By reflecting upon recent theoretical developments in open innovation studies, we shed new light on diverse potential sources of complementarities between corporate R&D activities as well as on contextual factors that could affect the complementarities. In particular, to break from the previous discussions confined to absorptive capacity, we considered the diverse knowledge management processes of knowledge exploration, retention, and exploitation. Then we empirically examined the existence of complementarities between corporate R&D strategies and uncovered the contextual factors. Our empirical results suggest the possible existence of a complementary relationship between in-house and joint R&D. We also discovered the firm-specific contextual variables, such as a firm's cumulative patent stocks and scientific information inflows from public research institutes and universities, that drive the decision to combine in-house and joint R&D. Our theoretical discussions on firms' diverse knowledge management processes allow more enriched understanding on these empirical findings.

The purpose of this study was to examine contextual factors (empowerment, ownership, and accountability) that facilitate and promote exploration and exploitation behavior. Data were obtained from an American manufacturing company using employee and supervisor surveys (n = 297). Findings indicate that empowerment improved exploitation and that when employees perceived they would have to be accountable for their actions, employees who felt empowered showed lower gains in exploration behaviors compared with those who felt less empowered; in contrast, those having feelings of ownership exhibited higher gains in exploration behavior than those who scored low in ownership. Although ownership was theorized to have a positive effect on exploitative behavior, we found evidence for its negative effects instead. We contribute to the limited individual-level ambidexterity literature by providing empirical evidence on the effects of contextual factors on ambidextrous behavior. This knowledge could help firms better manage employee behavior and implement effective supervisory oversight.

The literature exploring the impact of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) supportive employment policies on work and life satisfaction and how these relationships reflected business outcomes is largely derived from the LGB workforce in Western countries. To our knowledge, empirical evidence from LGB workforce in Thailand is very limited. To address this shortcoming, this study aims to identify and evaluate the work-related supportive factors that influence job and life satisfaction of Thai LGB employees. Theoretically, the study offers novel aspects of LGB employees’ perception toward their workplace environment in different social and cultural context of Thailand. Online surveys were administered to 144 LGB individuals, and the results highlight the effects of three types of support at work – supervisor, organizational, and coworker – on Thai LGB employees’ job and life satisfaction. The findings also provide insights for human resources managers to attract and retain LGB employees.

The Grand Seaside Hotel is a large five-star hotel in an Australian Coastal town. It is a place that not only aspires to provide excellent service but that also seeks to reconcile two apparently divergent demands: the need for customized service and the efficient management of business operations. To commit staff to the provision of service excellence, management has introduced a customer service programme that relies on various forms of training and rewards, as well as a guest response system. The customer service programme, particularly the use of guest questionnaires, appear as disciplinary strategies that aim to produce service encounters in which both staff and guests are ‘normalized’. The main loci of ethnographic data collection for this paper are regular Management Briefings. Through data collected from these, the paper investigates the use of the ‘imaginary’ in constituting service encounters and guest expectations. It interprets these in terms of Foucault's Panoptic analysis to identify the immanent mechanisms of discipline in these customer service programmes.

In this examination of New Zealand entrepreneurship in the period 1840 to 1990, we document the origins of New Zealand entrepreneurs, and explore the differences between New Zealand, UK, and United States entrepreneurial history. Historical data is further analysed to depict the rise of alternative entrepreneurial growth strategies and the evolution of industry and financing structures, unique to the New Zealand business environment.

We investigate how exposure to unethical practices affects the personal attitude of accountants in small accounting firms towards unethical behaviours. This is an important topic for business because accountants in small accounting firms are in a position to influence the behaviour of the large number of businesses they serve. The main independent variable is a measure of exposure to a variety of different types of unethical practices. A regression involving the exposure variable onto personal attitude is carried out using data from owners/managers of small accounting firms in Australia. Findings confirm a negative relationship between the amount of exposure and personal attitude towards questionable practices: increased exposure to questionable ethical behaviour is related to an increase in the level of acceptance of unethical behaviour. While such a finding is not unexpected, it suggests that other strategies need to be pursued to encourage ethical behaviour.

This study details the possible escalation of employees' perceptions of pandemic threats into diminished job performance, while considering a mediating role of their sense of job insecurity and a moderating role of their emotion regulation and improvisation skills. Results based on multisource, three-wave data show that employees' perceived pandemic threats compromise their work-related performance, because they believe that their job is at risk. This mediating role of perceived job insecurity is mitigated by employees' greater ability to control their emotions and come up with novel ideas on the spot. This study accordingly pinpoints employees' conviction that they may not be able to keep their jobs as a crucial mechanism by which the hardships of a global pandemic generate negative performance consequences, as well as how organizations can contain this risk by helping employees hone their pertinent personal skills.

This paper adopts an explanatory sequential mixed method design to explore the impact of decentralized (vs. centralized) leadership on cross-functional teams' resource exchanges at a long-term care facility in Canada. In the quantitative phase, social network analyses were used to examine the direct and moderated effects (via leader–follower relationship quality; LMX) of the presence of formal decentralized leaders on: (1) knowledge sharing, and (2) work hindrance networks within cross-functional healthcare teams. In the qualitative phase, team members were interviewed regarding the impact of their decentralized leaders. Collectively, the findings suggest that the presence of a decentralized leader may enhance knowledge sharing and safeguard against work hindrance behaviors in cross-functional healthcare teams. However, these effects are contingent on the situation (e.g., LMX quality and status-based hierarchies). Implications for research and healthcare practice are discussed.

This study examines the organization impression management (OIM) tactics used in agri-food cooperatives to communicate their intentions toward sustainable development. Based on content analysis of the chairperson and CEO statements of 14 agri-foods cooperatives from six years' annual reports, this study sheds light on the role of member-owned firms in shifts toward realizing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The paper proposes multistakeholder OIM tactics. These insights about sustainable development extend knowledge of how senior managers communicate their intentions in multistakeholder situations, which include shareholders, suppliers, customers, and local communities. This study contributes to the literature on organizational impression management and member-owned firms. Managerial implications are also outlined.

This study investigates the connection between employees’ experience of time-related work stress and their job performance, with a particular focus on the mediating role of their propensity to engage in negative gossip and the moderating role of their collectivistic orientation. The results based on multisource, three-wave data from employees, their peers, and supervisors in Pakistani organizations show that an important reason that time-related work stress might diminish job performance is that employees expend significant energy discussing their negative evaluations of other organizational members with peers, possibly as a way to protect their self-esteem resources. This mediating role of gossip is also invigorated by employees’ collectivistic orientation. For organizations, this study identifies a key mechanism – informal conversations with peers about the flaws of others in the organization – by which time-related stress prevents employees from allocating sufficient energy to completing their job tasks, and it reveals that this process is more likely among collectivistic employees.

There is an increasing focus in today's organization on measuring results and calculating return on investment. Efforts of administrators today to control organizational endeavors are essential and generally aligned with current best practices. Control mechanisms, however, ultimately prove to be only part of the puzzle. Strategic planning, encompassing such activities as planning, performance measurement, program budgeting, and the like, has proven to be very useful but limited. It is a technical fix that gets at only part of the question of organizational effectiveness and only deals with some organizational dilemmas. In the face of such realities, the notion of strategic thinking emerges to fill the gaps and overcome the limitations that experience with strategic planning has proven to exhibit. This paper presents an integration of leadership ideas, strategic thinking and traditional planning activities in an effort to make important connections and important distinctions.

The cost of recruitment and training of newcomers can be a burden for enterprises, causing adverse effects on human resources management. Although much research has addressed employee turnover, less attention has been paid to methods of improving the retention of new hires. This study is an empirical examination of the increase in predictive strength of antecedents of affective commitment for comparing newcomers’ workplace spirituality. The results of an employee survey completed by 237 newcomers with under two years of work experience indicate that socialization tactics have a direct impact on job embeddedness, which in turn has a direct effect on affective commitment. Workplace spirituality has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between socialization tactics and job embeddedness. Also, workplace spirituality has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between job embeddedness and affective commitment.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether outsourcing frontline functions warrants equivalent level of customer-orientated behaviors as provided by a principal organization, and, if not, what the causes of the differences are. A total of 753 frontline workers of a leading South Korean telecommunications company and its partner companies responded to a survey regarding their levels of customer-oriented behaviors, their supervisor's degree of customer orientation, and their organization's training on customer orientation. Structural equation models were then utilized to examine the proposed relationships. The results show that the frontline workers of the partner organizations have a significantly lower level of customer-oriented behaviors compared with those of the principal organization. The immediate supervisor's degree of customer orientation and customer-orientation training accounted for a significant amount of difference found between the principal and partner organizations.

We examine the relationship between high-performance work system (HPWS) and job satisfaction, drawing on the ‘too much of a good thing’ theory, to establish whether a non-linear relationship can explain conflicts in previous findings. Moreover, we extend the study by exploring the mediating role of work overload and the moderating role of person–organization fit (P–O fit). Based on a cross-sectional data set of 220 employees and a longitudinal data set of 373 employees from organizations in China, the empirical findings show an inverted U-shaped relationship between HPWS and job satisfaction. Results also indicate that the relationship between HPWS and job satisfaction is fully mediated by work overload, and that P–O fit negatively moderates HPWS-work overload and HPWS-job satisfaction relationships. These results shed new light on how HPWS impacts employee outcomes and practical implications for managers are discussed.

This methodological article introduces positive organisational scholarship in healthcare and video reflexive ethnography (POSH-VRE) as a methodology to cut through the challenges of accessing and engaging organisations for research. We demonstrate how POSH-VRE can open space to navigate and better understand organisational complexity and build capacity. Organisational complexity denotes the interrelated components of a system. POSH-VRE can be helpful within complex organisations, such as health services, because it focuses on positive healthcare practices and experiences. We exemplify this with reference to a study on brilliant community-based palliative care. Using fieldnotes and video-recordings, we reveal the value of positive recognition – or celebration; video-cameras; and courtesy, whereby we adapted to different contexts. POSH-VRE can be of scholarly, methodological, and organisational value. It enables researchers to navigate organisational complexity and co-construct findings with nonacademic experts. Furthermore, it can encourage nonacademic experts to improve practice by learning from their own capacities to navigate organisational complexity.

The New Zealand electricity industry is not new to change. However, decision of the New Zealand government to implement a Mixed Ownership Model have resulted in commotion. Stakeholders have reacted and one powerful stakeholder group had the potential to stop the sale of state assets. In this case study we examine how different stakeholders have responded as the future of the New Zealand electricity industry remains uncertain.

Crises are socially constructed. Affected stakeholders of an organizational crisis conceive complex associations between their perceptions of the implicated company's response and about the company itself. The study moves away from a simple cause–effect view by deriving alternative configurations of these associations. This approach allows for a better understanding of how stakeholders attribute responsibility for a critical event and the resulting crisis faced by the company that caused it. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we analyze insights of 325 families affected by an environmental incident in 2018 involving Colombia's largest company. We establish a correlation between stakeholders' perceptions of crisis response timeliness and credibility. Accordingly, we expand on how perceptions affect organizational judgments. Finally, we propose that trustworthiness and reputation are antecedents to how organizational crisis response is perceived and how these antecedents affect the degree of the severity of the company crisis.