Drawing on systems theory, this paper aims to search for a leverage point in a high-performance work system (HPWS) wherein a small change of a constituent part significantly enhances the effect of the whole system on organizational performance (OP). Based on meta-analysis of 59,207 firms and establishments from 240 sample studies up to December 2021, the paper examines the effect of HPWS composition, coupled with country of origin and industrial affiliation, on the HPWS–OP relationship. The paper finds that training and development serves as a leverage point to significantly strengthen the synergy of HPWS. However, this leverage point works in advanced countries rather than developing countries, and in service industries rather than manufacturing industries. The finding indicates that a leverage point is not omnipresent, but contingent on country of origin and industrial affiliation. This study has practical implications for managers, highlighting the importance of a leverage point to the HPWS–OP relationship and the contingency nature of the leverage point.

How does employees' work context and job characteristics influence their creative behavior? To explore this question, this study draws on the Job Demands – Job Resources (JD-R) model to examine the role of excessive work overload and training and development on employee creative behaviors. Additionally, the study explores whether employees' work passion mitigates or enhances the effects of work overload and training and development on their creative behavior. Data from 142 employee–supervisor dyads in a Singaporean telecommunications organization showed that work overload had a marginally significant positive effect on employee creative behavior. Additionally, employees' work passion was found to enhance the effects of training and development on their creative behavior. The study contributes to ongoing debates in the literature regarding how specific characteristics of one's job and targeted human resource practices may foster employee creativity.

Business process management (BPM) has been the main driver behind company optimization and operational efficiency. However, the digitization era we live in necessitates that organizations be agile and adaptable. Delivering unprecedented rates of automation-fueled agility is necessary to be a part of this digital revolution. On the other hand, BPM automation cannot be done only by concentrating on procedure space and traditional planning methodologies. With the introduction of BPM, where the deployment of BPM with cloud computing has undergone enormous development lately, cloud computing has been considered a particularly active topic of study. Cloud computing points to the provision of dependable computing environments based on improved infrastructure availability and service quality without imposing a significant cost load. This research aims to discover the relationship between technical factors, financial factors, environmental factors, security of the cloud-based information systems, and the agile development of industrial BPM (IBPM). The present study aims to fill this gap and show how partial least squares structural equation modeling (SEM) can be employed in this field. Importance–performance map analysis (IPMA) evaluated the importance and performance of factors in the SEM. IPMA enables the identification of factors with relatively low performance but relatively high importance in shaping dependent variables. The empirical findings showed that four key factors (technical, financial, environmental, and security) positively influence the agile development of IBPM.

The rise of liberal market economies, propagated by neoliberal free market thought, has created a vacant responsibility for public interests in the market order of society. This development has been critiqued by Catholic social teaching (CST), forcefully arguing that governments and businesses should be directed to the common good. In this debate, no attention has yet been given to the Reformational tradition and its principle of sphere sovereignty, which provides guidelines on the responsibilities of governments and companies for the public interest of society. This article analyzes the differences and similarities between CST and the Reformational philosophy in their critiques of the neoliberal free market perspective of Hayek. We apply the three perspectives to the case of orphan drugs in the pharmaceutical industry and show that CST and the Reformational philosophy offer valuable insights in correction to Hayek’s views on the responsibilities of governments and companies for public health interests.

This article draws from Charles Taylor’s work of retrieval to advance moral foundations theory (MFT). Taylor’s contribution to MFT lies in his insistence that we retrieve the moral sources that have helped constitute, substantiate, and give meaning to individuals’ moral sensibilities. Applying Taylor’s insights to MFT, this article seeks to advance a view of moral foundations that connects them more explicitly to their underlying moral sources. Using this retrieved account of moral foundations, this article then addresses current issues within moral foundations research and theory. Finally, this article suggests ways in which Taylor’s philosophy can contribute to three areas within business ethics: ethical leadership, behavioral ethics, and ethics pedagogy.

A renewed political interest in profit sharing and employee codetermination prompts an analysis of the Swedish wage-earner funds, implemented by a Social Democratic government in 1983 and dismantled by a center-right government in 1991. This article explains the funds’ financial performance and the political decisions surrounding their dismantlement. It finds that the funds underperformed slightly in relation to financial targets. Reasons include inexperienced boards, limited investment opportunities, and a hostile attitude from the business community. For the center-right parties, getting rid of the funds was an ideological decision. Transferring the assets to research foundations and public venture capital funds would improve the business climate, compensate firms for taxes paid to finance the wage-earner funds, and ensure that the Social Democrats would not be able to reinstate the funds. The intense debate surrounding the wage-earner funds, their implementation, how they functioned in practice, and their dismantlement clearly contributed to Sweden’s sharp market turn in the 1980s and 1990s.

This study details the possible escalation of employees' perceptions of pandemic threats into diminished job performance, while considering a mediating role of their sense of job insecurity and a moderating role of their emotion regulation and improvisation skills. Results based on multisource, three-wave data show that employees' perceived pandemic threats compromise their work-related performance, because they believe that their job is at risk. This mediating role of perceived job insecurity is mitigated by employees' greater ability to control their emotions and come up with novel ideas on the spot. This study accordingly pinpoints employees' conviction that they may not be able to keep their jobs as a crucial mechanism by which the hardships of a global pandemic generate negative performance consequences, as well as how organizations can contain this risk by helping employees hone their pertinent personal skills.

According to the nonworseness claim, it cannot be morally worse to exploit someone than not to interact with them at all when the interaction 1) is mutually beneficial, 2) is voluntary, and 3) has no negative effects on third parties. My aim in this article is to defend the moral significance of exploitation from this challenge. To that end, I develop a novel account of why sweatshop owners have a moral obligation to pay sweatshop workers a nonexploitative wage despite the fact that their relationship is entirely optional. More precisely, I defend two main claims. First, I show that sweatshop owners are morally obligated to pay sweatshop workers a nonexploitative wage even though they have a right not to hire them and even though that will require them to pay sweatshop workers a wage that is higher than the one they voluntarily accepted. Second, I explain why this obligation on the part of sweatshop owners is not defeated by the fact that other individuals not party to the transaction would benefit even more than sweatshop workers from receiving this additional level of pay.

Ahsan, Sinha, and Srinivasan (2020) studied the motives of knowledge-intensive Indian firms’ international expansion based on resource-based considerations and the locational advantages offered by host countries. They identified firm characteristics associated with strategic asset-seeking, opportunity-seeking, and market-seeking motives. In this replication study, we examine Ahsan et al.'s (2020) model in the Chinese context. Based on our improved empirical model, our findings reveal some similarities but more importantly some key differences in the antecedents of internationalization motives between Indian and Chinese firms. Drawing on insights from prior studies, we propose that these differences can be attributed to differences in absorptive capacity, international expansion scales and patterns, ownership type, and the home institutional contexts in which Indian and Chinese firms operate. Overall, this replication study demonstrates the importance of contextualizing international business research.

We revisit predictions about the relationship between gender diversity and firm productivity using data on 1,082 manufacturing firms from six Sub-Saharan African countries: Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Kenya. Recent evidence suggests that a gender-diverse workforce opens up a firm to a vast range of talent, knowledge and perspectives critical to enhancing innovation and problem solving, and thereby, increasing firm productivity. Given the importance of manufacturing for employment and structural transformation in Africa, we test the gender diversity–productivity proposition by exploring structural differences (heterogeneity) across manufacturing firms using the Industry without Smokestacks (IWOSS) classification. We find that while gender diversity promotes firm productivity at lower levels, this effect is displaced with further increases. Our results did not show that IWOSS firms do any better in promoting the diversity–productivity link. Implications of this finding and areas for future studies are also discussed.

Organisational psychology literature is abounded with empirical evidence of the mitigating effect that social support seeking (SSS) behaviour has on stress. However, it is unclear if this phenomenon is present in a collectivist context where workers might be hesitant to seek social support when under stress. A total of 123 employees from China completed a longitudinal survey over 4 weeks assessing their appraisals of an ongoing work stressor, coping strategies, and stress level. Path-analysis, hierarchical regression and means comparison determined the degree of fit of two theoretical perspectives (stress-buffer and main effects) to Chinese employee's SSS behaviour, and its frequency of use against other coping strategies. Results showed that SSS was not elicited by primary and secondary appraisals, but instead may be better explained by employees' collectivistic aspirations. Implications of the results were addressed in relation to stress management strategies and human resource support initiatives. Future research directions were also discussed.

Drawing on social learning theory and taking a motivational perspective, this study mainly investigates how leader humility can promote employees' other-oriented motivations, and uncovers the other-serving motivational mechanism through which leader humility can impact their employees' different types of voice behavior. By collecting data from 152 leader–subordinate dyads through an online survey, the results revealed that leader humility was positively related to both employees' prosocial motivation and organizational concern motivation. Meanwhile, these two motivations play mediating roles in explaining how leader humility can positively affect employees' supportive voice and challenging voice. It is noteworthy that leader humility, which features highlighting the value and strength of others, is more likely to trigger employees' prosocial motivation and thus influence their voice behavior. This research extends our understanding of leader humility, employee motivation, and workplace voice. Practical implications and limitations of the results are also discussed.

Studies up to great extent have focused on investigating the possible consequences of supervisor incivility in organizations; however, surprisingly very little research has concentrated on its antecedents. Drawing on affective event theory, the aim of this study is to identify how role overload may cause the supervisor behavior uncivil toward their subordinates in the project environment by examining the mediating role of emotional exhaustion and moderating effect of time consciousness. Data were collected from both supervisors and their immediate subordinates from project-based organizations of Pakistan. After data consolidation, the final sample was 296 supervisor–subordinate dyads. The results revealed that supervisor role overload and emotional exhaustion is positively related with supervisor incivility and emotional exhaustion mediates this relationship. Time consciousness moderates the link between supervisor role overload and emotional exhaustion. The practical and theoretical implications of our findings are provided.

The purpose of this study aims to explore the relationships between business portfolio reconfiguration and firm performance in developing countries as well as the moderating roles played by organizational slack, capabilities and ownership structure. By using the perspectives of dynamic capabilities, resources-based view and social network, this study proposes that there is a U-shaped relationship between business portfolio reconfiguration and firm performance. Furthermore, while R&D capability, marketing capability and foreign ownership are expected to positively moderate this U-shaped relationship, organizational slack, state and domestic ownership may potentially make this U-shaped relationship less pronounced. We draw our observations from Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges in China from 2008 to 2017, and obtain 26,151 firm-year observations, which are consisted of 3,508 publicly traded companies. The results generally support our hypotheses, and some theoretical and practical implications are extracted from this study.

This conceptual paper focuses on the importance of extending the collaborative dynamic capabilities (C-DCs) view and its emphasis on the boundary spanning strategic communities (SCs) from firm-centric to the network-centric perspective. The C-DC view is an original theoretical perspective that offers a good explanation of corporate-level transformations in the context of cross-sectoral convergence. Although the focus of prevailing research on large firms as cornerstones of SCs is valid, it does not fully capture the more complex dynamics that take in the horizontal networks of firms. We show that C-DC and SC theoretical perspectives can be adapted to the context of regional industrial clusters and contribute to their strategic renewal. The paper conceptualizes the different challenges and nature of leadership that prevail in SC-based firms networks. It also presents the different enabling aspects of collaborative DCs (with regard to trust building, co-specialization and capability synthesis) in firm- vs. network-centric environments.