After two decades of expanding leadership scholarship and mounting critique regarding dominant leadership theory, there is a need for a radical revitalisation of leadership thinking. A dialogic, humanist and contextualised orientation to leadership, long progressed by Ken Parry charts a direction for this work. But a truly revitalised leadership field must also involve a multi-dimensional and explicitly values-driven approach that places the roles, rights and responsibilities of leaders and followers – and the relationships between them – at its heart.

The current study investigated employees' weekly responses to experienced job insecurity. Based on appraisal theory, it was postulated that employees may adopt three coping strategies in response to job insecurity (i.e., remaining silent, adapting, or being proactive) in order to maintain or improve their weekly well-being. We introduced a multilevel moderated mediation model, explaining how weekly job insecurity would be related to well-being in the following weeks through these three behaviors. We also expected that subordinate emotional regulation and supervisor prosocial motivation (both defined as trait variables) would function as contextual factors moderating the relationships of job insecurity with employee behavior and well-being. A 5-week diary study of 149 subordinates partially supported the model. The results showed longitudinal conditional indirect effects of job insecurity on subordinate well-being depending on subordinate emotional regulation style and supervisor prosocial motivation. In doing so, the study offers two main contributions to the job insecurity literature. First, employees are not passive responders to perceived job insecurity, but active shapers through coping depending on the context. Subordinates' emotional regulation strategy and supervisors' prosocial motivation, as trait variables, impact on how subordinates respond to perceived job insecurity over weeks. From a practical point of view, the dynamic nature of perceived job insecurity suggests implications for interventions to maintain subordinates' well-being.

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

Factors influencing organisational performance have attracted attention, both in the literature and in practice, as a means of responding to increasing market competition. One factor that may enhance performance is a technology policy and a number of organisations have implemented such policies. Technology policy proponents argue that a society's capacity for sustained technological innovation is crucial to its economic well being. The primary purpose of the present paper is to investigate the extent to which organisational performance is influenced by the use of a technology policy. Since the literature suggests that task difficulty and task variability may influence this relationship, the paper also examines these relationships. The results suggest there is an association between technology policy and performance and that this relation is influenced by task difficulty, but not task variability. The relationship between technology policy and performance seems to greater when task difficulty is high than it is when task difficulty is low.

Organisation theory makes extensive use of analogies to encourage diversity in thought and explanation of complex phenomena. Analogies are able to provide insights about the internal and external behaviour of organisations of organisations. This is readily observed in the use of the systems concept in the description of organisations.

Systems thinking is often seen as unifying; spanning the physical, biological, and social sciences. The term systems theory is perhaps a misnomer in that in its general form it is neither testable, falsifiable nor predictive. However, most of the theories or laws describing the physical universe use the concept of a system. It can be argued that it fits Kuhn's concept of a paradigm.

The dual career couple is a contemporary and growing phenomenon in western industrialised nations. There are numerous human resource management issues associated with the dual career couple. The focus of this paper is on just one of these issues — employee relocation. The research reported here found that dual career employees are concerned about their partner's career prospects and unless current career levels can be maintained for the trailing partner, organisations may experience relocation resistance. Of specific interest in the Australian context is that organisations with operations in country areas may be particularly affected, since country areas are less likely to offer desirable career opportunities for trailing partners. Further, organisational mobility expectations frequently force couples to decide which partner's career will take precedence. Historically it has been the male partner's career, even in dual career relationships. The findings from this study suggest that such decisions are becoming more complex, with couples placing greater emphasis on economic and quality of life concerns. Traditionally, organisations have relied on employee mobility as a career development strategy. However, greater emphasis on long-term human resource planning is advocated to facilitate career development strategies which are less reliant on geographical relocation. Further, if organisations are to retain their dual career employees, relocation assistance packages may need re-assessment to reflect the needs of those employees who are unwilling to sacrifice their partners' careers for the sake of their own.

This paper addresses longstanding questions about how promise and obligation, two of the key conceptual building blocks for psychological contract research, are conceptualized and operationalized: How do employees understand these concepts? Would their understandings be congruent with the researchers’ and how would this knowledge inform future psychological contract research? Drawing on interviews with 61 Chinese workers from diverse backgrounds, our results suggest the concepts have distinct meanings for participants in terms of three criteria (defining characteristics, key features and manifestations in employment). We argue that promise and obligation are likely to serve different functions in employment relationship and have different meanings for researchers versus participants, and accordingly we highlight the challenges of using them to conceptualize and operationalize psychological contracts in China and beyond.

This paper examines professional and organizational-level antecedents of public sector innovation using findings from a 9-month ethnography conducted within the marketing department of a large UK postal organization. The analysis centres on vignettes of two cross-functional projects to develop product and service innovations that involved external design agencies. The data are based on observation of the marketing teams, semi-structured interviews, and documentary analysis. The study highlights that social practices characteristic of communities of practice are antecedent to the generation of absorptive capacity, but also shows that the learning produced by communities of practice is mediated by relations of power associated with these groups and interaction with organizational absorptive capacity. This paper develops the theory of absorptive capacity by shifting attention away from ‘prior knowledge’ in enabling acquisition of external knowledge to highlighting the role of intensive interaction, organizational context, and power relations in shaping knowledge creation for learning and innovation.

The current study draws on the upper echelons theory to examine the nature of the relationship between top management team (TMT) tenure and a firm's level of entrepreneurial orientation (EO). We find evidence of an inverted-U relationship between TMT tenure and EO using data from firms across three industries with varied industry dynamics. We further introduce a contingency element by demonstrating that TMT industry background heterogeneity moderates the relationship between TMT tenure and EO, where the inverted U-shaped relationship will be more pronounced when the heterogeneity is low and will flatten when the heterogeneity is high. The findings demonstrate the complexity CEOs and governing bodies face while shaping a diverse TMT that can affect EO.

Thriving at work is closely related to the way employees are embedded in their social contexts, such as the structure of their communication relations with coworkers. In previous research, communication relations have been found to negatively relate to thriving at work. However, social network theory suggests that communication relations are beneficial in obtaining resources in the workplace, which might increase thriving at work. To reconcile the seemingly conflicting mechanisms, we draw on social network theory to unpack the mechanisms underlying communication relations by considering the instrumental and expressive roles. Using a structural equation model, we investigate the indirect effects of communication networks on thriving at work via advice-seeking networks (instrumental) and friendship networks (expressive). Our findings indicate communication relations are negatively related to thriving at work via advice-seeking relations, but are positively related to thriving at work via friendship relations.

The purpose of this paper is to (a) develop a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between person–environment (PE) fit and employee engagement by shedding light on their intervening mechanisms; (b) represent how different types of PE fit and employee engagement interact; and (c) establish a comprehensive theoretical framework to guide future research based on the empirically examined constructs and their relationships. An integrative literature review of 51 empirical papers which analyzed the relationship between PE fit and employee engagement suggests that the antecedents of the relationship exist at the organizational, group, and individual levels and can be conceptualized as socialization, relationship building, and personal character, respectively; values–supplies fit, needs–supplies fit, and demands–abilities fit act as intervening mechanisms in the relationship; the relationship is temporal, reciprocal, and facilitated by human agency; and various outcomes result from the relationship. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed.

This study investigates antecedents of entrepreneurial intentions of young adults, the next generation of entrepreneurs. We determine whether aspiring entrepreneurs' positive and dark traits relate to entrepreneurial intentions. Results indicated that entrepreneurial fitness, a second-order construct comprised of multiple positive and bright traits, positively relates to entrepreneurial intention, while the dark traits of Machiavellianism and narcissism differentially relate to entrepreneurial fitness and intention. Narcissism positively relates to entrepreneurial fitness and intention both directly and indirectly. Though Machiavellianism positively and directly relates to entrepreneurial intention, it also negatively and indirectly relates to intention through a negative relationship with entrepreneurial fitness. However, overall, entrepreneurial fitness positively relates with entrepreneurial intention. Findings extend the core model of entrepreneurial intention by concurrently illuminating the adaptive and maladaptive aspects of the dark side of narcissism and Machiavellianism with the bright, positive antecedents of entrepreneurial intention with entrepreneurial fitness. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.