European Management Review最新文献

The existing empirical evidence on the political directors' impact on company performance is mixed and inconclusive, suggesting that this relationship is more complex than initially hypothesised and requires further investigation. This study enhances our knowledge by exploring both political directors' direct effects and the role of moderating contextual variables. Precisely, building on resource dependence and contingency theory, we argue that political directors can positively affect company performance and that this relationship may be moderated by industry regulation and national financial systems. We tested our hypotheses using a longitudinal sample of large European listed companies. Our results highlight that political directors have a detrimental effect on firm performance, while industry regulation and credit-based financial systems positively moderate this baseline relationship. As such, our findings expand the use of resource dependence theory and provide a more contextual understanding of the impact of political directors on firm performance.

This study focuses on employees' work-related social media use. The multivalent involvement of social media in corporate processes calls for attention to how employees' social media use is conceptualized and managed. Drawing on a sample of 1179 knowledge workers, the study explores how employees perceive their communicative roles, how contextual factors shape these perceptions, and how communicative role perceptions, in turn, are associated with work-related social media use. The findings demonstrate that leadership support and employees' perceptions of the anticipated impact of their communication are positively related to role perceptions, and the more employees define their communicative roles as an expected part of their work, the more likely they are to use social media for work-related purposes. This study is highly relevant to scholars and managers as it draws attention to expanding workplace roles that emerge in relation to advancements in, and the adoption of, new information and communication technology.

Meta-organizations form to advance collective action. But collective action can be more difficult to coordinate for meta-organizations comprising governmental agencies or sovereign states, with system-level objectives often conflicting. These challenges can be more binding during a crisis, where the responses called for are outside of the original reason for the meta-organization's existence. We advance a framework for conceptualizing meta-organizations that focuses on both internal attributes and external perceptions and suggests how each may help or hinder meta-organization influence during a crisis. Using as a case study the response of the European Union (EU) to COVID-19 and, specifically, to air travel restrictions at the outbreak of the pandemic, we show how meta-organizations can have difficulties in responding expeditiously to crises, particularly when encountering contradictory system-level goals. We argue that meta-organizations must plan for crises during less turbulent times, developing the processes that contribute to the gradual creation of new system-level goals.

Due to the ongoing refugee crises, refugees and their workplace integration have attracted the attention of management scholars. The understanding of refugees varies and often lacks clarity in this emerging research. In analyzing how management scholars define the term “refugee,” detailing their approaches to heterogeneous refugee populations and outlining their assumptions about refugees' coping agency, this literature review provides a structured analysis of the emerging field's collective knowledge and theorization. We propose detailed implications to enhance the understanding of refugees in management research and show future avenues for research.

Research on how and when leader–member exchange (LMX) impacts work engagement in different public sector contexts and categories of employees is scarce. Utilising conservation of resources theory, we advance research on LMX and work engagement in two studies. Study 1 investigates the mediating role of a contextual resource (psychological safety) and an energy resource (job crafting) in a resource-rich context, and Study 2 investigates the moderating role of a personal resource (optimism) in a resource-poor context. Study 1 uses a three-wave research design with employees from the engineering and technical divisions of an Irish public utility operating in the energy market and found that both psychological safety and job crafting functioned as partial mediators. Study 2 uses a sample of teachers and tutors from three Irish local authority education and training organisations and found that subordinate optimism moderated the LMX work engagement relationship. Our study findings highlight that both psychological safety and job crafting operated as important linking mechanisms and shed light on how LMX is linked to work engagement in the case of public utility employees. We also found that employee optimism provided an explanation of when it will impact work engagement with employees working in an education context. We highlight theory and practice implications.

This research sought to uncover the role played by intellectual capital (IC) in the interplay between strategic alliances of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and servitisation strategies. An in-depth investigation of a single case represented by an SME consortium in the elevator industry served as the empirical context. Multiple sets of data were examined by integrating the analysis of documents with the analysis of data gathered through semi-structured interviews. We found that a strategic alliance among SMEs constitutes a form of relational capital and creates/improves other components of IC that support the formulation of the servitisation strategy and enable its implementation. The development of IC triggered by the formation of a strategic alliance appears to function as a driver of the servitisation strategy and to influence the innovation process. The value of this research lies in the analysis of IC in a new context—the servitisation of SMEs through strategic alliances—that focusses on interrelations among multiple forms of capital.

This study examines the impact of CEO career dynamics (including CEO tenure, CEO horizon and CEO seasons) on environmental management within the UK context. Unlike the previous studies that have primarily focused on corporate social performance, we instead examine these relations within the environmental management context. We posit and detect that CEO tenure has a positive nonlinear association with environmental management, indicating that CEOs' interest in environmental issues diminishes over time. We also provide evidence that CEO horizon has a positive impact on environmental management. Finally, as regards CEO seasons, we provide limited support that CEOs in their ‘convergence’, and ‘Response to mandate and experimentation’ stages are associated with environmental management. These results hold important implications for both firms and policymakers in the United Kingdom.

Research shows that women are less successful than men in obtaining external funding for research projects. However, other research points to advantages of female leadership and suggests that women are capable of breaking glass ceilings in competitive contexts (e.g., promotions). We bridge these ideas by arguing that although women are disadvantaged in the funding process (e.g., as principal investigators or PIs), there may be advantages of female representation in research projects that compete for funding. We analyze a unique panel dataset based on all call texts and all applications to the “Cooperation” part of the EU FP7, a 2007–2013 EUR 53.2 billion program. Using fixed-effects regressions, we find that projects with high female representation (or with female PIs) receive less favorable evaluations. However, this effect weakens as the relevant projects become more heterogeneous and radical. These findings are robust to a number of alternative specifications.

As the COVID-19 outbreak forced many organizations to shift to work from home (WFH) arrangements, many are now considering whether to continue these arrangements post-pandemic. To make informed decisions, understanding the environmental factors that influence employees' capacity to WFH effectively is crucial. This study contributes to this understanding by drawing on neo-institutional theory to develop a model that characterizes how employees' WFH outcomes are shaped by their national institutional environment. The model was tested using data from multiple national-level sources and individual-level data obtained via a survey. The findings reveal that employees from high competency (cognitive institutions), meritocratic (normative institutions), and more labor-regulated (regulatory institutions) contexts demonstrate higher levels of perceived productivity and satisfaction with WFH. Moreover, the link between the institutional context and WFH effectiveness is more pronounced when employees' capacity to adjust to WFH is high. Theoretical and practical implementations for organizations, especially multinational ones, are being discussed.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been identified as a central construct to understand how firms compete and perform effectively in increasingly competitive environments. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, this study examines how chief executive officers' (CEOs') regulatory focus, a motivational attribute that entails a promotion focus for growth and a prevention focus for safety, affects the EO of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Results from 110 UK SMEs show promotion focus positively, and prevention focus negatively affect EO when the two foci are examined independently. Our findings also demonstrate that EO varies significantly among firms led by CEOs with different combinations of the two foci. Specifically, firms engaged in significantly higher levels of EO when they are led by CEOs with a high rather than a low promotion focus, where prevention focus is at a high level. This study extends the literature by uncovering regulatory focus as a motivational microfoundation of EO.