Search results

The purpose of this study is to revisit the conventional wisdom about a key contribution [i.e. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis] in the field of strategic management. The societal context and the role of academics, consultants and executives is taken into account in the emergence of SWOT analysis during the 1960–1980 period as a pivotal development within the broader context of the satisfactory, opportunities, faults, threats (SOFT) approach. The authors report on both the content and the approach, so that other scholars seeking to invigorate indigenous theories and/or underreported strategy practices will thrive.

Applying a historiographic approach, the authors introduce an evidence-based methodology for interpreting historical sources. This methodology incorporates source criticism, triangulation and hermeneutical interpretation, drawing upon insights from robust evidence through three iterative stages.

The underreporting of the SOFT approach/SWOT analysis can be attributed to several factors, including strategy tools being integrated into planning frameworks rather than being published as standalone materials; restricted circulation of crucial long-range planning service/theory and practice of planning reports due to copyright limitations; restricted access to the Stanford Research Institute Planning Library in California; and the enduring popularity of SOFT and SWOT variations, driven in part by their memorable acronyms.

In the spirit of a renaissance in strategic planning research, the authors unveil novel theoretical and social connections in the emergence of SWOT analysis by combining evidence from both theory and practice and delving into previously unexplored areas.

Caution is advised for scholars who examine the discrete time frame of 1960–1980 through mere bibliometric techniques. This study underscores the risks associated with gathering incomplete and/or inaccurate data, emphasizing the importance of triangulating evidence beyond scholarly databases. The paradigm shift of strategic management research due to the advent of large language models poses new challenges and the risk of conserving and perpetuating academic urban legends, myths and lies if training data is not adequately curated.

Existing gender inequality across all sectors has weakened women’s resilience to risk management. The chaos heightens if they are not only breadwinners of their family but roaring the entrepreneurial world. Disasters and crises hit entrepreneurs equally but post-disaster damages following ripple effects hit hardest to women ruling the one-third portion of the entrepreneurial world. Surprisingly, the post-disaster entrepreneurial challenges of women are overlooked, and the study aims to fill the gap by explaining the right way of empowering women through entrepreneurial initiatives.

The research is based on data collected from 372 women entrepreneurs in the tourism industry of the Andaman Sea coastal area in Thailand by following the cluster sampling technique. The women entrepreneurs of Thailand were chosen as target respondents because women’s participation is more than 40% in entrepreneurial businesses.

The findings revealed that entrepreneurial marketing, entrepreneurial opportunity and entrepreneurial tenacity have a significant influence on entrepreneurial initiatives and the entrepreneurial mindset successfully mediates between dependent variables and entrepreneurial initiatives.

This study has important insights for policymakers, women entrepreneurs, institutions and the tourism industry. However, it focuses solely on women entrepreneurs participating in the tourism industry of Thailand. Therefore, future studies are invited to incorporate male entrepreneurs and be conducted in other developed and Asian countries.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurial field by proposing entrepreneurial factors that can help women entrepreneurs restart their businesses, mitigating or minimizing natural disaster effects and proposing pioneering suggestions to uplift the tourism entrepreneurial sector.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the boundary conditions between objective overqualification and perceived overqualification. In addition, we aim to investigate the mediation patterns between objective overqualification, perceived overqualification and job satisfaction.

A two-wave survey was conducted with 382 new entrants of job market. Data was analyzed with Process 3.5 in SPSS 26.0 to test the hypothesized moderated mediation model.

Results indicated that perceived overqualification fully mediated the relationship between objective overqualification and job satisfaction. In addition, the relationship between objective overqualification and perceived overqualification was significant unless employees perceived high internal employment opportunities but low external employment opportunities at the same time. Same moderating pattern was also evident in the indirect effect of objective overqualification? Perceived overqualification? Job satisfaction.

This study has theoretical and practical implications for personnel management. Theoretically, this study contributed to the understanding of the relationship between objective overqualification and perceived overqualification. Practically, this study found that offering internal employment opportunities can mitigate the perception of overqualification when employees perceive limited external employment opportunities.

This is one of few studies that stressed the boundary conditions between objective overqualification and perceived overqualification under the framework of relative deprivation theory. In addition, this study provided time-lagged evidence of the relationship between objective overqualification, perceived overqualification and job satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to answer a well-known but always-current question: what is the focus of entrepreneurship research? Usually, scholars address their attention toward the boundaries of entrepreneurship, and question the possible overlaps with innovation, on the one hand, and management, on the other. Despite their relevance, achieved results are still uncertain and opaque. To overcome these limits, the present paper adopts a different approach and, instead of delimiting the boundaries, looks for the heart of entrepreneurship research – H.E.R.

This paper reviews entrepreneurship literature not as a whole, but according to four main strands of research, respectively dealing with the telos (the Greek word standing for the aims), psychological traits, the context and the network. The results are read and interpreted to intertwine them and look for H.E.R.

This paper achieves two main results. First, it is clarified that H.E.R. consists of the adoption of dynamic capabilities by entrepreneurs and their networks in an attempt to foresee the future; the effort to work on entrepreneurial opportunities to make them mature for stakeholders and the market, thus reducing the likeability bias; and the reference to a context characterized by unknown unknowns. Second, by looking for H.E.R., it is possible to clearly distinguish entrepreneurship from other fields of research.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is among the first that look for H.E.R., the heart – and not the boundaries – of entrepreneurship research. Originality consists of adopting an unusual perspective to advance entrepreneurship studies and contribute to the international debate about their focus.

This study investigates how a hospital can increase the flow of patients through its emergency department by using benchmarking and process improvement techniques borrowed from the manufacturing sector.

An in-depth case study of an Australasian public hospital utilises rigorous, multi-method data collection procedures with systems thinking to benchmark an emergency department (ED) value stream and identify the performance inhibitors.

High levels of value stream uncertainty result from inefficient processes and weak controls. Reduced patient flow arises from senior management’s commitment to simplistic government targets, clinical staff that lack basic operations management skills, and fragmented information systems. High junior/senior staff ratios aggravate the lack of inter-functional integration and poor use of time and material resources, increasing the risk of a critical patient incident.

This research is limited to a single case; hence, further research should assess value stream maturity and associated performance enablers and inhibitors in other emergency departments experiencing patient flow delays.

This study illustrates how hospital managers can use systems thinking and a context-free performance benchmarking measure to identify needed interventions and transferable best practices for achieving seamless patient flow.

This study is the first to operationalise the theoretical concept of the seamless healthcare system to acute care as defined by Parnaby and Towill (2008). It is also the first to use the uncertainty circle model in an Australasian public healthcare setting to objectively benchmark an emergency department's value stream maturity.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) contribute to organisational success through enabling actors to restructure businesses, stimulating exchanges of resources as well as applications and improvements to technological approaches. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to study the impact of EE micro-level variables on digital transformations.

Based on data spanning 5,000 Portuguese firms, the authors selected a random sample of 300, including businesses in the industrial, retail and service sectors. The authors deployed the multiple linear regression statistical method to validate the hypotheses.

As a result, the authors may conclude the organisation and the micro-level actors of EEs, owners and their members of staff produce influences on digital transformation processes.

This study contributes to completing the gap in the literature regarding the shortage of quantitative empirical studies approaching micro-level EE variables from the perspective of their relationships with digital transformation processes.

Although the outcomes arising from firms’ interaction with policymakers is a developed theme, family firms’ political credentials and lobbying remain unexplored. To ignite this discourse, the extent to which these factors influence family firms’ tax experience and perception of corruption obstacles is estimated, as well as the impact on sales performance.

Cross-sectional data from Turkish family firms are examined by a structural equation model. The sample is comprised of 588 family firms spanning 12 regions.

The paths revealed that family firms’ political credentials do not inherently yield a positive tax experience. Rather, membership of a business association provides a medium to engage in lobbying activity. In turn, this leads to a more positive tax experience but also a greater exposure to corruption. Likewise, informed lobbying increases sales performance while corruption has the reverse effect.

The significant influences of political credentials and lobbying make a novel contribution to organisational field theory. Practically, the study appeals to family firms seeking to ease their tax experience while increasing sales and bypassing corruption.

This paper aims to investigate the factors that influence millennial purchase behaviour, brand choice and distribution channel selection in an evolving technology-driven environment.

The study was exploratory, using qualitative methods of personal interviews and some ethnographic observations to collect data from 585 millennials from ten cities in nine African countries.

Findings from the study confirm and support the critical role of e-commerce in facilitating millennials engagement with brands, highlighting how brand purchases are integral to their lifestyle choices. There is an overwhelming confirmation of the importance of influencer marketing and social media in shaping purchase decisions, with new insights into the role of local micro-influencers and social networks. The findings from the study highlight the pivotal role of a brand’s country of origin in influencing millennials’ brand preferences. The study supports and advances insights into the importance of online shopping and diverse factors influencing millennials’ selection of distribution channels.

There is an opportunity to leverage the growing mobile telephone penetration and social media usage to develop innovative integrated marketing communications strategies. There are opportunities for co-creating marketing communication campaigns with millennials in different settings. These are outlined in the practical implications section.

The paper is based on original empirical data collected from ten countries and explores the behaviour of a growing but under-researched segment of millennials in Africa.

This research investigates the impact of business analytics (BA) on corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and open innovation (OI), considering the moderated mediation analysis in the context of Iran as a developing country. The study was conducted in various industries, including food, chemicals, agriculture, automobile, and service industries, with 207 observations.

Through an in-depth review of the extant literature a conceptual model was developed and the proposed hypotheses were tested using Structural Equation Modeling technique (PLS-SEM).

The results indicate that business analytics has significant effects on corporate entrepreneurship and open innovation. Open innovation has a significant effect on corporate entrepreneurship, with open innovation serving as a suitable mediator. Furthermore, the moderated mediation analysis shows the positive impact of Business Analytics on Open Innovation-Corporate Entrepreneurship relationship.

As this study was conducted in Iran, one of the main limitations can be attributed to the specific characteristics of the country which may affect how and how much the variables influence each other.

The study highlights the importance of promoting Open Innovation in organizations and utilizing Business Analytics to make strategic decisions and foster innovation in entrepreneurial activities.

This study fills the gap in the literature by exploring how BA contributes to corporate entrepreneurship of the Iranian organizations in various industries, given open innovation as a mediator under dynamic market conditions.

This study aims to explore the factors that influence job satisfaction among women in Jordan and contribute to the growing interest in women’s workplace happiness in the context of the Middle East.

The authors used an explanatory sequential mixed-method approach. During the first phase, 250 female respondents were surveyed from the private sector in Jordan. The authors analyzed the impact of various employment-related attributes and other variables, including educational level, position, work experience, daily work hours, income level, relationships with colleagues and supervisors and internal career opportunities on job satisfaction. During the second stage, the authors interviewed 23 supervisor female respondents and conducted a thematic analysis to explore in more depth the determinants of job satisfaction of females working in the private sector in Jordan.

The quantitative findings of this study indicate that job satisfaction is positively influenced by education level and income, while notably, it was negatively impacted by work experience and daily work hours. Relationships with colleagues and supervisors, as well as internal career opportunities, positively affect job satisfaction. The qualitative findings of the study indicate that positive corporate culture, developing subordinates, financial independence, self-worthiness, work-life balance, internal career opportunities and factors that spillover from the personal life domain contributed highly to job satisfaction.

The findings of this study can help employers in gaining a deeper understanding of the needs and behaviors of female workers in the Middle East, potentially resulting in decreased job turnover and heightened productivity.

This study offers valuable insights into the cultural dynamics at play and sheds light on the psychology of the Arab female workforce. Given the limited research on job satisfaction among women in the Middle East and the Arab world, this study holds significant importance for practitioners.