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.

Challenged by the effects of organisational flexibility and high corporate real estate costs, organisations are increasingly seeking flexibility and operational efficiency in their office spaces. To date, the literature relating to flexible office spaces has focused mainly on their physical characteristics. The full effects of such spaces on human reactions and the corporate culture of organisations are less understood. The objective of this paper is to examine the influence of introducing activity-based working (ABW) on existing organisational culture. It was addressed from the perspective of the management of large corporate organisations. A mixed-method research that included a qualitative approach followed by a quantitative approach was adopted. The first stage included semistructured interviews with 19 large organisations who had introduced flexible layouts. The second stage involved a questionnaire survey of 32 organisations which had experienced office layout changes. Findings identify that the nature of workplace designs has a considerable impact on the corporate culture of an organisation and can be used to leverage and change its culture. Workplace designs directly influence culture by supporting the systems, symbols, engagement/motivation and behaviours of the organisation and employees. However, some differences between the perceptions of public and private organisations were identified. In conclusion, office layouts are artefacts that can either support, or change, the existing organisational culture. Therefore, the critical achievement of workspace design is to integrate the cultures, values and behaviours of organisations to meet their ultimate goals.

The circular economy (CE) has gained increasing attention as a means towards sustainable development. Entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises are regarded as key custodians in the transition to a CE. Opportunity identification is the cornerstone of entrepreneurship and has been extensively studied in traditional venturing; however, research on circular opportunity identification is limited. This paper addresses this gap by exploring (1) how entrepreneurs identify opportunities in the CE, underpinned by an adaptation of a sustainable opportunity identification conceptual model and (2) how CE principles are reflected in the identified opportunities, through the lens of the ReSOLVE CE framework. Nine in-depth interviews were conducted with circular entrepreneurs from three European Union member states with high, medium, and low Resource Efficiency Scoreboard rankings. The findings shed light into the black box of circular opportunity identification and indicate that the ReSOLVE levers constitute a useful framework to advance knowledge on circular entrepreneurship.

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.

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.

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.

We use attribution theory to show that firms that make more internal attributions to positive performance outcomes engage slack resources more freely for corporate entrepreneurship (CE) than firms that make fewer of such attributions. In addition, we show that the way in which companies make external attributions to performance outcomes moderates this relationship. To examine this empirically, we explore how top management teams discuss the factors that contribute to firm performance. Specifically, we look at attributions provided in the Management's Discussion and Analysis section of the annual reports of 144 pharmaceutical firms over a 2-year period. In line with our predictions, we find that greater internal attribution to positive performance outcomes leads to increased use of slack resources for CE. Furthermore, we find that this effect is stronger when firms make more external attributions to negative performance outcomes than positive performance outcomes.

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.

A review of the strategy literature suggests there have been five phases in the evolution of the field since the Second World War. The present paper discusses each of these phases, drawing on developments in each decade to determine the key lessons for managers and researchers. In particular, it is suggested that ongoing concerns with the effectiveness of strategy implementation in the 1980s and 1990s have led the field to pay greater attention to managers' thought processes, the use of technology, organisational learning, organisational politics, organisational culture and group dynamics. It also appears that a debate has evolved as to whether strategy should be practiced as art, a science or a combination of both.

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.

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.

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.

Research uncovering the behavioural and cognitive foundations of capability development has gained traction in recent years. However, the emotional foundations of capability development have not been adequately addressed. This is an important gap; if emotions impact decisions and actions of key organisational actors, this suggests an influence on capability development processes in organisations, with implications for their survival and evolution. In this paper, we therefore explore ‘how do the emotions of key strategists enable and/or hinder capability development?’ Our in-depth qualitative research, based on five small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), shows that emotions of key strategists, including emotional tensions and ambivalence, have multi-faceted effects on capability development depending on the activation level of pleasant and unpleasant emotions experienced. This adds to extant understanding of idiosyncratic foundations of capability development and extends conversations regarding the internal dynamics behind organisational survival and evolution.

This study investigates the effects of employees' perceived values-congruence within an organisation affect employees' beliefs about organisational change. Specifically, we investigated the effects employees' perceived values-congruence with their organisation, supervisor and colleagues had on beliefs about an organisational change implementation and tested whether these relationships were mediated by employees' felt trust and perceptions of the quality of their organisations' communication, as suggested by the literature. Data from 251 respondents who had undergone an organisational change within the last 6 months were analysed. Support was found for the influence all three types of perceived values-congruence (i.e. congruence with their organisation, supervisor and colleagues) had on change-related beliefs and strong support was found for the mediation role played by trust and the quality of communication.

Hierarchical bullying in public healthcare organizations is an entrenched negative behaviour that results in a range of adverse outcomes for staff, including diminished wellbeing. This study integrates social exchange and conservation of resources theories as a lens for formulating hypotheses and employs multilevel statistical modelling to examine whether team-level compassion moderates the impact of hierarchical bullying on wellbeing. Using multilevel statistical modelling, the study analysed cross-sectional data from 632 healthcare workers nested within 48 teams in a single public health district in Australia. The findings indicate that work teams with higher levels of team compassion can mitigate the negative effects of hierarchical bullying on employee wellbeing. The results imply that investing in developing compassion within teams is an effective strategy for mitigating some harmful effects of hierarchical bullying on employee outcomes.

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.

The importance of strategy has led scholars, consultants and managers to explore the term more intensively. From some of the important words used in the definitions of strategy, differences in various approaches to strategy formulation can be analysed and specific approaches can be identified. Keeping this in view, 273 strategy definitions were analysed using major nouns appearing in these definitions. The study obtained six distinct approaches to strategy formulation namely: the planning approach – related to long-term planning and execution to achieve organisation goals; fit approach – concerned with matching internal strengths and weakness with that of external opportunities and threats; emergent approach – involving adapting to change when needed; positioning approach – involving placing company in such a position so that it gains maximum advantage vis-à-vis its competitors; resource-based approach – identifying and utilizing key resources efficiently and finally, stakeholders' approach – protecting the interest of stakeholders. Using Content analysis, this study shows that each of the approaches emerged and dominated at different periods. This study also shows that during the last four decades, the positioning approach has been the most dominant approach followed by the resource-based approach.