The current study examined how happiness is affected by optimism, self-efficacy, and occupational compromise (OC), among young workers (aged 20–30 years) in the post-Covid-19 pandemic period. A sample of 211 young people (aged 20–30 years) who were currently or formerly employed participated in the study. The research findings indicate negative correlations between (a) the optimism and self-efficacy of the employees to their OC and (b) between their OC to their sense of happiness. In addition, as hypothesized, positive correlations were found between (a) feelings of optimism and self-efficacy to the degree of happiness and (b) between optimism and self-efficacy. Finally, the study tested a mediation model that indicated optimism as a mediating variable in the relationships of self-efficacy and OC with happiness. In light of these findings, several conclusions emerged from the study. First, according to general trends in the Israeli economy, even among young workers, who make up the new generation of workers in the post-Covid-19 period, there is a reduction in the degree of OC in order to achieve happiness. But this depends on several personality elements, such as their feelings of optimism and self-efficacy. Second, in accordance with the mediation model tested in the study, it seems that optimism has a central role in enhancing happiness among young workers in the post-Covid-19 era, at the beginning of their career path. Eventually, it appears that the reduced OC and elevated happiness among young workers in the post-pandemic period, has the potential to shape the future job market as filled with content employees that can also improve their organizations’ economic output.

Successful employment outcomes are often beyond the reach of people with disabilities, but relatively little is known about the factors that best enable the achievement of this goal. Using survey data from 803 people with and without disabilities, we examine the association of eight factors with successful employment outcomes. Using regression tree analysis, five factors emerged as statistically significant predictors of successful employment outcomes for people with disabilities: corporate culture and climate, job characteristics, government support, employer attitudes, and societal attitudes. Key interrelationships between factors include: (1) government support linking with corporate culture and climate; and (2) job characteristics linking with corporate culture and climate. Findings are relevant to organisations and governments to inform policy and practice to improve employment outcomes for people with disabilities.

Access to heterogeneous knowledge resources is suggested in the literature as an important explanation of firm innovation and performance. The exchange of knowledge, however, can be a complex managerial challenge, especially between different epistemic communities. Our research focuses on the concept of epistemic communities to illuminate the complexity of tensions that arise in heterogeneous knowledge exchange in alliances, thus filling a gap in the literature. Using the Straussian grounded theory case study approach, our research investigates the emergence of horizontal, vertical, and inter-organizational epistemic tensions and explores management controls as instruments to guide the knowledge exchange in intermediary-driven research and development alliances. We find that the source of multiple epistemic tensions is rooted in the natural social behaviors of epistemic community members and further shows how these behaviors influence the effective use of inter-organizational management controls in facilitating heterogeneous knowledge exchange.

While employees actively seek out workplaces that offer meaningful work experiences, the concept of meaningful work remains notably underexplored within the turnover literature. The present study addresses this gap by examining the role of work meaningfulness among knowledge workers and its direct and indirect effects on turnover intentions and job satisfaction through the lens of self-determination theory. Our findings show significant effects on turnover intentions and job satisfaction, with work meaningfulness emerging as a stronger predictor of job satisfaction, while still contributing to reducing turnover intentions. Most extant literature focuses on sources and ways to enhance work meaningfulness. We contribute to more recent research on its relationship with its outcomes especially the link with turnover intentions, offering insight into a relationship that has produced few, but conflicting,results.

Work stress and employee wellbeing have gained heightened attention since the COVID-19 pandemic. Until now, organizations have primarily sought to conceptualize these variables as an individual-level phenomenon; thereby neglecting the potential influence of social dynamics within the workplace. Drawing on conservation of resources and emotional contagion theories, this study examines the extent to which team-level emotional contagion moderates the impact of stress on wellbeing, factoring in multilevel effects. Data from 237 professional services employees nested within 41 teams was analyzed. The results show support for emotional contagion as a team-level moderator between individual-level work stress and employee wellbeing. The role of organizational resources in shaping stress and wellbeing outcomes was also significant. This study underscores the significance of team dynamics and organizational resources in shaping employee wellbeing. Well-targeted, stress alleviation, and team-contagion enhancing initiatives will have a more positive impact on wellbeing, than individually targeted stress alleviation initiatives in isolation.

Former refugee women’s entrepreneurial journeys are embedded in social, cultural, and legal environments in their home, transition, and host countries. Their multiple context embeddedness creates contradictions and identity issues. Thus, women adopt behaviours that make them visible or invisible simultaneously when navigating these contradictions. Using intersectionality and translocational positionality lenses, this study explored this phenomenon. We collected narrative data using semi-structured interviews from refugee women resettled in New Zealand. The findings illustrate that multi-country social processes, that is, ‘translocational’ experiences, create (in)visibility paradoxes for women entrepreneurs. Women dynamically create visibility for themselves through reliance on or defiance of ethnic, cultural or refugee identities in their ventures and by creating a business identity aligning with the host country’s values. In contrast, cultural conformity and playing a role behind the ‘shopfront’ make women invisible. This study synthesises these paradoxical entrepreneurial strategies, develops a conceptual framework and contributes to women’s entrepreneurial identity studies.

The attention-based view contends that executives possess limited attentional capabilities that must be carefully allocated across different strategic issues. Although many scholars contend that narrow strategic attention breadth leads to better performance, others argue that broad strategic attention breadth may be more beneficial due to better opportunity scanning. We posit that the relationship between strategic attention breadth and performance will be inverted U-shaped, where strategic attention breadth is positively related to firm performance up to an optimal point, after which firms will see declining benefits due to executive cognitive overload. Furthermore, we propose that executives’ assessment of strategic opportunities will be influenced by the firm’s corporate social responsibility perspective, as the firm’s environmental and ethical commitment may mitigate executive blind spots and enhance opportunity selection. We support our hypotheses with multiple measures of firm performance and a content analysis of annual reports corresponding to a 5-year longitudinal sample of 2,245 S&P 500 firms.

Drawing on job-demands resources and self-consistency theories, this study investigates individual and contextual factors influencing managers’ intrapreneurial intention (INI). We focus on the role of personal resources (organization-based self-esteem and proactivity) related to INI. Further, we analyze job resources (top management support and role clarity) shaping INI, and their interaction with proactivity. Our data comprises 193 Kosovan managers employed in companies varying in size and industry. The results show that organization-based self-esteem and proactivity are positively related to INI. Additionally, proactivity serves as the underlying mechanism, mediating organization-based self-esteem-INI relationship. Furthermore, job resources – top management support and role clarity – strengthen the likelihood of INI among proactive employees, suggesting a moderated mediation model.

By jointly examining individual and contextual antecedents of INI, this study contributes to the debate of who the intrapreneur is and what nurtures his/her inclinations. Furthermore, this is among the few studies to examine INI using a managerial sample and in an emerging economy context.

While unethical acts are common in the business world, we know little about how employees react when they observe coworkers caught engaging in unethical behavior. This is both theoretically and practically relevant, given that many supervisors take unethical behavior in the workplace very seriously. Drawing on appraisal theory, we argue that observing a coworker caught engaging in unethical behavior elicits feelings of schadenfreude. Then, this positive feeling spills over to a separate task and enhances performance. Finally, we suggest that trait empathy can weaken this effect because individuals with high trait empathy are more likely to understand the motivations of the person caught. Across two studies, our results showed that perpetrators getting caught increased schadenfreude among observers, which then increased their subsequent task performance. However, trait empathy did not significantly affect these results. Our work contributes to the literature on unethical behavior and emotions in the workplace.

Learning orientation emphasizes the importance of learning from any experience. It is grounded on commitment to learn, shared vision, open‐mindedness, and knowledge sharing. Organizational knowledge management literature based on social complexity theory posits that learning orientation makes companies generate new knowledge through spontaneous multi-level iterations and self-organization. Challenges related to the current business environment requires companies to constantly adjust to remain competitive. Still, the mechanisms making learning-oriented companies more capable to develop innovative product have been scantly explored. Pertinent literature actually conjectures this relationship as spontaneous, directed, and unmediated. Moreover, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)rarely represent the context of analysis of research on this topic. Frequently lacking resources to systematically pursue product innovation, SMEs rely on solutions deriving from the combination of internal knowledge and external sources; thus, these companies depend on learning orientation principles to remain innovative. In this vein, the research aims to understand how learning orientation allows product innovation in SMEs through the achievement of strategic flexibility. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse data from 300 British SMEs. The results demonstrate the mediating role of strategic flexibility in the relationships between learning orientation and product innovation. The importance of innovation culture also emerged.

This article advances research at the intersection of macro talent management (TM) and the career capital of expatriates. It does so by reporting the findings of a qualitative study of self-initiated expatriates’ strategies of engaging the practices of a city-level TM institution to facilitate career capital formation. Strategies of engaging city-level practices of TM have diverse, at times paradoxical implications. Self-initiated expatriates employ strategies of engaging institutional practices to (1) support global career mobility without considerable adjustment, (2) develop local networks and careers in the host country, and (3) even actively escaping an expanding sphere of international institutions. The article explains how dynamics of career capital formation occur as (un)anticipated consequences of being exposed to institutional logics of adopted TM practices. Corporate and market-oriented logics of TM realized in an international city institution ambiguously combined with community logics, for some self-initiated expatriates resembling those of traditional expatriate institutions.

This study aims to provide insights into the values entrenchment strategies that indigenous Black founders and next-generation (NextGen) leaders use in their efforts to entrench values into their family businesses. The study uses a qualitative methodology and an inductive approach, and draws on seven indigenous African family business cases operating in various industries within the services sector. Our findings show that founders and NextGen leaders use explicit and implicit carriers as they strive to entrench values in their family businesses. It was established that these leaders are influential institutional constituents who contribute to entrenching values into the family business and, by doing so, shape institutional knowledge. Our study contributes to family business literature by extending the founder centrality to include that of the NextGen leaders in values entrenchment, explaining how these leaders articulate their personal and family values and how they seek to translate them into family business values.

Differences in cultures, religious beliefs, and philosophical views suggest that leadership ethics may vary between Western and Eastern perspectives. However, ethical leadership scales are mostly rooted in Western conceptualization. This systematic review explores the cultural contributions, philosophical perspectives, and underlying theories shaping the measures of ethical leadership. A comprehensive search across Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest Management, and Emerald Insight from 1990 to 2021 yielded over 3900 articles, with only 15 focusing on an Eastern conceptualization of ethical leadership. Findings reveal that Eastern ethical leadership encompasses unique dimensions, including leaders’ responsibility and concern for long-term sustainability, often overlooked in existing measures. Despite some similarities in virtues and values between Eastern and Western philosophical views, past studies predominantly employed Western theoretical perspectives to explain ethical leadership. This review highlights the imperative for measures that authentically capture Eastern cultural distinctions, crucial for advancing ethical leadership research amid the East’s increasing global influence.

In Asian workplaces, effective innovative work behavior (IWB) presents challenges. Knowledge on how Asian leaders can promote employee IWB through their behavioral repertoire is needed. This assumption prompted us to develop and validate the so-called Innovative Leader Survey (ILS), covering a repertoire of leader behaviors by which employee IWB is stimulated in Asia. Study 1 interviewed 60 high-performing leaders and employees on such behaviors, bringing forth three leader-behavioral dimensions and survey items for fostering employee idea generation, promotion, and implementation, labeled Envisioning, Energizing, and Enabling. Study 2 involved 1,037 survey respondents through which we validated these three sets of specific leader behaviors. Study 3, with 287 respondents, established ILS’s discriminant validity while all of its 11 operationalized leader behaviors were found to predict their followers’ IWB after 4 months. Future research with the ILS is proposed to enrich theory and empirical research on the relationship between effective leadership and employees’ IWB in Asian organizations.

Grounded in self-determination theory, this study unveils the connection between developmental human resource (HR) practices and employee agility by examining employees’ workplace spirituality and thriving at work. Based on data collected from 428 employees, our empirical analysis has demonstrated that the relationship between developmental HR practices and employee agility is partially mediated by thriving at work. The results also indicate that employees’ workplace spirituality moderates the relationship among developmental HR practices, thriving at work, and employee agility. These findings have unveiled the underlying mechanism of the link between developmental HR practices and employee agility. This research offers fresh insights into the studies on employee agility and provides potential HR management recommendations for enhancing organizational agility in corporate strategic planning.

In the global economy, the international strategies of family firms, influenced by family ownership and management, remain underexplored. Bridging the family business and international business fields, we use the socioemotional wealth lens to examine 1,236 international expansions from 2007 to 2013. Categorizing firms into pure family, nearly pure family, borderline family, and non-family typologies, we assess the influence of internal (experience, knowledge) and external (country risk) factors on their entry modes. Results indicate that higher family involvement in ownership/management increases the preference for greenfield investments over acquisitions or equity alliances, a relationship further moderated by international experience and country risk. This study provides nuanced insights into the international behaviors of family firms.

This study addresses endogenous factors related to the strategic planning of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our findings help explain the paradox: If better CSR always leads to better firm performance, why do so many companies either choose not to engage in CSR or act irresponsibly? Managers may make decisions regarding CSR based on the environment. Some companies may be better served through a proactive CSR strategy; however, others may be unable to achieve better performance through this strategy for a variety of endogenous causes. Our sample included 594 U.S. publicly traded companies with 2,019 firm-year observations. We empirically simulated scenarios where companies selected inappropriate CSR strategies and found that the companies were unable to achieve better firm performance if they did not select appropriate CSR strategies based on their internal and external environment. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Extant research examining the effects of top management team (TMT) gender diversity on firm performance report equivocal findings. We seek to enhance understanding of this critical relationship in the context of an acquisition, which necessitates changes in one or both firms during a process characterized by non-routine decisions, time pressures, high uncertainty, and frequent debates among strategic leaders. Specifically, we examine the effects of gender diversity of top management and female executives’ formal and informal power on post-deal performance. Our results indicate gender diversity has negative effects on post-deal performance. Further, in a subsample of acquirers with gender diverse teams, our results reveal that female executives’ structural power and ownership power have negative performance effects, while power conferred through an elite education has positive performance effects. Our findings highlight the need to expand gender diversity research to consider the strategic context facing diverse TMTs and power dynamics among them.

Research suggests that institutional complexity is of strategic importance and recent calls have been made to investigate organizational strategizing in such a situation of multiple institutional logics. We therefore investigate middle managers’ strategizing for institutional complexity. In doing so, we follow theoretical suggestions of a renewed practice-based view on strategizing as a broad social accomplishment beyond top management activities. Based on a qualitative field study in a company under influence of substantive financial reform, findings show that middle managers re-strategize institutional complexity at the vertical interstices of top management strategies and the distributed agency of their followers. Furthermore, the study highlights the character and effects of lateral dynamics of middle managers’ competing strategizing. We explain how these vertical and lateral dynamics provide insight into strategizing for institutional complexity as a distributed, situated, and emergent social accomplishment. Such strategizing practices have unintended organizational consequences beyond both top and middle management control.

A hegemonic neoliberal ideology dominates all areas of work in Turkey, including healthcare. Though neoliberalism has been studied extensively from the perspective of meaning, values, and processes, managerial and leadership behavior dynamics require further research. This study analyzes the relationship between managerialism, toxic leadership, and ethical climate in an industry swept up by untamed neoliberalism, particularly in a nation where employment and human rights are ceremoniously protected. Through an analysis of medical doctors working in 207 public and private university hospitals in Turkey, we explored the role of managerialism and four distinct ethical climate types, resulting in the emergence of toxic leadership behaviors during the global pandemic. We theorize the extent to which toxic leaders emerge from managerialism. We further explain why the hegemonic Turkish leadership culture thrives in toxic behaviors such as paternalism, fealty, ingratiation, nepotism, and cronyism in the context of neoliberal expansion.