The aim of this study is to examine the influence of humble and empowering leader behaviors on the prosocial voice of subordinates. We also investigate subordinate power distance orientation as a possible moderator of this relationship and subordinate psychological empowerment as the underlying mechanism behind this moderated effect. Findings from 306 employees of a Korean business conglomerate indicated that humble and empowering leadership were positively related to the prosocial voice of subordinates, and the moderation effects of subordinates’ power distance orientation between these two types of leader behaviors and subordinates’ prosocial voice were fully mediated by the extent to which they felt psychologically empowered. Our findings indicated that the moderation for the main effect between leadership and voice was caused by the significant moderating effect in the indirect path between two main variables via psychological empowerment. We conclude by highlighting implications for management practice and identifying avenues for future research.

Within sparse studies available on ethnic privilege at work, the emphasis is dominantly on ethnic privileges available to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, heterosexual men and to a lesser extent white women. This paper presents and develops an Islamic and postcolonial perspective on ethnic privilege, which is unique not only due to contextual and cultural differences but also due to its postcolonial nature and composition. By postcolonial, the paper refers to cultural legacies of Arab colonialism and ideology in South Asia and elsewhere. Drawing on a qualitative study of Muslim female employees in Pakistan, the paper shows that religio-ethnic privilege represents postcolonial influences of a foreign (Arab-Salafi, ultra-orthodox Islamist) culture on a (non-Arab Muslim) society, and as such does not represent ethnic norms of a local mainstream society. The paper investigates the case of religio-ethnic privilege and female employment in Pakistan and examines how a foreign-influenced stereotype of female modesty is used to benchmark and preferentially treat ‘good Muslim women.’ The analysis shows that an Islamic and postcolonial lens may be needed to understand the nature and implications of religio-ethnic privilege at work in Muslim majority countries and societies.

This article acknowledges that strategising processes revolve around allowing for continual shifts in an uncertain environment to constructively shape the ways in which managers strategise. The research question pursued in this article is: ‘How do unforeseen events shape managerial strategising?’ The theoretical background for this article is inspired by research done within the strategy-as-practice and strategy-in-practice communities and uses concepts such as strategic intent, wayfinding/wayfaring and temporal work to explore how the managers from the small Danish Software Company cooperated with actors in the mining industry. This cooperation was initially perceived as an unforeseen event but, incrementally and retrospectively, it became strategic. The main theoretical and practice-anchored findings draw attention to the roles that unforeseen events can play in shaping strategising. These findings underline the significance of prioritising micro-founded actions carried out contextually by strategists when learning more about the who, what and how of strategising.

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.

We examine the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee silence behaviour with 324 employees in 16 state-owned manufacturing enterprises in China. We draw from theories of motivation and person–environment fit to explain the mediating roles of psychological safety and organization-based self-esteem, and the moderating effects of power distance orientation. Regression analyses show that authoritarian leadership has a positive relationship with employee silence behaviour. Mediation analyses show that both psychological safety and organization-based self-esteem partially mediate the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee silence. Moderation analysis revealed that the direct relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee silence behaviour is stronger for employees with high (as opposed to low) power distance orientation. Additionally, moderated-mediation analyses show that the mediating effects of both psychological safety and organization-based self-esteem are stronger for employees with low (as opposed to high) power distance orientation. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

The present study investigated the role of temporal flexibility on three conceptualizations of person–environment fit and job satisfaction. Data were collected from 320 full-time employees in Canada and America. Using structural equation modeling, it was found that temporal flexibility was directly related to increased job satisfaction and indirectly related to job satisfaction through supplementary fit, demands–abilities fit, and needs–supplies fit. Moreover, supplementary fit and demands–abilities fit were influential on perceptions of needs–supplies fit, although we acknowledge that additional research is required to further explore our novel findings of the relative relationships between the three conceptualizations of person–environment fit. The present research supports the idea that giving employees greater control over their schedule increases their autonomy, thus helping to satisfy a core psychological need. Organizations that provide employees with the opportunity to choose their own schedules may be more likely to retain satisfied and committed people who believe they fit well with their employer.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among human resource development (HRD) efforts, top management support, and employees’ attitudes (job satisfaction and organizational commitment) in the Korean context. Based on the Korean Human Capital Corporate Panel survey data, 3,899 responses from 159 large companies were analyzed by adopting hierarchical multiple regression analysis and a regression-based path analysis. The results indicated that HRD efforts positively affected organizational commitment through job satisfaction. In addition, job satisfaction had a moderated mediation effect on the interaction of HRD efforts and top management support on organization commitment. Finally, top management support moderates the relationship between HRD efforts and employees’ attitudes such that increased top management support for HRD efforts improves employees’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

With women representing nearly half of the workforce in Western countries, it is likely that a woman will have a woman manager and/or employees at some point during her working life. In our research, we worked collaboratively with 13 New Zealand women to develop personal and organisational responses when hierarchical relationships between women become strained. We identified four interlinked strategies at the personal and organisational level: developing awareness of the existence and nature of the conflict, enhancing personal and relational skills such as confidence and communication, building support networks within and outside the organisation, and finding acceptance when change is needed. Taking a gendered relational perspective, we propose that responses to a strained relationship need to be considered within the broader personal, organisational, societal and temporal context within which the relationship is situated. Therefore, we propose a more holistic relational and context-focussed framework to create an environment more conducive to understanding and positive change.

This panel study, conducted in a large Venezuelan organization, took advantage of a serendipitous opportunity to examine the organizational commitment profiles of employees before and after a series of dramatic, and unexpected, political events directed specifically at the organization. Two waves of organizational commitment data were collected, 6 months apart, from a sample of 152 employees. No evidence was found that employees’ continuance commitment to the organization was altered by the events described here. Interestingly, however, both affective and normative commitment increased significantly during the period of the study. Further, employee’s commitment profiles at Wave 2 were more differentiated than they were at Wave 1.

While Islam is the second largest religion in the world with 1.6 billion Muslims, there are variations in the interpretations of that law (i.e., Sharia). This diversity and variation may hold the key in explaining the different behaviours among Muslim entrepreneurs because of their views on the concept of work as worship. In this study, we examine how Malay entrepreneurs are guided in their sourcing and shaping of entrepreneurial opportunities through Shafii practice. Our contributions include identifying five central values that guided the participant’s sourcing of opportunities: Fardhu Kifayah (communal obligation), Wasatiyyah (balanced), Dakwah1 (the call of joining the good and forbidding the bad), Amanah (trust), and Barakah (blessings). We also contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how these macro-level values of worship gave the entrepreneurs confidence in creating their new ventures.

Play as practice literature has long been dominated by studies on the serious play. Focusing on a play that develops in artificial settings and requires managerial intervention, these studies overlook other playful manifestations, which are employee-driven and situated in the natural work habitat. This paper extends current play as practice reflections by adopting the notion of informal play as an alternative to prevailing views that espouses the employee rather than the managerial perspective. Drawing upon insights from play and practice literature, we incorporate five practice-based constructs into the systematic analysis of informal play in the world of work. We advance an integrative framework that highlights the constitutive relationships between the retained constructs and acknowledges different enactments of informal play for generating productive outcomes or cynically resisting authority. A multi-domain agenda for future inquiry that may contribute to a more nuanced understanding of informal play as practice in organizations concludes the paper.

This paper identifies how management’s intentional use of participatory management practices can heighten knowledge sharing across a multigenerational workforce through the presence of socio-technical flexibility. In this conceptualization, we identify the value of socio-technical flexibility to effective employee knowledge sharing in three steps. First, we define the prominent characteristics of the current multigenerational workforce. Second, we define the behavioral characteristics of socio-technical flexibility. Third, we describe how an intentional use of salient management practices, including reverse mentoring, flexible work roles, and self-managed teams optimizes multigenerational talents to enhance employee socio-technical flexibility, which in turn, leads to multigenerational knowledge sharing. We believe that by embracing the benefits of multigenerational workforce, management can take intentional steps to create a workplace that optimizes effective knowledge sharing behaviors for improved service through salient participatory management practices.

Futurists predict that a third of jobs that exist today could be taken by Smart Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Algorithms (STARA) by 2025. However, very little is known about how employees perceive these technological advancements in regards to their own jobs and careers, and how they are preparing for these potential changes. A new measure (STARA awareness) was created for this study that captures the extent to which employees feel their job could be replaced by these types of technology. Due to career progression and technology knowledge associated with age, we also tested age as a moderator of STARA. Using a mixed-methods approach on 120 employees, we tested STARA awareness on a range of job and well-being outcomes. Greater STARA awareness was negatively related to organisational commitment and career satisfaction, and positively related to turnover intentions, cynicism, and depression.

Diversity literature has demonstrated negative effects of surface-level diversity and positive effects of deep-level diversity. How do two types of diversity among cross national team members influence team knowledge sharing and team creativity? The purpose of this study is to explore conditions that leverage the positive and restrain the negative effects of team diversity on team knowledge sharing, which leads to team creativity. We expect inclusive climate as the significant condition and knowledge sharing as the profound intervening mechanism between team diversity and team creativity relationship. We tested the hypotheses with data from a sample of 60 cross-national research teams from several universities in China. The results support the hypothesized relationships among inclusive climate, team knowledge sharing, and team creativity. Our findings contribute to the advancement of team diversity and team creativity literature, and their theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Through two studies, this paper investigates the moderating effects of personality traits (i.e., extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism) and the mediating effect of psychological empowerment on the relationship between perceived transformational leadership and job satisfaction. Study 1 searches whether personality traits moderate the effects of perceived transformational leadership on followers’ job satisfaction. Using a sample of 221 R&D employees employed by information technology organizations, the results of Study 1 indicate that the more conscientious the employee, the stronger the relationship between perceived transformational leadership and job satisfaction. Study 2 explores whether psychological empowerment mediates the effects of perceived transformational leadership on followers’ job satisfaction. Based on data from 348 academics, the results support the mediating role of psychological empowerment on job satisfaction, in that when employees perceive their leader as transformational they feel more psychologically empowered, which in turn increases job satisfaction levels. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

This study examines the relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity with mediating role of trust in leader and moderating role of openness to experience. Data were collected from 205 supervisor–subordinate small textile firms across Pakistan. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the distinctiveness of variables used in our study. The results confirmed that ethical leadership promotes creativity at workplace, while trust in leader mediates the effect of ethical leadership on creativity. Furthermore, the results did not confirm the moderation of openness to experience on the relationship between trust in leader and employee creativity. The implications are discussed.

Firms today thrive on innovation. Knowledge exploration, the nonlocal search for new knowledge beyond the firm’s current expertise, is posited to be critical for innovation. This paper seeks to contribute to the research on knowledge exploration in two ways. First, this paper provides a comprehensive review of key empirical studies on knowledge exploration and innovation. Second, this paper proposes a recombinatory search framework of innovation to reconceptualise extant understanding of knowledge exploration on innovation. This new framework focusses on the evolution of the benefits and costs of knowledge exploration, and puts forward an inverse S-curve proposition between knowledge exploration and innovation. Two company cases, IBM and Procter & Gamble, are then used to illustrate the new proposition.

This research analyses the effects of the knowledge overlap between acquirer and target firms on the performance of technological mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Extending previous research that has focused on the quantitative characteristics of knowledge, this research introduces a framework capturing the effects of both the quantity and quality of knowledge in overlapped and nonoverlapped parts of the knowledge base on subsequent innovation performance. Analyzing a data set of 192 technological M&As of 162 high-technology firms from 2001 to 2009, the results show that a high quality of overlapped knowledge has a positive effect on subsequent innovation performance, while the effect is negative for nonoverlapped knowledge quality. In addition, this research investigates the influence of the knowledge quantity on subsequent innovation performance. The implication of this research is that the knowledge overlap in technological M&As is essential for acquiring high-quality knowledge from the target firm and for improving innovation performance.

This study investigates the diverse performance outcomes related to the bundles/components of high-performance work systems on the basis of ability–motivation–opportunity model. Using the primary data from 563 employees of 204 firms operating in India (collected during the time period between March, 2012 and January, 2013), the study has indicated that employees’ perceptions regarding the applicability of ability-enhancing, motivation-enhancing, and opportunity-enhancing human resource practices result in enhanced affective commitment and superior firm performance. The results have revealed that affective commitment fully mediates the relationship of opportunity-enhancing human resource practices with firm performance and partially mediates the relationships of ability-enhancing and motivation-enhancing human resource practices with firm performance. The study contributes in unlocking the ‘black box’ related to the high-performance work systems and firm performance relationship by stressing upon the importance of affective commitment as a mediator. Managerial implications and directions for future research are also discussed.

Numerous studies have investigated human resources as a source of sustained competitive advantage, indicating that the high-performance work systems created by certain human resource development and human resource management practices lead to greater firm performance. Though the mechanism by which this link exists remains a ‘black box,’ substantial evidence shows organizations benefit by adopting the human resource development and human resource management practices that lead to high-performance work systems. We discuss two divergent perspectives, institutional theory and resource-based view, and their impact on high-performance work systems. We argue that organizations adhering to tenets of institutional theory experience isomorphism in certain human resource development and human resource management practices, whereas resource-based view attributes create ways that firms differentiate their practices. We posit that to be competitive firms must balance the push–pull effect of institutional pressure with that of resource-based view differentiation.