With the rapid advancement of innovative technology, coupled with IT being a core function in contemporary business, there has been an upward trend of multi-national companies (MNCs) reporting a skill deficit in areas such as data analytics and cybersecurity (Columbus, 2017. IBM predicts demand for data scientists will soar 28% By 2020. Forbes; NeSmith, 2018. The cybersecurity gap is an industry crisis. Forbes). In a recent survey with over 3,000 CIOs, 65% indicated their organizations were unable to maintain par with the progression of technology in areas such as data analytics and security due to a lack of adequate talent (Harvey Nash & KPMG, 2018. CIO survey 2018). Although, organizations have recently started to expand their talent pipeline following a neurological breakthrough: research as well as anecdotal evidence suggests adults with mild forms of autism display above-average intelligence, increased attention focus, and high visual–spatial abilities; a combination in high market demand for roles such as software testing, data analysis, cybersecurity, and engineering due to their uncanny ability with pattern recognition, information processing, analytics, and attention to detail.

These auspicious developments come at the helm of an increasing rate of governments around the world implementing provisions to their labour regulations towards equitable hiring of people with disabilities (Myors et al., 2017. Perspectives from 22 countries on the legal environment for selection. Handbook of Employee Selection. 659–677. Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business.). Some, such as France, Japan, Kenya, Korea, and Taiwan, have gone so far as to set quota targets (Myors et al., 2017. Perspectives from 22 countries on the legal environment for selection. Handbook of Employee Selection. 659–677. Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business.). The implication for organizations is that they need to develop disability-inclusive recruitment and selection systems along with work designs and environments that are disability friendly. But what does this mean in practice? What does a disability-inclusive recruitment and selection system look like?

Enter DXC Technology (DXC): born out of a merger between global conglomerate Computer Science Corporation and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, generating close to $25 billion annually in revenue, with clients across more than 70 countries, they strategically became a pioneer in the digital transformation that was taking place globally. In the wake of the breakthrough in employment diversity, DXC recognized this as an opportunity to gain a critical edge within the increasingly competitive talent pool market. First, design a program of their own for recruiting and selecting adults with high functioning autism. Next, through a collaboration with various universities including the University of Queensland and Macquarie University, Neurodiversity Hubs were established; an initiative designed to assist neurodivergent students with obtaining work experience and internships. In doing so, they faced the following key challenges: How could they design a recruitment and selection strategy for neurodivergent individuals that was equitable, ethical, and efficient? In particular, where could they find suitable neurodivergent candidates, what criteria should they use to select them, and how should they handle unsuccessful candidates to ensure beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders?

This study precisely investigates the relationship of information technology (IT) and knowledge management (KM) capabilities with organizational agility along with the moderating influence of external environmental actors on this linkage. A matched-pair field survey was conducted and pretested structured questionnaires were administered to accumulate primary responses from 300 business and IT personnel working in various Indian financial groups. The research findings encompass first, IT and KM capabilities are enablers of organizational agility, while KM capability is more effective on agility. Second, a more diverse and less hostile environment is required for IT and KM capabilities to have more positive influence on agility, yet the moderating effects of environmental factors are found to be more on IT–agility linkage than on KM–agility relationship. These inferences provide several implications for the business and IT executives to concentrate on leveraging both IT and KM capabilities for generating augmented organizational agility.

Existing research suggests that leaders/supervisors are the major persons in work organizations to promote employee perception of job significance, which is an intrinsic motivator for employee productivity. However, the literature remains unclear on the relationship between workplace friendship and perceived job significance. Results from a survey of 290 Taiwanese employees indicated that workplace friendship enhanced perceived job significance, and such enhancement did not vary across organizational levels. Our findings suggest intrinsically motivating employees through workplace friendship, which extends extant literature on work role of leaders/supervisors in employee motivation. Further, although lower organizational levels have a disadvantage of objectively less job significance in work organizations, our findings suggest workplace friendship is an effective factor in promoting employee perception of job significance. Thus, organizations can embed the mechanism of workplace friendship into the factors of job design to promote employees' intrinsic motivation and thus job and organizational productivity.

In the context of education for sustainable development, the purpose of this paper is to report on the findings of a study in Spain into the extent to which corporate social responsibility (CSR) is taught in management schools. The study makes an exploratory and descriptive web-content analysis of the curriculum and subjects on Business and Management degrees at all universities in Spain. Our findings show that a high percentage of universities include CSR-related subjects on their curriculum. CSR content is taught as either specific CSR subjects (stand-alone CSR subjects) or as part of various subjects on the academic curriculum (embedded CSR subjects). Although at first sight our findings may seem promising, a more detailed analysis shows that few universities include stand-alone CSR subjects and that although many universities have embedded CSR subjects, the CSR content is by no means fully developed.

Organizational decision making requires the ability to process ambiguous information while dealing with overload and conflicting requirements. Although researchers agree that ambiguity tolerance is a critical skill for making high-quality complex decisions, few have investigated the effects of ambiguity tolerance on self-efficacy to make complex decisions. In the current experiment, 151 participants were randomly assigned to either a moderate complexity or high complexity decision task. Ambiguity tolerance moderated the relationships between task complexity and self-efficacy, and between task complexity and the accuracy of self-efficacy in predicting future performance. In the highly complex task, individuals with a higher tolerance for ambiguity reported higher self-efficacy and more accurate self-efficacy versus individuals with lower tolerance for ambiguity. In the moderately complex task, tolerance for ambiguity had no effects on self-efficacy or accuracy. Implications for research and practice are presented, along with study limitations.

In this study, the empirical evidence regarding small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) growth determinants allows us to conclude that: (1) stimulating factors are cash flow and gross domestic product; (2) restrictive factors are: debt, firm size, age of the firm and the interest rate; and (3) in the period after 2008, the financial crisis and implementation of austerity measures, in the Portuguese context, produced a negative effect on SME growth. In the period 2008–2012, that is, after the beginning of the financial crisis, cash flow had less importance, while debt was found to have a stronger negative effect on SME growth, compared with the pre-crisis period.

Investigation of customer participation in new product development (NPD) performance has yielded conflicting results. This study explores the idea that intensive customer participation is not always better. Instead, the usefulness of customer participation in NPD is determined by the fit between product innovativeness and customer participation as information providers and as co-developers. An empirical study of 196 NPD projects of Taiwanese high-tech firms is analyzed by structural equation modeling. The findings show that product innovativeness negatively moderates the impact of customer participation as information providers on NPD outcome. Thus, the greater the involvement of customer participation as information providers in radical innovation projects, the lower the NPD outcome. Moreover, our results also indicate that product innovativeness positively affects the relationship between customer participation as a co-developer and NPD outcome, which suggest that the more customer participation as a co-developer in a radical innovation project, the better the NPD outcome.

In the wake of recent financial scandals and in the context of the global financial crisis, corporate governance is especially significant. We examine the effect of corporate governance practices on the performance of 106 mid-sized firms in India, between 2005 and 2007. Our results confirm a significant relationship between CEO duality and firm performance. We also find that a small board is more effective and enhances the value of the firm. However, in the Indian context, we find that non-executive independent directors are failing in their monitoring role.

This paper presents a suggested framework for future research designs to examine the benefits of entrepreneurship, both non-financial and financial. Based on a review of the literature and using contextual exemplars throughout the paper with an Australia and New Zealand focus, we identify a range of benefits from entrepreneurship at the various levels of analysis (e.g. individual, organizational, national). From a non-financial perspective such benefits include independence, autonomy, competitive advantage, increased market share, employment and increased standards of living. From a financial perspective, entrepreneurships benefits include enhanced remuneration or rent from revenue, profits, cash flow, return on investment and increases in GDP – specific financial measures to be expressed in clear financial terms. The suggested framework represents both an initial step towards the measurement of entrepreneurships financial benefits and a valuable starting point for the development of a theory of the non-financial and financial benefits of entrepreneurship.

Issues of morality and ethics have increasingly become more important in organizations and business settings. Traditionally, these issues of ethics and social responsibility in business settings have been discussed and commented on by prescriptive approaches that are grounded in philosophical traditions. Building on the idea that we need to develop a more comprehensive and complete understanding of the value that people assign to ethics and how it influences their actions and decisions, in the present article we discuss and review the importance and relevance of adopting also a descriptive approach that is grounded in the behavioral sciences (referred to as behavioral business ethics). This approach has the advantages to promote our insights into how people can show both good and bad behavior and why this is the case. Behavioral business ethics therefore represents an important research challenge for organizational researchers to pursue and engage more meaningfully with more prescriptive approaches.

While there is extensive management and academic literature on the topic area of high performance management internationally, research on high performance management practices in the Australian context is limited. Furthermore, research on high performance management practices has focused predominantly on large organisations and is largely a new direction for research in SMEs. This study attempts to fill some of the gaps in existing studies by considering a wide range of high performance management practices in Australian SMEs. Owing to the dearth of national data on high performance management in Australian SMEs, the results of this study are used to determine whether there is any evidence of a ‘high performing’ scenario in relation to management practices in Australian SMEs. The results, reporting a national study (N = 1435) on employee management in Australian SMEs, reveal a moderate take-up of high performance management practices. The findings by themselves do not support a ‘high’ performing scenario in relation to management practices in SMEs; however the low application of participative practices in the context of low unionization, and a low incidence of collective relations, indicates that many SMEs need a makeover if they are to meet the demands of competition. It is evident from the findings in this study that high performance practices in SMEs stand to benefit from modernisation and improvement.

We developed and tested a model of employee creativity based on achievement goal theory and role identity theory. Examining the relationship between the three dimensions of goal orientation and employee creativity, we explored the mediating effect of creative role identity. Data were collected from 197 employees and their supervisors from several industries in China. The results indicated that employee learning orientation was positively related to employee creativity, but that no such positive relationship existed between approach performance orientation and employee creativity. Interestingly, we found that avoidance performance orientation was positively related to employee creativity. Learning orientation, approach performance orientation and avoidance performance orientation were all found to have significant effects on creative role identity. In turn, creative role identity fully mediated the relationship between learning orientation and employee creativity, and the relationship between avoidance performance orientation and employee creativity. These findings contribute to the advancement of role identity theory, and their theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The Tall Poppy Syndrome (TPS) of knocking high achievers is often described as being ingrained in New Zealand's culture. This study interviews 40 entrepreneurs to explore how TPS impacts on entrepreneurs. Internationally, New Zealand is considered to be a highly entrepreneurial country. Thus TPS and an entrepreneurial culture appear to co-exist. Over half of the participants had experienced TPS in their role as entrepreneurs and their individual strategies for managing its impact included 'staying under the radar', not telling people they owned a business and not ‘flaunting’ their wealth. This study suggests that the effects of TPS may have significant implications for entrepreneurship in New Zealand. Firstly, TPS may discourage entrepreneurs from starting a business. Secondly, people who have experienced a business failure may be reluctant to establish another business because of the public reaction to their 'fall'. Finally, entrepreneurs may deliberately limit business growth because they don't want to attract attention. Potential ways of reducing the impact of TPS on entrepreneurs include celebrating entrepreneurial success more visibly, highlighting realistic role models for people to aspire to and emphasising the hard work and risk that entrepreneurs take to achieve success.

Customary land is commonly perceived as a barrier to economic development and indigenous entrepreneurship in Pacific Island countries. We turn this proposition on its head, arguing that customary land provides a solid foundation for indigenous entrepreneurs who wish to achieve social, cultural and environmental, as well as economic, goals for their businesses. Furthermore, we assert that appropriate tools are needed to measure the success of indigenous businesses on customary land, as conventional tools have a narrow focus on economics that fails to capture the more holistic, sustainable development goals that indigenous people hope to achieve through their businesses. The indicators we utilise relate to socio-cultural, economic and environmental sustainability. The tool’s usefulness was scrutinized through pre-testing on two indigenous businesses in Fiji; this revealed that culturally oriented tools are essential if the sustainability of indigenous business is to be measured in terms that are meaningful to Pacific communities.

There is widespread agreement that organizational learning (OL) and firms' innovative culture (innovativeness) positively influence organizational innovation (OI), which ultimately fosters long-term competitiveness. However, there is more limited empirical evidence on the role of OL as a forerunner of innovativeness, or on the combined effects of OL and innovativeness on OI and how performance is ultimately improved. In this research, OI is evaluated as a firm's actual ability to regularly adopt and implement more technical and administrative innovations with a greater degree of incorporated novelty relative to their main competitors. The aim is to approach innovation from a comprehensive viewpoint and to assess the attainment of superior competitive advantage in the innovation field. Effects on performance are evaluated at both the organizational level and in the commercialization of new services by means of two different conceptual model. These models are tested on a sample of 246 knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) located in Spain. We used polychoric correlations (Lee, Poon, & Bentler, 1995), together with a robust methodological approach, to analyze categorical variables in structural equation systems in EQS. The empirical results show that OL is an important antecedent for innovativeness, and that the latter plays a key role in the adoption of more technical and administrative innovations with a greater degree of incorporated novelty. Organizational learning exerts a direct effect on administrative innovation efforts although, contrary to previous research, the mediating role of innovativeness is required for the former to affect technical innovation. The research also supports the influence of OI on the attainment of competitive advantages at the business level and in the performance of new services. The greater ability of KIBS to innovate thus constitutes an invaluable resource to foster customer performance and profitability at the business level and in the commercialization of new service offerings.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that entrepreneurial self-efficacy influences intentions and performance, but little research on ESE and actual activities. In this paper the possible dual impact of ESE on task effort is explored. On the one hand self-efficacy boosts motivation and persistence, but on the other hand high confidence in one's abilities can lead to decision-making shortcuts and reduced effort on key tasks (the overconfidence hypothesis). Propositions about the relationship between self-efficacy and effort on different types of tasks (action and judgment tasks) are developed and tested with a small sample of active entrepreneurs. Results support a positive impact of self-efficacy on effort regardless of the type of task, thereby raising questions about the overconfidence hypothesis. Understanding types of confidence (in one's ability, knowledge, and judgment) and effort (cognitive effort) may explain these results. Further research on these topics, and on entrepreneurial experience and the use of heuristics are suggested.

This study incorporates insights from both institutional and family socioemotional wealth perspectives with agency theory to examine the relationships among governance practices, family ownership, and information disclosure quality. Employing a sample of 516 publicly listed firms in Taiwan over a period of 5 years (2006–2010), we found that high levels of board independence and board activity have a significant positive effect on disclosure quality. Further, family ownership positively moderated the relationship between board independence and disclosure quality. This relationship is stronger with a higher level of family ownership. The results support the institutional proposition that family-owned firms that pursue socioemotional wealth are more likely to promote information transparency to gain legitimacy and enhance their reputations with outside stakeholders.

The development of artificial intelligence has created new opportunities and challenges in industries. The competition between robots and humans has elicited extensive attention among legal researchers. In this exploratory study, we addressed issues regarding the introduction of robots to the practice of legal service through a semistructured interviews with lawyers, judges, artificial intelligence experts, and potential clients. An extended robot lawyer technology acceptance model with five facets and 11 elements is proposed in this study. This model highlights two dimensions: ‘legal use’ and ‘perception of trust.’ In summary, this study provides new specific implications and exhibits three characteristics, namely, derivative, macroscopic, and instructive, in the legal services with artificial intelligence. In addition, artificial intelligence robot lawyers are being developed with some of the abilities necessary to substitute for human beings. Nevertheless, working with human lawyers is imperative to produce benefits from this type of reciprocity.