Board of directors (BOD) bring valuable human and relational capital to firms but may act as self-interested agents by design. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the compensation of BOD members in high-technology sectors affects overall firm performance. We tested our specific hypotheses using panel regression methodology on data gathered from the CRSP, Compustat, BoardEx, and ExecuComp databases. Our final sample consisted of 9,127 firm years, and the companies in our sample were all high-tech publicly traded U.S. firms from 1992 to 2019. Our results showed that there is an association between BOD’s pay structure and firm performance (accounting-based return on assets and market-based Tobin’s Q). Our findings demonstrate originality and contribute to the literature since we empirically demonstrate that the level of variable BOD pay has a diminishing effect on return on assets and Tobin’s Q. This study advances our knowledge of executive compensation in the high technology sector.

Fostering employees’ innovative work behavior (EIB) has become one of the most important tasks of leaders. Although numerous studies have investigated the relationship between leadership and EIB, it is still unclear which specific leader behaviors promote EIB. Previous research has focused on leadership in terms of broad, non-innovation-specific leadership styles. Behavioral sub-factors have been neglected, and prioritization according to the importance of individual behaviors is still lacking. To address these issues, we identify innovation-specific leader behaviors and analyze which behaviors are best suited to increase EIB. To explain the relationship between the respective leader behaviors and EIB, we rely on the Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) framework and distinguish between ability-enhancing, motivation-enhancing, and opportunity-enhancing leadership behaviors. Our empirical analyzes are based on data from 1214 German employees. Our findings reveal that motivation- and opportunity-enhancing leadership behaviors foster EIB, with certain innovation-specific behaviors being particularly important for EIB. Building on our results, we provide guidelines for innovation-specific leadership.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Using a person-oriented approach with a broad sample of 200 employees across several sectors, we identified four victim subgroups sharing similar configurations of frequency and severity of aggression: high–high (high levels of frequency and severity; 15%), moderate–moderate (moderate levels of frequency and severity; 15%), high–low (high frequency but low severity; 26.5%), and low–low (lowest levels of frequency and severity; 43%). Further, we examined the relationship between victim groups, social demographics, and victim disposition. The results showed that women, young, and lower-tenured employees are at risk of belonging to the high–high victim group. In addition, employees with high negative affect and psychopathy traits are at risk of belonging to the high–high victim group. Drawing upon learned helplessness theory, we examined whether victim groups differed concerning internalizing problems. Results suggest that high–high group victims experienced the highest anxiety, loss of confidence, and social dysfunction, whereas low–low group members experienced the lowest levels.

Based on self-determination theory, this research relied on person-centered analyses to show how the distinct components of psychological need states combine to produce distinct profiles. We also explored contemporarily antecedents (perceptions of the organization’s environmental corporate social responsibility and negative moral emotions related to the organization’s environmental (ir)responsibility) and organizational outcomes (affective organizational commitment, turnover intentions, and cyberslacking). Questionnaire surveys were completed by 525 French employees. Four profiles characterized by configurations of psychological need states were identified and showed well-differentiated patterns. Negative moral emotions predicted membership in the most detrimental need states profiles while corporate social responsibility perceptions did not. As expected, we found opposite patterns of associations between profile membership and affective organizational commitment and turnover intentions, while the highest levels of cyberslacking were found in the most positive need states profiles. The results add to person-centered research and emphasize the importance of psychological experiences in the workplace and organizational outcomes.

In this study, we integrate work–family enrichment and upper echelons theories to examine how and when chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) family experiences impact their firms’ performance. We argue that CEO family harmony has an indirect effect on their firms’ product innovation performance through top management team (TMT) behavioral integration. Additionally, we propose that CEO founder status strengthens the effects of CEO family harmony. Our analysis of data from 101 CEOs and 458 TMT members in various high-tech industries in China indicates that the positive relationship between CEO family harmony and firms’ product innovation performance is mediated by TMT behavioral integration. Moreover, CEO founder status increases the direct effect of CEO family harmony on TMT behavioral integration and its indirect effect on firms’ product innovation performance through TMT behavioral integration. These findings have theoretical and practical implications and provide new research directions in the study of CEO family–work spillover and CEO–TMT interfaces.

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.

We propose that while positive performance feedback is positively related to firm sentiment, negative performance feedback is negatively associated with the firm sentiment. Additionally, overconfident Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) will improve the positive relationship between positive performance feedback and firm sentiment and reduce the negative relationship between negative performance feedback and firm sentiment. Using 7,182 firm-year observations for the 2004−2017 period, we show that positive performance feedback positively affects firm sentiment, and negative performance feedback negatively influences firm sentiment. We also found that higher levels of CEO overconfidence will minimize the negative impact of negative performance feedback on firm sentiment. Our research extends the current discourse on organizational impression management (proxied by firm sentiment) and CEO overconfidence research as we provide a nuanced relationship between firm performance feedback and organizational impression management. Our findings have theoretical and practical implications for corporate governance leaders and shareholders.

This paper builds on the creation of new ways of organizing work, where the freelance economy specifically targets the increasing number of skilled self-employed individuals collaborating for shared output. Through describing and discussing creativity within the freelance economy, this paper seeks to understand creativity in collaborations among these self-employed individuals. Drawing from a case study conducted in the advertising sector, the paper concludes that creativity within the freelance economy occurs between equal and inherently creative freelancers rather than being the product of individual traits, despite their respective skills. Creativity between individuals arises when processes are appropriately formalized, while the creative output is constrained by individual decisions and styles. The paper contributes to existing research by shedding light on the distinctive characteristics of the freelance economy and its paradoxical organizational nature. By doing so, it offers insights that contrast with prior studies on artistic creativity.

The increasing integration of digital technologies in business processes calls for a deeper understanding of their impact on business model efficiency. This study explores how digital alignment, composed by strategic decision support and operational support, affects business model efficiency, while also examining the extent to which strategic flexibility moderates this relationship. To test the proposed hypotheses, we adopt a quantitative approach on a sample of Italian small and medium-sized enterprises in the manufacturing industry. In particular, a regression analysis, complemented by a necessary condition analysis, is performed. We find that digital alignment, both in terms of strategic decision support and operational support, fosters business model efficiency. Strategic flexibility strengthens the relationship between strategic decision support and business model efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to operationalise digital alignment as composed of strategic decision support and operational support. Accordingly, this study contributes to the extant literature on digital alignment and business models.

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.