Extant theory proposes that stakeholders reward organizations that behave ethically and punish those that don’t. Taken at face value, this dynamic implies that organizations prioritizing ethical concerns should have competitive advantages augmenting performance. Unfortunately, hoped-for advantages often fail to materialize. Examining this difficult reality, we explore how pluralistic ethical standards manifest in ways that are not obvious because they are often locally and temporally attached to stakeholder groups. Further, we adopt a resource-based view of organizations and draw on literature related to dynamic capabilities and stakeholder theories to argue that ethics-related organization-level behavior can only lead to sustainable competitive advantages when there is continued competence across present and future-oriented systems. As a whole, our work provides a useful theoretical framework for addressing the pragmatic difficulties associated with enacting universal ethical principles in unique situations.

This study investigates the barriers that hinder the non-leading Brazilian higher education institutions (HEIs) in repositioning within the digital landscape based on dynamic capabilities. In-depth semi-structured interviews with top managers at six non-leading HEIs show that the main barriers include uncertainty about the traditional HEI future in the digital scenario, lack of strategic tools to reposition the HEIs, lack of knowledge about the cost-benefit of an institution’s digitization, lack of knowledge on how to implement changes, and lack of information on if an HEI should (or not) meet all the new stakeholder needs. These barriers prevent HEIs from successfully adapting to the digital era. Methodologies and tools are required to guide strategic decisions, perform digitization’s cost-benefit analysis, and implement changes that meet stakeholders’ evolving demands. By overcoming these barriers, HEIs can effectively implement dynamic capabilities, transforming the challenges of the digital age into opportunities for growth and innovation.

The present study focuses on the Charismatic, Ideological, and Pragmatic Theory of leadership, examining how sensemaking mitigates follower reactions after unethical leader behavior. We examine the impact of ethical misconduct type on follower outcomes, specifically whether CIP leaders are able to justify unethical behavior to maintain follower attitudes toward the leader. Participants assumed the role of an employee for a fictional oil and gas exploration company, encountering the company’s C, I, or P chief executive officer (CEO) through a video-taped speech discussing the state and vision of the organization. Participants read ethical misconduct related to “people” or ethical misconduct related to “tasks or resources” by the organization’s CEO. Finally, participants were provided (or not provided) a video-taped justification of the ethical misconduct. A three-way interaction revealed the impact of ethical misconduct type is key to leader sensemaking. Implications are discussed.

The focus of job satisfaction literature remains on the subordinate even though supervisors are responsible for evaluating employee performance, determining employee pay, raises, promotions, growth opportunities, etc., all of which impact employees’ subsequent performance that contributes (or not) to organizational success. Using a psychological contracts lens, we develop and test theoretical arguments predicting supervisors’ response to contributions is not uniformly positive depending on the type and amount of contribution involved. Across two studies, we ask supervisors to evaluate subordinates’ delivered contributions relative to promised contributions. Our results challenge the assumption that supervisors always desire larger amounts of work from their subordinates; excess contributions were associated with lower supervisors’ satisfaction with subordinates for some types of contributions. The results imply that subordinates’ contributions of work to supervisors may influence supervisors’ satisfaction with subordinates perhaps affecting their performance reviews and career opportunities.

This study examines the antecedent role of organizational culture and the mediating role of digital transformation when promoting big data analytics capabilities. Employing the Competing Values Framework, we scrutinize the influence of various cultural typologies, including digital culture on the successful deployment of digital transformation and the enhancement of big data analytics capabilities. Our analysis utilizes Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling on a dataset of 183 firms to evaluate our hypotheses. The findings reveal that adhocratic, digital and hierarchical cultures significantly foster big data analytics capabilities mediated by digital transformation, which is a dynamic process that needs supportive digital and innovative values. In contrast, market and clan cultures exhibit weaker linkages. By providing empirical evidence and practical implications, this study highlights how organizations with a strong adhocratic and digital cultures outperform those with traditional cultures in their digital transformation and big data analytics capabilities efforts.

Historically, the higher education curriculum in business degrees has contained little or no Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (herein ‘Indigenous’) content. With the increase in awareness at the societal level, Australian university business schools need to change and design the curriculum, so that students graduate with the capability to engage with Indigenous businesses, individuals, and communities while understanding contemporary policy and business including sustainability, Human Resources, supply chain, and governance. First, secondary data from Australian Department of Education, Skills, and Employment were collected on Indigenous and non-Indigenous higher education students is presented to establish the current levels of student’s access and completion rates in management, commerce and business areas. Secondly, focus groups were held to gain the views of educators who have taught Indigenous curriculum in Foundation business and commerce curriculum and share their perceptions of the impact of this on students and themselves. The secondary data presented show the imperative of providing strategies to support and opportunities to Indigenous students and that by embedding Indigenous knowledge students can build awareness and connection leading to short and long term improvements. Information gathered from the research can be used to support the largely positive impact teaching Indigenous curriculum thereby addressing government policies in closing the gap of education and employment.

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 significantly impacted Australia’s resources sector, particularly mining, oil, and gas industries, posing challenges for operational leaders. This study applied Adaptive Crisis Management Theory (ACMT) to understand how these leaders adapted during the crisis. Through interviews with 32 operational leaders, it was found that their roles evolved as crisis demands changed. Initially, they addressed immediate needs, then shifted focus to remote work facilitation and digital transformation, and finally emphasised recovery, trust, and resilience. These adaptations influenced leaders’ behaviours, highlighting the importance of flexibility in supporting employee wellbeing and organisational continuity during crises.

Charisma, often seen as an innate trait, is now understood as leader signaling grounded in values, symbols, and emotions, suggesting it can be developed through interventions. However, the method for cultivating charisma remains unclear. This study examines nonverbal communication strategies, highlighting the potential of body language, facial expressions, and vocal modulation to enhance charisma. Additionally, we introduce a virtual reality training program focused on these cues and explore the role of audience presence in boosting the intervention’s effectiveness by fostering self-awareness and behavioral adjustments. Results of a controlled randomized experiment with virtual reality-trained participants and online charisma assessors demonstrated significant improvements in observer-rated charisma from pre- to post-training compared to the control group. Moreover, training in front of a virtual audience yielded the expected outcomes. This study sheds light on charisma theory, its potential virtual reality training application, and its implications for leadership development.

Previous literature generally acknowledged that leader inclusiveness has positive effects on employee voice. However, emerging research and practice commentary highlight the importance of considering the potential dark side of leader inclusiveness on employee voice. This study examines the dual-path mechanism by which leader inclusiveness influences employee voice through perceived autonomy and cognitive dependence and investigates the moderating role of performance-prove goal orientation within this dynamic. Based on data from 286 independent leader–subordinate dyads working in China, we find that leader inclusiveness can promote employee voice by increasing perceived autonomy, and hinder employee voice by increasing cognitive dependence. Furthermore, performance-prove goal orientation weakens the positive indirect effect of leader inclusiveness on voice via perceived autonomy and strengthens the negative indirect effect of leader inclusiveness on voice via cognitive dependence. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how leader inclusiveness affects employee voice behavior through dual pathways and its boundary conditions.

This study explores what kinds of moral potency profiles can be identified among three different samples: Top sports, Leaders, and Followers. Based on the social norm theory, we examine whether and how the experienced strength of ethical organizational culture is associated with the probability to be identified into different moral potency profiles. Based on ratings of 188 top sport representatives, 237 leaders and their 202 followers, a person-centered approach was used to identify three moral potency profiles: morally hesitant, moderate moral potency, and morally confident. A fourth profile was identified based on the followers’ evaluations of their leaders: morally void. Low evaluations of ethical culture increased the likelihood of being classified into the morally hesitant profile. As the followers were somewhat more critical in evaluating their leaders’ moral potency than the leaders themselves, our findings highlight the value of including other-rated indicators when examining moral actions within organizations.

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.

This study provides a holistic approach to the potential drivers of corporate environmental policy. Institutional and/or stakeholder theories are used to explain any influence on this type of policy in situations with different characteristics. Specifically, the analysis considers country-, industry-, and firm-level determinants of an international sample of listed companies. Exploratory factor analysis was first applied to the variables at the country level because their underlying interrelationships were unknown. Using ordered probit models clustered at the firm level, we found that some environmental characteristics of a country and some macro-level variables considered together affect corporate environmental policy, along with pressure from industry peers. Moreover, we observed that companies with better policies for stakeholders, greater board independence, and greater gender diversity tended to develop better environmental policies. This study offers insight into fostering environmental responsibility through policy incentives and effective corporate governance structures.

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.

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.

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.