference for practical business operations.

This study examines the role of service innovation, including service process, Information Technology infrastructure and customer acuity, on customer satisfaction from the network relationships perspective. This study tests the hypotheses in a sample of 136 companies, which is drawn from top 5,000 Taiwanese firms listed in the 2015 yearbook published by the China Credit Information Service Incorporation. The results indicate that service innovation is positively related to network relationships, and that network relationships have a positive effect on customer satisfaction. Also, the results provide evidence that network relationships play a mediating role between service innovation and customer satisfaction. The findings of this study contribute to the theoretical development of a conceptual model for explaining the interrelationships among service innovation, network relationships, and customer satisfaction. The empirical evidence of the Sobel test, in line with Baron and Kenny’s procedure and bootstrap analysis supports the process-oriented view and indicates that network relationships mediate the effect of service innovation on customer satisfaction. Finally, this study discusses managerial implications and highlights future research directions.

The effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership (EL) at different levels has been widely recognized by scholars who have carried out substantial exploration; however, the empirical studies on the effectiveness of EL are scattered and their results are mixed. This study aims to organize these findings, advance knowledge about the multilevel effectiveness of EL and clarify the heterogeneity in the relationship between EL and effectiveness outcomes. Based on a systematic review of the extant literature and the construction of an integrated framework, this study examines the influence of EL on effectiveness outcomes at multiple levels and the moderators of this relationship through meta-analysis of 35 empirical studies including 35 independent samples. The results show that EL can improve effectiveness outcomes at different levels of organization, team and individual; cultural context obviously moderates this relationship, whereas the moderating effects of enterprise type and EL measure are all not significant. This study helps to determine the specific association of EL with effectiveness outcomes at different levels, and identify important factors influencing this relationship, which broadens the understanding of leadership effectiveness and provides certain value for enterprises to give full play to the role of EL at all levels.

This research discusses the findings from a study undertaken for an exploration of the critical issues around the working conditions, workplace climate, and well-being of business school (predominantly management) academics in Australia and New Zealand. With an ageing workforce, and almost half of the Australian and New Zealand workforce intending to retire, move overseas, or leave the sector within this decade, amidst rising demand in the tertiary education sector, the effective retention of this key skilled workforce is pertinent. With data from a survey conducted in 2017 involving 451 business school academics in Australia and New Zealand, this research note highlights several key issues around the areas of workplace climate and well-being which importantly, are within the control of management. Specifically, these salient workforce issues include work intensification, burnout, and poor work–life balance.

Paradoxical arguments and mixed empirical evidence coexist in the current literature concerning the relationship between team familiarity and team innovation. To resolve this contradiction, we apply habitual routines theory to propose that team familiarity and team innovation have an inverted U-shaped relationship. Using a data set of 68,933 R&D teams in the electrical engineering industry, our results support a nonlinear relationship between team familiarity and team innovation, and suggest that the best innovative performance is produced by moderately familiar teams. Furthermore, we find that external learning can moderate this curvilinear relationship. Theoretical contributions and future implications are discussed.

Decades of ambidexterity research have gained huge scholarly attention from diverse research areas like marketing, organizational learning, innovation management, supply chain management, strategy, and entrepreneurship. However, it has been observed that past studies do not provide a quantitative assessment of ambidexterity determinants applicable to small and medium firms. In response, this study attempts to address this gap by providing an extensive list of eight determinants that are significantly related to Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) ambidexterity. We employed Random effects meta-analytical procedure to examine the combined effect sizes of each determinant. The analysis was based on 37 empirical publications from 2004 to 2021, involving 8422 SME observations and 48 correlations. The findings of the meta-analysis revealed that all the considered determinants such as Knowledge management, Entrepreneurial orientation, Formalization, Market orientation, Networking, Technological capability, Organization context, and Environmental dynamism are heterogeneous, and they all exert a significant positive impact on ambidexterity.

Our study develops a new conceptual framework in which guanxi practices (managerial use of interpersonal ties to benefit their organizations) are analyzed by their focus (resources flowing inward or resources flowing outward) and their base (familiar – based on friendship ties; or family – based on kinship ties). Using this framework, we highlight the linkage between costs and benefits from using guanxi in Chinese business organizations, and show how the linkage depends on the guanxi base. Finally, we show how guanxi focus and guanxi base importantly affect employee responses to the use of guanxi practices in their organizations.

Developing previous work on charismatic leadership by Boas Shamir and Ken, we investigate the contention that followers of charismatic leaders have an emotional connection with that leader in the form of a ‘sense of belonging’ and links to community. We, therefore, investigate whether there is any evidence of a sense of belonging when people describe those they judge to be charismatic. Using a mixed-methods aesthetic narrative approach, we are able to supply empirical support for the existence of such a relationship and to extend the findings of previous studies by incorporating the connection that the leader has with the community, in general, as an important factor in the leader–follower relationship.

In a world where there has long since been more at play than functionality and cost price, we need creative innovation more than ever before. Organizations are trying to find ways to embed more creativity, more innovative potential, and more entrepreneurship into the everyday running of their businesses. They are constantly in search of effective ways to make their organization's culture better equipped for change. The Belgian non-profit organization Arteconomy has developed a method for doing this, by bringing business people and artists together in a series of particularly unique projects. In this paper, you can read about the philosophy that give rise to Arteconomy and the pioneering work that preceded it. The paper describes two specific projects that provide a concrete illustration of the arteconomy approach in two Belgian textile firms: ‘The Dragon of Deerlijk’ at Promo Fashion and ‘The Walk’ at Concordia Textiles. This paper is particularly relevant to illustrate change as an organizational process and to demonstrate how organizations can stimulate employees' creative skills.

Explanations of racioethnic inequality in organizations highlight the role of stereotypes, prejudices, biases, and discrimination in the production of such inequality. However, little is known about the impact that regular organizational practices have, either curbing or exacerbating racioethnic inequality at work. This paper argues that bureaucratic practices curb while post-bureaucratic practices exacerbate racioethnic inequality. First, this paper shows that unequal access to career advancements and payment between majority and minority employees of the Dutch national tax administration is partly due to the prevalence of post-bureaucratic ways of labour control. Second, linked to forms of labour control, post-bureaucratic ways of organizing the primary process also contribute to the production of such racioethnic inequality. Regarding both labour control and the structuring of the primary process, minority employees have an interest in the application of bureaucratic concepts that limit the space for stereotypes, prejudices, biases, and discrimination whereas post-bureaucratic concepts amplify this space.

According to social exchange theory, the motivation for organizational citizenship behavior can be understood with the help of the frameworks of obligation to reciprocate and expected reciprocity. This study predicts that the true motivation for organizational citizenship behavior could be differentiated conditional on the career plateau. These relationships predict the existence of a U-shaped nonlinear relationship between the career plateau and organizational citizenship behavior. In addition to exploring this relationship, the study attempted to discover the effect of organizational commitment and job involvement on the relationship. As a result, a U-shaped curvilinear relationship is applied between career plateau and four dimensions of organizational citizenship behavior except civic virtue. Commitment and involvement show unexpected moderating effects on those curved relationships.

In this article we develop a theoretical perspective of how professional identities in multi-professional organisational settings are co-constructed in daily interactions. The research reported here is located in a healthcare context where overlapping knowledge bases, unclear divisions of responsibilities, and an increased managerialist emphasis on teamwork make interprofessional boundaries in healthcare operations more complex and blurred than ever. We thereby build on a research tradition that recognises the healthcare sector as a negotiated order, specifically studying how professional identities are invoked, constructed, and re-constructed in everyday work interactions. The perspective is employed in an analysis of qualitative data from interviews and participant observation at a large Swedish hospital, in which we find three main processes in the construction of space of action: hierarchical, inclusive, and pseudo-inclusive. In most of the interactions, existing inter-professional divides and power relations are sustained, preventing developments towards integrated interprofessional teamwork.

This conceptual paper focuses on the importance of extending the collaborative dynamic capabilities (C-DCs) view and its emphasis on the boundary spanning strategic communities (SCs) from firm-centric to the network-centric perspective. The C-DC view is an original theoretical perspective that offers a good explanation of corporate-level transformations in the context of cross-sectoral convergence. Although the focus of prevailing research on large firms as cornerstones of SCs is valid, it does not fully capture the more complex dynamics that take in the horizontal networks of firms. We show that C-DC and SC theoretical perspectives can be adapted to the context of regional industrial clusters and contribute to their strategic renewal. The paper conceptualizes the different challenges and nature of leadership that prevail in SC-based firms networks. It also presents the different enabling aspects of collaborative DCs (with regard to trust building, co-specialization and capability synthesis) in firm- vs. network-centric environments.