Asia Pacific Journal of Management最新文献

Research has found that entrepreneur foreign-study experience can have either positive significant effects on firm innovation, or nonsignificant effects. The question, then, is when such experience benefits firm innovation, and when it does not. Adopting a resource-substitution perspective, we posit that the difference occurs because certain local resources can play a significant moderating role. Specifically, a private entrepreneur’s foreign-study-enabled human capital becomes less influential in driving firm innovation when the foreign-educated entrepreneurs participate strongly in the political system, or when the firm has a high level of guanxi––each of which enables the firm to achieve a local resource advantage over other firms, without the need for enhanced innovation. In contrast, foreign-study-enabled human capital becomes significantly influential in the context of high local marketization. We used the data from a series of nationwide surveys of privately owned firms in China to test these ideas. Regression results based on negative binomial regression models showed that returnee entrepreneurs’ participation in the political system, and firms’ guanxi, each substituted for the role of the returnee entrepreneurs’ foreign study experience in fostering firm innovation, thus rendering such experience no longer significant for firm innovation in the presence of strong political participation or guanxi. In contrast, entrepreneur foreign-study experience led to advantageous firm innovation in the context of higher local marketization.

Frugal innovation (FI) is a recently emerged phenomenon that is increasingly gaining importance to serve a set of customers in developing countries. Frugal entrepreneurship (FE) based on frugal innovations is emerging from different regions. FI mainly emerging from resource-constrained environments with institutional voids shows how to serve low-income customers with affordable solutions. Yet, we know little about this phenomenon. The objective of this study is to explore how frugal entrepreneurs embrace institutional voids in a developing country to identify and execute business opportunities targeting low-income customers. Using six start-up cases from Pakistan, this qualitative study contributes to the existing literature on FI and FE in several ways. We reveal certain underlying mechanisms that entrepreneurs utilize in their attempt to undertake FI. We find that the entrepreneurs’ strong aspirations to tackle societal needs trigger them to develop FIs and pursue FE. Constructive cobbling and leveraging appropriate technologies in a frugal manner, in particular, are two key enablers for FE, which results in novel outcomes. Based on the findings, we provide implications and future research avenues.

Although the role of justice has long been documented in organizational contexts, little is known about the relative effects of distinct types of justice in inter-organizational relationships. Building on transaction cost theory (TCT), our research investigates how procedural justice and distributive justice affect alliance success differentially and under what conditions these effects are amplified or weakened. Results derived from a sample of 410 Chinese alliance firms involving two key informants per firm suggest that procedural justice has a greater influence on alliance success than distributive justice and that such a comparative effect varies across types of trust and conflict. Specifically, when alliance firms share a high level of goodwill trust or constructive conflict, they rely to a greater extent on procedural justice than on distributive justice to achieve alliance success. In contrast, when there is a high level of constructive conflict, alliance firms depend more heavily on distributive justice than on procedural justice to achieve success. Our study extends TCT to explain how, in the context of Chinese culture, firms employ appropriate tools of justice in ongoing alliances.

Although the positive effects of structural holes on creativity have been well explored, little research has explored why structural holes damage creativity. Based on social network theory and impression management theory, we propose that the influence of structural holes of knowledge hiders in trust networks vary by dimensions (i.e., evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding) of knowledge hiding, and structural holes have various indirect effects on creativity via knowledge hiding. Following a two-wave survey of 217 R&D employees, our results show that trust structural holes positively affect all the dimensions of knowledge hiding, and their effect on rationalized hiding is stronger than that on evasive hiding and playing dumb. Furthermore, we prove that evasive hiding has a positive mediating effect on the creativity of brokers, whereas playing dumb and rationalized hiding have adverse effects. Thus, trust structural holes have positive indirect effects on creativity via evasive hiding, while the indirect effects on creativity via playing dumb and rationalized hiding are negative. Moreover, we reveal that perspective taking mitigates the positive effect of structural holes on evasive hiding and playing dumb.

Implementing environmental regulations in Pakistan remains an ideological thought with little or no enforcement. In this context, an organization’s sincerity towards corporate social responsibility initiatives is proven when it operates responsibly without regulatory pressures. Aimed at advancing the discourse on social identity and self-determination theories, this paper examines the influencing mechanism of multilevel responsible leadership on employees’ voluntary green behavior from a vertical perspective through leader identification and autonomous motivation for the environment. The sample included 357 employees working in 97 teams from pharmaceutical, cement manufacturing, and textile sector companies. Multi-source data were collected in two phases and analyzed with multilevel structural equation modeling through MPlus 8.3 software. The results support the hypothesized direct and mediating mechanisms of responsible leadership in shaping employees’ voluntary green behavior. Theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and future research suggestions are discussed.

In this study, we examine the impact of the membership status of the founders of family firms on transgenerational succession intention in a Chinese context. Based on data concerning 1983 family firms in China, we find that certain forms of organizational membership on the part of founders (i.e., party, political or business membership) are positively associated with succession intention. In addition, we consider two kinds of moderating effect: family control and institutional environment. Family control weakens the relationship between social identity and succession intention; however, institutional environment strengthens this relationship. These results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests. The study extends our understanding of how and why family firms’ succession behavior varies as a result of individuals’ sociological traits, particularly in the context of Chinese family firms, and has important implications for the task of sustainable family firm development.

Leaders’ sense of power is often found to induce abusive and aggressive behaviors toward subordinates, which consequently undermines interactional justice. Drawing on moral exclusion theory, we predict that subordinates’ instrumental value determines whether leaders’ sense of power prompts abusive supervisory behaviors or actions of showing goodwill toward subordinates, which, in turn, reshapes interactional justice. We theorize that leaders’ outcome dependence on subordinates is the key indicator of subordinates’ instrumental value. The results of two field studies lend support to our propositions. When leaders have low outcome dependence on subordinates, their sense of power is more likely to trigger abusive supervisory behaviors and then hamper interactional justice. Conversely, when leaders have high outcome dependence on subordinates, their sense of power is more likely to promote goodwill toward subordinates and consequently foster interactional justice. We further find that subordinates’ power distance influences the relationship between power-induced behaviors and interactional justice.