Haier should be like the sea, only the sea can have such a broad mind to hold so much water and does not abandon the trickle; the sea can hold all the dirty water and can purify it. Only in this way can we have an ever-flowing Yangtze River, a turbid Yellow River and the trickle; all of them gather here after thousands of turns and twists, being the first at a mad rush. They become the vast ocean with an eternally inexhaustible and incomparable spectacular!

Political marriage is an under-investigated form of social capital for family firms. In this study, we examine the relationship between political marriage and the growth of family firms. We analyze this relationship using survey data from parent–child dyads of 164 family firms in mainland China, along with qualitative data from eight semi-structured interviews. Drawing on social capital theory and self-verification theory, we propose that political marriage makes a significant contribution to the growth of family firms. We further propose that the effects of a political marriage on firm growth are moderated by the duration of the marriage and the degree of romantic love experienced by the couples. We find that the positive relationship between political marriage and firm growth is stronger when the duration of the marriage is longer. Our results also reveal a three-way interaction effect of political marriage, length of marriage, and romantic love on firm growth. In this interaction, the positive effect of political marriage is strongest when the marriage is long and the degree of romantic love is low (rather than high). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study investigates how venture capital firms (VCs) choose syndication partners. Exponential random graph models of Chinese VC syndication networks from 2006 to 2013 show that the homophily mechanism does not always determine VCs’ partner selection. In selecting partners, VCs have to strike a balance between reducing uncertainty and mobilizing heterogeneous resources. Therefore, decisions about partners depend on institutional uncertainty and VCs’ investment preferences. While VCs that focus on traditional business in an immature market are more likely to form homogeneous syndications, their peers that prefer to invest in innovative companies and that can rely on a stable market tend to syndicate with heterogeneous partners.

The Second MOR Research Frontiers Conference explored knowledge creation and innovation capacity of SMEs on the economic development of transforming economies. The theme echoed the new trend in China that the economy has entered the ‘new normal’ (xinchangtai) stage and entrepreneurship and innovation have been regarded as the ‘twin engines’ for future growth. The majority of the conference papers paid attention to the entrepreneurial potential and innovation capacity of China's rising private sector, and pointed out for me an emerging research agenda on innovation and entrepreneurship studies in China.

This study investigates the influence of business-specific, bank-specific, and political-specific networks on small firm investments in Vietnam. Also, I aim to explain how these social networks substitute the weaknesses of local institutions. Examining a set of more than 9,800 firm-year observations of small businesses in Vietnam from 2005–2015, I find that social ties with bank officials can boost firm investments; social ties with government officials can help firms overcome institutional voids; whereas social ties with businesspeople appear trivial to investment decisions. More importantly, I propose that networking, especially networks built upon connections with government officials, can substitute local institutions by addressing weaknesses in (1) inefficient legal enforcement, (2) corruption, (3) bureaucratic compliance, and (4) non-transparent governance system.

This study examines Chinese corporations’ responses to a sudden natural disaster in terms of their philanthropic donations. We apply Polanyi's double movement perspective to argue that rapid market expansion in an emerging economy causes social problems such as large-income disparities and environmental degradation. This calls forth counterforces advocating social responsibility and sustainability. Such countermovements can be strengthened by a major disaster, especially in the domain of corporate philanthropy. The resulting increase in corporate philanthropy persists long after the disaster, especially for those firms with large intra-firm pay disparities, operating in socially contested industries and located in regions with more social foundations. Using the context of China's 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, we find support for these arguments in a sample of Chinese public firms.

China is now poised to achieve its national aspiration of becoming an innovation economy. As it seeks to greatly increase equality in wealth creation, it also aims to assert global leadership in the development of all transforming economies, lead an expansion of international trade, and contribute to global environmental security policies. President Xi Jinping gave voice to these aspirations in his opening speech to the nineteenth national congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017.

This study integrates research on social networks and interpersonal counterproductive behaviours to examine the role of third party relationships in predicting an individual's susceptibility to co-worker mistreatment, and in moderating the relationship between co-worker mistreatment and job performance. Third party embeddedness and network closure are examined in the formal workflow network and the informal liking network. Results obtained from employees in a family-owned Chinese business in Singapore indicate that an individual is more likely to be mistreated by a co-worker when both parties are strongly embedded in mutual third party relationships in the workflow network, and that the individual is less likely to be mistreated when both parties are strongly embedded in the liking network. At the individual network level, network closure (i.e., the extent to which an individual's contacts are themselves connected to one another) in the workflow network increases the likelihood that a co-worker will mistreat the individual, but closure in the liking network weakens the negative relationship between mistreatment and performance. The findings offer a network-based perspective to understanding interpersonal mistreatment and counterproductive work behaviours, particularly in the context of Confucian Asian firms, and provide practical implications for organizations and individuals to reduce counterproductive behaviours at work.

Management scholars and practitioners emphasize the importance of the sizeand diversity of a knowledge worker's social network. Constraints onknowledge workers' time and energy suggest that more is not always better.Further, why and how larger networks contribute to valuable outcomesdeserves further understanding. In this study, we offer hypotheses to shedinsight on the question of the diminishing returns of large networks and thespecific form of network diversity that may contribute to innovativeperformance among knowledge workers. We tested our hypotheses using datacollected from 93 R&D engineers in a Sino-German automobile electronicscompany located in China. Study findings identified an inflection point,confirming our hypothesis that the size of the knowledge worker's egocentricnetwork has an inverted U-shaped effect on job performance. We furtherdemonstrate that network dispersion richness (the number of cohorts that thefocal employee has connections to) rather than network dispersion evenness(equal distribution of ties across the cohorts) has more influence on theknowledge worker's job performance. Additionally, we found that thecurvilinear effect of network size is fully mediated by network dispersionrichness. Implications for future research on social networks in China andWestern contexts are discussed.

Past studies have shown that the flow of knowledge from incumbent firms is associated with the creation of startups and their subsequent performance. While much research has focused on the mechanisms of how incumbent-to-startup knowledge transfer takes place, such as entrepreneurs pursuing opportunities that their previous employers do not want to pursue, we explore with detailed qualitative analysis of six private startups in the Chinese synthetic-dye industry what type of knowledge actually flows and what type is more important for the long-term success of startups. We discover eight types of knowledge that flow from incumbents to new firms during the foundation of startups. Abstracting these eight types of knowledge into two general categories of functional knowledge and strategic knowledge, we find the reception of strategic (not functional) knowledge shapes the long-term competitiveness of surviving startups. Receiving technical knowledge – one type of functional knowledge – during the founding period is necessary for startups’ short-term survival but insufficient for long-term success. Our findings show that the performance implications of initial knowledge flows from incumbents hinge on the type of knowledge, contributing to a more explicit explanation of how incumbent-to-startup knowledge flows affect entrepreneurial performance.

Open innovation (OI) has been appointed as a key factor to promote innovative performance, but some research gaps remain especially when it comes to SMEs in developing countries. This article deals with (1) the effect of formalization of innovation strategy on OI activities in SMEs, (2) the impact of OI activities on SMEs’ innovative performance, and (3) the moderating role played by control on the relationship between inbound and outbound activities and the innovative performance. OI encompasses a range of innovative methods and procedures in firms to stimulate internal innovation and widen the external use of innovation (inbound and outbound). In this work, an empirical study is carried out on 543 Ecuadorian SMEs. The results show that the formalization of the innovation strategy promotes OI activities, both inbound and outbound. While outbound activities carried out by SMEs enhance innovative performance, this positive effect is only identified for inbound open innovation activities when control exists and increases, acting this variable as a moderating factor. These results have important implications both for the management of companies and the development of public policies aimed at promoting OI in SMEs in developing countries. This research contributes to the literature as it deals with a developing country context and considers a wide range of OI activities.

Despite the salutary effects of mask wearing broadly recognized during the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known about the consequences of wearing masks in the workplace. The current research raises the question of whether and how mask wearing may impact employees' emotional well-being at work. Drawing on emotion regulation theory (e.g., Gross, 1998, 2015), we propose that mask wearing enables employees to adopt more authentic emotional displays, which in turn decreases emotional exhaustion. Furthermore, guided by the social interaction model of emotion regulation (Coté, 2005), we further posit that for employees whose work requires more frequent face-to-face interaction, the positive impact of mask wearing on emotional exhaustion becomes more significant. Across a pilot study and a three-wave field survey, we find support for this hypothesized model. Implications of these findings for future theorizing and research on mask wearing are discussed.