Strong performing companies often have intents that state their ambitions for the future and this will be clearly communicated to stakeholders by the chief executive officer. The chief executive officer should lead company strategy and play the key role in establishing and communicating the strategic intent. This conceptual paper uses insights mainly from the strategy process and corporate governance literature to build better understanding of how a business can achieve a strong sense of strategic intent to inform their strategy work. Three dimensions of the strategic intent construct are identified – shared vision, resource focus and foresight. Through the development of a series of research propositions a substantial future research agenda is offered in an area where the literature is quite limited. Points of interest to the strategy practice field are also discussed.

Organizations often face the challenge of institutional complexity, which involves incompatible prescriptions from multiple institutional logics. To deal with this challenge, prior researchers have proposed several strategies to tackle conflicts within and between organizations. The success of these solutions fundamentally hinges on achieving clarity. However, while clarity often brings further conflicts for both internal and external stakeholders, I argue that ambiguity logic is an alternative approach to deal with institutional complexity as it creates space for negotiations and potential solutions. As such, this paper proposes five research propositions that examine when ambiguous language and behavior can be better used to deal with institutional complexity. In general, the use of ambiguity logic is associated with power. Specifically, ambiguity logic is better applied in organizations when power is more evenly distributed among the stakeholders.

Previous studies have identified numerous factors that affect incident-reporting behavior. However, few studies have applied an individual psychology perspective to identify and examine the factors affecting the intention of nursing staff to report incidents. We integrate the theory of planned behavior, organizational behavior, psychological behavior, and social exchange theory to identify which factors affect the intentions of nursing staff to report incidents. Samples were collected from nursing staff at 40 regional or larger hospitals for model verification. The results of this study show that psychological safety, attitude toward reporting incidents, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control correlate positively with the intention to report incidents. The perceived cost and perceived benefit of incident reporting directly affects the attitude toward incident-reporting behavior, and self-efficacy influences perceived behavioral control. Furthermore, subjective norms and the perceived benefits of incident reporting mediate the effect of psychological safety on attitude toward incident-reporting behavior.

The psychological contract is used to examine the dynamics of the employee–employer exchange relationship. The dominant contract conceptualisation is that it is constituted by beliefs about ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ promises; however, there is a dearth of conceptual investigation regarding how other research fields understand promising and reconciling this with how the notion has come to be used in psychological contract theory. In particular, the notion of implicit promising remains conceptually and empirically underdeveloped, despite forming a key plank of the contemporary account of the contract. This paper explores these issues by presenting a cross-disciplinary review of promising and applying this to how the notion is used in the contract literature. A conceptual model is also developed to provide avenues to investigate how promise beliefs form in a contract context and their outcomes. Finally, research directions are outlined regarding the roles that beliefs other than promises can play in contract theory.

The knowledge-based view of the firm portrays knowledge assets as the basis of sustainable competitive advantage. However, leveraging the knowledge available to the firm is not straightforward. The transfer of best practices within the firm or the replication of a certain routine poses challenges for managers. Causal ambiguity of knowledge makes it difficult to transfer practices into other contexts within the firm. In this paper, a new framework is proposed that identifies four antecedents to causal ambiguity: complexity, tacitness, relevance to the existing knowledge base, and the locality of knowledge. The paper concludes with the implications of the framework.

Our study develops a new conceptual framework in which guanxi practices (managerial use of interpersonal ties to benefit their organizations) are analyzed by their focus (resources flowing inward or resources flowing outward) and their base (familiar – based on friendship ties; or family – based on kinship ties). Using this framework, we highlight the linkage between costs and benefits from using guanxi in Chinese business organizations, and show how the linkage depends on the guanxi base. Finally, we show how guanxi focus and guanxi base importantly affect employee responses to the use of guanxi practices in their organizations.