In this paper we contribute to the body of work on agency and institutional transmission by proposing two new concepts: distributed agency and dialogue. Distributed agency is a companion concept to that of ‘institutional entrepreneurship’. Whilst institutional entrepreneurship emphasizes the deliberate institution-building by a select few, distributed agency highlights the emergent institution-building that involves any and every organizational member. In turn, dialogue supplements the models of institutional diffusion by drawing attention to the situated interactions between the ‘champions’ and the ‘recipients’ of institutional innovations, to the frictions that accompany institutional transmission, and to the deviations that emerge from those interactions. We use these concepts to analyze the micro-discursive processes during a crucial event in the institutionalization of a new organizational template in a UK public–private partnership. We found that the implementation hinged upon enabling the audience (i.e. the employees expected to apply the template in their work) to act as agents (hence, distributed agency) by engaging in a dialogue that sought to define the audience's identity vis-à-vis coercive pressures, articulate and address its interests, and recognize its rights to modify the template to suit the local circumstances.

Networking behaviors toward career and community domains assist individuals in doing their jobs better and advancing their careers. However, few studies investigate and identify how these different types of networking behaviors lead to supervisory promotability evaluations. The current study argues that career- and community-based networking behaviors interact with political skill on promotability. This study surveyed and collected data from 160 financial employees and 103 supervisors working at branches of a large bank in Taiwan. Career-based networking behaviors, particularly maintaining contacts and engaging in professional activities, were found to be positively related to promotability, and political skill strengthened the relationship between community-based networking behaviors and promotability. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of networking behaviors, political skill, and promotability.

Some organizations, such as General Electric, currently use or have used forced distribution performance evaluation systems in order to rate employees' performance. This paper addresses the advantages and disadvantages as well as the legal implications of using such a system. It also discusses how an organization might assess whether a forced distribution system would be a good choice and key considerations when implementing such a system. The main concern is whether the organizational culture is compatible with a forced distribution system. When a company implements such a system, some important issues to consider include providing adequate training and ongoing support to managers who will be carrying out the system and also conducting adverse impact analyses to reduce legal risk.

Workaholism is an important workplace phenomenon that has received less empirical testing than might be expected. This study of 100 New Zealand blue-collar workers tested whether three dimensions of the workaholism triad: work involvement, drive to work and work enjoyment were related to anxiety, depression and insomnia, and in the majority this was supported. Work involvement was positively related to all outcomes, while work enjoyment was negatively related. Drive to work was positively related to anxiety and insomnia only. Overall, consistently, large amounts of variance were explained by the workaholism triad. While previously untested in the literature, a three-way interaction of the workaholism triad was found towards anxiety and insomnia. Overall, higher work involvement was useful in buffering detrimental outcomes for those with either high work involvement or high drive to work, but not both. The present study provides a new way of understanding the effects of workaholism in the workplace.

This article evaluates the impact of academic research in management and business on a sample of the leaders of Australia's largest companies and public sector organizations. The data from a questionnaire survey conducted in 2005 indicate that the impact of the collective research outputs of business/management academics on senior private and public sector leaders is almost non-existent. The implications of these findings for the conduct of research in business and management in the future are evaluated, as well as the emerging challenges we face from new non-university research and business/management education providers. The broader consequences of a possible paradigm shift from a largely academic research/teaching orientation, towards a more explicitly professional and business/industry orientation are discussed towards the end of the article.

Supporting on recent theoretical approaches to the concept of familiness based on the notion of social capital, this study analyzes the composition of top management teams in non-listed family firms and its effect on the performance of these firms. An empirical analysis comprising 929 Spanish private family firms highlights the positive and significant influence of the inclusion of non-family managers, the family nature of top executives, as well as the presence of the founder. The study includes no significant results regarding homogeneity within family managers, or the interaction between a top family executive and the proportion of non-family managers.

Drawing on social cognitive theory (SCT), this study examines the effects of employee resilience, through well-being, on job productivity, and relational satisfaction among extraverted versus introverted workers in Croatia, Thailand, and the United States during the early period of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Participants included 832 working adults from various industries. Moderated mediation analyses revealed employee resilience positively predicted psychological well-being which, in turn, positively predicted both productivity and relational satisfaction. Regardless of culture, extraverted workers reported less productivity but greater satisfaction with coworkers compared to introverted workers. Also, resilience dampened the negative effects of introversion on relational satisfaction. The findings support the multilevel perspective of resilience and SCT assertion that behavioral outcomes are determined by an interaction between personal and environmental factors and highlight the need to promote employee resilience and well-being during times of crisis. Recommendations on how managers can support employees during this unprecedented global health crisis are provided.

The centrality of knowledge sharing to organizations’ sustainability has been established. This research explores and illustrates the influences for individual professionals and paraprofessionals – specifically civil engineers and design drafters – to share their deep, personally constructed knowledge, in a public sector provider of railways infrastructure. It investigates the extent to which: (i) knowledge sharing will be positively influenced by the professional identity, values and knowledge culture to achieve organizational and project goals; and (ii) sharing of deep personal expertise will be influenced by the quality of relational capital among individuals and individual perspectives. It finds that knowledge sharing develops within frameworks established through the alignment among sector, profession and organization values. However, individual behavior is found to be most strongly influenced by the presence and quality of relational capital and individuals’ personal perspectives.

Using a content analysis on a sample of 77 internet companies that went public in the late 1990s, this paper tested the factors surrounding the legitimacy of new firms in a turbulent environment. Support was found for most of the hypotheses as to which factors were legitimating and which had the opposite effect. Legitimating factors included CEO Duality and Alliance inclusion while delegitimating factors included Capital Raising, Acquisitions, Restructuring, Delisting and Geographic Diversification. This paper adds to the theoretical issues surrounding legitimacy as a precursor to reputation. At the same time, this work fills a gap in the literature which currently lacks empirical testing of the notion of legitimacy.

Mergers and acquisitions can be a mechanism used by firms to access innovative knowledge, including intellectual property, and to strengthen and expand their core capabilities. In the mergers and acquisition context, the creation of value depends on the transfer of capabilities and knowledge being carried out successfully during the post-acquisition integration process. The paper adopts this view. It examines the role of the top management and personnel who hold knowledge and skills linked to the capability of the acquired firm considered most valuable by the acquiring firm in the transfer of knowledge from the acquired firm to the acquiring firm. The paper also examines whether the impact of the retention of the acquired firm's high-value human resources (HVHR) on knowledge transfer is moderated by the degree of embeddedness of the knowledge to be transferred. Furthermore, the study identifies the factors that influence the retention of the acquired firm's HVHR. We tested the model using data from a sample of 57 domestic, related, friendly Spanish mergers and acquisitions belonging to a wide variety of industries. The results support the notion that the more embedded the knowledge, the greater the impact of the acquired firm's HVHR retention on the knowledge transfer. They also show that the autonomy granted to the acquired firm, the frequency of use of rich media among the personnel of both firms, and the acquired firm's pre-acquisition profitability are factors encouraging the acquired firm's HVHR to remain. The study contributes to the literature on knowledge transfer in mergers and acquisitions by highlighting the relevance of retention of the acquired firm's HVHR for knowledge transfer, as well as demonstrating the importance of taking into consideration the nature of the knowledge to be transferred. It also contributes to the literature on the implementation process in mergers and acquisitions by identifying factors available to managers to favor HVHR continuity in the acquiring firm or the one resulting from the merger.

Given the growing demand for aged residential care facilities in Western industrialised economies, the adequate staffing of these facilities is a growing concern. Increasingly migrant care workers are being employed to fill the local labour shortfall. In this paper we present findings of a qualitative study exploring how managers of aged residential care facilities work to ensure consistent delivery of quality care through their migrant care workers. The issues raised by the 16 managers cluster around three themes: communication and language barriers; racism by residents, families and managers; and underemployment of tertiary qualified migrant care workers. In addition to issues of quality care delivery, concerns around migrant employee well-being are seen to be difficult to avoid.

This research is a pilot study on identifying the social initiatives that could potentially provide employment opportunities for female Sudanese refugees settled in western Sydney, Australia. An interpretative ethnographic approach was employed to analyse academic literature, government information and data gathered through in-depth interviews with a not-for-profit organisation working with this community. The outcome of this research emphasises three fundamental questions that relate to community value, customer need and opportunity risk that need to be considered with respect to the limitations that are framed by the social initiatives identified in relation to reducing unemployment for these women. This study revealed an interesting observation: programs that make use of existing skills create new opportunities in the employment market, whereas programmes that provide new skills or a combination of new and existing skills, were more inclined to link to existing opportunities in the employment market.

Research indicates that there is a positive relationship between organization-based self-esteem and in-role performance. The intervening process that creates this relationship, however, has not been investigated. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine employee learning behavior as a process between organization-based self-esteem and in-role performance. Additionally, this study examines perceived delegation as a boundary condition of a positive relationship between two variables. The sample size consisted of 293 employees from a Korean company, and the study findings revealed that employees’ learning behaviors mediate the relationship between organization-based self-esteem and in-role performance. Further, perceived delegation moderated the strength of the mediated relationship. Therefore, this study provides implications for how human resource practitioners and their organizations could support volitional learning behaviors through formal training, development-focused performance feedback, and the creation of new work experiences and learning opportunities.

The sudden outbreak of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) sparked widespread concern about organisational resilience in the management domain. The resources, operations and practices of organisational resilience have to be considered in particular contexts at different stages and in relation to numerous inputs, processes and outputs. Selected as one example, the preparation, response and development of a retail supermarket's management and operations in China is examined through an empirical case study. Supply chain and digital construction, improvisational ability, system management and corporate social responsibility all played a positive role in this organisation's response to the outbreak of COVID-19 (2019–2020) in the Chinese management context. Organisational resilience is reflected in the case study organisation's self-interested and altruistic policies and practices. The case provides valuable insights on efficacious management practices for organisational resilience building in the retail industry.

Contextual performance in the workplace has been identified as including relational activities that maintain the broader social and psychological environment in which task performance occurs in organisations. In this conceptual writing, organisational advocacy (OA) is offered as a form of task and contextual performance that is pertinent in the 21st century, especially while serving and working with customers on a day-to-day basis. Organisational citizenship behaviour is conceptualised as a component of the contextual performance of OA. OA and customer advocacy are defined and models are provided, suggesting that what is thought, said, and done by organisational members must receive expanded attention, in this case, in dealing with internal and external customers.

Dynamic capabilities ‘create, extend or modify’ the firm's current operating capabilities in order to enable strategic renewal. Although widely recognized, this conceptualization of the relationship between dynamic and operating capabilities lacks empirical grounding. Using process research into the difficult radical new product development path of a new influenza drug, our data reveal that dynamic and operating capabilities have a stage-gate type relationship. We demonstrate that dynamic capabilities need to achieve certain critical outputs if successful transfer to the operating capability stage is to be reached. Furthermore progress from one stage to the next is dependent on how well dynamic capabilities co-specialize with downstream operating capabilities. This co-specialization is enabled via three processes within a dynamic capability: value network knowledge generation, value schema development and value proposition development.

We argue that there is scholarly potential in linking theory on industry clusters with theory on value networks. To date, these two theoretical streams have developed largely in parallel, limiting understanding of how the two are integrated in practice. By considering these theories in combination and the unique context of creative industries, we generate insight on the management of clusters as value networks. Our ongoing longitudinal empirical case is a new media cluster called ‘Mediapolis’ in the city of Tampere, Finland. The case study commenced at the time the cluster was in the planning and early operational stage. Results demonstrate the usefulness of linking the two theories, and support a future research agenda examining the types of cluster configurations meeting the criteria of value networks, and the conditions under which value network cluster configurations are more sustainable than simply a spatial agglomeration of clusters.

Indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystem development is not addressed in research. We define and characterise Indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystems and their evolution based on a qualitative study comparing Indigenous entrepreneurship in Chile and in Aotearoa New Zealand. We draw on interviews with 10 Mapuche entrepreneurs in Araucanía and 10 Māori entrepreneurs in the Bay of Plenty, observation, and a literature review to address the question – how does an Indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystem develop along with the social, economic, and political development of mainstream society? We find that Indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystems evolve with the economic and social environments of their countries because of an internal imperative towards cultural continuity and the resilience of culture to change. We find that mature Indigenous entrepreneurial ecosystems are associated with higher states of development and support a broader range of business models. Implications for policy, practice, and research are discussed.

This paper extends the work of Thompson, Beauvais, and Lyness (1999, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 54, 392–415) on work–family culture by considering the role co-workers play. The proposed extended measure encompasses non-work spheres beyond the family as it has been established that much of the extant research does not include a large part of the workforce – those without childcare responsibilities (Kelliher, Richardson & Boiarintseva [2019, Human Resource Management Journal, 29, 101]). The extended measure constitutes Thompson et al.'s (1999) three original dimensions plus two additional dimensions: co-worker involvement (support and consequences) and gender expectations. Two quantitative studies confirmed that the extended measure is robust for different types of workers (part- and full-time, males and females). The co-worker dimensions were significantly associated with several outcome measures; however, the gender expectation dimensions added little additional variance in relation to employee outcomes. The results support the inclusion of co-workers as an important dimension of the workplace environment that supports work and life balance.