British Journal of Management最新文献

Reflecting on our experiences in the academic profession, in this paper we offer insights on how to craft sustainable careers as minority academics. While there has been engaged interest amongst business school scholars to study the myriad challenges encountered by those academics who occupy minority identity categories, there has been far less consideration of the strategies that can be adopted to navigate the profession in order to not only survive but thrive. In presenting narrative ruminations related to research, teaching and service, we illuminate certain shared themes found across our professional experiences that may provide strategies to other minority academics as they construct their own academic careers. These shared themes revolve around striking a delicate balance between playing the proverbial ‘game’ and remaining true to who we are. While ostensibly disclaiming any suggestion that we put forward an all-encompassing ‘solution’ to the challenges confranted by minority academics working as management educators in today's business school, this paper offers a set of ideas and practical advice on some of the paths available through which to craft sustainable careers in the academic profession.

Firms face pressure to improve their environmental performance. However, in addition to making substantive investments that enhance environmental outcomes, firms may also engage in investments that are green but mostly symbolic and not effective in improving environmental performance. To examine whether the green skill investments firms make are effective in enhancing environmental performance, we analyse detailed job posting data from 2010 to 2020 and micro-level data on toxic chemical emissions from plants. We find that an increased demand for green skills is associated with subsequent reductions in toxic chemical releases at plants, especially toxins that are harmful to humans. Further analyses reveal that reductions in toxic releases are more pronounced when firms direct their investments in green skills towards local establishments rather than the headquarters. By integrating a resource-based view with concepts of market failure and organizational legitimacy, we show that investments in green skills can simultaneously serve legitimacy-seeking and substantive performance-improvement purposes.

The role of human resource management (HRM) in pro-actively driving business innovation has been tenuous at best in the past. Most innovations have happened in spite of, rather than because of, HRM. But the artificial intelligence revolution through which we are currently living marks an alignment between technological innovation and process innovation, the likes of which has never been seen before. The incorporation of new technologies into the practice of HRM is likely to lead to a new paradigm in ‘people management’, broadly construed. We explain how this new paradigm will emerge against the backdrop of the three papers included in this Special Issue on new organizational forms, business model innovation and HRM.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is critical for firms navigating dynamic environments, yet the mechanisms driving its development remain underexplored. This study examines the role of entrepreneurial alertness (EA) as a mediator linking environmental dynamism to EO and firm performance. We argue that whilst information acquisition reduces uncertainty, excessive focus on gathering information without adequate processing can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. This imbalance may hinder the development of EO and adversely affect firm performance. Using data from 209 small and medium enterprises in Ghana, collected across multiple informants in two waves, our findings provide empirical support for the proposed model. The study contributes to the EO literature by demonstrating the relationship between information acquisition and processing in fostering EO and performance. It also cautions against the risks of overemphasizing one dimension at the expense of the other in dynamic environments. Additionally, we extend the conceptualization of EA by demonstrating that its dimensions operate through flexible, non-linear pathways, enabling entrepreneurs to adapt their information-processing strategies to the demands of dynamic environments.

Collaboration is often used to combine capabilities and share resources to deliver strategic goals. The process has potential to support organizational learning and intertwining of knowledge between participating organizations. However, this often overlooks the complexities and contexts that make collaborations prone to failure. This paper explores inter-organizational learning between two police forces in the United Kingdom as they embark on a strategic partnership through collaboration. We investigate how learning emerges through the collaboration, what tensions surface as the partnership develops and how these tensions are resolved. Our research contributes to inter-organizational learning theory in three ways. Firstly, we show that inter-organizational learning is a multi-level process through practices that occur at inter-personal, inter-group and inter-organizational levels. Secondly, we highlight that key tensions attenuate the effectiveness of learning processes. Finally, we note that the outcomes of institutionalized learning — that is, merging infrastructure, standardizing processes and creating a shared identity — are interconnected, and that inter-organizational learning cannot be achieved without all three being embedded successfully. We offer new and important insights into the collaborative learning efforts that promote strategic partnership and integration.

A burgeoning literature on green mergers and acquisitions (M&As) is based on the assumption that acquirers are polluting firms and buy targets with green resources to gain sustainable development, ignoring the fact that acquirers can also have green resources. This study explores how green acquirers select their targets and realize benefits in the international takeover market. Drawing upon the resource-based view and information asymmetry perspective, we argue that green acquirers have a competitive advantage and prefer targets with lower firm-level (publicly listed target) and industry-level (targets from the related industry) information asymmetries in order to better estimate the target's value and avoid the risk of overpayment. Findings from 7788 M&As announced between 2005 and 2021 support our argument, showing that green acquirers buy targets with lower information asymmetries and earn higher returns. We also find that board characteristics and takeover experience are boundary conditions affecting the target selections of green acquirers. Our study contributes to green M&As and information economics by emphasizing the interplay of green innovation and lower information asymmetries in target selection and value creation.

Achieving top leadership positions is a career goal for many, including those in academia. Despite the increasing size and importance of the higher education sector, the literature on university presidents' careers remains scarce. We interviewed 48 university presidents in three academic models (UK, France, and Vietnam) to identify the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of their career trajectories. Whilst the academic career model reflects characteristics of ‘new careers’, our findings support and expand several career theories. We identified a multi-stage career trajectory, where progression to the next stage is contingent on meeting certain requirements. It is only from having achieved prior levels that the move to an executive leadership role becomes a consideration. Progress is largely informal, partly ‘accidental’, and sponsored by existing leadership and/or other colleagues. Furthermore, we observed similarities and differences in the enablers and barriers across national systems. Finally, we reveal the almost complete lack of the involvement of human resource management in the process, providing implications for those responsible for people management in universities.

Although digital technologies can be powerful tools to fulfil environmental responsibilities, scant research has examined whether and how firms adopting these technologies evade environmental responsibilities. This study uses data on Chinese listed firms from 2012 to 2022 to explore whether corporate digitalization (CD) leads to corporate greenwashing (CGW). Our findings indicate that CD exacerbates CGW, as it exacerbates information asymmetry between companies and stakeholders through impression management, information manipulation and increasing the complexity of corporate operations, all of which can lead to CGW. Furthermore, building on the fraud triangle, we find that financial distress, digital misalignment and earnings manipulation exacerbate the main effect. This study contributes to the literature on the dark side of digital transformation in firm performance.

Hedge fund activism has become a prominent organizational phenomenon that attracts increasing scholarly interest. To advance our understanding of the spillover effect of this phenomenon, this study develops a theory on the industry-wide spillover effects of hedge fund activism on non-targeted firms’ focus on exploration vis-à-vis exploitation in technological innovation activities. In the empirical context of US-listed chemical firms from 2000 to 2015, we find that non-targeted firms exhibit a lower level of exploration relative to exploitation following hedge fund activism against their industry peers. Moreover, the industry spillover effect of hedge fund activism increases with the target firm's media coverage and decreases with the focal non-targeted firm's financial performance. These results support our theory and highlight the potential dark side of hedge fund activism on exploratory innovations in firms even if they are not directly targeted.

Recent management education debates identify room for greater emphasis on character building within business school pedagogies. As a way forward, we suggest virtue ethics as an agent-centred character-building ethical approach that provides guidance in management education where norm- and outcome-oriented ethical approaches have limits. However, its whole-person and life-span perspective makes it difficult to develop virtue ethics competence in business schools. We thus conceptualise a virtue as competence learning framework for management. We do so by integrating Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue approach with the intellectual–behavioural–personal (IBP) competence framework that specifies independent and interdependent dimensions of intellectual, behavioural and personal competence. The virtue as competence learning framework guides learners to develop virtue competence. We make three contributions. First, we explicitly address the whole-person and life-span perspective of virtue and thus address the lack of systematic approaches to virtue ethics learning in managerial studies. Second, by conceptually applying the IBP competence framework to the learning of a whole-person ethics approach, we address the particularisation of competences in the competence debate. Third, we offer concrete inspirations for a character-building pedagogy that develops whole-person competence and addresses the scarcity of ethics pedagogies that develop behavioural and personal competence.