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This paper aims to identify and report the differential effects of activity control and capability control on role stressors, which subsequently affect salespeople’s job satisfaction and sales performance.

Drawing on job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, the authors defined active control and customer demandingness as the job demands and capability control as the job resource, and designed their relationship with role stressors, which are indicated as role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload. The authors enrolled a sample of 223 industrial salespeople from pharmaceutical companies. After collecting the data, the authors used structural equation modeling using AMOS to test and estimate causal relationships along with a two-step approach to examine the interaction effect. The authors have also tested the simple slope of two-way interactions. All of the measured variables were identical to those used in previous studies.

The study findings indicate that behavior-based control can be counterproductive. Reducing activity control can decrease role stress, increase job satisfaction and improve job performance; increasing capability control, however, can reduce role stress and increase job satisfaction and performance. It is also important to acknowledge the external environment of the sales context in which behavior-based control is most effective: whereas high customer demandingness and capability control are related to reduced role stress, high customer demandingness and activity control are related to increased role stress.

Sales managers should recognize that different control management regimes reinforce or mitigate salespeople’s job stressors and outcomes under specific conditions (i.e. work environments marked by higher or lower customer demandingness).

Drawing on JD-R theory, the research shows that a behavior control (i.e. activity control and capability control) has differential, and even opposite, psychological consequences.

The purpose of this study is to examine how different innovation efforts can support multinational enterprises’ (MNEs’) pursuits of sustainable development goals (SDGs) in emerging markets and under what circumstances they are applied.

The article comprises in-depth case studies on two high-profile Swedish MNEs: a telecom firm and a fast-fashion firm, with data collected both at the headquarter-level and local-market level.

The study shows that MNEs pursue a selection of prioritized SDGs in emerging markets. To overcome challenges related to attaining these goals, we find that MNEs engage in innovation efforts at different levels of commitment. In some instances, they engage in operational innovation aimed at relieving symptoms of sustainability misconduct and ensuring compliance. In other instances, they engage in systemic innovation efforts, which involve the actual market structures underlying sustainability problems.

MNEs are increasingly incorporating the United Nations SDGs into their innovation strategies. The study contributes to international business research on MNEs’ roles in realizing the SDGs by conceptualizing and discussing two pertinent approaches to innovation.

Consumer perception of corporate brand equity has primarily focused on product brand dimensions, neglecting considerations at the firm analysis level. Assessing corporate brands requires different criteria relevant to the competitiveness of companies, such as their prominence, management and meeting society’s demands. In this sense, this study aims to develop and validate a scale of corporate brand equity founded on consumer perceptions, transcending industry boundaries and comparing its relationship with companies' market share.

The authors used an integrative approach to clarify the construct’s domain, building on previous measures. They took several steps to select appropriate items, refine the measure, validate it through reliability tests and convergent and discriminant analyses, test the validity of the second-order formative structure of corporate brand equity and assess associations between first-order factors, the second-order factor and market share.

The model identifies three first-order dimensions of corporate brands (presence, outstanding management and responsible) that shape the second-order factor (corporate brand equity). They are directly related, but not proportionally, to market share, contributing to the general and joint assessment of the company’s competitive performance considering the consumer.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to develop a comprehensive measurement model of corporate brand equity that considers the firm level of analysis, combines metrics from previous research on corporate brand evaluation criteria and includes consumer perceptions of the company’s competitiveness, unifying branding theory with the theory of the marketing firm.

The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature regarding the open innovation management approaches that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can use to access digital technologies and incorporate them into their organizational processes. The research question is: What organizational and process-level managerial actions do SMEs take to successfully access and implement digital technologies within their organizational processes?

Using Guertler et al.'s (2020) Action Innovation Management Research (AIM-R) framework, this study examines the digital transformation experiences of 10 European SMEs to gain insights into the managerial actions that foster successful digital transformation.

The findings of the paper reveal two major contributions. First, a digital transformation roadmap for SMEs is proposed, with a focus on accessing external resources and reconfiguring internal ones to ease their digital transformation journey. Second, three distinct paradoxes that influence the digital transformation process in SMEs are highlighted, providing useful insights into the challenges and tensions SMEs face during this journey.

This paper provides a unique perspective on the digital transformation of SMEs by examining the managerial actions required for successful technology adoption and revealing the paradoxes that may emerge during this transformative process. The findings form the basis for future research, deepening our understanding of digital transformation in SMEs and providing actionable advice to managers and practitioners navigating this journey.

The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the role of dynamic capabilities, specifically the sequence of sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities, in highly uncertain, emerging technology environments. Focusing on the extended reality industry, the study aims to understand the antecedents to these dynamic capabilities, their sequential nature, and their subsequent impact on innovation and company performance.

Based on a survey of 130 German companies in the extended reality sector, we built a structural equation model that explores the relationship between dynamic capabilities, their antecedents, and their effect on innovation and company performance.

The analysis suggests that sensing capabilities positively influence seizing and transforming capabilities, while seizing directly contributes to transforming. Transforming capabilities are linked to improved innovation performance, which in turn boosts company performance. Organizational ambidexterity, market orientation, and technology orientation are found to be crucial antecedents, accounting for 33.1% of the variance in sensing capabilities.

This research illuminates the interdependence of dynamic capabilities in highly uncertain business environments, such as emerging technology markets. It contributes original insights by elucidating the sequential nature of dynamic capabilities and identifying their vital antecedents. It also enlarges the understanding of how dynamic capabilities impact firms’ innovation performance.

This paper aims to investigate sustainability-led innovation, focusing on the interplay between product and process innovation for sustainability goals and the underlying supplier–customer relationships. Thus, the paper delves into sustainability-led innovation and how it affects supplier–customer relationships, and vice versa, thus providing a twofold perspective.

The textile industry is the empirical context of this study, which is exploratory research based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs, managers and experts in the textile industry.

In the textile industry, sustainability-led product innovation concerns mainly product durability and performance, product recyclability and the use of waste for new product development. Process innovation deals with circular economy, traceability and water and chemical use minimization. The paper also shows how sustainability-led innovation is implemented in more technical terms and regarding supplier–customer relationships.

The paper adopts an original perspective on how processes take place in the relationships between suppliers and customers, where there is no dominance of one actor, but innovation emerges from interdependence and interaction. Such perspective allows to provide an in-depth analysis of the supplier–customer relationships and underlying dynamics that affect sustainability-led innovation; moreover, the authors study how such innovation impacts supplier–customer relationships and the underlying relational dynamics. The value of the paper also stands in delivering a real representation of the innovation processes grounded in the textile industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the pandemic affects tenants’ response to their lease obligations. This paper commences with examining the adopted tenant selection criteria during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, this paper statistically tests if there is a relationship between selection criteria and response on whether the pandemic has effects or not. Then, this paper investigates the specific areas of impact on tenants’ ability to adequately keep to lease agreements in the Nigerian rental market. Finally, this paper proceeds to confirm if there is a relationship between selection criteria and the aspects of tenants’ deficiencies in rental obligations because of COVID-19.

Survey data, backed with interviews, is elicited from practicing estate surveyors and valuers and licensed property managers in Lagos, the largest property market in Nigeria and sub-Sahara Africa. Policy solutions and implications were solicited from personnel at the ministry of housing and senior professionals in the property sector. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis and computer-aided qualitative data analysis, Atlas.ti.

Tenant’s health status is now accorded a priority together with others. Numbers of tenants are challenged with keeping to the prompt-rent-payment rule. Other areas of slight breaches included livestock rearing, subletting, alteration and repair covenants. Except for tenant reputation and tenant family size, there was no significant relationship between tenant’s health status consideration and the COVID-19 effect on tenant non-compliance with lease obligation. Tenants’ non-compliance with tenancy obligations has a connection with the tenants’ affordability, reputation, ability to sign an undertaking and health conditions during the pandemic. This paper recommends rental housing policy review.

It is recommended that the rental policy should be reviewed to give room for rental allowance or palliatives, private rental market regulation, exploration of the national housing fund and, if possible, social housing adoption policy in Nigeria.

This paper draws policymakers’ attention to the need to prepare for the future safety net that caters to citizenry welfare in challenging times.

The paper aims to analyse the construct of business model innovation (BMI) in the digital and sustainable landscape, investigating the key role of boundary strategies. The paper advances a comprehensive framework aimed at further understanding the overlap among digitalization, sustainability and BMI development, by a “boundary approach”.

The paper follows a theoretical approach based on an in-depth review of relevant literature on BMI, digitalization and sustainability as relevant megatrends and, boundary management. By critically integrating the literature, a framework is developed with the objective of supporting firms in the current transformation challenges.

The paper highlights the interplay among BMIs, megatrends and boundary management. The pressures and opportunities driven by the technological changes have made even more relevant the management of resources placed in the boundary area. Our study shows how firms can rethink their BMs in the digital and sustainable landscape by providing a boundary-based framework.

The framework offers insights and guidelines to help practitioners manage the change processes dictated by digitalization and sustainability. The authors encourage a focus on boundary resources/capabilities to increase the effective management of the digitalization and sustainability processes, to grasp the external stimuli driven by these two megatrends and to develop new/renewed BMIs.

This study emphasizes the importance of developing new BMIs in the current digital and sustainable landscape starting from the analysis of firm’s boundaries. The paper enriches the BMI literature supporting the enhancement of boundary management, leading firms to overcome challenges in the digital and sustainable landscape.

This study aims to examine how knowledge sharing contributes to organizations’ ambidexterity, their overall performance and the role of knowledge quality in this relationship. Knowledge sharing is conceptualized based on tacit and explicit dimensions, and ambidexterity is viewed as comprising exploitative and explorative capabilities.

This study uses a cross-sectional survey-based research design and structural equation modeling to test the proposed model of knowledge sharing and knowledge quality in organizational ambidexterity and the related hypotheses.

The results indicate that tacit knowledge sharing has a significant, direct impact on the exploitative and explorative capabilities of the organization and indirectly impacts both dimensions of ambidexterity (i.e. exploitative and explorative) through knowledge quality. In contrast, explicit knowledge sharing does not have a significant impact on knowledge quality and affects only the exploitative extent of ambidexterity. Both exploitative and explorative capabilities significantly impact organizational performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first study to empirically examine the role of knowledge quality in the context of knowledge sharing for ambidexterity, especially within the context of organizations in the United Arab Emirates.

This study is focused to support an ongoing development project of the case company's current state and the challenges of the order-to-cash (O2C) process. The O2C process is the most visible process to the customer, and therefore, its punctual and fluent order management is vital. It is observed that the high degree of manual work in the O2C process causes mistakes, delays and rework in the process. The purpose of this article is therefore to analyze the case company's current state of the O2C process as well as to identify the areas of development in this process by deploying the means of Lean Six Sigma tools such as value stream mapping (VSM).

The study was conducted as a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Based on both the quantitative and qualitative data, a workshop on VSM was organized to analyze the current state of the O2C process of a case company, engaged in the energy and environment sector in Finland.

The results found that excessive manual work was highly connected to inadequate or incorrect data in pricing and invoicing activities, which resulted in canceled invoices. Canceled invoices are visible to the customer and have a negative impact on the customer experience. This study found that by improving the performance of the O2C process activities and improving communication among the internal and external stakeholders, the whole O2C process can perform more effectively and provide better customer value.

The O2C process is the most visible process to the customer and therefore its punctual and fluent order management is vital. To ensure that the O2C process is operating as desired, suitable process performance metrics need to be aligned and followed. The results gathered from the case company's data, questionnaire interviews, and the VSM workshop are all highlighted in this study. The main practical and managerial implications were to understand the real-time O2C process performance, which is necessary to ensure strong performance and enhance continuous improvement of the O2C process that leads to operational excellence and commercial competitiveness of the studied case company.