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With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.

The authors studied a public service agency in Singapore in which a five-day Lean Innovation Training was implemented, using a combination of Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools, with a simulation on day one and subsequent team-based project coaching, spread over six months. The authors administered pre- and postintervention surveys among all the employees, and initiated group interviews and observations before, during and after the intervention.

Creative role identity and innovative work behavior had significantly improved six months after the intervention, enabled through senior management’s transformational leadership. The training induced managers to role-model innovative work behaviors while cocreating, with their employees, a renewal of their agency’s core processes. The three completed improvement projects contributed to an innovative work culture and reduced service turnaround time.

Starting with a role-playing simulation on the first day, during which leaders and followers swapped roles, the action-learning type training taught all the organizational members to use various Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools. This nimble Lean Innovation Training, and subsequent team-based project coaching, exemplifies how advancing the staff’s creative role identity can have a positive impact.

Entrepreneurs are generally considered to be committed in order to strive for highly desirable goals, such as growth or commercial success. However, commitment is a multidimensional concept and may have asymmetric relationships with positive or negative entrepreneurial outcomes. This paper aims to provide a nuanced perspective to show under what conditions commitment may be detrimental for entrepreneurs and lead to overinvestment.

Using a sample of entrepreneurs from incubators in France (N = 437), this study employs a configurational perspective, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), to identify which commitment profiles lead entrepreneurs to overinvest different resources in their entrepreneurial projects.

The paper exposes combinations of conditions that lead to overinvestment and identifies five different commitment profiles: an “Affective profile”, a “Project committed profile”, a “Profession committed profile”, an “Instrumental profile”, and an “Affective project profile”.

The results show that affective commitment is a necessary condition for entrepreneurs to conduct overinvesting behaviors. This complements previous linear research on the interdependence between affect and commitment in fostering detrimental outcomes for nascent entrepreneurs.

This article aims to analyze the strategic work of Polish entrepreneurs in the furniture industry following the political changes in 1989. The authors examined how these entrepreneurs transitioned from local craftsmen or importers into leaders of international manufacturing companies and how their strategizing contributed to the unprecedented growth of the Polish furniture sector.

The authors examined extant data, specifically biographical interviews conducted with 11 prominent leaders in the Polish furniture industry (Hryniewicki, 2015, 2018). They analyzed within a theoretical framework that integrates J.C. Spender’s theory of strategic management with Barry Johnson’s concept of polarity management. Polarity is a way of understanding and managing interdependent, opposing pairs of values or perspectives that give rise to conflict.

The analysis reveals key patterns of strategic challenges at the level of human agency, history and sense-making. The authors identified four key polarities: life and business, knowledge presence and absence, concordance and discordance, and instrumental and non-instrumental sense-making.

The polarity concept illuminates the interplay of agency and determinism in strategic decision-making, offering valuable insights for methodology and a deeper understanding of Poland’s furniture industry.