British Journal of Management最新文献

Affordance theory suggests that technology offers certain opportunities or ‘affordances’ that can be exploited by users. In this context, we are exploring how FinTech adoption provides opportunities to address corporate greenwashing. Drawing on an affordance perspective, we assert that FinTech adoption effectively inhibits corporate greenwashing behaviour, primarily through facilitating green innovation and improving managerial efficiency. We also contend that the impact of FinTech adoption on reducing greenwashing behaviour is not uniform across all industries. It is more pronounced in heavy-polluting industries, indicating that FinTech has a greater effect in encouraging accurate disclosure of environmental information in environmentally sensitive sectors. Conversely, its impact is weaker in high-tech industries, which might already have strong environmental commitments. The findings contribute to the literature on sustainability, FinTech and governance.

There has been a growing interest in comparative work exploring when and why firms embark on green paths. It has been concluded that in national contexts where inter-firm ties are stronger, progress has been stronger. In turn, this raises questions about the impact of inter-firm ties within, rather than between, national contexts, and in settings where progress towards renewables has been uneven and contested. Accordingly, we explore how common institutional ownership may foster collaboration among firms within the same industry against climate change. Using a sample of US-listed firms from 2006 to 2019, we obtain robust evidence that firms with industrial peers that are owned by the same institutional investors have lower carbon emissions. In addition, we find that a threshold exists for which the impact on carbon emissions holds only when firms are commonly connected with a substantial number of peers. The existence of this threshold suggests potential free-riding issues and highlights the beneficial role of investors in promoting cross-industry collaboration. Overall, our results highlight the role played by institutional investors in tackling climate issues, with important implications for both climate- and antitrust-related regulations.

While supplier involvement is largely considered an industry best practice, its financial performance implications are far from clear and remain equivocal. These disparate findings led us to shift the conversation to exploring the strategic conditions that may enhance the value of the practice. We do so by drawing on the strategic fit perspective, an underexplored perspective in supplier involvement research. We argue that the value of supplier involvement is shaped by the task priority associated with a firm's strategic orientation. Accounting for the multidimensional nature of strategic fit, we further investigate whether strategic fit is likely to be impacted by a firm's level of market competition. Using a longitudinal survey of automotive manufacturers in Brazil, we demonstrate that supplier involvement fits well with a low-cost strategy as opposed to a differentiation strategy. However, the degree of fit varies across levels of market competition. The study's overarching contribution is that it develops a theory of how strategic factors interact to impact the financial performance implications of supplier involvement, stressing the significance of strategic fit as the underlying mechanism.

In the wake of increased geopolitical tensions, we investigate the impact of geopolitical risk on the investments of international high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Prior research on SME internationalization has primarily emphasized the importance of home and host-country institutions and political risk, with limited attention given to geopolitical risk as a distinct contextual factor. Drawing on international relations literature, we posit that geopolitical risk, captured by diplomatic relations between home and host countries, creates political legitimacy concerns for international high-tech SMEs, discouraging their international investments. This effect is contingent on SME innovation (through patents) and the scope of international diversification. Analysing data from international high-tech SMEs and their subsidiaries for the period 2009–2022, we find consistent evidence for our hypotheses.

Distinguished societal recognition can influence corporate decision-makers to act responsibly. We exploit this unique sociological attribute of UK firm board members and examine the impact of honorary titles on the firm's environmental, social and governance (ESG) performances. Using the peerage and honorific titles of board members of public UK firms from 2002 to 2020, we demonstrate that firms wherein board members have a title of honour are associated with higher ESG performance. We also document a positive contagion effect of titleholders on other board members, which contributes to firms’ ESG performance. Our findings align with theories of resource dependence, upper echelons and peer effects postulations and highlight the importance of societal recognition in shaping corporate decisions towards sustainability.

This study investigates whether the surge of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) that occurred in Italy after the enactment, in 2016, of a new reform of credit cooperative banks (CCBs) ultimately improved their performance. Worldwide, CCBs have proved to play a crucial role in spurring local economic development. With the adoption of a dataset composed of 594 Italian banks and 3933 bank-year observations from 2008 to 2020, our results show a positive and significant impact of the 2016 reform on M&As among CCBs. However, contrary to the expectations of regulators, our results highlight a puzzling deterioration in bank stability of the CCBs involved in M&As, with no relevant improvement in capitalization and profitability, reinforcing the view that bigger is not always better, at least in the context of CCBs. Our evidence sheds light on the perils underlying a massive consolidation process of local banking industries, calling for a regulatory recalibration and further research investigating the impact of different growth models capable of preserving the diversity and unique characteristics of banks, rather than pursuing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model.

Drawing from optimal distinctiveness research, we explore the effect of strategic change on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in the context of CSR conformity and CSR differentiation. Additionally, we examine whether analyst coverage as a key external boundary condition can influence the magnitude of such an effect. Analysing an unbalanced panel of 2145 firm-year observations with 422 firms over the period 2004–2013, we found support for our predictions that while strategic change negatively and significantly affects CSR conformity, it positively and significantly impacts CSR differentiation. Additionally, our results show that analyst coverage strengthens the relationship between strategic change CSR conformity and CSR differentiation. Our findings expand the optimal distinctiveness, strategic change, and analyst coverage literature and provide insights into the complex and multifaceted aspects of CSR activities. Finally, this study's findings can equip strategic leaders and investors with knowledge as they face complex decision-making in their firms and investments.

Given the substantive influence of the digital revolution on the sharing economy, it is timely and relevant to ask why some sharing platforms (e.g. Airbnb and Uber) achieve significant success while others fail. To determine which factors encourage customers to participate in sharing goods and services on sharing platforms, and when they do so, this study conducts a meta-analysis of empirical findings from 192 independent samples, extracted from 167 studies involving 171,344 customers. As the results clarify, customer-related factors (customer motives, customer competence, customer satisfaction and subjective norms) are key antecedents. However, platform-related factors (service quality of the platform, trust in the platform, performance expectancy and effort expectancy) and service-provider-related factors (service quality of the provider, trust in the provider and provider gender) also exert meaningful effects. To assess the generalizability of these antecedents, the meta-analysis includes contextual moderators, namely customer type (previous provider experience), provider type (private/professional supply), platform characteristics (rivalry on the platform, prestige of ownership and services/goods) and exchange type (for-profit/non-profit and ownership transfer). The findings advance the literature on the sharing economy and provide specific guidance for platform managers about when to focus on certain antecedents.

In this paper, we leverage resource dependency theory to examine the impact of political connections on rivals’ costs and how this impact is affected by rival-side and politician-side contingencies. Using a panel dataset of Pakistani firms, our system generalized method of moments estimates show that politically connected firms can increase their rivals’ costs by influencing their rivals’ dependency relationship with the government. This impact is attenuated by the rivals’ strategic flexibility and social legitimacy, which provide some protection or insulation from political attacks in resource markets. Together, our findings extend the contingent dynamics of resource dependency in political markets from focal firms to competitors and offer significant contributions to the corporate political activity literature and resource dependency theory.

The development of digital technologies has triggered the digital transformation of organizations, enabling business model innovation. With the rise of a human-centred view of digitalization, previous studies have been devoted to exploring how leadership drives digitalization, overlooking the role of employees as a key stakeholder. Motivated by this gap, based on agency theory, we investigate how employee ownership affects digital transformation in firms. Further, we identify vital contingencies based on heterogeneity in human resource management under the ability–motivation–opportunity framework. Analysing data on Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2021, we find that the adoption of employee ownership promotes firms’ digital transformation, and that this positive effect is moderated by R&D personnel (ability), female CEO (motivation) and state ownership (opportunity). Our findings reveal the role of employees in the digital transformation process, which deepens our understanding of the literature on employee ownership and business model innovation.