Most recent papers:

• Another Post‐heroic View on Entrepreneurship: The Role of Employees in Networking the Start‐up Process.
  Timo Braun, Aristides I. Ferreira, Thomas Schmidt, Jörg Sydow.
  British Journal of Management. October 17, 2017
  Moving beyond the present post‐heroic perspective known from leadership and entrepreneurship research that emphasizes the importance of external context, we shift the focus from the entrepreneurial luminary and his or her core team to the entrepreneurial firm as an organization with employees. This organizational view captures the vital role of employees, in particular for deepening the external relationships of the firm. Towards this end, the authors investigate how three antecedents increase the organizational innovativeness of start‐ups: (i) the external relationships of the start‐up; (ii) the initiation and maintenance of such relationships through networking by entrepreneurs and employees; and (iii) the differentiation of hierarchical levels in this process. A survey‐based study drawing from the data of 96 entrepreneurs and 228 employees in start‐ups is conducted. To analyse the data, the authors tested the conditional indirect effects through a multilevel moderated mediation analysis. According to the results, interorganizational relationships (IORs) are particularly effective for entrepreneurial innovativeness if networking practices are pursued at the employee level. The collective involvement of employees in fact has a mediation effect compared with the individual efforts developed by the entrepreneur. These findings advance the post‐heroic perspective by emphasizing the distinctive role of employees in the utilization of IORs.

  October 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12256   open full text
• Feedback Loops as Dynamic Processes of Organizational Knowledge Creation in the Context of the Innovations’ Front‐end.
  Hammad Akbar, Yehuda Baruch, Nikolaos Tzokas.
  British Journal of Management. September 24, 2017
  Feedback loops are instrumental in the organizational knowledge creation (OKC) process across the highly uncertain and dynamic innovation's front‐end. Therefore, managers should be aware of how these loops unfold, how to recognize meaningful patterns and how to steer them towards planned and emergent outcomes. Easy to say, difficult to practise! This empirical paper focuses on knowledge–conceptualization – the new knowledge's generation‐crystallization journey – and develops a unique model of feedback loops as dynamic processes of OKC in the context of the innovations’ front‐end. Using ten qualitatively studied innovations, the authors identify five front‐end OKC stages (generation, evaluation, expansion, refinement and crystallization) and pattern these based on their overlaps to explore the associated feedback loops. This model distinctively illustrates increasing–decreasing, diverging–converging and frequent negative‐cum‐positive loops, and illuminates the complex and rich patterns of loops not captured before.

  September 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12251   open full text
• Stakeholder Corporate Social Responsibility Orientation Congruence, Entrepreneurial Orientation and Environmental Performance of Chinese Small and Medium‐sized Enterprises.
  Zhi Tang, Jintong Tang.
  British Journal of Management. September 20, 2017
  Stakeholder studies have discovered that strong stakeholder corporate social responsibility (CSR) orientation can motivate firms to engage better in environmental activities. However, when multiple stakeholders are involved, strong yet incongruent stakeholder pressure may not lead to improved environmental performance. The authors integrate complexity science with stakeholder management theory to address this issue. Using a sample of 149 Chinese small and medium‐sized enterprises, they find that the average stakeholder's CSR orientation improves environmental strengths, but generates an inverted U‐shaped relationship with environmental concerns. Further, results indicate that the congruence in stakeholders’ CSR orientation enhances this inverted U‐shaped relationship, and that the moderating impact of congruence is weaker when entrepreneurial orientation is higher.

  September 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12255   open full text
• Microfoundations of Small Business Tax Behaviour: A Capability Perspective.
  Martina Battisti, David Deakins.
  British Journal of Management. September 14, 2017
  Small business tax behaviour has received surprisingly little attention. We argue that an organizational capability perspective using microfoundations will allow us to better understand the relationships between different drivers and the dynamics of small business tax behaviour. This study draws on in‐depth interviews with 42 small business owners who are matched with the firms’ factual tax compliance status. Using grounded theory, we build a framework that (a) identifies different microfoundations of small business capability to manage tax and (b) explains the dynamic nature of the relationship between organizational capability and compliance. Findings suggest that high capability does not necessarily translate into high tax compliance and this relationship is mediated by the owner‐managers’ perceptions of taxation as well changes in the economic and regulatory environment.

  September 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12244   open full text
• Governance and Well‐being in Academia: Negative Consequences of Applying an Agency Theory Logic in Higher Education.
  Monica Franco‐Santos, Michael Nalick, Pilar Rivera‐Torres, Luis Gomez‐Mejia.
  British Journal of Management. September 14, 2017
  This study examines the relationship between alternative university governance practices and staff well‐being. Specifically, it investigates how people in academic and professional services roles are managed and how various governance mechanisms such as the use of performance measures and targets influence their sense of vitality and stress. Drawing from agency theory and stewardship theory research, the authors expected universities to align their governance practices to the nature of their employment roles to enhance well‐being. Based on data collected in the UK, the authors find that, for some academic roles, there is a misalignment between the responsibilities and job demands and the way institutions govern people in such roles, which is shown to affect their well‐being. These results suggest that well‐being responses to governance mechanisms change, depending on the role an employee performs and the position he or she occupies. Interestingly, these data suggest that the governance and well‐being experiences of academic leaders are more closely aligned with those of professional service leaders than with those of academics without leadership positions. Taking these data together, this investigation notes several shortcomings in the internal governance practices of higher‐education institutions that can have unexpected consequences and require close attention and further research.

  September 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12249   open full text
• Institutions and the Diversity and Prevalence of Multinationals’ Knowledge‐Augmenting Subsidiaries.
  Matthew M. C. Allen, Maria L. Allen, Knut Lange.
  British Journal of Management. August 16, 2017
  Multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly seek to gain access to, and exploit, locationally specific sources of advanced knowledge and technological capabilities, creating a need to explain (1) the diversity among these facilities and (2) how institutions influence MNCs’ abilities to invest in different subsidiary types. Extending debates on firms’ knowledge‐augmenting activities, the authors integrate institutions into their analytical framework to a greater extent than previous work has done. Moreover, existing contributions provide typologies of R&D subsidiaries. In contrast, the authors focus on a particular subset of subsidiaries, knowledge‐augmenting ones, and put forward a theory to explain their variety and their prevalence, enabling them to identify previously neglected subsidiary types that have important managerial and policy implications. By downplaying the diversity of these subsidiaries, existing work has not been able to capture the full range of managerial challenges as well as the costs and benefits of different subsidiary types to host countries. The authors, therefore, problematize firms’ abilities to gain access to foreign knowledge‐generating assets, highlight the importance of institutional environments, provide policy recommendations and identify areas for future research.

  August 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12242   open full text
• The Potential of Labour−Management Partnership: A Longitudinal Case Analysis.
  Stewart Johnstone, Adrian Wilkinson.
  British Journal of Management. August 08, 2017
  Issues of labour−management cooperation have long attracted the attention of management researchers, practitioners and policymakers. In Britain, the most recent wave of interest has been under the rubric of labour−management partnership, normally concerning the development of cooperative relations between unions and employers. A recurring theme is that cooperative relations can be difficult to develop and sustain, especially in liberal market economies. This paper advances the debate by examining the dynamics of labour−management partnership within the context of a British financial services organization over a 25‐year period. Drawing upon empirical case study data collected between 1990 and 2014, we assess the dynamics of the relationship between a building society and the recognized staff union. We confirm the possibility of sustaining collaborative relationships associated with a mutual gains agenda within a liberal market economy as well as the fragility of such arrangements. While we acknowledge that sustaining cooperative regimes can be difficult, we also caution against the tendency towards institutional determinism and underplaying of agency in many of the partnership critiques. Given the lack of a credible alternative, we conclude that labour−management partnership remains an important public policy goal and should not be dismissed as a chimera.

  August 08, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12240   open full text
• Foreign Competition and Innovation: The Mediating Role of Imitation.
  Tianjiao Xia, Xiaohui Liu.
  British Journal of Management. July 27, 2017
  This study examines the extent to which foreign competition affects the innovation performance of domestic firms through imitation, given firms’ absorptive capacity. In analysing longitudinal firm‐level data from the UK, we find a mediating effect of imitation on the relationship between foreign competition and local firms’ innovation performance, and an inverted U‐shaped relationship between imitation and the innovation performance of local firms. Our findings further reveal that absorptive capacity moderates the mediating effect of imitation, diminishing innovation gains at moderate levels of imitation and mitigating the diminishing innovation performance at high levels of imitation.

  July 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12236   open full text
• Corporate Governance and Tobin's Q as a Measure of Organizational Performance.
  Satwinder Singh, Naeem Tabassum, Tamer K. Darwish, Georgios Batsakis.
  British Journal of Management. July 27, 2017
  This empirical study examines the relationship between corporate governance and organizational performance (OP), measured using Tobin's Q (TQ) in the context of an emerging economy for which, as yet, only a handful of studies have been conducted. We employ a system generalized method of moments approach controlling for endogeneity and test it on a newly created dataset comprising 324 listed firms in Pakistan. We find that board size, number of board committees and ownership concentration are positively linked with high TQ ratio, whilst board independence and CEO duality display a negative relationship. In terms of moderating effects, we find that ownership concentration negatively moderates the relationship between board independence and OP, as well as that of CEO duality and OP. The relationship between the number of board committees and OP is positively moderated by ownership concentration. Our findings contribute towards a better articulation and application of a more concrete measure of OP − that of the TQ ratio − whilst, at the same time, testing the board composition–performance relationship in the context of an upcoming and increasingly important emerging market. Wider applicability of results and policy implications are discussed.

  July 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12237   open full text
• The Exploration Phase of Replication Strategies: The Role of Autonomous Action for Reverse Knowledge Flows.
  Martin Friesl, Joanne Larty.
  British Journal of Management. July 27, 2017
  Replication strategies rely on the exploration of new knowledge. An important source of new knowledge is the transfer of unit level experience to headquarters, a process referred to as reverse knowledge flows. Such knowledge flows are fraught with difficulty as formal mechanisms often break down due to diverging business interests of unit and headquarters managers. This study brings together research on knowledge stickiness and autonomous action to provide a new avenue for understanding reverse knowledge flows. By drawing on an exploratory study of a franchise network, we provide an insight into how autonomous action reduces initiation stickiness but potentially increases implementation stickiness. Our analysis suggests that the role of autonomous action for reverse knowledge flows is moderated by unit managers’ resource expectations that emerge as a result of autonomous action. Exploring the interplay of autonomous action and knowledge stickiness provides new explanatory means for understanding reverse knowledge flows in replicator organizations.

  July 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12239   open full text
• Re‐examining the Glass Cliff Hypothesis using Survival Analysis: The Case of Female CEO Tenure.
  Eahab Elsaid, Nancy D. Ursel.
  British Journal of Management. July 27, 2017
  We use the glass cliff to study the appointment and employment duration of 193 female CEOs between 1992 and 2014 in a sample of large, small and mid‐size North American firms. Consistent with the glass cliff, we find that women are appointed as CEOs in precarious situations. However, we find female CEOs are 40% less likely to face turnover at any point after appointment than male CEOs. This conflicts with an implication of the glass cliff and differs significantly from existing research which shows that female CEOs have only a slightly lower risk of turnover than male CEOs. Our larger, more recent sample captures changes in the labour market that explain the departure from the results of earlier studies. We find evidence that the lower turnover rate of female CEOs is related to firms’ desire to avoid the negative publicity that would accompany their termination, and we also show that greater education has a positive impact on CEO job security.

  July 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12241   open full text
• Essential Micro‐foundations for Contemporary Business Operations: Top Management Tangible Competencies, Relationship‐based Business Networks and Environmental Sustainability.
  Pervaiz Akhtar, Zaheer Khan, Jędrzej George Frynas, Ying Kei Tse, Rekha Rao‐Nicholson.
  British Journal of Management. June 28, 2017
  Although various studies have emphasized linkages between firm competencies, networks and sustainability at organizational level, the links between top management tangible competencies (TMTCs) (e.g. contemporary relevant quantitative‐focused education such as big data analytics and data‐driven applications linked with the internet of things, relevant experience and analytical business applications), relationship‐based business networks (RBNs) and environmental sustainability have not been well established at micro‐level, and there is a literature gap in terms of investigating these relationships. This study examines these links based on the unique data collected from 175 top management representatives (chief executive officers and managing directors) working in food import and export firms headquartered in the UK and New Zealand. Our results from structural equation modelling indicate that TMTCs are the key determinants for building RBNs, mediating the correlation between TMTCs and environmental sustainability. Directly, the competencies also play a vital role towards environmental practices. The findings further depict that relationship‐oriented firms perform better compared to those which focus less on such networks. Consequently, our findings provide a deeper understanding of the micro‐foundations of environmental sustainability based on TMTCs rooted in the resource‐based view and RBNs entrenched in social network theory. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings, and we provide suggestions for future research.

  June 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12233   open full text
• Do Parent Units Benefit from Reverse Knowledge Transfer?
  Smitha R. Nair, Mehmet Demirbag, Kamel Mellahi, Kishore Gopalakrishna Pillai.
  British Journal of Management. June 12, 2017
  Emerging market multinationals resort to knowledge acquisitions from their overseas subsidiaries to springboard and realize their global ambitions. Drawing from the knowledge‐based view and social capital perspective, this study explores the effects of organizational collaboration and tacitness on multiple dimensions of reverse knowledge transfer (RKT). Data were collected through a survey, from senior and middle level managers of parent Indian multinationals, pertaining to RKT from their overseas subsidiaries. The hypotheses are analysed using partial least squares modelling. The results demonstrate positive effects between the extent and benefits of RKT. Collaboration was found to have a positive influence on both dimensions of RKT. Tacitness also has a positive impact on the benefits from RKT. The implications of the findings and the limitations of the study are discussed along with suggestions for future research.

  June 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12234   open full text
• The Role of Local Context in the Cross‐border Acquisitions by Emerging Economy Multinational Enterprises.
  Peter J. Buckley, Surender Munjal.
  British Journal of Management. May 25, 2017
  This paper explores the role of local context in cross‐border acquisitions by emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs). It argues that the importance of local context has remained despite the increased global integration of the world economy. Hypotheses are tested using data on Indian acquisitions hosted in 70 countries over an eight‐year period. Results, which are consistent across number and value of cross‐border acquisitions, show that the local context in host countries offers contrasting benefits. Emerging economy multinational enterprises exploited these benefits by embedding in host countries through acquisitions. The acquisition strategy is conventional in the motives underpinning internationalization, but novel in its geographical clustering of host countries, and idiosyncratic owing to the EMNE's ability to draw on home country embeddedness. The paper develops theoretical implications and extends the concept of embeddedness, treating it as a series of internalization or quasi‐internalization decisions across a variety of local contexts by multinationals.

  May 25, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12231   open full text
• International Journal of Management Reviews Special Issue 2019 Paradoxes.
  
  British Journal of Management. May 12, 2017
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  May 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12238   open full text
• The Interplay Between Employee and Firm Customer Orientation: Substitution Effect and the Contingency Role of Performance‐Related Rewards.
  Dennis Herhausen, Luigi M. Luca, Michael Weibel.
  British Journal of Management. May 11, 2017
  This paper identifies and explains a potential tension between a firm's emphasis on customer orientation (CO) and the extent to which employees value CO as a success factor for individual performance. Based on self‐determination theory and CO implementation research, the authors propose that firm CO may represent both autonomous and controlled motivations for CO, but that employees’ CO is more strongly linked to individual performance when employees experience solely autonomous motivation. Hence, the authors expect a substitution effect whereby the link between employees’ CO and their performance is weaker when firm CO is high. Furthermore, the authors examine a boundary condition for the previous hypothesis and propose that performance‐contingent rewards have a positive effect on the internalization of the extrinsic motivation stemming from firm CO. Two multilevel studies with 979 employees and 201 top management team members from 132 firms support these hypotheses. Against previous research, these findings offer a new perspective on the effectiveness of CO initiatives, propose employees’ motivational states as the theoretical explanation for the heterogeneity in the link between employee CO and performance, and reappraise the role of performance‐contingent rewards in CO research. Managerial implications for the effective implementation of customer‐oriented initiatives within firms are provided.

  May 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12230   open full text
• Vocabularies of Motive and Temporal Perspectives: Examples of Pension Fund Engagement and Disengagement.
  Anna Tilba, John F. Wilson.
  British Journal of Management. May 09, 2017
  Prior research on institutional investors’ role in corporate governance draws a distinction between engaged and disengaged pension funds. The aim of this study was to shed more light on how pension fund practitioners talk about engagement and disengagement. Using insights from 35 in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews and round‐table discussions with pension fund trustees, executives, investment officers and financial intermediaries, we identify different types of vocabularies and temporal perspectives used to account for different stances towards engagement. We highlight a tension between a seemingly causal relationship between accounts and future behaviour and argue that these ‘accounts’, ‘vocabularies’ and ‘uses of the past’ in themselves need to be treated as an object of study because they may represent not simply the individual motivations but rather the expressions of extant norms in the broader social context of financial markets. An important policy implication is that perceived realities of investment are unlikely to cause a change in pension fund behaviour because participants seem to decouple their view of the world from their impact on the world.

  May 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12225   open full text
• Enabling Social Identity Interaction: Bulgarian Migrant Entrepreneurs Building Embeddedness into a Transnational Network.
  Stoyan Stoyanov.
  British Journal of Management. May 03, 2017
  Bulgarian migrant entrepreneurs (MEs) approaching diaspora networks (i.e. ethnic spaces in host countries) provides a unique context for exploring the processes by which peripheral actors achieve embeddedness. The study considers how in‐group social norms and expectations influence out‐group candidates’ network standing. The integration of the social identity perspective with embeddedness research allows the identification of the sequence of intergroup actions and the circulation of identity signals between groups. Traditionally, the social identity perspective focuses on the act of constructing identity through positively stereotyping in‐groups and negatively stereotyping out‐groups. Nevertheless, an empirical study of 12 cases of Bulgarian MEs indicates that the circulation of identity signals that facilitate inter‐group comparison can result in complementarity and brokerage. The study suggests the existence of a novel strategy (i.e. social circulation), to add to already known social identity strategies (i.e. social mobility, social creativity and social change). In contrast to previous constructs, the new one does not occur at the expense of either in‐groups’ or out‐groups’ identity. Thus, it adopts an integrative logic, currently missing from the social identity perspective.

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12235   open full text
• Regional Headquarter’s Dual Agency Role: Micro‐political Strategies of Alignment and Self‐interest.
  Kieran M. Conroy, David G. Collings, Johanna Clancy.
  British Journal of Management. May 03, 2017
  The increased research focus on the networked perspective of the multinational enterprise (MNE) reflects a greater delegation of responsibility from corporate headquarters (CHQ) to subsidiary and intermediary units such as regional headquarters (RHQ). This shift has increased the intensity of political interactions between key actors within the MNE. Despite the recent rise in studies on the micro‐political perspective of the MNE to date, little empirical work has explored this issue in the context of the CHQ–RHQ relationship. Drawing insights from agency theory and micro‐politics, the authors focus on the context in which RHQs develop micro‐political strategies in order to manage the flow and exchange of knowledge with CHQ. They show how RHQ may exhibit a ‘dual agency’ role when dealing with CHQ, in that it is characterized as a principal and agent, each requiring different micro‐political knowledge strategies. As a principal, RHQ will develop micro‐political knowledge strategies to increase alignment with CHQ. As an agent, RHQ develops micro‐political knowledge strategies to pursue its self‐interests. Having identified different RHQ agency roles, the authors develop a conceptual model that outlines how alignment and self‐interest‐seeking behaviours from RHQ are manifest through different micro‐political knowledge strategies in its agency relationship with CHQ.

  May 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12232   open full text
• Relational Ownership and CEO Continuity: A Property Rights Perspective.
  Hossam Zeitoun, Paolo Pamini.
  British Journal of Management. April 03, 2017
  Inspired by agency theory, research on Chief Executive Officer (CEO) succession often focuses on turnovers as a mechanism to discipline CEOs in the event of poor firm performance. Recent research extends this view by showing that CEO turnovers can also lead to substantial disruption in a firm's management. Less is known, however, about the antecedents of disruption and continuity in the context of CEO turnovers. Drawing on modern property rights theory, we investigate how CEO continuity varies across different types of firms. Using a sample of Swiss publicly traded firms, we find that relational ownership enhances the likelihood of CEOs staying in office or moving to the position of board chair. Firms with little relational ownership, in contrast, display a high degree of CEO continuity only when capital intensity is high. Provided that a CEO turnover occurs, relational ownership and capital intensity reduce the likelihood of interim CEO successions. These findings highlight the importance of a nuanced view of CEO continuity, taking into account owner types as well as contextual factors.

  April 03, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12223   open full text
• Do Chief Executives’ Traits Affect the Financial Performance of Risk‐trading Firms? Evidence from the UK Insurance Industry.
  Mike Adams, Wei Jiang.
  British Journal of Management. March 28, 2017
  We examine the effects of four key dimensions of Chief Executive Officers’ (CEOs’) traits on six financial performance metrics using panel data for 1999−2012 drawn from the UK's property−casualty insurance industry. We find that CEO insurance experience and CEO financial expertise enhance financial performance, while two other CEO traits − power and age − are generally not significant. Our results thus reinforce the importance of CEO insurance industry expertise and CEO financial expertise in the management and trading of risks. Our results have potential commercial and policy implications.

  March 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12222   open full text
• Choice of Structure, Business Model and Portfolio: Organizational Models of Knowledge Transfer Offices in British Universities.
  Abhijit Sengupta, Amit S. Ray.
  British Journal of Management. March 19, 2017
  This paper addresses the gap in the knowledge transfer literature around how universities choose specific organizational models for their knowledge transfer offices (KTOs). Organization theory points towards strong interlinkages between strategy, structure and processes in organizations. This motivates an exploration of similar links within the organizational setup of KTOs. In doing so, the paper provides a unified theoretical framework around a university's choice of structure, business model and strategic preferences for their KTOs linked to university‐specific contextual factors. A qualitative approach is used wherein four very distinct British universities are examined as individual case studies. The authors find that strategic aims of the university around practitioner engagement, the quantity of applied research and research specialization are key factors in determining the organizational characteristics of the KTO. The theoretical framework derived from the cases makes two key contributions to the university knowledge transfer literature. First, it links the university‐level contextual factors to the local model of knowledge transfer. Second, it allows us to develop a set of generic models of knowledge transfer, which can potentially guide universities to develop their own specific models.

  March 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12224   open full text
• Advancing Gendered Analyses of Entrepreneurship: A Critical Exploration of Entrepreneurial Activity among Gay Men and Lesbian Women.
  Susan Marlow, Francis J. Greene, Alex Coad.
  British Journal of Management. March 19, 2017
  This paper advances contemporary gendered analyses of entrepreneurial activity by exploring self‐employment amongst gay men and lesbian women. Within current entrepreneurial debate, heterosexual women have become the visible embodiment of the gendered subject. Our contribution is to queer this assumption when focusing upon the entrepreneurial activity of gays and lesbians. Our core question investigates if ‘there is evidence of differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals in their likelihood of being entrepreneurially active’. To address this question, we contrast competing notions of gender stereotypes and discrimination whilst drawing on findings from a large‐scale population‐based study of 163,000 UK adults. We find few differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals; this persists after examining intersectional patterns and considering if gay and lesbian entrepreneurs choose particular sectors, geographies or forms of self‐employment. As our discussion highlights, the value of this study lies within its critique of contemporary analyses of gender which assume it is an end‐point rather than a foundation for analysing gender as a multiplicity.

  March 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12221   open full text
• Bricolage and Identity Work.
  Klaasjan Visscher, Stefan Heusinkveld, Joe O'Mahoney.
  British Journal of Management. March 17, 2017
  Lévi‐Strauss’ concept of bricolage has been used widely in a variety of management and organizational studies to highlight creative ‘situational tinkering’. Yet, we know little about ‘the bricoleur’ beyond the assumption of a functional agent responding to conditions of resource scarcity or environmental complexity. As such, studies offer limited possibilities in explaining the occurrence of bricolage in the absence of external demands, or much about who the bricoleur is. Drawing on 136 in‐depth interviews with management consultants, this study argues for a richer understanding of bricolage by exploring the identity of the bricoleur. In doing so, the paper achieves three outcomes. First, it uses the original symbolic and cultural insights of bricolage made by Lévi‐Strauss to detail how bricoleur identities are constructed; Second, it highlights how different organizational strategies enable and constrain the pursuit of bricoleur identities; Finally, it emphasizes the bricoleur's status as primarily an aspirational elite identity in the context of consultancy work, in contrast to its usual treatment as a ‘low status’ activity.

  March 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12220   open full text
• From politically naïve to politically mature: conceptualizing leaders’ political maturation journey.
  Elena Doldor.
  British Journal of Management. March 14, 2017
  This paper contributes to the literature on organizational politics and leadership. Current studies of leaders’ engagement in politics neglect notions of learning and development. The current paper aims to overcome this shortcoming by providing a developmental perspective on leaders’ engagement in organizational politics. Using in‐depth qualitative interviews with leaders at different seniority levels, the study examines developmental patterns in leaders’ willingness and ability to engage in organizational politics. The inductive findings inform a three‐stage model of political maturation, providing insights into the developmental nature of political will and political skill. Drawing on leadership skill and adult development literature, the paper posits that political maturation entails not only changes in leaders’ observable skills and behaviours, but also deep‐structure changes in mindsets and cognitive scripts regarding engagement in organizational politics. Furthermore, findings demonstrate the roles of experience and significant others in facilitating learning about organizational politics. The paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of this dynamic, developmental perspective.

  March 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12219   open full text
• Making ‘Critical Performativity’ Concrete: Sumantra Ghoshal and Linkages between the Mainstream and the Critical.
  Paul K. Edwards.
  British Journal of Management. March 02, 2017
  Critical performativity (CP) advocates direct engagement with managerial practice to promote social change while being subversive of a focus on efficiency. Its critique of efficiency needs to be reconsidered: there can be a common real interest in efficiency, and addressing efficiency does not entail an uncritical acceptance of a managerial agenda. Taking this step allows CP to engage with more conventional views. Two kinds of such views can be distinguished, the unitarist, which stresses common interests, and the pluralist, which allows for diverging interests. The work of the mainstream scholar Sumantra Ghoshal illustrates an effort to move beyond unitarism towards a more pluralist position. He developed a ‘good theory of management’ that aimed to address efficiency, but also the quality of jobs. Appraisal of this theory from the perspective of real interests points to limitations, but also ways in which it can be given a critical edge. The result is an analysis that advances that strand of CP that seeks to make specific interventions in concrete organizational practice.

  March 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12227   open full text
• Effect of Organizational Identity Change on Integration Approaches in Acquisitions: Role of Organizational Dominance.
  Tian Wei, Jeremy Clegg.
  British Journal of Management. March 02, 2017
  The main focus of this study is the role that organizational dominance in organizational identity change plays in shaping integration approaches in acquisitions. Using four in‐depth case studies, this study categorizes the organizational identity change process into three stages: forms of resistance; conformation of new organizational identity; and integration approaches. The authors first identify two distinct roles of organizational dominance in organizational identity change after acquisition: multilevel resistance and power struggles, which are the prerequisites for developing integration approaches, according to the social identity theory. Second, they further investigate the conformation of new organizational identity with each of these two roles. They conclude that target firms completely lose their organizational identity when there is high organizational dominance after the acquisition. Conversely, target firms work with acquirers in developing integration approaches, and the power winner dominates the integration when there is low organizational dominance. Third, this study contributes to the understanding of integration approaches by connecting three specific integration approaches to the changed organizational identity. The study contributes to the literature on both organizational identity change and acquisition.

  March 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12226   open full text
• Exploration and Firm Performance: The Moderating Impact of Competitive Strategy.
  Zhongfeng Su, Hai Guo, Wei Sun.
  British Journal of Management. March 01, 2017
  In this study we examine the moderating effect of competitive strategy (including differentiation and cost‐leadership strategies) on the relationship between exploration and firm performance. We find that the moderating effect of differentiation strategy is positive while that of cost‐leadership strategy is negative. And, these moderating effects are stronger in a highly competitive context. This study offers an explanation for previous mixed findings on the linkage of exploration to firm performance and enriches the discipline's knowledge regarding the performance implications of exploration. Moreover, we respond directly to the appeal in research on competitive strategy to clarify the role played by competitive strategy in profiting from exploration.

  March 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12218   open full text
• Equity Ownership in Cross‐border Mergers and Acquisitions by British Firms: An Analysis of Real Options and Transaction Cost Factors.
  Mohammad F. Ahammad, Vitor Leone, Shlomo Y. Tarba, Keith W. Glaister, Ahmad Arslan.
  British Journal of Management. February 19, 2017
  The authors investigate the factors influencing the share of equity ownership sought in cross‐border mergers and acquisitions (CBM&As). Drawing on real options theory and transaction cost economics (TCE), they address and hypothesize key factors linked to commitment under exogenous uncertainty and the separation of desired and non‐desired assets’ influence on share of equity sought by acquiring firms in CBM&As. Empirical analysis based on 1872 CBM&As undertaken by British firms in both developed and emerging economies shows that British MNEs are more likely to pursue a partial acquisition in a target foreign firm when those foreign firms are from culturally distant countries. Further, findings support the view that the high cost of separating desired assets from non‐desired assets motivates firms to make a partial acquisition rather than acquire the target completely. This is one of the first studies to use real options theory to address the cost of commitment under exogenous uncertainty, as well as TCE logic to address the separation of desired and non‐desired assets in the target firm while analysing equity ownership sought in CBM&As. Empirically, this paper contributes by examining CBM&As by British firms in both developed and emerging markets.

  February 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12215   open full text
• Examining Facilitative Configurations of Entrepreneurially Oriented Growth: An Information Processing Perspective.
  Claudine Kearney, Sohrab Soleimanof, William J. Wales.
  British Journal of Management. February 19, 2017
  This study examines how the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm growth is shaped by learning orientation in technologically sophisticated environments. We draw upon an information processing perspective that emphasizes alignment between information processing demands and support mechanisms. Using data from 116 small to medium‐sized enterprises in the Netherlands, we observe that the ability of entrepreneurial orientation to drive firm growth greatly depends on the joint consideration of technological sophistication and learning orientation. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of how configurations of strategic orientations and environmental considerations work in concert to influence the efficacy of organizational entrepreneurial efforts dramatically.

  February 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12217   open full text
• Coopetition in New Product Development Alliances: Advantages and Tensions for Incremental and Radical Innovation.
  Ricarda B. Bouncken, Viktor Fredrich, Paavo Ritala, Sascha Kraus.
  British Journal of Management. January 26, 2017
  Coopetition (collaboration between competitors) can facilitate product innovation, but there is still debate about how it is suited to radical or incremental innovation. This paper argues that the early and later phases of coopetitive new product development (NPD) pose different benefits and risks for the innovation types. Building on the tensions approach to value creation and appropriation, we develop a series of hypotheses on the role of coopetition in NPD alliances and focal firm's innovation output. The hypotheses are tested on a quantitative data set of 1049 NPD alliances in the German medical and machinery sectors. The results show that, while coopetition is advantageous for incremental innovation in both pre‐launch and launch phases, radical innovation benefits from coopetition in the launch phase only.

  January 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12213   open full text
• How Leaders Affect Followers’ Work Engagement and Performance: Integrating Leader−Member Exchange and Crossover Theory.
  Daniela Gutermann, Nale Lehmann‐Willenbrock, Diana Boer, Marise Born, Sven C. Voelpel.
  British Journal of Management. January 26, 2017
  Drawing on leader−member exchange and crossover theory, this study examines how leaders’ work engagement can spread to followers, highlighting the role of leader−member exchange as an underlying explanatory process. Specifically, we investigate if leaders who are highly engaged in their work have better relationships with their followers, which in turn can explain elevated employee engagement. For this purpose, we surveyed 511 employees nested in 88 teams and their team leaders in a large service organization. Employees and supervisors provided data in this multi‐source design. Furthermore, we asked the employees to report their annual performance assessment. We tested our model using multilevel path analyses in Mplus. As hypothesized, leaders’ work engagement enhanced leader−member exchange quality, which in turn boosted employee engagement (mediation model). Moreover, employee engagement was positively linked to performance and negatively linked to turnover intentions. As such, our multilevel field study connects the dots between work engagement research and the leadership literature. We identify leaders’ work engagement as a key to positive leader−follower relationships and a means for promoting employee engagement and performance. Promoting work engagement at the managerial level may be a fruitful starting point for fostering an organizational culture of engagement.

  January 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12214   open full text
• Expanding the Notion of Dialogic Trading Zones for Impactful Research: The Case of Women on Boards Research.
  Ruth Sealy, Elena Doldor, Susan Vinnicombe, Siri Terjesen, Deirdre Anderson, Doyin Atewologun.
  British Journal of Management. January 19, 2017
  Debates about research impact highlight the importance of involving practitioners in research processes but are unclear as to how precisely to foster this dialogue. This paper considers how dialogic encounter can be encouraged through ‘trading zones’ where academics and practitioners collaborate. We draw on our experience of conducting research on women on boards for over 15 years to examine (a) how we established and evolved our role within trading zones in this field, achieving impact on policy and business practice, and (b) how we interfaced between trading zones and the academic field, thereby enabling cross‐fertilization of ideas between academics and practitioners. We contribute to literature on research impact by empirically examining and critically evaluating the key characteristics of trading zones. First, trading zones are theorized to be action‐oriented. Our analysis reveals how multiple stakeholders collectively redefine the action goals, illustrating the need to expand our understanding of relevant ‘practitioners’ beyond managers. Second, we find that durability of trading zones is crucial because it enables gestation of ideas and reframing problems. Third, we problematize the notion of psychological safety in trading zones, arguing that dialogic capability and the pursuit of impact require acceptance of trade‐offs and political manoeuvrings.

  January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12203   open full text
• Operationalizing Deep Structural Sustainability in Business: Longitudinal Immersion as Extensive Engaged Scholarship.
  Peter Wells, Paul Nieuwenhuis.
  British Journal of Management. January 19, 2017
  This paper offers an innovative perspective on engaged scholarship as multiple, cumulative interactions between academia and external organizations in the business and policy realms. A definition of longitudinal immersion is positioned relative to the extant literature on academic engagement as a dialectic relationship between academic research and the praxis of business and society. Using a case study of a specific academic theoretical concept, we seek to demonstrate how over a period of some 25 years the ideas and practice of deep structural sustainability have co‐evolved through a process of reflexivity. Drawing from critical management studies and design science we give a different perspective on the processes and mechanisms of engagement and the question of the nature of impact. Notwithstanding the challenges thus presented to researchers in nurturing the ability for informed creativity, it is concluded that future opportunities for engagement and impact may be captured by a longer‐term, value‐driven and less episodic approach to the entire research process.

  January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12201   open full text
• Embedding Impact in Engaged Research: Developing Socially Useful Knowledge through Dialogical Sensemaking.
  Ann L. Cunliffe, Giuseppe Scaratti.
  British Journal of Management. January 19, 2017
  This paper explores how we can embed impact in research to generate socially useful knowledge. Our contribution lies in proposing a form of engaged research that draws upon situated knowledge and encompasses dialogical sensemaking as a way of making experience sensible in collaborative researcher−practitioner conversations. We draw attention to the intricacies of doing socially useful research and illustrate how five conversational resources can be used within dialogical sensemaking through an example of a research project in which impact and relevance were embedded and where researchers and practitioners worked together to resolve an important social and organizational issue.

  January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12204   open full text
• The Impactful Academic: Relational Management Education as an Intervention for Impact.
  Lisa Anderson, Paul Ellwood, Charlotte Coleman.
  British Journal of Management. January 19, 2017
  We widen the scope of the impact debate by extending Boyer's theorization of scholarship through Denyer, Tranfield and van Aken's CIMO framework to propose relational management education as an intervention that creates the generative mechanism of co‐production and subsequent impact. In so doing, we propose a new conceptualization of academic impact that occurs through teaching and is situated within a community of inquirers. We offer a critique of current thinking, dominated by the idea that the research paper is the most appropriate unit of analysis by which to measure the excellence and impact of research. We examine the notion of the gap between academics and practitioners and argue that the impact agenda should be widened to include a consideration of how management academics can become impactful through their teaching of practitioners, broadly defined to include the whole range of learners associated with business schools. We propose that for management research to have the potential to change these practitioners, an engagement with knowledge is needed, and that this involves more than translation but the creation of new ideas. Such impact can be brought about by a disruption of, and challenge to, thinking engendered by an approach to management education that we term relational.

  January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12202   open full text
• Impact and Management Research: Exploring Relationships between Temporality, Dialogue, Reflexivity and Praxis.
  Robert MacIntosh, Nic Beech, Jean Bartunek, Katy Mason, Bill Cooke, David Denyer.
  British Journal of Management. January 19, 2017
  This paper introduces the special issue focusing on impact. We present the four papers in the special issue and synthesize their key themes, including dialogue, reflexivity and praxis. In addition, we expand on understandings of impact by exploring how, when and for whom management research creates impact and we elaborate four ideal types of impact by articulating both the constituencies for whom impact occurs and the forms it might take. We identify temporality as critical to a more nuanced conceptualization of impact and suggest that some forms of impact are performative in nature. We conclude by suggesting that management as a discipline would benefit from widening the range of comparator disciplines to include disciplines such as art, education and nursing where practice, research and scholarship are more overtly interwoven.

  January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12207   open full text
• Symbolic Management and the Glass Cliff: Evidence from the Boardroom Careers of Female and Male Directors.
  Brian G. M. Main, Ian Gregory‐Smith.
  British Journal of Management. January 13, 2017
  This paper uses archival board data to demonstrate that women who take positions as directors of UK companies have shorter tenures than their male counterparts. The authors show that female directors face a much higher risk of dismissal as they approach nine years of service on the board, when their long service deprives them of the all‐important classification as ‘independent’. At this point, their position on the board becomes precarious. Male directors do not suffer the same increase in boardroom exit. This gender‐specific difference is clearly shown to be linked to the independence status. It is argued that these observations are consistent with the notion that female directors are being used in the symbolic management of corporate governance and that, at nine years, when the cloak of independence disappears, women directors are then exposed to the biases that arise from role congruity issues.

  January 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12208   open full text
• Information Asymmetries in the Hiring Process and the Risk of New Leader Dismissal: Insights from English Premier League Soccer Organizations.
  Malay N. Desai, Andy Lockett, David Paton.
  British Journal of Management. January 05, 2017
  Why are some new leaders dismissed more quickly than others? Adopting agency theory logic, the authors examine how different succession contexts shape boards’ information asymmetries about a potential candidate's competencies in the hiring process, which influences the propensity of making poor hiring decisions and hence the risk of new leader dismissal. Employing duration analysis on a sample of 164 newly appointed leaders in the English premier league (1996–2014), the authors find that the risk of new leader dismissal is: (i) greater when the predecessor leader's exit was initiated by them rather than by the board; (ii) greater when following a longer‐tenured predecessor; and (iii) lower for outside successions compared with inside successions.

  January 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12210   open full text
• Toward a Differentiated Understanding of the Value‐Creation Chain.
  Christina Kuehnl, Andreas Fürst, Christian Homburg, Matthias Staritz.
  British Journal of Management. December 13, 2016
  The conventional view of the value‐creation chain suggests offering high‐value propositions at the product level (in terms of benefits provided by elements of the product) to attain high‐value perceptions at the customer level, which should ultimately result in high‐value appropriation at the firm level (i.e. relationship, volume, pricing and financial success). This study challenges this view and provides a differentiated understanding of the value‐creation chain. With a multi‐industry sample of 339 companies and a sample of 626 customers to validate managerial assessments, the authors apply a configurational approach to identify whether and to what extent offering high‐value propositions at the product level is necessary or sufficient for achieving superior value perceptions at the customer level and high‐value appropriation at the firm level. Taking into account the company‐internal and company‐external environment of the value‐creation chain, the study identifies seven value‐creation chain constellations.

  December 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12206   open full text
• Shifting the Goalposts? Analysing Changes to Performance Peer Groups Used to Determine the Remuneration of FTSE 100 CEOs.
  Rodion Skovoroda, Alistair Bruce.
  British Journal of Management. December 13, 2016
  This paper examines year‐on‐year changes to the composition of performance peer groups used for relative performance evaluation in setting CEO pay in FTSE 100 companies and finds evidence of peer selection bias. The authors find that firms keep their peer groups weak by excluding relatively stronger performing peers. They also show that peer selection bias is less pronounced in firms with higher institutional investor ownership, which suggests that institutional investors might be aware of the risks of peer selection bias. The results suggest that peer group modifications can be viewed, at least in part, as an expression of managerial rent‐seeking.

  December 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12209   open full text
• Subjective Perceptions of Organizational Change and Employee Resistance to Change: Direct and Mediated Relationships with Employee Well‐being.
  Alannah E. Rafferty, Nerina L. Jimmieson.
  British Journal of Management. November 04, 2016
  Researchers have focused on linking objective measures of change exposure, such as the number of downsizing activities implemented, with employee well‐being. This has meant that less attention has been paid to employees’ subjective experience of change. The authors examine relationships between employees’ perceptions of the extent of change and the frequency of change and insomnia and psychological well‐being. They propose direct and indirect relationships via resistance to change between employees’ subjective experience of change and well‐being. Data were collected from 260 employees from a range of different organizations and industries. Respondents completed surveys at two time points, separated by four months. Results revealed significant indirect relationships between subjective perceptions of change and insomnia and employee well‐being via affective resistance to change at Time 1 and Time 2. In addition, employees’ subjective reports that change was very frequent were initially positively associated with T1 behavioral resistance to change but also were negatively associated with T2 behavioral resistance to change. Discussion focuses on the importance of managing employees’ perceptions of change. Practically, the authors consider the difficult choices that confront managers when seeking to implement and ‘sell’ change within their organization.

  November 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12200   open full text
• Age Work in Organizations: Maintaining and Disrupting Institutionalized Understandings of Higher Age.
  Isabel Collien, Barbara Sieben, Michael Müller‐Camen.
  British Journal of Management. October 19, 2016
  Age diversity research calls for new approaches in explaining the persistence of age inequalities, which integrate different levels of analysis and display greater context sensitivity. Concurrently, neoinstitutionalist research interested in social inequalities calls for merging institutional theory with critical perspectives and to account for issues of power. In this study, we address the calls of both research streams through developing the concept of ‘age work’: the institutional work actors undertake on age as a social institution. Applying our novel concept to a multi‐actor study of four German organizations known for their age management, we come across a counterintuitive insight regarding actors’ age work: maintaining stereotypical age images can serve to counter age inequalities, whereas deconstructing age images can reinforce age inequalities. The multi‐actor perspective of our study allows us to categorize different forms of power‐laden and interest‐driven age work and to portray the reproduction of age inequalities as a result of actors’ age work, embedded in different contexts and complex power relations. Comparing employees’ forms of age work across sectors and organizations, we detail how notions of masculinity as well as income and job security shaped the categorized forms of age work.

  October 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12198   open full text
• International Business and Entrepreneurship Implications of Brexit.
  Douglas J. Cumming, Shaker A. Zahra.
  British Journal of Management. October 19, 2016
  This paper provides an overview of the international business and entrepreneurship implications of Brexit. Our perspective is preliminary and based on a review of the practitioner, policy and academic literature over the first month following the Brexit vote. We highlight some of the potentially negative consequences for markets in the UK and around the world that result from barriers to trade and immigration associated with the uncertainty created by Brexit.

  October 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12192   open full text
• Brexit, Private Equity and Management.
  Mike Wright, Nick Wilson, John Gilligan, Nick Bacon, Kevin Amess.
  British Journal of Management. October 19, 2016
  We analyse the expected impact of Brexit on private equity and its implications for management research. Specifically, we explore the implications for private equity funds and funding, and at the portfolio firm level with respect to employment and performance.

  October 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12191   open full text
• Money Can't Buy Me Trust: Evidence of Exogenous Influences Crowding out Process‐based Trust in Alliances.
  Jeppe Christoffersen, Matthew J. Robson.
  British Journal of Management. September 13, 2016
  In this study we investigate how external interventions shape process‐based trust development in cross‐border alliances. Specifically, we exploit a unique opportunity to observe the magnitude of external intervention through publicly available amounts of money given by the foreign, developed country partners’ government to support alliances with local, developing country partners. Applying motivation crowding theory to trust processes, we develop theoretical logic explaining how and under what conditions such third‐party financial support negatively affects the local partner's trust. Our assertions were tested using archival and survey data on 105 international strategic alliances. We find that amount of support is detrimental to local partner trust but that the negative relationship can be dampened via interaction between partners and agreement throughout these interactions. This shows a need for partners to think through trust development consequences of external interventions during the setting up of their alliances, in order to be able to act in a manner which promotes trust.

  September 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12189   open full text
• Constraining or Enabling Green Capability Development? How Policy Uncertainty Affects Organizational Responses to Flexible Environmental Regulations.
  Preston Teeter, Jörgen Sandberg.
  British Journal of Management. September 06, 2016
  Despite their growing popularity, flexible environmental regulations are increasingly characterized by high levels of policy uncertainty. This uncertainty poses numerous challenges for managers, policymakers and researchers, for we still have a poor understanding of how such uncertainty affects organizational responses and the ability of organizations to generate unique capabilities. This paper presents findings of a qualitative study of how organizations respond to the introduction of flexible environmental regulations amidst extremely high levels of policy uncertainty. Through an investigation of Australia's complex, and ultimately brief, carbon pricing scheme, we find that policy uncertainty forces organizations to focus their responses on short‐term investments and dealing with that very uncertainty, thereby precluding the development of green capabilities and preventing flexible regulations from achieving their intended policy results. However, we also find that organizations are able to develop innovative regulatory coping capabilities and that variation in regulatory response results in a variation in these capabilities.

  September 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12188   open full text
• Improving Expatriation Success: The Roles of Regulatory Focus and Burnout.
  Avi Silbiger, Ron Berger, Bradley R. Barnes, Douglas W.S. Renwick.
  British Journal of Management. September 05, 2016
  The study empirically and theoretically contributes to the human resource management discipline by developing and testing a cohesive model drawing on the pertinent literature from expatriate management, burnout and regulatory focus theory. Drawing on data from 233 expatriate managers, the study aims to examine the relationships between expatriate adjustment and the outcomes of job satisfaction and withdrawal cognitions via expatriate burnout. Specifically, the findings reveal that (a) higher levels of both work adjustment and interaction adjustment lead to reduced expatriate burnout, with the former having a greater effect on burnout than the latter; (b) burnout serves as a full mediator between work adjustment and withdrawal cognitions, and a partial mediator between work adjustment and job satisfaction; and (c) regulatory focus serves to moderate expatriate adjustment–outcome consequences, i.e. promotion‐focused (as opposed to prevention‐focused) expatriates demonstrate a stronger burnout–job satisfaction relationship. Several implications are extracted from the study for regulatory theory, burnout and expatriation management practices as well as suggested avenues for future research.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12187   open full text
• Business and Management Impact Assessment in Research Excellence Framework 2014: Analysis and Reflection.
  Neil M. Kellard, Martyna Śliwa.
  British Journal of Management. September 05, 2016
  The evaluation of research impact is likely to remain an important element of research quality audits in the UK for the foreseeable future. With this paper, we contribute to debates on impact and relevance of business and management studies research through an analysis of Research Excellence Framework 2014 impact scores within the business and management unit of assessment. We offer insights into the organizational contexts of UK business schools within which impact is produced, drawing attention to the issues of linkages with research intensity, grant income generation, research team size, career stage and gender of academics, and whether impact activity is focused on private or public sector organizations and national or international reach. We put forward recommendations for managers responsible for business schools and higher education policymakers regarding management and organizational policies and processes, as well as possible changes to the rules guiding future research excellence audits.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12186   open full text
• A Contingency Analysis of Precarious Organizational Temporariness.
  Joanna Karmowska, John Child, Philip James.
  British Journal of Management. August 12, 2016
  This paper extends current understanding of organizational temporariness. The life of a temporary British trade union branch established to recruit Eastern European migrant workers reveals ‘precarious temporariness’, which is less predictable than the ‘planned temporariness’ typically portrayed in the literature. This different type of temporariness was associated with four key contingencies affecting the branch: dispersed governance; bottom‐up initiatives; uncertain resourcing; and an effectuation logic. Analysis of the case extends existing understanding of organizational temporariness and points to an extension of existing theorizing by highlighting the contingent nature of temporariness. The broader managerial implication of the findings is that, for projects facing contingencies of the kind studied, the conventional linear approach of target setting and performance management will be less effective than an ongoing process of communication and consultation.

  August 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12185   open full text
• Does Religious Diversity in Health Team Composition Affect Efficiency? Evidence from Dubai.
  Alessandro Ancarani, Ali Ayach, Carmela Di Mauro, Simone Gitto, Paolo Mancuso.
  British Journal of Management. July 29, 2016
  Team cultural diversity, the degree to which working team members differ in culture‐related factors, may affect healthcare teams’ outcomes. This paper focuses on one particular source of cultural diversity, namely religion, and examines its relation to the production efficiency of hospital wards. Building on the categorization‐elaboration model of organizational diversity, the authors test an empirical model positing that team religious diversity has non‐linear effects on efficiency, and considering the role of moderating variables of the relation diversity–efficiency. Empirically, the authors adopt a two‐step approach, whereby the first step applies data envelopment analysis to estimate efficiency scores for each team, and the second investigates the effect of diversity and of moderating variables. The model is tested on a sample of hospital wards from three large hospitals in Dubai. The results suggest an inverse U‐shaped relation between religious diversity and the wards’ efficiency. Evidence is provided that the relation is moderated by task complexity, task conflict, team leader tenure and diversity in nationality. This study advances research on the management of hospital team diversity by emphasizing the complexity of diversity effects and the importance of contextual factors.

  July 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12184   open full text
• Is it All About Money? – Affective Commitment and the Difference Between Family and Non‐family Sellers in Buyouts.
  Oliver Ahlers, Andreas Hack, Kristen Madison, Mike Wright, Franz W. Kellermanns.
  British Journal of Management. July 12, 2016
  In this paper we investigate private equity firm perceptions of sellers’ affective deal commitment in buyout transactions. Using a sample of 174 buyouts, we test trust, goal congruence and private equity reputation as potential antecedents of perceived deal commitment. We also examine whether and how different types of sellers, family versus non‐family firms, moderate sources of perceived affective deal commitment. In sum, we find evidence that non‐financial factors play a role in buyouts, particularly for family firm sellers.

  July 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12178   open full text
• The Relational Antecedents of Interpersonal Helping: ‘Quantity’, ‘Quality’ or Both?
  Diego Stea, Torben Pedersen, Nicolai J. Foss.
  British Journal of Management. June 14, 2016
  Having a large network of colleagues means having several opportunities to help those colleagues, as well as a higher chance of receiving requests for help from them. Employees with large networks are therefore expected to help more in the workplace than those with small networks. However, large networks are also associated with cognitive costs, which may reduce the focal employee's ability to both recognize the need for help and engage in helping behaviours. For these reasons, the authors assert an inverted U‐shaped relation between the size of an ego's social network and engagement in helping behaviour. However, high‐quality relationships imply higher mutual understanding between the actors, and hence lower cognitive costs. In turn, the position (and threshold) of the curve between network size and interpersonal helping should be influenced by the quality of the relationship between the provider and the beneficiaries of help. Analysis of employee‐level, single‐firm data supports these ideas, providing preliminary evidence that quality of relationship compensates for the difficulties that may arise from having large social networks.

  June 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12176   open full text
• Team‐specific Human Capital and Performance.
  Bill Gerrard, Andy Lockett.
  British Journal of Management. June 13, 2016
  In this paper we explore the effects of team‐specific human capital (TSHC) on performance. We do so by delineating between two dimensions of TSHC, relating to team members and the team manager, and then exploring how the two dimensions may interact in shaping performance. Employing a 10‐year panel of football teams from the English Premier League we find that team members’ TSHC has a positive and significant effect on team performance, which is positively moderated by managers’ TSHC. Our results attest to the importance of considering both the team member and team manager dimensions of TSHC, and how the performance effects of team members’ TSHC are shaped by managers’ TSHC. Our results stand in stark contrast to the dramatic reduction in managerial tenure that has characterized the English Premier League in recent years.

  June 13, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12173   open full text
• The Alliance Experience Transfer Effect: The Case of Industry Convergence in the Telecommunications Equipment Industry.
  Sean T. Hsu, John E. Prescott.
  British Journal of Management. June 09, 2016
  A central premise of the industry change literature is that firms change their strategic actions when an industry changes. Industry convergence (IC), the blending of boundaries between industries creating competition among firms that previously did not compete, is increasingly impacting many industries and is a salient case of industry change. Acquisitions are an important action shaping the course of IC because they trigger imitation and bandwagon effects further accelerating IC. This paper focuses on why and when learning from alliances reduces uncertainty resulting in acquisitions during IC: an ‘alliance experience transfer effect’. We demonstrate the utility of this mechanism for the substitution‐based form of IC that occurred between the telecommunications equipment and computer networking industries. Our key insight is that when the extent of IC is low there are significant transfer effects but, as the extent of IC increases, firms have access to an expanding volume and diversity of information sources that reduce uncertainty, thus weakening the transfer effect mechanism. We contribute to the alliance–acquisition relationship and learning literatures by demonstrating that the alliance experience transfer effect mechanism explains changes in firm strategic action (alliancing and acquiring) as the extent of IC changes. We also introduce a semi‐convergence perspective by directly measuring the extent of IC.

  June 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12175   open full text
• The Impact of Investor Horizon on Say‐on‐Pay Voting.
  Konstantinos Stathopoulos, Georgios Voulgaris.
  British Journal of Management. May 29, 2016
  Shareholder investment horizons have a significant impact on say‐on‐pay voting patterns. Short‐term investors are more likely to avoid expressing opinion on executive pay proposals by casting an abstaining vote. They vote against board proposals on pay only in cases where the CEO already receives excessive pay levels. In contrast, long‐term investors typically cast favourable votes. According to our findings, this is due to effective monitoring rather than collusion with the management. Overall, investor heterogeneity in terms of investment horizons helps explain say‐on‐pay voting, in particular the low levels of say‐on‐pay dissent, which have recently raised questions over the efficiency of this corporate governance mechanism.

  May 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12172   open full text
• Institutional and Resource‐based Explanations for Subsidiary Performance.
  Mathew Hughes, Taman H. Powell, Leanne Chung, Kamel Mellahi.
  British Journal of Management. May 27, 2016
  Addressing calls to integrate insights from institutional theory and the resource‐based view, we bring together dual theoretical explanations from institutional theory and the resource‐based view to examine the effectiveness of transfer of practice and human capital development as two routes to subsidiary performance. Our study of Hong Kong firms with subsidiaries in Mainland China shows that both routes positively affect subsidiary performance. However, our data show that our sampled firms struggled to successfully transfer practices from their parents. We attribute an explanation for this to the characteristics of practices as organizational capabilities in which transfer is made harder by the difficulty in replicating such capabilities. Consequently, developing subsidiary human capital is an important ally to practice transfer as a means to achieve superior subsidiary performance. Our results raise interesting questions about practice transfer and the resource‐based view relevant to future scholarly research.

  May 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12169   open full text
• The UK National Minimum Wage's Impact on Productivity.
  Marian Rizov, Richard Croucher, Thomas Lange.
  British Journal of Management. May 23, 2016
  Low pay poses issues for managers internationally. We examine productivity in low‐paying sectors in Britain, since the introduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW). We use a multiple channel analytical strategy, emphasizing the wage incentives channel and linking it to a model of unobserved productivity. We estimate firm‐specific productivity measures and aggregate them to the level of low‐paying sectors. Difference‐in‐differences analysis illustrates that the NMW positively affected aggregate low‐paying sector productivity. These findings highlight increased wage incentive effects with implications for management practice and public policy since ‘living’ wages may be productivity enhancing.

  May 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12171   open full text
• The ‘Missing Masses’ of Resistance: An Ethnographic Understanding of a Workplace Dispute.
  David Knights, Darren McCabe.
  British Journal of Management. May 18, 2016
  The literature on resistance has largely attended to human agents whether in terms of collective action or individual subjectivity. Through focusing on the ‘missing masses’ or mundane material artefacts, this paper seeks to show how actor network theory (ANT) can advance our understanding of resistance. Drawing upon ethnographic research during a workplace dispute, this study explores how material artefacts as well as human actors reflect heterogeneous relations that together successfully mobilized opposition to the imposition of compulsory redundancies in a UK university. In so far as the mingling and entanglement of humans and non‐humans have been largely neglected in accounts of resistance, we believe that an ANT informed account contributes in distinctive ways to this literature.

  May 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12170   open full text
• Social Identification and Corporate Irresponsibility: A Model of Stakeholder Punitive Intentions.
  Paolo Antonetti, Stan Maklan.
  British Journal of Management. May 02, 2016
  Scholars hypothesize that retaliations against corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) are more likely when observers share the social identity of the victims. We present a model that explains in‐group bias against irresponsibility and identify collective narcissism as a moderator of this effect. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the effect of identity on retaliations is mediated by the perceived similarity of the victims which reinforces feelings of sympathy towards the victims and anger towards the corporation. These emotions drive stakeholders’ attitudes and retaliations. Our study shows that appraisals of the victims of CSI are an important antecedent of stakeholders’ emotions and behavioural intentions. Our evidence also demonstrates that sympathy, an emotion neglected by past research in this area, has a unique effect on individuals’ reactions. Experiment 2 demonstrates that social identity biases in individual punitive intentions are moderated by individuals’ level of collective narcissism. Collective narcissists see out‐group victims as very dissimilar from the self, whereas individuals with low levels of collective narcissism do not differentiate between victims of CSI on the basis of their identity. We extend knowledge on stakeholders’ reactions to CSI and offer insights to organizations promoting campaigns against irresponsible behaviour or managing the fallout from cases of corporate irresponsibility.

  May 02, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12168   open full text
• Resist or Comply: The Power Dynamics of Organizational Routines during Mergers.
  Mehdi Safavi, Omid Omidvar.
  British Journal of Management. May 02, 2016
  The role of power and agency in the development of organizational routines is under‐theorized. In this paper, we draw on an in‐depth qualitative case study of a merger between two academic institutions, a college of art and a university, and examine the diverging responses of two organizational routines (admissions and budgeting) during the course of the merger to understand how power dynamics contribute to resistance/compliance of routines. Our findings suggest that the differences in routines’ responses to a merger initiative can be explained by applying Bourdieu's theory of practice and by employing the concepts of field and symbolic capital to unpack power relations in the context of organizational routines, and to disclose why some routine participants can exercise their agency while others cannot. We find that (a) the field within which a routine operates and (b) the actors’ symbolic capital and position‐taking during change implementation shape routines’ responses to organizational change initiatives.

  May 02, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12167   open full text
• Network Positions and the Probability of Being Acquired: An Empirical Analysis in the Biopharmaceutical Industry.
  Erica Mazzola, Giovanni Perrone, Dzidziso Samuel Kamuriwo.
  British Journal of Management. May 02, 2016
  This paper examines the relationship between the firm's direct ties, its inter‐firm network prominence and its likelihood of being acquired. The authors argue that firm's direct ties and prominence enhance the firm's visibility and signal its quality – and thus foster the firm's likelihood of being acquired. However, higher levels of direct ties and prominence, by providing access to resources and the firm's status, respectively, increase the firm's ability to remain independent and thus reduce its likelihood of being acquired. Thus, the authors posit the overall relation as an inverted U‐shaped. Furthermore, they show that, for firms that undergo an initial public offering, the aforementioned relation becomes much weaker. The hypotheses are empirically tested in the biopharmaceutical industry and important theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

  May 02, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12174   open full text
• ‘Short Interest Pressure’ and Competitive Behaviour.
  Margaret Hughes‐Morgan, Walter J. Ferrier.
  British Journal of Management. April 27, 2016
  This study introduces and examines a new‐to‐strategy form of Wall Street pressure – ‘short interest pressure’ – the tension felt by management caused by short sales of the firm's stock. Drawing from a sample of over 5000 competitive actions carried out by competing firms over a 6‐year time period, we test whether the level of short interest pressure experienced by the firm in one time period is predictive of properties of the firm's competitive action repertoire in the ensuing time period. Our findings suggest that when faced with short interest pressure firms tend to carry out a higher number of competitive actions in the following time period, as well as a set of actions that deviate from the industry norm. In addition, post hoc analysis reveals that this effect is amplified for poorly performing firms. Thus, our study contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between capital market signals and competitive strategy.

  April 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12166   open full text
• The Differential Effects of Transformational Leadership on Multiple Identifications at Work: A Meta‐analytic Model.
  Christiane A. L. Horstmeier, Diana Boer, Astrid C. Homan, Sven C. Voelpel.
  British Journal of Management. April 14, 2016
  Employees’ identifications are a valuable asset for modern organizations, and identification research has stressed the necessity to distinguish identifications according to their focus (i.e. organizational, team, or leader identification). Interestingly, transformational leadership (TFL) has been proposed to unfold its effects by transforming followers’ identifications and could thus be a powerful way to actively manage identification. However, it remains unclear whether TFL affects identifications with different foci similarly or whether it predominantly influences a specific focus. To resolve this puzzle, the authors conducted a meta‐analysis (k = 73; N = 20,543) and found that TFL (and each TFL sub‐dimension) is more strongly associated with leader identification than with organizational identification or team identification. By presenting a comprehensive model of TFL's effects on identifications, we show that leader identification mediates the relationships between TFL and collective identifications (i.e. organizational identification or team identification), illustrating that relational identification plays a crucial role in subsequently shaping collective identifications. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

  April 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12160   open full text
• The Translational Role of Hybrid Nurse Middle Managers in Implementing Clinical Guidelines: Effect of, and upon, Professional and Managerial Hierarchies.
  Dimitrios Spyridonidis, Graeme Currie.
  British Journal of Management. April 07, 2016
  Our study uses qualitative and interpretative design to analyse what hybrid nurse middle managers do in their managerial practice, what affects this, and to what effect, focusing upon implementing policy‐driven guidelines on the clinical frontline. Examining two comparative hospital cases and drawing upon Scandinavian institutionalism, we conceive their role as one of ‘translation’. On the one hand, they exhibit strategic agency. On the other hand, their managerial role not only influences, but is influenced by, professional and managerial hierarchies. In both hospitals, in the short term we see how hybrid nurse middle managers are able to mediate professional and managerial hierarchies and implement clinical guidelines through translational work. However, in one case, they less effectively accommodate policy‐driven, managerial pressure towards compliance with government regulations and financial parsimony. In this case, the outcome of their translational work is not sustained in the longer term, as professional and managerial hierarchies reassert themselves. Drawing upon the example of their managerial role in healthcare, we highlight that hybrid middle managers enact a strategic translational role and outline situational constraints that impact this more strategic role.

  April 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12164   open full text
• The Impact of Investment Networks on Venture Capital Firm Performance: A Contingency Framework.
  Cristiano Bellavitis, Igor Filatotchev, Vangelis Souitaris.
  British Journal of Management. March 09, 2016
  Venture capital (VC) syndicates involve repeated transactions among partners and therefore possess network‐like characteristics. Although networks provide access to important externalities, extant literature has not studied the effects of the focal firm's resource needs on performance benefits arising from different network structures. We investigate the impact of two proxies for firm‐level resources, namely maturity and status, on the relationship between network cohesion and VC performance. We find that mature and high status VCs benefit less from network cohesion. We also show that maturity and status simultaneously determine the performance effects of network cohesion.

  March 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12162   open full text
• Close Communications: Hedge Funds, Brokers and the Emergence of Herding.
  Neil Kellard, Yuval Millo, Jan Simon, Ofer Engel.
  British Journal of Management. March 09, 2016
  We examine how communication, evaluation and decision‐making practices among competing market actors contribute to the establishment of herding and whether this has impact on market‐wide phenomena such as prices and risk. Data are collected from interviews and observations with hedge fund industry participants in Europe, the USA and Asia. We examine both contemporaneous and biographical data, finding that decision‐making relies on an elaborate two‐tiered structure of connections among hedge fund managers and between them and brokers. This structure is underpinned by idea sharing and development between competing hedge funds leading to ‘expertise‐based’ herding and an increased probability of over‐embeddedness. We subsequently present a case study demonstrating the role that communication between competing hedge funds plays in the creation of herding and show that such trades affect prices by introducing an additional risk: the disregarding of information from sources outside the trusted connections.

  March 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12158   open full text
• Regulation as Country‐Specific (Dis‐)Advantage: Smoking Bans and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment in the Tobacco Industry.
  Jo Crotty, Nigel Driffield, Chris Jones.
  British Journal of Management. February 24, 2016
  This paper seeks to examine the relationship between smoking bans and the propensity of tobacco firms to engage in foreign direct investment (FDI). Using international business theory based on the firm‐specific advantage/country‐specific advantage (FSA/CSA) matrix, the authors show that, contrary to what one may expect, smoking bans at home are an important institutional intervention, reducing the propensity for firms to engage in FDI, even to countries without a ban themselves.

  February 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12161   open full text
• The Changing Influence of Societal Culture on Job Satisfaction across Europe.
  Gail Pacheco, De Wet der Westhuizen, Abby Ghobadian, Don J. Webber, Nicholas O'Regan.
  British Journal of Management. February 11, 2016
  This paper contributes to the growing multidisciplinary body of literature on subjective well‐being by investigating the longitudinal stability and impact of societal cultural values (SCVs) – as opposed to the more common organizational values – on job satisfaction. It is assumed that SCVs evolve slowly; hence, their impact on job satisfaction is likely to remain stable over time. False adherence to this assumption could cause misalignment between organizational policies/practices and expectations formed by societal culture, decreasing job satisfaction and adversely affecting productivity, competiveness and prosperity. Four waves of the European Values Study are used to examine whether SCVs have evolved and their impacts on job satisfaction over a relatively short time: 1981–2008. SCVs are parameterized through reference to traditional vs secular‐rational, and survival vs self‐expression value continuums. Results indicate that the strength of many SCVs has declined, the impacts of traditional societal values on job satisfaction have remained fairly constant, and the impacts of survival societal values on job satisfaction have declined substantially over this sample period. These reductions in SCVs amplify the importance of accounting for such changes when designing new or adjusting existing policies/practices to enhance job satisfaction and stimulate improvements in productivity, competitiveness and prosperity.

  February 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12150   open full text
• Alliance‐building Process as Inhibiting Factor for SME International Alliances.
  N. Arranz, M. F. Arroyabe, J. C. Arroyabe.
  British Journal of Management. February 11, 2016
  This study examines how the alliance‐building process affects the intention to enter into international alliances in the case of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). From a psychological perspective (Perceived Behavioural Control), the authors analyse the alliance‐building process as an inhibitor of the international collaboration intention, considering to what extent the experience affects the intention of the partners involved. The study explores these hypotheses based on a sample of 220 Spanish SMEs. The results provide empirical evidence showing that the intention to develop international alliances is negatively affected by the search and the selection process as well as by the negotiation of the agreement, which reduces the intention to establish an international agreement. In addition, the intention is moderated by the experience of the SME manager. Moreover, there is a negative relationship between the extent of the SME manager's international experience and the intention to develop an international alliance.

  February 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12159   open full text
• Confidence Matters: Self‐efficacy Moderates the Credit that Supervisors Give to Adaptive and Proactive Role Behaviours.
  Helena Nguyen, Anya Johnson, Catherine Collins, Sharon K. Parker.
  British Journal of Management. February 04, 2016
  In complex and uncertain work environments, employees need to not only be proficient in carrying out their core duties, but also to be adaptive (able to cope and respond to unpredictable events) and proactive (able to anticipate the situation and act in a self‐directed way) in their work roles. In this study we investigate the extent to which supervisors actually give credit to adaptive and proactive role behaviours when they judge employees’ overall job performance. Drawing on attribution theory, we propose that the extent to which these role behaviours are valued by supervisors will be enhanced by employees’ confidence for relevant role behaviours. Support for these ideas is provided using data from junior doctors and their supervisors in a hospital emergency department. Adaptive role behaviours positively influenced supervisors’ judgements of overall job performance. This relationship was stronger for employees with high self‐efficacy for achieving outcomes. Engaging in proactive role behaviours while also lacking role‐breadth self‐efficacy resulted in supervisors’ giving employees less credit for their proactive role behaviours. Findings support the argument that employees’ self‐efficacy for specific role behaviours provides attributional cues about capability that modify how adaptive and proactive role behaviours are interpreted and valued.

  February 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12149   open full text
• Conflicting Subcultures in Mergers and Acquisitions: a Longitudinal Study of Integrating a Radical Internet Firm into a Bureaucratic Telecoms Firm.
  Alfons Marrewijk.
  British Journal of Management. January 27, 2016
  Media and telecommunications companies face the problem of how to integrate diametrically opposite radical internet firms after acquisition. Extant mergers and acquisitions (M&A) studies report that differences in the organizational culture are important in the cultural integration process. Frequently, M&A research assumes organizational cultures to be homogeneous and unified, but a large body of organizational literature suggests that organizations should be understood as heterogeneous living worlds in which employees construct their own subcultures. The paper focuses on the question of how such subcultures affect the long‐term cultural integration of merged firms. A 12‐year longitudinal field study in the Netherlands examined the integration of iPioneer into Telcom. The findings of the study show how three subcultures in iPioneer influenced the cultural integration process. The paper makes a contribution to the academic debate on cultural integration in domestic M&A by acknowledging that the numerous coexisting subcultures influence cultural integration in the complex process of post‐acquisition integration.

  January 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12135   open full text
• Embedded Networks and Suboptimal Resource Matching in Alliance Formations.
  Hitoshi Mitsuhashi, Jungwon Min.
  British Journal of Management. January 18, 2016
  Interest has been growing in alliance networks, and research has demonstrated several advantages of embedded networks, including joint problem solving. How embedded networks function as social capital and promote alliance formation has also been explored. However, less is known about constraints that they impose on firms’ extensive search for partners. In this study, we advance our understanding of the downsides of embedded networks by proposing that embedded networks facilitate alliance formations, but they may also cause suboptimal resource matching in alliance formations. Specifically, we predict that, in alliances where initial resource matching is more important than ex post collaborative activities, suboptimal resource matching is more likely when firms ally with partners with which they have pre‐existing direct or indirect ties and that such alliances decrease firm‐level resource utilization performance in operations. Using codeshare alliance data from the global airline industry, we find support for our predictions.

  January 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12134   open full text
• Exploring the Impact of Social Axioms on Firm Reputation: A Stakeholder Perspective.
  Bettina West, Carola Hillenbrand, Kevin Money, Abby Ghobadian, R. Duane Ireland.
  British Journal of Management. January 11, 2016
  This study proposes a model of how deeply held beliefs, known as ‘social axioms, moderate the interaction between reputation, its causes and consequences with stakeholders. It contributes to the stakeholder relational field of reputation theory by explaining why the same organizational stimuli lead to different individual stakeholder responses. The study provides a shift in reputation research from organizational‐level stimuli as the root causes of stakeholder responses to exploring the interaction between individual beliefs and organizational stimuli in determining reputational consequences. Building on a conceptual model that incorporates product/service quality and social responsibility as key reputational dimensions, the authors test empirically for moderating influences, in the form of social axioms, between reputation‐related antecedents and consequences, using component‐based structural equation modelling (n = 204). In several model paths, significant differences are found between responses of individuals identified as either high or low on social cynicism, fate control and religiosity. The results suggest that stakeholder responses to reputation‐related stimuli can be systematically predicted as a function of the interactions between the deeply held beliefs of individuals and these stimuli. The authors offer recommendations on how strategic reputation management can be approached within and across stakeholder groups at a time when firms grapple with effective management of diverse stakeholder expectations.

  January 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12153   open full text
• Changing Strategy Processes and Strategy Content in Public Sector Organizations? A Longitudinal Case Study of NPM Reforms’ Influence on Strategic Management.
  Jesper Rosenberg Hansen, Christian Bøtcher Jacobsen.
  British Journal of Management. January 05, 2016
  New Public Management reforms have been argued to intensify the use of strategic management in public organizations, but there is a need to understand how reforms influence specific aspects such as strategy processes and strategy content. The NPM reforms are expected to formalize and professionalize strategy processes and strategy content towards greater competitiveness, but this may counter cooperation between organizations, which is essential in many areas for overall service provision. Research has provided little empirical knowledge about the simultaneous competition and cooperation in the public sector. This study offers such knowledge via a panel case study of five Danish upper secondary schools over a ten‐year period during a large NPM reform. The study includes three rounds of interviews with school principals before, during and after the reform, combined with secondary data. The study shows that, during reform implementation, strategy processes become more formalized and professionalized, and that teachers, in particular, lose influence. Regarding strategy content, the authors find an increase in external focus and competition, though schools maintain a focus on cooperation. The results suggest that NPM reforms can significantly change strategic management in public organizations, and that this is not necessarily at the expense of cooperation, at least in the short run.

  January 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12157   open full text
• Coping with Diversity in Alliances for Innovation: The Role of Relational Social Capital and Knowledge Codifiability.
  Vesna Vlaisavljevic, Carmen Cabello‐Medina, Ana Pérez‐Luño.
  British Journal of Management. December 22, 2015
  Alliances are increasingly considered a key element for innovation, especially in knowledge‐intensive firms. While this is true, the mere membership to alliances does not explain innovation performance, and thus the alliance's characteristics that determine high performance must be examined. This research address the question of how the diversity of partners in a certain alliance for innovation affects innovation performance, and how this influence can be moderated by certain characteristics, such as the relational dimension of social capital and the type of knowledge shared among partners. The empirical analysis of a sample of 90 biotech companies shows that there is an inverted U‐shaped relationship between alliance partner diversity and innovation performance and confirms the positive moderating effects of relational social capital and knowledge codifiability. These findings contribute to the current research on alliances for innovation by providing empirical evidence on why some alliances perform better than others. Also, the results suggest that the study of alliance partner diversity, as a determinant of alliance performance, should not be addressed in isolation.

  December 22, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12155   open full text
• Look What's Back! Institutional Complexity, Reversibility and the Knotting of Logics.
  Davide Nicolini, Giuseppe Delmestri, Elizabeth Goodrick, Trish Reay, Kajsa Lindberg, Petra Adolfsson.
  British Journal of Management. December 22, 2015
  Through a comparative historical study of community pharmacy in the UK, Italy, Sweden and the USA, the authors examine what happens to institutional arrangements designed to resolve ongoing conflicts between institutional logics over extended periods of time. It is found that institutional arrangements can reflect the heterogeneity of multiple logics without resulting in hybridization or dominance. Because logics remain active, similar conflicts can reappear multiple times. It is found that the durability of the configurations of competing logics reflects the characteristics of the polities in which fields are embedded. The dominance of any societal institutional order leads to more stable field‐level arrangements. The authors suggest that the metaphor of institutional knots and the related image of institutional knotting are useful to capture aspects of this dynamic and to foreground the discursive and material work that allows multiple logics to coexist in local arrangements with variable durability.

  December 22, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12156   open full text
• The Chimera of Sustainable Labour–Management Partnership.
  Tony Dobbins, Tony Dundon.
  British Journal of Management. December 22, 2015
  The paper advances a threefold theoretical contribution using a system, society and dominance (SSD) effects framework to show how and why sustainable management–labour workplace partnerships are a chimera. First, managers (employers) find it increasingly difficult to keep workplace bargains with employees (unions) owing to increasingly neoliberal ‘system’ effects associated with capitalism as a globalized accumulation model. Second, workplace mutuality will be rare because of ‘societal’ level effects under voluntarism. Third, ‘dominance’ effects arising from the power of dominant economies and their multinational corporations can inhibit workplace mutuality. Drawing on empirical case study data from Ireland, the future prognosis of management–labour collaboration under neoliberal work regimes is discussed.

  December 22, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12128   open full text
• Competitive Dynamics between Multinational Enterprises and Local Internet Platform Companies in the Virtual Market in China.
  Jing Zeng, Keith W. Glaister.
  British Journal of Management. December 17, 2015
  We adopt the dynamic capability perspective and the institutional view as the guiding theoretical lenses to explain the relative performance of foreign internet platform companies (IPCs) operating in China. Based on data obtained from 51 interviews a multiple‐case‐study approach is adopted, with representative matched cases between foreign IPCs, including Google, eBay, Amazon and Groupon, and local IPCs. The findings highlight the unique characteristics of the IPCs and the Chinese context that challenge assumptions prevailing in the literature of the applicability of firm‐specific advantages in determining a sustainable competitive advantage. We highlight the dynamic capabilities of the firm, such as flexibility and experimentation, in contributing to sustainable competitive advantage. Further, rather than focusing on firm‐specific resources, we find that the active agency of the firm can approach institutions as resources through external links with diversified institutional players, which is crucial for multinational enterprise IPCs to develop sustainable competitive advantage. Drawing on the findings we present a number of propositions and implications for theory and practice.

  December 17, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12136   open full text
• The Aim Initiative: A Rejoinder.
  Robin Wensley, Andy Neely.
  British Journal of Management. December 11, 2015
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  December 11, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12152   open full text
• Value‐enhancing Learning from Industry‐wide Diversification Experience.
  Thang Nguyen, Charlie X. Cai.
  British Journal of Management. December 10, 2015
  Diversification is an important strategic decision and a rare event. By definition, when undertaking a new diversification, a firm will not have direct internal experience of the venture. In this regard, external experience of similar diversifications provides a valuable lesson pool for the focal manager. While there are many studies of internal learning in organizational learning literature, research on external learning is still scarce. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for external experiential learning and applies it to a study of the effect of industry experience on diversification value. It reports the novel finding of a cubic relationship between external learning from industry experience and diversification value. This indicates that industry experience matters to the outcomes of strategic decisions, but that the effect of this external experience on learning is conditional upon certain characteristics of the experience: namely, specificity and heterogeneity.

  December 10, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12151   open full text
• Managing Nationality Diversity: The Interactive Effect of Leaders’ Cultural Intelligence and Task Interdependence.
  Doris Rosenauer, Astrid C. Homan, Christiane A. L. Horstmeier, Sven C. Voelpel.
  British Journal of Management. December 08, 2015
  In light of the workforce's increasing nationality diversity, our study explores the antecedents for the successful management of nationality diversity as visualized in a favourable diversity climate and enhanced team performance. We propose a double‐contingency model in which we argue that the effects of nationality diversity will be dependent upon task interdependence and leaders’ cultural intelligence. We propose that nationality diversity will be more consequential in more interdependent teams, in which team interactions and processes are more salient. Moreover, team leaders with higher cultural intelligence will possess the skills to foster adequate team processes and thereby enhance diversity climate and performance of nationally diverse, more interdependent teams. We collected multi‐source data from 63 work teams (N = 410) and their supervisors at a German facility management company. Moderated regression analyses supported the hypothesized three‐way interaction between nationality diversity, task interdependence and leaders’ cultural intelligence. Additional simple slope analysis showed that nationality diversity is positively related to diversity climate and performance only when both team leaders’ cultural intelligence and task interdependence are high. Our study not only provides recommendations for successful nationality diversity management but also yields theoretical implications for diversity and cultural intelligence research.

  December 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12131   open full text
• Alternative Mechanisms Guiding Salespersons’ Ambidextrous Product Selling.
  Michel Borgh, Ad Jong, Edwin J. Nijssen.
  British Journal of Management. December 04, 2015
  Ambidextrous product‐selling strategies, in which companies’ salespeople concurrently pursue the sale of existing and new products, are hard to implement. Previous studies have addressed this issue for relatively simple consumer settings with the manager in close proximity to the salespersons and focusing on different levels of control and autonomy to resolve this issue. However, little is known about how field salespeople can be influenced to pursue such dual goals proactively for more complex business‐to‐business products. In this study, the authors distinguish between salespeople's proactive selling behaviour for new and existing products, and study the impact of two alternative mechanisms: a situational mechanism (i.e. perceived manager product‐selling ambidexterity) and a structural mechanism (i.e. salesperson organizational identification). Using a time‐lagged, multisource data set from a large ambidextrous company, the authors demonstrate that both mechanisms contribute to salespeople's proactive selling of new and existing products, but also act as each other's substitutes. The results suggest two most likely strategies for salespeople to obtain overall sales targets: focusing on existing product selling; or acting ambidextrously. The latter approach offers the benefits of better achieving ambidextrous company sales goals and of greater performance stability, and is thus preferred.

  December 04, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12148   open full text
• Aiming for Excellence: Reflections on the Advanced Institute of Management Research and its Elite.
  Stuart Macdonald, John Steen, Rahmat Shazi.
  British Journal of Management. November 08, 2015
  In 2002, the UK government launched the Advanced Institute of Management Research, a major initiative intended to raise the quality of research in business schools. Rather than offering research grants in open competition, AIM deliberately funded a select few leading lights in management. Insufficient allowance was made for the Research Assessment Exercise, which measured research excellence in terms of papers published in top journals. The AIM's elite exploited its existing publishing advantage, and AIM provided further resources to aid their efforts. The AIM recruited willing acolytes to work with its elite in fashioning the sort of papers required by the top journals of management – positive papers, consensual and endlessly citable. Analysis of the publishing patterns of AIM senior fellows reveals research cliques and publication silos rather than a network organization. Much as the elite saw its AIM funding as recognition of its own excellence, so AIM itself came to be seen as acknowledgement of the excellence of management research as a whole. That AIM existed to raise management research from intellectual poverty was forgotten. The AIM was wound up in 2012, having spent £30 million, most of it on the subject's elite. The problems that beset management research remain.

  November 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12147   open full text
• Improvising Prescription: Evidence from the Emergency Room.
  Maria da Graça Batista, Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Luca Giustiniano, Arménio Rego.
  British Journal of Management. October 21, 2015
  Global medical practice is increasingly standardizing through evidence‐based approaches and quality certification procedures. Despite this increasing standardization, medical work in emergency units necessarily involves sensitivity to the individual, the particular and the unexpected. While much medical practice is routine, important improvisational elements remain significant. Standardization and improvisation can be seen as two conflicting logics. However, they are not incompatible, although the occurrence of improvisation in highly structured and institutionally complex environments remains underexplored. The study presents the process of improvisation in the tightly controlled work environment of the emergency room. The authors conducted an in situ ethnographic observation of an emergency unit. An inductive approach shows professionals combining ostensive compliance with protocols with necessary and occasional ‘underlife’ improvisations. The duality of improvisation as simultaneously present and absent is related to pressures in the institutional domain as well as to practical needs emerging from the operational realm. The intense presence of procedures and work processes enables flexible improvised performances that paradoxically end up reinforcing institutional pressures for standardization.

  October 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12143   open full text
• Looking Too Old? How an Older Age Appearance Reduces Chances of Being Hired.
  Michèle Céline Kaufmann, Franciska Krings, Sabine Sczesny.
  British Journal of Management. October 14, 2015
  Building on theories of impression formation based on faces, this research investigates the impact of job candidates’ facial age appearance on hiring as well as the underlying mechanism. In an experiment, participants decided whether to hire a fictitious candidate aged 50 years, 30 years or without age information. The candidate's age was signalled either via chronological information (varied by date of birth) or via facial age appearance (varied by a photograph on the résumé). Findings showed that candidates with older‐appearing faces – but not chronologically older candidates – triggered impressions of low health and fitness, compared to younger‐appearing candidates. These impressions reduced perceptions of person–job fit, which lowered hiring probabilities for older‐appearing candidates. These findings provide the first evidence that trait impressions from faces are a determinant of age discrimination in personnel selection. They call for an extension of current models of age discrimination by integrating the effects of face‐based trait impressions, particularly with respect to health and fitness.

  October 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12125   open full text
• Of Journal Editors and Editorial Boards: Who Are the Trailblazers in Increasing Editorial Board Gender Equality?
  Isabel Metz, Anne‐Wil Harzing, Michael J. Zyphur.
  British Journal of Management. September 10, 2015
  Female academics continue to be under‐represented on the editorial boards of many, but not all, management journals. This variability is intriguing, because it is reasonable to assume that the size of the pool of female faculty available and willing to serve on editorial boards is similar for all management journals. This paper therefore focuses on the characteristics of the journal editors to explain this variability; journal editors or editors‐in‐chief are the most influential people in the selection of editorial board members. The authors draw on social identity and homosocial reproduction theories, and on the gender and careers literature to examine the relationship between an editor's academic performance, professional age and gender, and editorial board gender equality. Longitudinal data are collected at five points in time, using five‐year intervals, from 52 management journals. To account for the nested structure of the data, a three‐level multilevel model was estimated. Overall, it is found that the prospects of board membership improve for women when editors are high‐performing, professionally young or female. The authors discuss these findings and their implications for management journals with low, stagnant or declining representation of women in their boards.

  September 10, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12133   open full text
• The Impact of Transformational Leadership on Organizational Citizenship Behaviours: The Contingent Role of Public Service Motivation.
  Paul Bottomley, Ahmed Mohammed Sayed Mostafa, Julian Seymour Gould‐Williams, Filadelfo León‐Cázares.
  British Journal of Management. June 11, 2015
  In this paper we examine whether the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs) is contingent on public service motivation (PSM). We propose that PSM may reduce the motivational influences of transformational leaders’ behaviours on followers’ OCBs in public sector organizations. Using a sample of Mexican employees we tested this proposition with structural equation modelling. Our results show that the motivational effects of transformational leadership were less for public sector followers higher in PSM than for those lower in PSM. A follow‐up study in private sector organizations did not reveal a similar interaction effect. These findings appear consistent with previous research demonstrating that PSM is more aligned to the goals and values of public rather than private sector organizations. Nevertheless, the direct effects of PSM on OCBs remained in the private sector.

  June 11, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12108   open full text
• A Fresh Look at the Dark Side of Contemporary Careers: Toward a Realistic Discourse.
  Yehuda Baruch, Yoav Vardi.
  British Journal of Management. June 08, 2015
  In this paper we propose that careers be considered as both offering promise and the source of potential disillusionment. While the changing nature of careers and of career management requires a comprehensive perspective to highlight the characteristics and nature of careers in their entirety, most published work predominantly addresses the positive aspects of careers, leaving their darker dynamics almost untouched. We argue that while career scholars tend to clothe such concerns in euphemistic terms, contemporary career experiences may often be quite dark and include a number of undesired consequences. By linking selected career constructs and notions of organizational dark sides, we aim to advance a more balanced framework, offering a career perspective that consists of opportunities versus threats, truth versus untruth and positive versus negative aspects, all of which are inevitably embedded in careers. Thus, we call for career conceptualization and research to be less normatively biased and prescriptive and to be more grounded in reality.

  June 08, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12107   open full text
• Is it Just Me? Exploring Perceptions of Organizational Culture Change.
  Laura Gover, Michael Halinski, Linda Duxbury.
  British Journal of Management. May 31, 2015
  A review of the literature on organizational culture change suggests that the field might benefit from studies combining both etic (researcher) and emic (employee) perspectives to examine individuals’ views regarding how and why their culture has changed. This paper seeks to deepen researchers’ knowledge of how individuals perceive organizational culture change by undertaking a two‐part study within an organization that has undergone planned cultural change initiatives. More specifically survey (i.e. etic view) data and interview (i.e. emic view) data are used to explore: (1) factors associated with (a) whether an individual will perceive that culture change has occurred, and (b) whether they categorize this change as for the better, for the worse or one that could not be categorized using these two labels; and (2) individuals’ rationales for why the culture has changed. The findings are mixed regarding the extent to which they support or refute existing research on organizational culture change.

  May 31, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12117   open full text
• Distances in Organizations: Innovation in an R&D Lab.
  Wilfred Dolfsma, Rene Eijk.
  British Journal of Management. May 04, 2015
  The distance between actors in an organization affects how they interact with each other, and particularly whether they will exchange (innovative) knowledge with each other. Actors in each other's proximity have fewer conflicts, more trust towards each other, for example, and are thus more involved in knowledge transfer. Actors close to others thus are believed to perform better: by being more innovative, for instance. This theory of propinquity's claim resonates widely in the literature and has intuitive appeal: ‘people are most likely to be attracted towards those in closest contact with them’ (Newcomb, Th. (1956). American Psychologist, 11, p. 575). Knowledge that a focal actor receives from alters who are close is more readily accessed, better understood and more readily useable. At the same time, however, and in contrast to the what the theory of propinquity suggests, knowledge that a focal actor receives from alters who are at a greater distance may be more diverse, offer unexpected and valuable insights, and therefore give rise to innovation. In order to understand these opposing expectations, scholars have indicated that distance must be conceived of as multifaceted: individuals can be close to each other in one way, while at the same time distant in another. No prior paper has extensively studied the effects of distance as a multifaceted concept, however. This study offers two distinct contributions. It argues, first, why some instances of distance affect the opportunity to interact with alters, potentially lowering an actor's performance, while other instances of distance affect the expected benefits from interaction. The latter would increase an actor's performance. Secondly, this paper is the first study to test empirically the expectations about how seven different measures of distance affect an actor's innovative performance. Innovative performance is measured as both creative contribution and contribution to knowledge that has immediate commercial use (patents). In the setting of a large research lab, it is found, contrary to expectations, that distance does not hurt individual innovative performance and sometimes helps it in unexpected ways.

  May 04, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12114   open full text
• Gay Male Academics in UK Business and Management Schools: Negotiating Heteronormativities in Everyday Work Life.
  Mustafa Bilgehan Ozturk, Nick Rumens.
  British Journal of Management. May 26, 2014
  This paper contributes to a neglected topic area about lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people's employment experiences in UK business and management schools. Drawing on queer theory to problematize essentialist notions of sexuality, we explore how gay male academics negotiate and challenge discourses of heteronormativity within different work contexts. Using in‐depth interview data, the paper shows that gay male academics are continually constrained by heteronormativity in constructing viable subject positions as ‘normal’, often having to reproduce heteronormative values that squeeze opportunities for generating non‐heteronormative ‘queer’ sexualities, identities and selves. Constructing a presence as an openly gay academic can invoke another binary through which identities are (re)constructed: as either ‘gay’ (a cleaned up version of gay male sexuality that sustains a heteronormative moral order) or ‘queer’ (cast as radical, disruptive and sexually promiscuous). Data also reveal how gay men challenge organizational heteronormativities through teaching and research activities, producing reverse discourses and creating alternative knowledge/power regimes, despite institutional barriers and risks of perpetuating heteronormative binaries and constructs. Study findings call for pedagogical and research practices that ‘queer’ (rupture, destabilize, disrupt) management knowledge and the heterosexual/homosexual binary, enabling non‐heteronormative voices, perspectives, identities and ways of relating to emerge in queer(er) business and management schools.

  May 26, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12061   open full text
• The Role of the State in Explaining the Internationalization of Emerging Market Enterprises.
  Junjie Hong, Chengqi Wang, Mario Kafouros.
  British Journal of Management. May 20, 2014
  While the competitive advantages of firms from developed economies are well understood, knowledge of the advantages that enable emerging market enterprises (EMEs) to expand overseas remains limited. Our analysis goes beyond theorizing that focuses on firm resources, enhancing the understanding of how EMEs expand abroad by internalizing home‐country institutional advantages that extend beyond the firm boundaries. More specifically, we examine how the state and institutional idiosyncrasies in the home country help EMEs internationalize. We demonstrate that state ownership has a strong independent effect on the international expansion of EMEs. This effect, however, is contingent upon firms' own resources and other location‐ and industry‐specific forces pertaining to the market orientation of each subnational region and the institutional policies within a given industry.

  May 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12059   open full text
• Experiences of Women Elite Leaders Doing Gender: Intra‐gender Micro‐violence between Women.
  Sharon Mavin, Gina Grandy, Jannine Williams.
  British Journal of Management. May 15, 2014
  This paper responds to the dearth of research into women's negative intra‐gender relations and lack of understanding as to why and how these relations manifest. Through a qualitative study of women elite leaders' experiences in UK organizations, the research considers how gendered contexts, women doing gender well and differently simultaneously, intra‐gender competition and female misogyny may explain negative intra‐gender social relations between women. We consider micro‐aggression research and women's abjection and offer a unique conceptualization of intra‐gender micro‐violence with themes of disassociating, suppression of opportunity and abject appearance. The themes illustrate how the masculine symbolic order shapes and constrains women elite leaders' social relations with other women. We conclude that raising consciousness to intra‐gender micro‐violence between women is important as a means of disruption; to facilitate women and men's acceptance of intra‐gender differences between women; and to open up opportunities and possibilities for women in organizations.

  May 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12057   open full text
• Digitalization and Promotion: An Empirical Study in a Large Law Firm.
  Marion Brivot, Helen Lam, Yves Gendron.
  British Journal of Management. May 13, 2014
  In law firms, the number of hours that associates work reportedly plays a preponderant role in promotion decisions. We build on previous research in this area by distinguishing the effect of ‘development hours’ from ‘billable hours’ on promotions and by assessing the extent to which billable hours are still important criteria today, in digitalized environments where efficiency is, presumably, likely to matter more than working long hours. We also examine whether certain types of behaviours, like associates' interactions with technology, may be associated directly or indirectly with a higher likelihood of promotion. We studied these questions in the context of a large corporate law firm in continental Europe, focusing on the promotion of 93 lawyers between 2005 and 2010. We found that both billable and development hours are still significant positive predictors of promotions and that associates' ability to use the case firm's computer‐mediated knowledge management system productively is indirectly rewarded by promotion. This research reasserts the fundamental role of billable hours as one of the primary means for evaluating lawyers' work and suggests that using knowledge management systems gives associates an edge in the race for promotion, particularly in law firms moving along the ‘evolutionary path’ of legal service, from bespoke to commoditized work (Susskind, R. (2010). The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. Oxford: Oxford University Press).

  May 13, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12060   open full text
• Positive and Negative Spillover from Work to Home: The Role of Organizational Culture and Supportive Arrangements.
  Jenny Sok, Rob Blomme, Debbie Tromp.
  British Journal of Management. May 08, 2014
  For today's managers, striking a sound work−home balance is an important matter. In this paper we investigate the relationship between organizational culture and work‐to‐home spillover. Two types of organizational culture, supportive and innovative, were compared with regard to work‐to‐home spillover. We measured work‐to‐home spillover with the help of positive and negative work−home interference measures: negative work−home interference was divided into strain‐based negative work−home interference and time‐based negative work−home interference. A total of 418 alumni of two Dutch business schools completed a questionnaire. The data were analysed by means of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling. Findings showed that a supportive culture explained most of the variance in positive work−home interference and strain‐based negative work−home interference. The relationships between a supportive culture and positive and strain‐based negative work−home interference were fully mediated by flexible work−home arrangements. Flexible work−home arrangements explained the variance in time‐based negative work−home interference, while no relationship was found between supportive culture and time‐based negative work−home interference. Innovative culture was positively related to positive work−home interference and time‐based negative work−home interference. The outcomes suggest that a supportive culture, expressed in flexible work−home arrangements, can enhance positive spillover from the work domain to the home domain and diminish negative spillover. We suggest that improving the work−home interface may attract and retain valued managers.

  May 08, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12058   open full text
• Stress and Burnout in Bicultural Teams in Hi‐tech Industry.
  Ayala Malach Pines, Nurit Zaidman.
  British Journal of Management. May 02, 2014
  This study examined burnout, stress and work importance among 120 Israelis working in binational teams, using quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (semi‐structured interview) methodologies. Based on the existential perspective, the study documented low levels of burnout despite high levels of stress, which were explained by the high perceived importance of the work. Hierarchical regression showed that importance moderated the effect of stress on burnout. Findings also revealed that the unexpected social stressors associated with cultural differences between team members were more stressful than the stressors associated with high‐tech work.

  May 02, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12056   open full text
• Does It Pay to Be Moral? How Indicators of Morality and Competence Enhance Organizational and Work Team Attractiveness.
  Anne‐Marie Prooijen, Naomi Ellemers.
  British Journal of Management. April 24, 2014
  Based on a social identity analysis, the authors argue that people are attracted to teams and organizations with positive features. Such features can refer to the competence and achievements of the organization, or to its moral values and ethical conduct. However, in work contexts, ethics and achievements do not necessarily go together. The paper reports three studies that examine the relative and combined impact of perceived competence vs morality of a team or organization on its attractiveness to individuals. Study 1 (n = 44) reveals that students prefer to seek employment in a moral rather than a competent organization, when forced to choose between these organizational features on a bipolar scale. Study 2 (n = 100) replicates these findings in a design where the competence and morality of a fictitious organization were manipulated orthogonally. Study 3 (n = 89) examines responses to experimental task teams that systematically differed from each other in their competence and morality. Results of all three studies converge to demonstrate that the perceived morality of the team or organization has a greater impact on its attractiveness to individuals than its perceived competence. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

  April 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12055   open full text
• International Strategy and Knowledge Creation: The Advantage of Foreignness and Liability of Concentration.
  Patrick Regnér, Udo Zander.
  British Journal of Management. April 13, 2014
  International business scholars increasingly emphasize regional strategies based on an optimal location of downstream sales. There has been less scholarly attention, however, to the relationship between international strategy and upstream knowledge creation including R&D. Building on contemporary strategic management theory and the knowledge‐based view we remedy this. The viability of home‐regional or bi‐regional strategies is based on common assumptions that imply negative consequences of distance and foreignness for downstream sales and marketing and benefits from agglomeration for upstream knowledge creation activities including R&D. In contrast, we propose that upstream knowledge creation, radical innovation in particular, rather gains from distance and foreignness and from being dispersed, suggesting the effectiveness of a global strategy. Based on the resource‐based view and recent research on the economics of strategic opportunities and competitive advantage, we provide theoretical explanations for this. We demonstrate how a global multinational corporation is uniquely equipped with knowledge extensity including heterogeneous social‐identity frames in multiple sub‐units. Thanks to arbitrage advantages between the sub‐units’ separate and often locally embedded knowledge, a global multinational corporation can address complex interdependences and interactions between knowledge sets required for knowledge creation. This suggests that maximum exploration capabilities are made possible by a global rather than a home‐regional or bi‐regional strategy.

  April 13, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12054   open full text
• Workplace Flexibility Practices and Corporate Performance: Evidence from the British Private Sector.
  Philip B. Whyman, Mark J. Baimbridge, Babatunde A. Buraimo, Alina I. Petrescu.
  British Journal of Management. March 12, 2014
  This paper investigates the relationship between workplace flexibility practices (WFPs) and corporate performance using data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004. Disaggregating WFPs into numerical, functional and cost aspects enables the analysis of their relationships to an objective measure of corporate performance, namely workplace financial turnover. Furthermore separate analyses are presented for different types of workplace: differentiated by workforce size; ownership; age; wage level; and unionization. Results show that different types of workplaces need to pay attention to the mix of WFPs they adopt. We find that certain cost WFPs (profit‐related pay, merit pay and payment‐by‐results) have strong positive relationships with corporate performance. However, training delivers mixed corporate performance results, while the extent of job autonomy and the proportion of part‐time employees in a workplace have an inverse association with corporate performance. Given the limited existing research examining disaggregated measures of WFPs and objectively measured corporate performance, this paper offers useful insights for firms, policy makers and the overall economy.

  March 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12051   open full text
• The Regime of Excellence and the Erosion of Ethos in Critical Management Studies.
  Nick Butler, Sverre Spoelstra.
  British Journal of Management. March 12, 2014
  The regime of excellence – manifested in journal rankings and research assessments – is coming to increasing prominence in the contemporary university. Critical scholars have responded to the encroaching ideology of excellence in various ways: while some seek to defend such measures of academic performance on the grounds that they provide accountability and transparency in place of elitism and privilege, others have criticized their impact on scholarship. The present paper contributes to the debate by exploring the relationship between the regime of excellence and critical management studies (CMS). Drawing on extensive interviews with CMS professors, we show how the regime of excellence is eroding the ethos of critical scholars. As a result, decisions about what to research and where to publish are increasingly being made according to the diktats of research assessments, journal rankings and managing editors of premier outlets. This suggests that CMS researchers may find themselves inadvertently aiding and abetting the rise of managerialism in the university sector, which raises troubling questions about the future of critical scholarship in the business school.

  March 12, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12053   open full text
• Fairness Perceptions of Work−Life Balance Initiatives: Effects on Counterproductive Work Behaviour.
  T. Alexandra Beauregard.
  British Journal of Management. March 03, 2014
  This study examined the impact of employees' fairness perceptions regarding organizational work−life balance initiatives on their performance of counterproductive work behaviour (CWB). Moderating effects of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism were also explored. Quantitative data collected from 224 public sector employees demonstrated significant main and moderating effects of informational justice, adaptive perfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism on CWB. Adaptive perfectionism weakened the link between informational justice and CWB, while maladaptive perfectionism strengthened it. Qualitative data collected from 26 employees indicate that both the social exchange and job stress models are useful frameworks for understanding CWB in the context of work−life balance initiatives; CWB emerged as both a negative emotional reaction to unfairness and as a tool used by employees to restore equity in the exchange relationship with their employer. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

  March 03, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12052   open full text
• Doing More with Less? Employee Reactions to Psychological Contract Breach via Target Similarity or Spillover during Public Sector Organizational Change.
  Neil Conway, Tina Kiefer, Jean Hartley, Rob B. Briner.
  British Journal of Management. January 27, 2014
  Many countries are facing the twin pressures of austerity and recession following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. This paper uses the UK public sector and a major national announcement of budget cuts signalling extensive organizational cutbacks as its setting. We examine (a) whether organizational changes following the national announcement affect public sector employees' psychological contract breach, (b) whether employee reactions to psychological contract breach are consistent with the target similarity model and vary across foci, namely the organization, co‐workers and public service users, and (c) whether some of these relationships are moderated by job insecurity or public sector commitment. We collected longitudinal survey data before and after the announcement of budget cuts, using a sample of 340 employees from a range of public organizations and locations. Results largely confirm the hypotheses. Increases in organizational change predicted psychological contract breach, which in turn predicted decreases in contributions towards the organization; however, contributions towards co‐workers and public service users were unaffected, which can be explained with a target similarity, rather than a spillover, model. Furthermore, the relationship between breach and employee behaviours directed toward the public was moderated by job insecurity and public sector commitment.

  January 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12041   open full text
• Parents, Perceptions and Belonging: Exploring Flexible Working among UK Fathers and Mothers.
  Caroline J. Gatrell, Simon B. Burnett, Cary L. Cooper, Paul Sparrow.
  British Journal of Management. January 27, 2014
  This paper advances knowledge regarding how fathers and mothers perceive and experience flexible working opportunities. It does this through applying the theoretical concept ‘belonging’ to ‘Parsonian’ classifications of parenting and work. In so doing it makes transparent the misconceptions and inequities which exist among parents and their organizational environments. Focusing initially on a qualitative study of fathers’ experience of working flexibly, the paper shows how fathers felt marginalized from the possibilities of flexible work due to line managers’ assumptions that men belonged to an ‘instrumental’ economic provider group. The paper contributes a new angle to debate by articulating how fathers perceived employed mothers as belonging to an ‘expressive’ child‐oriented group, with privileged access to flexibility. However, drawing upon a study of maternity and flexible work we query fathers’ assumptions that flexibility was easily available to mothers, suggesting that fathers’ perceptions of maternal privilege were misconceived. While mothers were categorized as belonging within an ‘expressive’ group associated with childcare, they were nevertheless discouraged from accessing flexibility. Inequities between women and men (with regard to flexibility) thus appeared to be less significant than fathers supposed.

  January 27, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12050   open full text
• Empowering Leadership, Psychological Empowerment and Employee Outcomes: Testing a Multi‐level Mediating Model.
  Kai Hung Fong, Ed Snape.
  British Journal of Management. December 17, 2013
  This study examined the effects of empowering leadership on employees in a customer service organization, using data from 266 employees and their supervisors from 41 work teams in a division of a large Hong Kong telecommunications corporation. Empowering leadership had acceptable levels of within‐group agreement and between‐group variability, providing support for its analysis as a group‐level construct. Testing a multi‐level model in which psychological empowerment was hypothesized to mediate the relationship between both within‐group and between‐group empowering leadership and individual outcomes, empowering leadership was associated with psychological empowerment at both levels. There was evidence of significant mediation effects at both the individual and group levels. These findings underline the importance of analysing both within‐group and between‐group differences in empowering leadership and their effects on individual attitudes and behaviours.

  December 17, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12048   open full text
• A Dyadic Model of Customer Orientation: Mediation and Moderation Effects.
  Simon Brach, Gianfranco Walsh, Thorsten Hennig‐Thurau, Markus Groth.
  British Journal of Management. December 16, 2013
  This research distinguishes between employees' customer orientation (ECO) and customer orientation as perceived by customers (COPC) to investigate the contingencies of the relationship between these two constructs. Drawing on emotional contagion theory and using a dyadic field study design, the authors examine whether ECO affects COPC, as well as whether the link between ECO and COPC might be mediated by employees' authentic emotional displays. They also examine service scripts and the accuracy with which customers detect employees' authentic emotional displays as moderators of this mediated link. The findings confirm the important role of ECO as an influence on COPC and provide evidence that employees' authentic emotional displays mediate the effects of ECO. In addition, service scripts and customers' detection accuracy have moderating effects.

  December 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12049   open full text
• The Sound of Silence. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Discrimination in ‘Inclusive Organizations’.
  Vincenza Priola, Diego Lasio, Silvia De Simone, Francesco Serri.
  British Journal of Management. December 09, 2013
  Most studies on diversity and discrimination in the workplace have focused on ‘visible’ minorities such as gender or race, often neglecting the experiences of invisible minorities such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers. In this paper we explore the practices of inclusion/exclusion of LGBTs in the workplace in Italian social cooperatives, which are specifically founded to create employment for people who are disadvantaged in the labour market. The study examines how organizations, which have an ethos focused on inclusion and mainly employ workers from specific social minority groups, manage the inclusion of LGBT workers. We also explore the experience of LGBT workers within these organizations. The paper reports that the culture of silence existing in the five organizations studied prevents LGBT employees from constructing a work identity which encompasses their sexual identity and prevents the organizations from achieving their aim of being fully inclusive workplaces.

  December 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12043   open full text
• Being All Things to All Customers: Building Reputation in an Institutionalized Field.
  Arild Wæraas, Hogne L. Sataøen.
  British Journal of Management. December 09, 2013
  This paper seeks to draw empirical attention to the relationship between legitimacy and reputation in institutionalized fields. Norwegian hospitals find themselves in a strongly institutionalized field and do not want to differentiate from each other, despite seeking a favorable reputation. In order to acquire insights into the conditions that prompt organizations to reject differentiation, we carried out qualitative interviews with the hospitals’ communication directors. Three sets of justifications for not differentiating emerged from an inductive analysis of these interviews. Differentiation is not adapted to the universalistic needs of the hospitals, not in accordance with solidarity norms, and not a pragmatic solution. The analysis suggests that the hospitals face a trade‐off between the contradictory demands of similarity and difference and hence legitimacy and reputation: They renounce the advantage of a unique reputation (i.e. competitive advantage) in order to retain the benefits of conformity (i.e. legitimacy). Implications of these findings for our understanding of the relative salience of legitimacy and reputation and the dynamics between them are discussed.

  December 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12044   open full text
• Females and Precarious Board Positions: Further Evidence of the Glass Cliff.
  Mark Mulcahy, Carol Linehan.
  British Journal of Management. December 05, 2013
  The ‘glass cliff’ posits that when women achieve high profile roles, these are at firms in precarious positions. Previous research analysed appointments (male/female), estimated the precariousness of firms involved and drew inferences about the glass cliff. This study is different as it directly tests the relationship between a precarious situation and changes in board gender diversity. The sample is companies listed on the UK stock exchange reporting an initial loss in the years 2004–2006. A matched control sample is used in a difference‐in‐differences analysis to avoid inadvertently attributing improvements arising from societal/regulatory changes in gender diversity to the loss event. Findings suggest that when the loss is ‘big’ there is a difference in the increase in gender diversity versus both the control and the ‘small’ loss subsamples, i.e. compelling evidence of the glass cliff. In the context of ongoing political and social debates about women on boards our work (i) identifies continuing structural barriers for women ascending to board level in that women are more likely to be over‐represented on boards of companies that are more precarious and (ii) sounds a note of caution about celebrating increased gender diversity on boards without considering the precariousness of the company involved.

  December 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12046   open full text
• Organizational Cultural Perpetuation: A Case Study of an English Premier League Football Club.
  Emmanuel Ogbonna, Lloyd C. Harris.
  British Journal of Management. November 08, 2013
  Although the prevalence of studies of cultural change initiatives has encouraged some researchers to suggest that a greater understanding of the enduring nature of organizational culture is important, there is a dearth of illustration of this aspect of the cultural phenomenon in organizations. This paper provides an empirical description of the factors that are associated with the perpetuation of organizational culture, thereby making it resistant to forced change. We achieve this by presenting evidence of an attempt by executives in a top English Premier League football club (organization) to transform the culture of their organization. We elucidate the espoused rationale for change, the approach adopted and the outcomes of the change efforts. Thereafter, we highlight the impact of the strong forces perpetuating the culture of the organization and impeding the planned actions of managers.

  November 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12037   open full text
• Rich Ties and Innovative Knowledge Transfer within a Firm.
  Rick Aalbers, Wilfred Dolfsma, Otto Koppius.
  British Journal of Management. November 08, 2013
  We show that contacts in formal, informal and especially multiplex networks explain transfer of innovative knowledge in an organization. The contribution of informal contacts has been much acknowledged, while that of formal contacts did not receive much attention in the literature in recent decades. No study thus far has included both these different kinds of contacts in a firm, let alone considered their combined effect. The exact overlap between formal as well as informal contacts between individuals, forming multiplex or what we call rich ties because of their contribution, especially drives the transfer of new, innovative knowledge in a firm. Studying two cases in very different settings suggests these rich ties have a particularly strong effect on knowledge transfer in an organization, even when controlling for the strength of ties. Some of the effects on knowledge transfer in an organization previously ascribed to either the formal network or the informal network may actually be due to their combined effect in a rich tie.

  November 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12040   open full text
• Lessons Learned from Community Organizations: Inclusion of People with Disabilities and Others.
  Yuka Fujimoto, Ruth Rentschler, Huong Le, David Edwards, Charmine E. J. Härtel.
  British Journal of Management. July 30, 2013
  Workforce diversity requires broader vision and scope in managing diversity so that there is greater inclusion inside and outside organizations. This paper provides this vision by extending the stream of workforce diversity research to community‐oriented inclusion and its processes. The authors interviewed 34 people with disabilities and 40 people without disabilities who were stakeholders of community arts and sports organizations. The participants with disabilities were mainly arts audiences, artists and sports athletes, and the participants without disabilities were mainly managers and government officials. The key findings report the importance of inclusion through common interest groups being facilitated by (1) non‐minority specific communal activities, (2) listening to minority voices, (3) multidimensional accessibility, (4) availability of organizational and natural champions and (5) cross‐boundary networks and collaborations. In order to create more inclusive organizations, the authors suggest that private organizations need more community‐oriented values, goals and strategies that foster boundaryless inclusion of people with disabilities and other minority groups in organizations and society.

  July 30, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12034   open full text
• The Snowballing Penalty Effect: Multiple Disadvantage and Pay.
  Carol Woodhams, Ben Lupton, Marc Cowling.
  British Journal of Management. June 26, 2013
  This paper makes the case that the current single‐axis approach to the diagnosis and remedy of pay discrimination is inadequate in the case of multiple disadvantage. While a good deal is known about pay gaps, particularly those affecting women, less is known about those affecting people in other disadvantaged groups and those in more than one such group. This analysis of multiple years of pay data, n = 513,000, from a large UK‐based company shows that people with more than one disadvantaged identity suffer a significantly greater pay penalty than those with a single disadvantage. The data also suggest that penalties associated with multiple disadvantage exponentially increase. In other words, disadvantages seem to interact to the detriment of people at ‘intersections’. The paper considers the implications for policies aimed at reducing pay inequalities. These currently take a single‐axis approach and may be misdirected.

  June 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12032   open full text
• The Effects of Cross‐border and Cross‐industry Mergers and Acquisitions on Home‐region and Global Multinational Enterprises.
  Gerhard Kling, Abby Ghobadian, Michael A. Hitt, Utz Weitzel, Nicholas O'Regan.
  British Journal of Management. June 17, 2013
  We examine the effects of international and product diversification through mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on the firm's risk–return profile. We identify the rewards from different types of M&As and investigate whether becoming a global firm is a value‐enhancing strategy. Drawing on the theoretical work of Vachani (Journal of International Business Studies, 22 (1991), pp. 307−222) and on Rugman and Verbeke's (Journal of International Business Studies, 35 (2004), pp. 3−18) metrics, we classify firms according to their degree of international and product diversification. To account for the endogeneity of M&As, we develop a panel vector autoregression. We find that global and host‐region multinational enterprises benefit from cross‐border M&As that reinforce their geographical footprint. Cross‐industry M&As enhance the risk–return profile of home‐region firms. This effect depends on the degree of product diversification. Hence there is no value‐enhancing M&A strategy for home‐region and bi‐regional firms to become ‘truly global’.

  June 17, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12023   open full text
• Mobile Technology and Boundary Permeability.
  Linda Duxbury, Christopher Higgins, Rob Smart, Maggie Stevenson.
  British Journal of Management. June 13, 2013
  An extensive review of the literature reveals a lack of insight into why some employees and their families benefit from the adoption of mobile technology while others do not. The paper summarizes the authors' efforts to answer this question. The authors undertook a longitudinal case study of the adoption and use of a BlackBerry Smartphone by 25 professional knowledge workers. Four theoretical lenses were used to help with the data analysis process: boundary theory, the social constructivist view of technology, sensemaking and attribution theory. Analysis of the Time 2 data identified three groups. Segmentors (n = 4) did not use their smartphones outside work hours. Integrators (n = 8), used their smartphones to connect to both work and family anywhere, but not any time (temporally separated work and family roles). Struggling segmentors (n = 13) felt pressured by their organization to use their device 24/7 and did so. The analysis indicates that the relationship between the use of mobile technology and successful boundary management depends on the development of a strategy to manage the device prior to adoption, the ability to change one's strategy to respond to concerns at home, and self‐control.

  June 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12027   open full text
• The M Curve and the Performance of Spanish International New Ventures.
  Paloma Almodóvar, Alan M. Rugman.
  British Journal of Management. June 06, 2013
  In this paper we address three challenges. First, we discuss how international new ventures (INVs) are probably not explained by the Uppsala model as there is no time for learning about foreign markets in newly born and small firms. Only in the longer term can INVs develop experiential learning to overcome the liability of foreignness as they expand abroad. Second, we advance theoretically on previous research demonstrating that the multinationality−performance relationship of INVs follows a traditional S‐shaped relationship, but they first experience a ‘born global illusion’ which leads to a non‐traditional M curve. Third, using a panel data analysis for the period 1994–2008 we find empirically that Spanish INVs follow an inverted U curve in the very short term, where no learning takes place, but that experience gained over time yields an M‐curve relationship once learning takes place.

  June 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12022   open full text
• Convergence and Divergence Dynamics in British and French Business Schools: How Will the Pressure for Accreditation Influence these Dynamics?
  Lisa Thomas, Jon Billsberry, Véronique Ambrosini, Harry Barton.
  British Journal of Management. May 09, 2013
  This paper focuses on convergence and divergence dynamics among leading British and French business schools and explores how the pressure for accreditation influences these dynamics. We illustrate that despite historical differences in approaches to management education in Britain and France, these approaches have converged partly based on the influence of the American model of management education but more recently through the pursuit of accreditation, in particular from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and the European Quality Improvement Standard. We explore these dynamics through the application of the resource‐based view of the firm and institutional theory and suggest that, whilst achieving accreditation is a necessary precursor for international competition, it is no longer a form of competitive advantage. The pursuit of accreditation has fostered a form of competitive mimicry reducing national distinctiveness. The resource‐based view of the firm suggests that the top schools need a more heterogeneous approach that is not easily replicable if they are to outperform the competitors. Consequently, the convergence of management education in Britain and France will become a new impetus for divergence. We assert that future growth and competitive advantage might be better achieved through the reassertion of national, regional and local cultural characteristics.

  May 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12007   open full text
• Organizational Learning, Innovation and Internationalization: A Complex System Model.
  Ricardo Chiva, Pervez Ghauri, Joaquín Alegre.
  British Journal of Management. May 09, 2013
  Research on organizational learning, innovation and internationalization has traditionally linked these concepts through linear causality, by considering any one of them as the cause of another, an approach that might be considered contradictory and static. This paper aims to clarify these relationships and proposes a dynamic theoretical model that has mutual causality at its core and is based on ideas originating in complexity theory. The final model results from case studies of two clothing sector firms. The authors consider that the three concepts constitute a complex system and can adapt and transcend, as any alteration can take the system to the edge of chaos. Adaptability is fostered by concentration, improvement and discussion. Transcendence is fostered by attention, dialogue and inquiry. The different paces of the two case study companies led their systems to two different models: the incremental complex adaptive system model and the global complex generative system model. The incremental model is characterized by adaptive learning, incremental innovation and low internationalization; and the global system is characterized by generative learning, radical innovation and global internationalization. The paper ends with an exploration of the academic and management implications of the model.

  May 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12026   open full text
• The Regional Strategies of British Multinational Subsidiaries in South East Asia.
  Quyen T.K. Nguyen.
  British Journal of Management. May 09, 2013
  We compare the strategies of manufacturing and service multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiaries in South East Asia to investigate whether they follow global versus regional strategy. We examine foreign direct investment (FDI) motives, types of FDI, product and service offerings, and sales strategies of these two groups. Using a unique primary data set of 101 British MNE subsidiaries in six South East Asian countries over the five‐year period (2003–2007), we find that manufacturing and service subsidiaries pursue regional strategies. Both groups have a strong regional focus in their sales. We explore the possible reasons for the relative lack of global strategy of these subsidiaries.

  May 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12006   open full text
• Technology Sourcing and Reverse Productivity Spillovers in the Multinational Enterprise: Global or Regional Phenomenon?
  Nigel Driffield, James H. Love, Yong Yang.
  British Journal of Management. May 09, 2013
  The focus of this paper is the importance of regions in technology transfer by the multinational firm. Specifically, we focus on an issue that has become known as knowledge or technology sourcing via ‘reverse spillovers’, i.e. productivity effects running from domestic firms to foreign establishments. Traditionally this issue has presented a challenge for international business scholars, both in terms of identifying the phenomenon and in terms of determining the success of the strategy. In this paper we examine these questions within the context of the debate on globalization/regionalization. For a set of some 4500 subsidiaries of multinationals across a wide range of countries we show that reverse productivity spillovers via technology sourcing are significant but that they tend to be concentrated within ‘triad regions’ rather than across them. We also find that reverse spillovers from host country multinational enterprises are greater than those from other host country firms or from other foreign affiliates.

  May 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12009   open full text
• Testing the Regional Performance of Multinational Enterprises in the Retail Sector: The Moderating Effects of Timing, Speed and Experience.
  Alex Mohr, Fernando Fastoso, Chengang Wang, Vikrant Shirodkar.
  British Journal of Management. May 09, 2013
  Drawing on regional strategy theory we complement the core effect of firm‐specific advantages on the performance of multinational enterprises with an analysis of the performance consequences of home region concentration on firm performance. We also develop hypotheses regarding the effect of foreign entry timing, internationalization speed and international experience on the performance effect of home region concentration. We test our hypotheses against unique longitudinal data from a panel of 128 multinational enterprises in the retail sector whose geographical spread of international activities we traced between 1995 and 2010. Our findings support the predictions of regional strategy theory and highlight the importance of foreign entry timing and internationalization speed in strengthening the positive effect of home region concentration on the performance of multinational enterprises.

  May 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12013   open full text
• Regionalization Strategies of European Union Electric Utilities.
  Ans Kolk, Johan Lindeque, Daniel Buuse.
  British Journal of Management. May 09, 2013
  As part of the debate about globalization and regionalization, this paper adds a perspective that has so far remained underexposed, that of (formerly state‐owned) firms in (previously) regulated industries, in order to better understand the (changing) role of the home country/region in internationalization processes in the context of regional market liberalization. We explore the global/regional orientations of the seven major European Union electric utilities from five different home countries, which are active in both fossil‐fuel and renewable energy generation. Using a multiple case study design, we collected internationalization/regionalization data from firms' annual reports for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010, supplemented with an analysis of secondary sources. Firms show a clear pattern of increasing internationalization away from the home‐country market, coupled with a home‐region orientation for traditional generation activities which differs from the more international, wider and often multiple regional presences in the newer renewables business for some firms. Institutional factors are argued to play an important role in both processes. Findings suggest distinct regionalization patterns for business units and different firm‐specific advantages, with strategic opportunities related to asset positions. Home‐country effects may be linked to a heterogeneous firm‐specific home‐region liability of foreignness, resulting in incomplete home‐region internationalization in most cases.

  May 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12015   open full text
• A Regional Perspective on Multinational Expansion Strategies: Reconsidering the Three‐stage Paradigm.
  Chang Hoon Oh, Farok Contractor.
  British Journal of Management. May 09, 2013
  Empirical studies on international expansion have shown only limited support for the three‐stage (S‐curve) hypothesis. Whilst the basic concept is intuitively acceptable, the very generality of the paradigm is its weakness in empirical studies. This paper takes a more fine‐grained theoretical and empirical approach by distinguishing between the regions covered by different multinational companies. The regional scope covered by a multinational firm makes a substantial difference with regard to its performance. We find that most firms can enhance their performance by focusing on their home region, whilst only a subset of firms operating in both the home and foreign regions show the overall S‐curve relationship between multinationality and performance. Certain combinations of product diversification and regional coverage also enhance performance.

  May 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12019   open full text
• Gender Inequalities in Academic Innovation and Enterprise: A Bourdieuian Analysis.
  Mine Karataş‐Özkan, Elizabeth Chell.
  British Journal of Management. April 24, 2013
  This paper demonstrates that engagement in innovation and enterprise activity in SET departments within three UK universities is, in part, gendered. A Bourdieuian approach is adopted to identify underlying structures and practices that have causal powers to generate gender‐based inequalities. Drawing on empirical research with 52 participants, this study reveals gendered science enterprise experiences, characterized by a field that is considered strong in shaping the habitus and presenting stark options to women in pursuit of their careers. It demonstrates the multilayered nature of the fields that shape gendered experiences and resultant inequalities by taking into account individual dispositions of academics and their habitus, including their science enterprise experience and the wider commercial field beyond the university, and generates a number of implications for practice and policy.

  April 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12020   open full text
• Investigating Unpaid Overtime Working among the Part‐time Workforce.
  Neil Conway, Jane Sturges.
  British Journal of Management. April 08, 2013
  This paper considers whether unpaid overtime working relates to contracted working hours (i.e. whether an employee works part‐time or full‐time) in Britain. It uses the authoritative 2004 British data set Workplace Employment Relations Survey to derive a sample of 4,530 workers, from 735 workplace establishments, who worked unpaid overtime. It tests hypotheses linking contracted working hours to unpaid overtime, and whether this link is moderated by gender, occupational group and the availability of flexible working arrangements. Part‐time workers were found to work significantly more unpaid overtime hours compared with their full‐time counterparts. Gender, occupation and flexible working practices moderated this relationship, where the extent to which part‐timers work more unpaid overtime than their full‐time counterparts was greater for men than for women, was greater for professional/managerial part‐time workers compared with other occupations, and was more evident in establishments less likely to offer flexible working arrangements. The findings raise concerns about the exploitation of part‐time workers.

  April 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12011   open full text
• Perceived Support and Women's Intentions to Stay at a Sport Organization.
  Jennifer R. Spoor, Russell Hoye.
  British Journal of Management. April 08, 2013
  Women remain underrepresented in upper management within sport organizations and more broadly. This research examines organizational factors that may affect women's (and men's) likelihood of remaining with their sport organization, which would presumably affect their willingness and ability to step into leadership roles. The research examines the effects of equity human resource management practices, top management support for gender equity and gender‐related barriers on organizational commitment and intent to stay with their sport organization, as well as whether changes in perceived organizational support would mediate the relationships. Results from a survey of current employees in Australian sport organizations generally support the hypotheses. Perceived top management support for gender equity is a strong and consistent predictor of outcomes, and the effect is mediated by perceived organizational support. Implications for top management's role in implementing gender equity practices are discussed.

  April 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12018   open full text
• Recalibrating Management: Feminist Activism to Achieve Equality in an Evolving University.
  Regine Bendl, Mary Ann Danowitz, Angelika Schmidt.
  British Journal of Management. April 04, 2013
  In this paper we examine the process of incorporating gender equality into a higher education institution as it evolves into a managerial university. The case illustrates the ongoing processes between structure, activism and features of gender equality, and provides insights into how activists adapt to changes in governance and influence managerial responses to equality. Tracing the interaction of employee activism with new managerialism over nearly two decades, four phases of change are identified. These provide a basis for generating two concepts – managerial recalibration and individual activism – while challenging the social abeyance hypothesis of social movements.

  April 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12008   open full text
• Reordering Spatial and Social Relations: A Case Study of Professional and Managerial Flexworkers.
  Julia Richardson, Steve McKenna.
  British Journal of Management. March 25, 2013
  Research on flexible work practices has focused primarily on social relationships, individual identity, work/work–life balance experience and performance. This paper aims to add another dimension by focusing on space and, specifically, the performance of space by professional flexworkers as they reorder their home and work lives through the process of becoming flexworkers. Drawing on Law's ‘modes of ordering’ and Latourian actor network theory, as well as on Beyes and Steyaert's recent contribution on ‘performing space’, the paper considers how flexworkers themselves reorganize space(s) as an ongoing accomplishment. The purpose and contribution is to offer an alternative to the view that the home and work are rigid containers fixed in social structure, to one that views them as self‐referential space(s), reordered by flexworkers as they seek to ‘keep the social moving’. The paper is based on an empirical study of employees in a Canadian subsidiary of a large hi‐tech multinational corporation. It examines organizational policy documents and interviews with managerial and non‐managerial flexworkers to identify how social and spatial relations are reordered and performed.

  March 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12017   open full text
• Organizational Responses to Contending Institutional Logics: The Moderating Effect of Group Dynamics.
  Toke Bjerregaard, Charlotte Jonasson.
  British Journal of Management. March 13, 2013
  This paper advances knowledge on how the forms of institutional logics that emerge and become venerated among members of a singular organization in a heterogeneous field are influenced by struggles between contending interest groups. It examines the moderating effect of group dynamics that occur when an organization attempts to balance novel institutional complexity within organizational bounds through its hiring and promotion systems. The authors argue that, while the specific institutional oppositions of heterogeneous fields compel organizational changes, the institutional forms that emerge and become legitimate among members of an organization in such fields are the effects of indeterminate social processes of regularization and breaking of coexisting logics. The paper provides insights into how the negotiations among groups of organizational actors over the process and outcome of institutional change are influenced by asymmetric power relationships yet significantly mediated by their social strategies. The findings reported are from an ethnography of the enactment of institutional changes at a South Korean credit card company following the economic crisis in 1997 and the International Monetary Fund bailout programme.

  March 13, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12014   open full text
• Beyond Authenticity? Humanism, Posthumanism and New Organization Development.
  Melanie Bryant, Julie Wolfram Cox.
  British Journal of Management. March 10, 2013
  In recent debates, the relevance of traditional objectivist organization development (OD) approaches has been questioned in terms of their appropriateness for contemporary organizations. A new OD has emerged wherein change is viewed as a socially constructed process and where there are multiple rather than singular authentic possibilities. We explore these possibilities by drawing on employees' discussions of how they manage conflicting interpretations of organizational change. Using the example of emotional labour, we compare traditional and new OD approaches in terms of how they view authenticity and then discuss posthumanist analysis, in which authenticity (or lack thereof) is no longer of focal concern. In particular, under traditional OD, where authenticity can be ‘discovered’, the need to negotiate multiplicity and to downplay ‘negative’ responses is a problem to be addressed. Under new OD such multiplicity becomes data for dialogue and discussion of future potentials. In contrast, a posthumanist analysis, while relational, neither reframes nor tempers authenticity but decentres the very notion of autonomy on which authenticity is based. The social constructionism of new OD is recast and implications for theory and intervention are discussed.

  March 10, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12005   open full text
• Top Management Team Members’ Decision Influence and Cooperative Behaviour: An Empirical Study in the Information Technology Industry.
  Tine Buyl, Christophe Boone, Walter Hendriks.
  British Journal of Management. March 04, 2013
  Organizational leadership is generally distributed between the chief executive officer (CEO) and the top management team (TMT) members. Building on this observation, we present an empirical investigation of the cues for CEOs to delegate decision‐making influence to particular TMT members. In the literature, explanations both based on expertise and driven by similarity are described. In this study, we reconcile both explanations by examining the moderating role of the TMT's level of ‘cooperative behaviour’ (collaboration and information exchange). We analyse when and in what circumstances TMT members’ expertise and similarity to the CEO regarding his/her functional background and/or locus‐of‐control predict their decision‐making influence. We postulate that TMT cooperative behaviour will advance the effect of expertise on TMT members’ decision influence but impede the effect of similarity to the CEO. Our hypotheses are tested on a data set of 135 TMT members from 32 Dutch and Belgian information technology firms. Overall, we find that our proposed research model is confirmed for technology‐oriented decisions. Furthermore, we draw exploratory conclusions about the effect of TMT cooperative behaviour on the systematic distribution of decision influence in TMTs.

  March 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12004   open full text
• Professional Migrant Women Decentring Otherness: A Transnational Perspective.
  Edwina Pio, Caroline Essers.
  British Journal of Management. February 27, 2013
  Embraced by their ethnicity and gender many migrant women have negotiated their own spaces in the host country. Yet, much of the literature on migrant women focuses on those who are struggling to make ends meet with low levels of education and how this defines the construction of the Other. We contribute to the limited scholarship in management research on professional migrant women by illustrating how transnational processes play out in the lived experience of professional migrant Indian women in New Zealand, and how they invoke agency in decentring Otherness. This qualitative study foregrounds the navigation of asymmetrical power relations and the strategic deployment of ethnicity, education and caste affiliation, when confronted with processes of exclusion in the labour market. We argue for the need to highlight narratives of professional migrant women which reflect the agency and articulation of their voices, thus reworking notions of the Other in transnational space.

  February 27, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12003   open full text
• Internal and External Social Capital for Radical Product Innovation: Do They Always Work Well Together?
  Gloria Cuevas‐Rodríguez, Carmen Cabello‐Medina, Antonio Carmona‐Lavado.
  British Journal of Management. January 07, 2013
  We examine the role of internal and external relational social capital (SC) as determinants of radical product innovation (RPI). By analysing both sides of SC, we provide interesting insights on their relative influence and their interaction effect on this type of innovation. Besides, traditional assumptions on SC and innovation are questioned. In our empirical study using a sample of 142 manufacturing and service companies we found that, of the two types of SC analysed, internal SC is the most relevant predictor of RPI in relation to either technological or market dimensions. The influence of external SC is not as strong as the internal one. Regarding their interaction effect, external SC reduces the positive effect of internal SC on the market dimension of RPI. Interesting implications arise for practitioners, who should pay special attention to the higher impact of internal SC on RPI and the need to carefully manage the difficulties that emerge when it is combined with external SC.

  January 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12002   open full text
• From Entrepreneurial Orientation and Learning Orientation to Business Performance: Analysing the Mediating Role of Organizational Learning and the Moderating Effects of Organizational Size.
  Juan C. Real, José L. Roldán, Antonio Leal.
  British Journal of Management. December 03, 2012
  Following the organizational learning theory and the knowledge‐based view approach, this contribution aims to study the influence of entrepreneurial orientation and learning orientation on organizational learning, considering the latter as a mediating variable in the relationships between both antecedent cultural values and business performance. We also analyse the moderating role of organizational size on these previous relationships. The hypotheses proposed in our research model are tested on a sample of 140 Spanish industrial companies, applying variance‐based structural equation modelling: partial least squares. In order to assess the moderating effects of organizational size, we adopt a multi‐group approach using two subsamples with large firms and small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Our findings indicate that organizational learning partially mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and performance and fully mediates the link between learning orientation and performance. Likewise, the results reveal that the relationship established between entrepreneurial orientation and organizational learning is more intense for the group of large firms than for the group of SMEs. Moreover, the influence of learning orientation on organizational learning is greater in SMEs than in large firms.

  December 03, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00848.x   open full text
• Women in Upper Echelons of Management, Tenure and Legal Risk.
  Shuji Bao, Stav Fainshmidt, Anil Nair, Veselina Vracheva.
  British Journal of Management. October 29, 2012
  Integrating risk, gender diversity and upper echelons literatures, we examine whether the presence of women in upper management (top management team (TMT) and board of directors (BOD)) and the tenure of TMTs and BODs are associated with the risk of lawsuits. An analysis of data from firms in the US retail industry shows that the presence of women in TMTs and BODs and the tenure of TMTs and BODs are negatively associated with legal risk, but longer tenured BODs with more women had a positive impact on lawsuits. Implications and suggestions for future research are offered.

  October 29, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00847.x   open full text
• Effects of Leadership Style, Creativity Technique and Personal Initiative on Employee Creativity.
  Daniel Herrmann, Jörg Felfe.
  British Journal of Management. October 29, 2012
  Transformational leadership is assumed to enhance employees' creativity. However, results of meta‐analytic research on the relations between transformational leadership and creativity have fallen short of expectations. The authors argue that, besides leadership style, the creativity technique that a leader employs is an important means of stimulating employees' creativity. In addition, it is assumed that leadership styles and creativity techniques may have different effects, depending on the measure of creativity output (quantitative vs qualitative). Therefore, in an experimental setting, the effects of different creativity techniques (provocation technique vs brainwriting) and leadership styles (transformational vs transactional) on both quantitative and qualitative creativity were examined. Results showed that transformational leadership and provocation technique led to higher levels of qualitative creativity than transactional leadership and brainwriting, respectively. Conversely, transactional leadership and brainwriting were more effective for quantitative creativity. The additional benefit of the provocation technique in qualitative creativity was found to be higher in the transactional leadership condition than in the transformational leadership condition. Moreover, personal initiative made a significant and independent contribution to both qualitative and quantitative creativity. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

  October 29, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00849.x   open full text
• The Dilemmas of Internationalization: Corporate Social Responsibility in the Multinational Corporation.
  Krista Bondy, Ken Starkey.
  British Journal of Management. October 19, 2012
  We add to the global–local debate by highlighting concerns with the empirical and conceptual validity of the construct ‘integrated’ as it operates within corporate social responsibility (CSR). We do so by investigating the extent to which foreign national culture and related local issues are incorporated into the CSR policy of 37 multinational corporations, examining strategy development and implementation across global locations. This research suggests that integrated internationalization strategies do not resolve global and local CSR issues. In fact, they reinforce outcomes similar to global strategies, where core issues identified by headquarters are legitimated and local issues are marginalized, an outcome that appears somewhat at odds with the spirit of local responsiveness embedded in CSR thinking.

  October 19, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00840.x   open full text
• Emergent Marketing Strategies and Performance: The Effects of Market Uncertainty and Strategic Feedback Systems.
  Simos Chari, Constantine S. Katsikeas, George Balabanis, Matthew J. Robson.
  British Journal of Management. October 18, 2012
  Although many process‐based studies appear in the strategic management literature, little attention has been devoted to the formation process of marketing strategies. Drawing on enactment and information‐processing theories, this study views the external environment as a source of information (i.e. enacted) and organizations as information‐processing entities. We propose a conceptual framework of antecedents and market performance consequences of emergent marketing strategies and test it with a sample of 214 UK enterprises. The results suggest that dimensions of market uncertainty (i.e. dynamism and complexity) and strategic feedback systems influence the formation of emergent marketing strategy. Furthermore, the data reveal that market uncertainty aspects condition the association between emergent marketing strategies and market performance in different ways. These findings provide new insights into how emergent marketing strategies evolve and influence organizational outcomes.

  October 18, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00843.x   open full text
• Corporate Diversification, Information Asymmetry and Insider Trading.
  Ali Ataullah, Ian Davidson, Hang Le, Geoffrey Wood.
  British Journal of Management. October 08, 2012
  The literature suggests that corporate diversification destroys firm value. This value destruction is usually considered to be a consequence of managers' pursuing diversification strategies to benefit themselves rather than to increase firm value. This paper provides evidence that casts doubt on this agency theory‐based explanation for corporate diversification. Evidence based on insider trading suggests that managers themselves consider their diversification strategies to be value‐increasing. Specifically, it is documented that corporate insiders (directors) purchase more of their firms' shares in the open market when corporate diversification is high. Moreover, insiders purchase more when the level of diversification discount is high, suggesting that they disagree with outside investors' undervaluation due to diversification. It is also found that the market reaction to insiders' purchases is positively related to corporate diversification. This result suggests that outsiders consider the amount of favourable information contained in insiders' purchases to increase with the extent of corporate diversification.

  October 08, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00846.x   open full text
• Impact of Customer‐based Corporate Reputation on Non‐monetary and Monetary Outcomes: The Roles of Commitment and Service Context Risk.
  Gianfranco Walsh, Boris Bartikowski, Sharon E. Beatty.
  British Journal of Management. September 19, 2012
  A firm's reputation is an important intangible asset, because of its potential for value creation. The authors explore non‐monetary and monetary outcomes of customer‐based corporate reputation (CBR) and hypothesize that commitment serves as a partial mediator, while service context risk is a moderator, of these relationships. Using a large sample of service customers who evaluated the reputation of service firms in four service categories, the results show that (1) commitment partially mediates the relationship between CBR and most of the outcome variables, and (2) service provider selection risk moderates these relationships, such that reputation has a stronger effect on several non‐monetary outcomes for higher‐risk services and commitment has a stronger effect for lower‐risk services, consistent with a dual‐processing framework explanation. The authors discuss the theoretical and managerial implications.

  September 19, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00845.x   open full text
• Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour, Ambiguity and Straight‐talking.
  Oliver Mallett, Robert Wapshott.
  British Journal of Management. July 03, 2012
  This paper presents in‐depth qualitative research on three small professional service firms whose owner‐managers sought to introduce greater degrees of formality in their firms’ working practices and employment relationships. We focus on humour as an ambiguous medium of informality, yet viewed by owner‐managers as a tool at their disposal. However, while early studies of humour in small and medium‐sized enterprises support such a functionalist view, our findings indicate its significant limitations. We argue that humour obscures but does not resolve disjunctive interests and it remains stubbornly ambiguous and resistant to attempts to functionalize it. Our findings contribute to studies of humour in small and medium‐sized enterprises by challenging its utility as a means of managerial control or employee resistance. They also contribute to studies of employment relationships by exploring humour's potentially disruptive influence within the formality–informality span, especially as small and medium‐sized enterprises seek greater degrees of formalization, with implications for how those relationships are conducted and (re)negotiated on an ongoing basis.

  July 03, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00836.x   open full text
• Twice as Smart? The Importance of Managers’ Formative‐Years’ International Experience for their International Orientation and Foreign Acquisition Decisions.
  Dorota Piaskowska, Grzegorz Trojanowski.
  British Journal of Management. May 25, 2012
  This study examined how top management team's (TMT) international orientation influences perceptions of environmental uncertainty and how these perceptions impact international strategic decisions, in particular regarding ownership stakes taken in foreign acquisitions. We highlighted the need for the concept of TMT international orientation to encompass executives’ formative‐years’ international experiences along with their international career experiences and nationalities. Empirical tests based on a sample of 2122 international acquisitions completed by 561 UK firms over the period 1999–2008 showed that TMT international orientation positively moderated the negative impact of cultural differences and host country risk on acquisition ownership stakes. The results underscored the importance of considering decision‐makers’ attributes due to their experiences at a young age, beyond their demographic characteristics or professional experience, in the context of international strategic choices. We also discussed some implications of one of the possible consequences of executives’ formative international experience, namely biculturalism, for international business.

  May 25, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00831.x   open full text
• Ambidextrous Organizational Culture, Contextual Ambidexterity and New Product Innovation: A Comparative Study of UK and Chinese High‐tech Firms.
  Catherine L. Wang, Mohammed Rafiq.
  British Journal of Management. May 23, 2012
  Contextual ambidexterity is of paramount importance for new product innovation and organizational success, particularly in high‐tech firms operating in a dynamic environment. Whilst it is recognized that contextual ambidexterity is grounded in organizational culture, existing research has not crystallized what kind of organizational culture enables contextual ambidexterity and consequently new product innovation. In this paper, drawing on data from 150 UK and 242 Chinese high‐tech firms, we conceptualize ambidextrous organizational culture as a higher‐order construct consisting of organizational diversity and shared vision, and examine its impacts on contextual ambidexterity and consequently on new product innovation outcomes. Using structural equation modelling, we find significant relationships between ambidextrous organizational culture, contextual ambidexterity and new product innovation outcomes; contextual ambidexterity mediates the relationship between ambidextrous organizational culture and new product innovation outcomes. Our findings also suggest that the above relationships are robust in the UK–China comparative research context, and that contextual ambidexterity and new product innovation outcomes are dependent on business unit level heterogeneity (i.e. ambidextrous organizational culture and research and development strength) rather than industry or cross‐cultural differences.

  May 23, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00832.x   open full text
• Discourses of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion: Trenchant Formulations or Transient Fashions?
  Cliff Oswick, Mike Noon.
  British Journal of Management. May 23, 2012
  Using bibliometric analysis of published work, we examine the discursive trends, patterns and implications of three different anti‐discrimination solutions (equality, diversity and inclusion) over a 40‐year period from 1970 to 2010. The findings reveal that the anti‐discrimination discourses are consistent with management fashions, in terms of both their trends and the rhetorical strategies used by proponents to establish the dominance of their favoured approach, particularly by denigrating previous approaches. Practitioner‐facing academics play a key role in the process by giving shape, exposure and credibility to the anti‐discrimination solutions, but not in creating them. Only by breaking free of the oppositional discursive patterns can the debate move on to anti‐discrimination solutions that attempt to blend together equality, diversity and inclusion.

  May 23, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00830.x   open full text
• Explaining the Causes and Effects of Dynamic Capabilities Generation: A Multiple‐Indicator Multiple‐Cause Modelling Approach.
  Vanesa Barrales‐Molina, Óscar F. Bustinza, Leopoldo J. Gutiérrez‐Gutiérrez.
  British Journal of Management. May 17, 2012
  The purpose of this paper is to develop a multiple‐indicator multiple‐cause model to explain dynamic capabilities generation. We use one of the main common effects of dynamic capabilities (operational, structural and strategic flexibility) to design a measurement tool for dynamic capabilities generation. Based on this measurement tool, we test the influence of several factors identified in the specialized literature as potential causes that trigger and promote dynamic capabilities generation. We use data from a survey of 200 CEOs of Spanish firms to test the model. The results show that only organizations whose managers have perceived a high degree of environmental dynamism have generated dynamic capabilities. The results also show that knowledge codification and technical innovation are significantly related to dynamic capabilities generation. We attempt to shed light on current theoretical debates about dynamic capabilities generation and provide a practical guide to explain the origin and results of dynamic capabilities that have been tested empirically.

  May 17, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00829.x   open full text
• Gendered Identification: Between Idealization and Admiration.
  Elisabeth K. Kelan, Alice Mah.
  British Journal of Management. May 16, 2012
  While much of the literature on gender focuses on role models, this paper extends the understanding of gendered professional identification processes by exploring these processes through the lenses of idealization and admiration. Using the method of discourse analysis to analyse MBA students' accounts of people with whom they identify, this paper explores discourses of idealization, defined as aggrandizing a person, and of admiration, which means discussing positive as well as negative and neutral characteristics of a person. It is shown, first, that most male and female MBA students idealized the self‐made ‘authentic’ CEO or founder of an organization and, second, that women mainly admired other women through naming their positive, neutral and negative attributes. The paper thereby adds to understanding of how gendered identification processes are structured by idealization and admiration.

  May 16, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00834.x   open full text
• Spillover Between Work and Home, Role Importance and Life Satisfaction.
  Hans‐Joachim Wolfram, Lynda Gratton.
  British Journal of Management. May 10, 2012
  This study of n = 201 knowledge workers examines positive and negative spillover between work and home and its interrelation with life satisfaction. Additionally, it accounts for the direct effect of role importance on life satisfaction and its moderating effect on the interrelation between spillover and life satisfaction. Central to role importance is the degree of attachment that an individual places on family role and career role. Positive spillover from home is interrelated with higher life satisfaction, whereas negative spillover from work is related to lower life satisfaction. Family role importance and career role importance are associated with higher life satisfaction. For respondents with higher family role importance, there is a stronger interrelation between negative spillover from home and lower life satisfaction.

  May 10, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00833.x   open full text
• A Matter of Reputation and Pride: Associations between Perceived External Reputation, Pride in Membership, Job Satisfaction and Turnover Intentions.
  Sabrina Helm.
  British Journal of Management. April 24, 2012
  This study investigates how job satisfaction and turnover intentions are related to external reputation as perceived by employees and their pride in membership. Based on a cross‐sectional survey including 439 employees, it also provides insights into external reputation as a possible source of collective pride. Study results indicate that, in agreement with social identity theory, outsiders' views of the organization are closely associated with employees' pride in organizational membership as well as job satisfaction. Both pride and job satisfaction mediate the relationship between perceived external reputation and turnover intentions. Hence, a favourable reputation matters in managing turnover intentions and is closely related to employee pride and satisfaction. Tenure of employees is positively associated with pride while intensive customer contact is negatively related to perceived external reputation and pride. Implications pinpoint the need for alignment of reputation management and human resources management. Furthermore, managers need to focus on new staff and employees with frequent customer contact and should implement pride‐building strategies according to the tenure of employees and intensity of customer contact.

  April 24, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00827.x   open full text
• Part‐time Work as Practising Resistance: The Power of Counter‐arguments.
  Julia Nentwich, Patrizia Hoyer.
  British Journal of Management. April 20, 2012
  Contributing to a Foucauldian perspective on ‘discursive resistance’, this paper theorizes how part‐time workers struggle to construct a valid position in the rhetorical interplay between norm‐strengthening arguments and norm‐contesting counter‐arguments. It is thereby suggested that both the reproductive and the subversive forces of resistance may very well coexist within the everyday manoeuvres of world‐making. The analysis of these rhetorical interplays in 21 interviews shows how arguments and counter‐arguments produce full‐time work as the dominant discourse versus part‐time work as a legitimate alternative to it. Analysing in detail the effects of four rhetorical interplays, this study shows that, while two of them leave unchallenged the basic assumptions of the dominant full‐time discourse and hence tend instead to reify the dominant discourse, two other interplays succeed in contesting the dominant discourse and establishing part‐time work as a valid alternative. The authors argue that the two competing dynamics of challenging and reifying the dominant are not mutually exclusive, but do in fact coexist.

  April 20, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00828.x   open full text
• Surrogate Boycotts against Multinational Corporations: Consumers’ Choice of Boycott Targets.
  George Balabanis.
  British Journal of Management. March 12, 2012
  Within the context of surrogate boycotts for multinational corporations (MNCs), the author develops a conceptual framework which examines how the interaction between expectations of boycott objectives’ attainment, the ascribed egregiousness of the principal offender and a MNC's actions, activism, concern for the boycott issue and personal sacrifices affect consumers’ likelihood to boycott a targeted MNC. The focus is on surrogate boycotts where the targeted MNCs have some involvement with the underlying issues. One of the key objectives is to determine disparities in the boycotting of different MNCs which are targets of the same surrogate boycott. Results from two real boycotts and four real boycott targets indicate that the ascribed egregiousness of the MNC's actions is the strongest determinant of boycott participation, followed by expectation related to the attainability of the boycott objectives. Those MNCs with lower product substitutability and higher consumer preferences will suffer less than other boycott targets. Despite the alleviating influences of low substitutability and consumer preferences on boycotts, MNCs need to proactively develop decision‐making frameworks for early recognition of ethically dubious issues.

  March 12, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00822.x   open full text
• Refining the Concept of Political Will: A Gender Perspective.
  Elena Doldor, Deirdre Anderson, Susan Vinnicombe.
  British Journal of Management. March 08, 2012
  While politics are known to be prevalent at managerial levels, there is currently little insight into what drives managers to engage in organizational politics and whether there are gender differences in this respect. In the current study we explore the concept of political will by using a qualitative approach based on 14 semi‐structured interviews with managers (five men and nine women) in a global semiconductor company. We identify key dimensions of managerial political will consisting of three attitudinal ambivalences: functional, ethical and emotional. We also examine gender differences along these dimensions and discuss managers' political will in the context of a masculine organizational setting. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the findings and further research directions.

  March 08, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00812.x   open full text
• How Managers Talk about their Consumption of Popular Management Concepts: Identity, Rules and Situations.
  Hendrik Wilhelm, Suleika Bort.
  British Journal of Management. March 06, 2012
  This paper analyses how top managers account for their consumption of popular management concepts. By ‘consumption’ we refer to managers acting as active users of popular management concepts within their organizations. After reviewing the relevant literature, we argue that the logic of appropriateness is a better theoretical perspective to view, understand and analyse managers' accounts of concept consumption than is the logic of consequence. We apply this perspective to extensive interviews we conducted with top managers in Germany. Based on the managers' own accounts of how they understand and apply popular management concepts, we identified four discourse categories: (1) learning from others' experiences, (2) controlling organizational change, (3) gaining external legitimacy and (4) collective sensemaking. We argue that these discourse categories all draw on the social norm of rationality central to managerial identity, while differing in socially defined rules about how rationality is realized in typical management situations. Our findings strongly encourage researchers, when investigating popular management concepts in the future, to take into account the situational nature of rationality that circumstantiates the consumption of concepts.

  March 06, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00813.x   open full text
• Ethnic Minority Women in the Scottish Labour Market: Employers' Perceptions.
  Nicolina Kamenou, Gina Netto, Anne Fearfull.
  British Journal of Management. March 06, 2012
  This paper contributes to an under‐researched area through investigating employers' perceptions of ethnic minority women in the Scottish labour market. Adopting a social constructionist approach which acknowledges agency and structure and incorporates insights relating to organizational and social group culture, the study highlights the influence of individual (micro), organizational (meso) and contextual (macro) factors on ethnic minority women's participation in the labour market. The paper is based on qualitative research involving Scottish employers in the public and private sectors to examine perceptions and practices related to the employment of ethnic minority women. Institutional commitment to equality issues is questioned, although individual instances of engagement with key equality issues were sometimes evident. Proactive recruitment strategies and career support for ethnic minority women and men were not in evidence, and there was low awareness of the unique position of ethnic minority women in employment and society. We argue that these findings call for a multi‐level approach to advancing human resources management policy, practice and research within a wider socio‐political environment in which the responsibilities and duties of public sector organizations are clarified and more support is provided for organizational promotion of equal opportunities.

  March 06, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00811.x   open full text
• Constructing Interlocking Rationales in Top‐driven Strategic Renewal.
  J. Ignacio Canales.
  British Journal of Management. March 06, 2012
  Under top‐driven change, active involvement of middle managers in strategy‐making requires top and middle to find common ground. The paper offers inductive theoretical development of top managers’ role as enablers for the strategic contribution of the middle levels. Central to this role is the symbolic reorganization where the middle managers’ position is set. Next, middle managers’ operational efficiency allows their performance to be shown and increases their reputation. In consequence, the middle level can actively shape the role suggested by top management, which increases their power base. Finally, when these previous interactions escalate into a two‐way process where the middle and top management contribute to each other's efforts, interlocking rationales are achieved.

  March 06, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00821.x   open full text
• Why the Home Region Matters: Location and Regional Multinationals.
  Alan M. Rugman, Chang Hoon Oh.
  British Journal of Management. February 28, 2012
  Much of the literature in international business analysing the multinational enterprise uses the country as the relevant environmental parameter. This paper presents both theoretical and empirical evidence to demonstrate that country‐level analysis now needs to be augmented by analysis at the ‘regional’ level of the broad triad markets of Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific. The great majority of the world's 500 largest firms concentrate their activities within their home region of the triad. This study uses variance component analysis and finds that this home region effect outperforms the country effect. Together, the regional and industry effects explain most of the geographic expansion of multinational enterprises (MNEs), whereas country, firm and year effects are very minor. The new data and variance component analysis on the activities of large MNEs reported here suggest that new thinking is required about the importance of large regions of the triad as the relevant unit of analysis for business strategy to supplement the conventional focus on the country.

  February 28, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00817.x   open full text
• Managing Maturing Government‐Supported Networks: The Shift from Monitoring to Embeddedness Controls.
  Joakim Wincent, Sara Thorgren, Sergey Anokhin.
  British Journal of Management. February 28, 2012
  In formal inter‐firm networks backed with significant financial support by policy‐makers, network boards are typically established to monitor network activities and to manage the tension between organizational and collective interests. This approach to network governance, however, builds mainly upon agency logic. We integrate agency with embeddedness theory to offer insights into the effectiveness of monitoring as a governance mechanism as networks mature and member firms become embedded. The analyses focus on two issues: (1) how network board characteristics typically associated with monitoring – board independence, board size and board compensation – influence network performance; and (2) how these effects are moderated by network age. The model is tested with longitudinal data on 53 government‐supported networks. In addition to the direct effects of board characteristics, network board size and board compensation have a stronger positive impact on network performance in younger networks than in more mature networks. This study provides insight into why the instituting of boards may prove successful for network‐level performance in newly formed government‐supported networks, but also explains why the positive effects from network board monitoring may diminish as networks grow older.

  February 28, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00819.x   open full text
• Do Human Resource Practices Enhance Organizational Commitment in SMEs with Low Employee Satisfaction?
  George Saridakis, Rebeca Muñoz Torres, Stewart Johnstone.
  British Journal of Management. February 09, 2012
  This paper considers a large matched employee–employer data set to estimate a model of organizational commitment. In particular, it focuses on the role of firm size and management formality to explain organizational commitment in British small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) with high and low levels of employee satisfaction. It is shown that size ‘in itself’ can explain differences in organizational commitment, and that organizational commitment tends to be higher in organizations with high employee satisfaction compared with organizations of similar size with low employee satisfaction. Crucially, the results suggest that formal human resource (HR) practices can be used as important tools to increase commitment and thus, potentially, effort and performance within underperforming SMEs with low employee satisfaction. However, formal HR practices commonly used by large firms may be unnecessary in SMEs which benefit from high employee satisfaction and positive employment relations within a context of informality.

  February 09, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00814.x   open full text
• It's Only Temporary: Time Frame and the Dynamics of Creative Project Teams.
  René M. Bakker, Smaranda Boroş, Patrick Kenis, Leon A.G. Oerlemans.
  British Journal of Management. February 09, 2012
  The success of many knowledge‐intensive industries depends on creative projects that lie at the heart of their logic of production. The temporality of such projects, however, is an issue that is insufficiently understood. To address this, we study the perceived time frame of teams that work on creative projects and its effects on project dynamics. An experiment with 267 managers assigned to creative project teams with varying time frames demonstrates that, compared to creative project teams with a relatively longer time frame, project teams with a shorter time frame focus more on the immediate present, are less immersed in their task and utilize a more heuristic mode of information processing. Furthermore, we find that time frame moderates the negative effect of team conflict on team cohesion. These results are consistent with our theory that the temporary nature of creative projects shapes different time frames among project participants, and that it is this time frame that is an important predictor of task and team processes.

  February 09, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00810.x   open full text
• A Contingency Model of Boards of Directors and Firm Innovation: The Moderating Role of Firm Size.
  Fabio Zona, Alessandro Zattoni, Alessandro Minichilli.
  British Journal of Management. February 09, 2012
  This study asserts that the effects of board characteristics on firm innovation need to be evaluated with reference to contingency variables. A literature review suggests that relatively few studies adopt a contingency view when examining the outcomes of boards of directors. This study examines the influence on firm innovation of characteristics such as board size, outsider ratio and board diversity, and suggests that their influence is contingent upon firm size. The model is tested on a sample of Italian companies and finds support for the contingency hypothesis. This study advances research on boards of directors by emphasizing the importance of context.

  February 09, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00805.x   open full text
• Temporary Work, Underemployment and Workplace Accommodations: Relationship to Well‐being for Workers with Disabilities.
  Alison M. Konrad, Mark E. Moore, Eddy S. W. Ng, Alison J. Doherty, Katherine Breward.
  British Journal of Management. February 02, 2012
  This study examines whether employment status and workplace accommodations are associated with perceived well‐being among workers with disabilities. Data from the 2006 Participation and Activity Limitation Survey conducted by Statistics Canada were used to test the relationship between employment status, receipt of workplace accommodations and well‐being. Findings indicated that fully utilized permanent employees showed greater life satisfaction and less perceived disability‐related discrimination than either temporary workers or permanent workers who were underemployed. These findings support the theory that inadequate employment is associated with deleterious effects on employee well‐being due to inferior need fulfilment and reduced social status. Workplace accommodations were associated with higher levels of well‐being for all workers with disabilities and helped to mitigate the negative effects of temporary status and underemployment. These findings supported the theoretical extension of main effect and buffering models of workplace stress to the prediction of perceived workplace discrimination.

  February 02, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00809.x   open full text
• The Development of Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Role of Human, Social and Institutional Capital.
  Claire M. Leitch, Christel McMullan, Richard T. Harrison.
  British Journal of Management. February 02, 2012
  This paper contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial leadership development. Leadership studies are characterized by an increasing emphasis given to an individual leader's social and organizational domain. Within the context of human capital and social capital theory, the paper reflects on the emergence of a social capital theory of leadership development. Using a retrospective, interpretivist research method, the authors present the experience of a cohort of business leaders on an executive development programme to uncover the everydayness of leadership development in practice. Specifically, they explore how entrepreneurial leadership develops as a social process and what the role of social capital is in this. The findings suggest that the enhancement of leaders’ human capital only occurred through their development of social capital. There is not, as extant literature suggests, a clear separation between leader development and leadership development. Further, the analysis implies that the social capital theory of leadership is limited in the context of the entrepreneurial small firm, and the authors propose that it should be expanded to incorporate institutional capital, that is, the formal structures and organizations which enhance the role of social capital and go beyond enriching the human capital stock of individual leaders.

  February 02, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00808.x   open full text
• Managerial Risk‐taking in International Acquisitions in the Brewery Industry: Institutional and Ownership Influences Compared.
  Mike Geppert, Christoph Dörrenbächer, Jens Gammelgaard, Ian Taplin.
  British Journal of Management. January 31, 2012
  This paper deals with the role that institutional differences play in managerial risk‐taking when firms engage in international acquisitions. It is assumed that multinational corporations (MNCs) have different interests and capabilities when dealing with international acquisition, which in the authors’ view are significantly shaped by specific home country institutional influences. This study concerns the question of how different forms of ownership – concentrated (e.g. family and bank based) and dispersed (stock market based) – influence risk‐taking and managerial decision‐making in large international acquisitions. Comparing a total of 12 large acquisitions of four leading MNCs in the global brewery industry, the paper shows that mutually reinforcing influences of country of origin (coordinated vs liberal market economies) and ownership (family ownership vs stock market ownership) lead to different risk profiles and managerial risk‐taking with regard to international acquisitions.

  January 31, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00806.x   open full text
• The Equality Effects of the ‘Hyper‐formalization’ of Selection.
  Mike Noon, Geraldine Healy, Cynthia Forson, Franklin Oikelome.
  British Journal of Management. January 30, 2012
  This paper explores how formalization of employee selection procedures for the purpose of ensuring equality of opportunity can become so extensive that the intended outcome of fairness is undermined. Drawing on empirical evidence from a large media organization, the analysis reveals the detrimental impact of formalization in relation to the recruitment of ethnic minority staff. While the existing literature describes how, during recruitment of employees, the circumvention of formal equality procedures can occur through managerial neglect and manipulation, the analysis in this paper shows that, paradoxically, circumvention can also occur through compliance with procedures. This new category takes three forms (robotic, defensive and malicious) and appears under conditions of excessive formalization – the term hyper‐formalization is coined to describe this. The paper develops new concepts that add to understanding of the limitations of equality and diversity procedures, and brings fresh challenges to some of the liberal assumptions about the efficacy and desirability of formalization for achieving fairness.

  January 30, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00807.x   open full text
• Drivers and Performance Outcomes of Innovativeness: An Empirical Study.
  Lida P. Kyrgidou, Stavroula Spyropoulou.
  British Journal of Management. January 20, 2012
  The issue of innovativeness within organizations has attracted considerable attention in the literature. However, limited knowledge exists about the drivers of and their simultaneous effects on innovativeness and the role of innovativeness in enhancing performance. We adopt the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm and insights from the literature on capabilities to investigate specific capability types serving as antecedents to innovativeness and to examine its performance outcomes. From a sample of 218 Greek manufacturers, the results indicate that managerial, entrepreneurial and technical capabilities facilitate the establishment of innovativeness, which in turn enhances business performance. The study lends support to prior research that highlights the importance of innovativeness in enhancing organizational performance and sharpens understanding of the drivers of innovativeness and the way they collectively operate through innovativeness to boost performance. The study further provides new insights into the role of innovativeness from the perspective of the RBV, while highlighting certain firm capabilities that might both enable and impede competitive advantage and superior performance creation. As such, this study contributes to the effective management of the innovativeness process within organizations.

  January 20, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00803.x   open full text