European Management Journal最新文献

Managing employees’ personal, psychological, and social capital is now considered key to sustained public sector organizational success. This study draws on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory to suggest the mechanisms and processes by which psychological capital and social capital are likely to influence such organizational performance. A phased, time-lagged online survey was conducted among 298 Israeli public servants at the managerial level working in government agencies. The theoretical model provides a novel, holistic perspective suggesting that stimulating personal and social resources will be fruitful, leading to improved organizational performance through organizational trust as a mediator and proactive behavior as a moderator. The result supports important insights from COR theory and its tenets, bearing on the under-researched public sector context. Practically, this study underlines how socio-psychological factors support the entire process of improving the human capital in the managerial level within the public sector.

We link job design and leadership literature to advance our understanding of the dynamics in transformational leadership. We tested the idea that motivating work characteristics can release positive energy (i.e., vigor) and help leaders who care about others (i.e., high in prosocial motivation) to realize their transformational leadership potential. We conducted a weekly diary study and collected data from leaders of organizations in Switzerland over five weeks (k = 100, N = 500). Multilevel analyses supported our hypotheses: When leaders were exposed to more motivating work characteristics (i.e., task significance, skill variety, and cooperation), they felt more vigorous. When leaders felt more vigorous, they showed more transformational leadership, although this finding was only observed in leaders with high (vs. low) prosocial motivation. Findings provide insights into when and for whom we can observe fluctuations in transformational leadership to guide organizations on supporting leaders to unleash their leadership potential.

This study investigates the effect of job satisfaction on investment efficiency. To operationalize job satisfaction empirically, we employ a novel measure based on crowdsourced employer reviews. Considering the as yet under-researched and less regulated private firm setting, in which internal characteristics such as employee satisfaction should play a more important role for corporate actions, we find that our measure for job satisfaction has a positive impact on investment efficiency. High job satisfaction seems to alleviate problems related to moral hazard and adverse selection resulting from information asymmetries, which ultimately improves corporate investment efficiency. We further show that high job satisfaction reduces particularly the likelihood of underinvestment, where profitable investment projects are not carried out. Our study demonstrates the importance of cultivating a positive workplace environment with contented employees, which does benefit fundamental corporate actions.

Increasingly, for-profit firms commit to creating value for stakeholders. But what are the consequences of mixing stakeholder value and profit? In this article, we draw on insights into moral psychology to explain that a firm's commitments to stakeholder value and to profit both influence individual stakeholders' cooperation, albeit in opposite directions. We predict that mixed firms – committed to both stakeholder value and profit – are perceived as less other-regarding, and, therefore, elicit less cooperation, than stakeholder-oriented firms – balancing the interests of a broad range of stakeholders. In two series of vignette experiments, we find that this is the case for mixed firms switching between profit and stakeholder value, and for mixed firms simultaneously increasing profit and stakeholder value. By investigating mixed firms, this article expands the descriptive scope of stakeholder theory. By applying knowledge from moral psychology, and experimental methods, this work advances the micro-foundations of stakeholder theory.

Academic journals are also organizations. As such, they are subject to institutional forces and environmental changes, to which they have to respond. They also have an internal life of their own, marked by people, events, choices. As the editor-in-chief of the European Management Journal (EMJ) from 2006 to 2012, I had the opportunity to witness and face drastic changes in the scientific publishing industry (digitalization) and in the way research and researchers are evaluated (mostly through articles in peer-reviewed journals). This article narrates and analyzes how the EMJ responded to these changes. Understanding these processes can be of interest for today's EMJ readers and contributors. Beyond the EMJ case, it also sheds light on the contemporary academic world in Business and Management Studies and, by illustrating its past, invites us to reflect on its future.

Significant research provides evidence of social and individual factors that influence ethics. However, consideration of the cultural assimilation process that simultaneously emphasizes the roles of national-level and individual-level values is scarce. Building on the arguments of Merton's anomie theory (1938, 1968), this study considered a multilevel mediation model to investigate the direct effects of cultural values on supervisors' ethics as well as the indirect effects through value commitments. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was employed to perform a centered within context with the reintroduction of the subtracted means at Level-2 (CWC(M)) mediation analysis on the data of 9813 supervisors across 30 countries. The study's findings contribute to Merton's anomie theory by deliberating on the importance of the assimilation of society's cultural values as reflected by individual value commitments in shaping supervisors' ethicality. Considering that some results opposed the propositions of Merton's anomie theory, this paper offered arguments that complement them.

Domestic violence has considerable professional repercussions. Abusive partners isolate victims, damage their self-confidence, belittle them, instill doubt, and create an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. Such mechanisms of domination, control, and isolation could have consequences for the professional lives of the victims, including absenteeism, decreased performance, and errors. These professional consequences can further isolate the victims because organizational actors, often unaware of or not understanding the domestic violence the victims are experiencing, can hold them accountable for poor work outcomes. This paper reports on action research conducted at EDF, a large French electricity company, and sheds light on the role of the employer in supporting victims of domestic violence, particularly by proposing a set of social and human resources practices that could help the victims escape from abusive situations. However, while it is important for organizations to undertake initiatives in addressing the cases of domestic violence, such involvement remains voluntary and depends on the goodwill of employing organizations. That is what some labor unions wish to change by advocating new professional rights for victims of domestic violence at national levels.