Editor’s introduction

Citation

Campos e Cunha, R. (2010), "Editor’s introduction", Management Research, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/mrjiam.2010.50608aaa.001

Editor’s introduction

Article Type: Editorial From: Management Research: The Journal of the Iberoamerican Academy of Management, Volume 8, Issue 1

The eighth volume of Management Research: The Journal of the Iberoamerican Academy of Management (MR), marks the beginning of a new stage in the journal’s life. MR is now published by the Emerald Group Publishing Limited (EMERALD), a group that is characterized by its dynamism and proactiveness, namely in the promotion of the journal to a wider audience. The readers of MR will certainly appreciate the fact that it is now available on-line, as well as the new design and layout.

In order to enhance the attractiveness and usefulness of MR to its readers and future authors, new sections will be introduced for each of the three issues per volume: “Young Iberoamerican scholars”, where some young successful researchers will give their points of view on how they manage to publish in good journals in different areas, “To, from and beyond the margins”, focusing on emerging research areas, research coming from under-represented communities and/or launching new avenues for research in more established research areas and therefore creating a point of differentiation for the journal and “A life in research”, where we will chart an established researcher/academic’s history, what they have accomplished in their academic lifetime and what impact their research findings have had, especially in an Iberoamerican context.

In addition, it is with great pleasure that I inform you that MR is listed as a B journal, in the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative, a very influential official journal ranking by the Australian Government, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. This is certainly a great achievement for the journal and I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of all authors and reviewers, as well as the previous editors, for guaranteeing the high-quality standards of this research outlet. This will certainly be an additional motivator for all researchers, to keep submitting and enable the scientific development of MR.

After the good news, let me now briefly introduce the contributions for this issue. As usual, we have a diversified set of papers.

The paper by Fernando Ribeiro Serra and Manuel Portugal Ferreira uses five case studies of well-known multinational corporations to identify four strategy pillars that help explain a firm’s success – leader and top management team, strategic focus, trust in the future and resources support. Using the resource-based view of the firm as the theoretical framework, the role of the CEO entrepreneur is stressed in this study as a core strategic success factor.

The research note by Carla Freire develops a new measure for the construct “Trust in the team leader: operationalization of the construct in an R&D context”, in the context of R&D teams. This new scale is divided into four components – integrity, benevolence, concern and ability – and is presented in the Appendix, to be used in future research projects.

The third paper, by Natalia Weisz, Roberto S. Vassolo, Luiz Mesquita and Arnold C. Cooper, discusses the influence of team member diversity and internal social capital on project performance within the context of business plan competitions. Using survey data from 95 nascent entrepreneurial teams they found out that higher levels of functional diversity are a significant contributor to performance, in these open-to-the-public competitions, where needs for information processing and decision making are quite high.

Finally, in the inaugural section “Young Iberoamerican scholars”, Pascual Berrone shares with the readers his opinion, based on his experience, about typically cited barriers to publishing in Iberoamerican contexts and how to overcome them. It is an enlightening point of view that will certainly enhance the motivation of young scholars to pursue their research projects.

For all these reasons, this issue of MR is worth your full attention. As usual, I close this introduction by appealing to all of you to spread the word about MR and to submit.

Rita Campos e Cunha