A decisive 2004 fourth term win for the Howard Government and control over the Senate provided the Australian government with a mandate to further deregulate the labour market in the name of ‘flexibility’. This paper uses a critical perspective to challenge the wisdom of neo-liberal market economics as the driving force behind the rapid expansion of non-traditional ‘flexible’ forms of work and the persistence of a deficit model/perspective that continues to devalue the human capital value of older workers. It is argued that these trends will contribute to ongoing under utilisation of ‘older’ labour and intensification of skill shortages, in part, as a result of lack of investment in maintaining human capital. In responding to Australia's rapidly ageing workforce the Howard Government has adopted modest measures designed to counter age based discrimination and encourage workforce participation. However, participation rates among older workers in Australia have remained one of the lowest among Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries. This paper argues that the Government's labour market deregulation policies are reducing the availability of jobs that provide sufficient working conditions and remuneration to make workforce participation attractive. The erosion of employment conditions associated with ‘flexible’ workforce reform leads to underemployment, an employment outcome that often fails to meet the needs of many older workers. More recently, however, the Government has embarked on reforms that appear to provide genuine incentives aimed specifically at attracting workforce participation by older workers, but unfortunately these are by and large confined to those aged 60 years and over.

Using the meta-analysis technique, this research comprehensively reviews the existing open innovation (OI) literature, systematically aggregates empirical findings on the impact of OI on performance to identify key moderators and statistically tests the significance of these moderators in influencing the OI–performance relationship. Based on a comprehensive dataset of 2,377,123 firms and sub-firm units in 171 studies published from 2003 to 2018, this research demonstrates that the OI–performance relationship is significantly moderated by three key factors: performance measure, OI approach, and level of analysis. This research helps explain the conflicting findings regarding the OI–performance relationship in the existing literature, and contributes to the understanding of the effectiveness of OI practice.

What has been called the war for talent in companies has become a key element in organizations that want to be competitive. Talent management has already been studied and verified in terms of its impact on performance and productivity, and this has led to more and more research generating a professional and scientific interest with other variables, such as ethical behavior. In the present study it is verified, through a model of structural equations, that the organizations that apply strategies of talent management have more ethical behaviors and intention to stay. Talent management and ethical behavior would reinforce work environments, by restoring confidence in the organization. Likewise, talent management implies greater loyalty of talent, that is an antecedent of the intention to stay in the organization.

It has been said that entrepreneurs plan in order to deal with market uncertainty. It has also been argued that entrepreneurs act spontaneously and with insufficient planning, as time is of the essence and as market uncertainty seldom yields to planning. Theoretically, in uncertain market conditions, the concept of effectuation posits that entrepreneurs control their resources enhancing them through likeminded stakeholder buy-ins towards creating an opportunity. Alternatively, the first prospective action steps under uncertainty are argued to be taken regardless of resources position, reflecting enactment before sensemaking. Thus, enactment embodies resource-independent action-embracing ambiguity, whereas effectuation, i.e., controlling resources and enhancing stakeholder buy-ins, represents resource-dependent action that mitigates ambiguity and risk. This paper proposes that prospective enactment action and effectuation control action are analytically distinct, complementary and simultaneous aspects of entrepreneurial action. It further proposes that successful outcomes of entrepreneurial action may be anticipated by a high and matching combination of enactment and effectual action in a generative co-occurrence. The paper illustrates the propositions using cases that exhibit diverse action outcomes. It also potentially reconciles the ambiguity-embracing or risk-taking approach and the ambiguity-reducing or risk-mitigating control approach in understanding entrepreneurial action seeking opportunity in an uncertain and dynamic market.

This paper assesses the recent contribution of Michel Foucault to the study of power and subject in organizations. First, we theoretically examine Foucault's thinking by dividing his works into archaeological, genealogical and aesthetic/ethical phases. We then conduct a review of 113 international journal articles from between the years 2000 and 2009. We do this in order to obtain an overview of the phases of Foucault's thinking that are prevalent in recent organization studies. We find that recent academic studies drawing on Foucault are increasingly leaning towards Foucault's writings on governmentality, as well as on his genealogical works, which have sustained their popularity. Reflecting the growing interest in governmentality and genealogy, we end by pointing out some avenues for future research.

Conflict is a ubiquitous feature of groups in organizations that clearly affects group performance. While prior research has investigated the role of personality on conflict resolution styles at the individual level, little work has examined the role of personality on the emergence of conflict. This may be partially due to the fact that the emergence of conflict is inherently a group-level phenomenon, and thus requires the aggregation of personality to the group (or at least dyadic) level of analysis. I propose that each of the Big Five personality traits (or specific facets), at the group level, affect the emergence of either task conflict, relationship conflict, or both. Developing our understanding of how group personality composition affects both of these types of conflict is necessary to better enable groups to manage conflict, and thereby lessen potentially harmful outcomes resulting from conflict.

Forming strategic alliances with foreign organizations is critical for firms, as it can enable them to access external resources globally. However, because firms, especially those in emerging economies, may possess less legitimacy in foreign countries, potential foreign alliance partners may lack satisfactory organizational information to adequately evaluate them. By applying signaling theory, this study argues that alternative sources, such as the prestige characteristics of the top management team, play an important role in signaling the quality of firms. Additionally, this study expects that the effects of the prestige characteristics of top management teams on the formation of international strategic alliances are lessened when the number of prior international alliances increases. The empirical results support our arguments. Overall, this study contributes by bringing signaling theory into the research of the formation of international strategic alliances.

Applying conservation of resources theory, we propose a theoretical model that explains how and when supervisor knowledge sharing affects creative behavior. Specifically, this study examines employee self-efficacy as the core intermediary mechanism and work–family conflict as the boundary condition of the indirect effect of supervisor knowledge sharing on creative behavior via self-efficacy. Drawn from a sample of 147 dyads comprising full-time employees and their immediate supervisors, the results of this study showed support for our moderated mediation model. The findings indicated that supervisor knowledge sharing had a significant effect on creative behavior and this influence is mediated by self-efficacy. Furthermore, our study revealed that work–family conflict attenuated the positive supervisor knowledge sharing's effect on creative behavior via self-efficacy. Implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed.

How individuals form justice perceptions has been a fundamental question for organizational justice research. While most researchers have treated justice perceptions as a result of deliberate cognitive processes, a limited number of studies have examined the role of affect in forming justice perceptions. Using the affect infusion model, we investigate the predictive role of affect in forming justice perceptions and consider two moderating contextual factors: personal relevance and group context. Two experimental studies, with a student sample and an employee sample, were conducted. Results confirm that participants in positive affective states perceived higher distributive and procedural justice than those in negative affective states. Moreover, personal relevance moderates the relationships between affect and both distributive and procedural justice perceptions, and the relationship is enhanced as the level of personal relevance increases. The results also suggest that group context constrains the influence of an individual participant’s affect on procedural justice.

In this paper, the author, a freelance writer and researcher who has worked in this way for over 30 years, draws on his own experience of independent working to present freelancing and well-being as an important yet neglected area of research. The paper is therefore presents a brief overview of the context of freelancing, particularly in the United Kingdom and Europe as this is the working environment of the author. This overview is blended with a review the existing research on the topic of freelancer well-being. The aim is to reveal the questions and issues that the author feels encompass well-being in this context as well as to highlight some recent initiatives where independent workers and their clients have worked together to support key areas of their vulnerability compared with those in full-time employment. Setting this often intensely personal perspective set against the wider context of academic and practitioner research reveals that, in contrast to some the common public opinion that freelance and contract work is ‘second-rate’ option, many independent professionals are happy about the way they work and experience high levels of job satisfaction. However, what does also emerge is that beyond local professional bodies and associations, many feel almost completely unsupported. Of greatest concern were reports of being treated with neglect and even suspicion by policy and law makers. The hope is that this paper heralds the beginnings of a wider research agenda into this important but neglected aspect of the independent professional workforce.

Walk tall: The story of REX Bionics is about the key decisions faced by the founders Richard Little and Robert (Robbie) Irving to commercialise a ‘walking skeleton’ for people who are wheelchair-bound for extended periods. The changing role of the founders in a technology-based business and the interplay between the founders’ vision and the reality of growing technology-based businesses is the focus. The history of REX Bionics lies in the founders’ first-hand experiences with people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Over 15 years the company evolved from a ‘workshop idea’ in a garage to public listing on the London AIM Stock Exchange. Facing multiple institutional hurdles, rapidly moving technology and high start-up costs, REX Bionics successfully commercialised the walking robotic exoskeleton inspirited by the ‘Power Load’ in the movie Aliens. Little and Irving faced some tough choices about which commercialisation pathways to pursue in the light of diverse perspectives from the board of directors, an advisory board, various investors to their personal mission.

This study investigates the relationships between humor (frequency and effectiveness), communication satisfaction (informational and relational), and employee job performance (task and contextual) in international joint ventures in Iran. Based on a survey of 375 employees and their supervisors in two of the biggest joint ventures in the automotive industry in Iran, the results indicate that the frequency of humor had significant positive effects on contextual and task performance as well as on informational and relational communication satisfaction. In addition, informational communication satisfaction was significantly related to both contextual performance and task performance, whereas relational communication satisfaction was related only to task performance. Finally, informational communication satisfaction mediated the relationship between the frequency of humor and job performance (task and contextual), while relational communication satisfaction mediated the relationship between the frequency of humor and task performance.

Organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) plays a pivotal role in organisational success. This research explored factors hypothesised to facilitate OCB within a primary school context. Two studies using questionnaire survey’s explored: (i) OCB relative to personal differences and psychological contracts; (ii) the relationship between OCB and principals’ leadership frames. Primary school teachers were recruited and responses analysed from 547 and 488 respondents, respectively. Results from both studies combined suggest that the leadership style of the principal and the employee’s expectations of their role within the school strongly influence their OCB. This study identifies factors that influence the prevalence of OCB in primary school teachers and confirms that the new theoretical framework provides a useful heuristic for managers, human resource management policy makers and academic researchers alike.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relation between openness to diversity in terms of linguist, visible, value and informational heterogeneity and group processes depicted by group trust and group conflict. We collected data using a web-based survey among 498 academics in multicultural departments. The departments were located in four different Danish universities. We found openness to value diversity and informational diversity to have a positive association with group trust and a negative association with group conflict. Openness to linguistic diversity had positive relationships with group trust. The findings of this study suggest that openness to diversity should be highly prioritized by human resource managers in demographically diverse organizations. Possible interventions include organizational culture change programs, diversity training at individual and team levels as well as rewarding group oriented behavior.

Sales performance is widely regarded as an important index of individual and organizational performance. Sales employees require access to organizational and job resources as well as personal resources in order to function effectively. An individual-level salesperson performance model is proposed that draws from the motivational process represented in the Job Demands-Resources Model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007). Organizational and job resources are conceptualized in terms of employee involvement climate (Riordan, Vandenberg, & Richardson, 2005). Personal resources are conceptualized in terms of employees' psychological capital (Luthans & Youssef, 2004). The model delineates how employee involvement climate influences engagement; how psychological capital influences performance; how employee involvement climate and psychological capital interact to influence employee engagement; and how, in turn, engagement impacts salesperson performance. The model will potentially prove useful to human resource managers, organizational development practitioners, and sales managers aiming to up-skill and more fully involve and engage their salespeople in order to optimize salesperson performance.

Customer power is an ever-increasing phenomenon, particularly in relation to service failure. Service failures not only elicit strong emotional reactions from disgruntled customers, but may ultimately lead to a severing of the service provider–customer relationship. A significant but overlooked area of research relates to the behavioural processes which shape customers' perceptions of service failure and recovery. As front-line staffare frequently the customer's only contact in the service encounter, they act as the key referent point in the literature with regard to service quality, speed and convenience. However, it is asserted that as employees of the organisation, senior management also plays an important role. This conceptual paper draws from research in the field of services marketing and organisational behaviour to provide evidence which suggests that customer responses to a service crisis are likely to be affected by perceptions of senior management behaviours and character attributes as generally just. We propose a cumulative effect of these justice perceptions on customer emotions and trust. In the wake of exceptional service failure, we argue, these factors play a vital role in shaping how customers may respond to such events.

The literature on knowledge transfer is confident in its assertion that a ‘stickiness’ pervades knowledge disclosure process. This phenomenon is often attributed to structural communication barriers but an equally valid explanation could stem from the individual feeling a sense of ownership of their knowledge which then engenders a reluctance to be open about their knowledge within a formal knowledge transfer process. We pursue this idea theoretically through notions of possessiveness and psychological ownership; and empirically by exploring the concept of willingness to disclose. Assuming willingness to be unidimensional a methodology is put forward that uses indicators to measures its direction. Using a sample of 1050 UK engineers we illustrate the direction of willingness on a reluctance–willing dimension. We argue that knowledge transfer requires management to examine more closely the stimuli that affect the process.

This study explored how individual and team-level goal orientation influence individual creativity in a work setting. By creating a cross-level theoretical framework, we tested 562 members of 81 teams currently working in various companies in China. The study analyzed the relationships between individual goal orientation, team goal orientation, and individual creativity from cross-level perspective linked by motivated information processing theory. Applying multilevel research method and hierarchical-level modeling, we found that team learning goal orientation and individual learning goal orientation influence individual creativity through different information activities at their own levels. Moreover, team learning goal orientation has a positive and team performance-avoidance goal orientation has a negative effect on individual creativity through team information exchange, while individual learning goal orientation poses a positive effect on individual creativity through individual information elaboration. In conclusion, it was indicated that team members tend to elaborate more work-related information when teams are more learning-orientated. Conversely, team members do not tend to elaborate information when their team has higher performance-avoidance goal orientation.

This paper reports on an exploratory study into critical success factors as they are perceived by Māori small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners in the Otago/Southland regions of New Zealand. We draw on interview responses from 11 Māori business owners and four representatives of SME support services. The aim of this study is to explore Māori SME characteristics in terms of the critical success factors that help or hinder the achievement of their business aspirations. The findings indicate three main thematic concerns: Māori SME owners’ perception of being Māori impacts on how they position themselves as a business; the regional business environment has particular features that impact in a particular way on Māori SMEs; and, notions of business strategy are culturally nuanced. We propose that a culturally constituted regional business support system will better enable Māori SMEs to achieve their aspirations.