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The purpose of this paper is to focus on efforts of a large department store to increase its business advantage by boosting innovation. The first broad research question of this study investigated how the family and non-family members influence the process of organizational change aimed at greater innovativeness in a successful retail family business. The second research question was how the family enterprise handles the tension between change stemming from innovation and progress and the need for stability continuity tradition and maintenance of family control.

This study is an in-depth inductive analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) of an important and unique case (Yin, 1994).

The results of the study indicate that the push toward innovation was initiated by family members and that it was focused largely on creating structural support for the innovation activity keeping this activity tightly under monitoring and control by upper management. The attempts at equipping employees with innovation-relevant decision-making authority or consulting the clients in designing novel projects were absent, while the move to change the organizational culture was measured.

This study makes several contributions to the academic literature. It offers an empirical assessment of the effects of emotional attachment and ownership concentration on innovation management, a phenomenon postulated by Kotlar et al. (2016). These two characteristics pulled innovation-boosting initiative in opposite directions creating a unique dynamics. This research also provides an example of organizational identity that hinders the innovation process in the context of a family business that survived and developed over generations.

Meetings are ubiquitous at work. Therefore, understanding what makes meetings effective (or not) is important. Entitativity (i.e., the “group-ness” of a meeting) may theoretically explain when some meetings are effective. That is, when meeting participants perceive a high enough level of group-ness in their meeting, then they begin to enact the processes to create a successful meeting and experience the outcomes of a successful meeting. The authors propose a model connecting the characteristics of successful face-to-face (FtF) meetings to entitativity and extrapolate this model to online meetings. Specifically, the authors interpret well-researched characteristics and practices of meetings (e.g., using an agenda and meeting punctuality) to be examples of well-established entitativity antecedents (e.g., creating similarity of goals and establishing meeting boundaries). That is, using an agenda creates effective meetings because it focuses members’ attention on common goals. Therefore, entitativity may be an explanatory mechanism for successful meetings. The authors examine the unique challenges of online meetings, which are growing in number. The authors note that entitativity may be harder to establish in online meetings making successful online meetings more difficult. Characteristics of online meetings (e.g., focusing on the few shared documents which may focus members on goals) that may promote success. The authors propose further theoretical work as well as suggest strategies that can be used to increase entitativity in FtF and online meetings.

This chapter examines the affordances of social media to understand how groups are experienced through social media. Specifically, the chapter presents a theoretical model to understand how affordances of social media promote or suppress entitativity.

Participants (N=265) were recruited through snowball sampling to answer questions about their recent Facebook status updates. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine the goodness of fit for our model.

We validate a model of entitativity as it occurs through the affordances offered by social media. Participant’s knowledge that status update responders were an interacting group outside of Facebook affected their perceptions of interactivity in the responses. Interactivity and history of interactions were the strongest predictors of status update entitativity. Further, status update entitativity had positive relationships with overall Facebook entitativity as well as group identity.

To encourage group identity through social media, managers need to increase employees’ perceptions of entitativity, primarily by enabling employees to see the interactions of others and to contribute content in social media platforms.

This is the only study we know of that empirically examines how groups are experienced through social media. Additionally, we draw from an affordance perspective, which helps to generalize our findings beyond the site of our study.

As the First Lady, Michelle Obama stated that she had a number of priorities but that the first year would be mainly about supporting her two girls in their transitions to their new life in the White House. Her choice to be mom-in-chief drew unusually intense and rather puzzling, scrutiny. The chapter briefly discusses the range of reactions along the political spectrum as well as African-American feminists’ analyses of the stereotypes of Black women underlying those reactions. This analysis engages the debates from a different perspective. First, the chapter addresses the under-theorizing of the racialized gender norms embedded in the symbolism of the White House and the role of First Lady. It challenges the presumption of traditional notions of true womanhood and the incorrect conclusion that mothering would preclude public engagement.

Second and most importantly, this chapter argues that there are fundamental misunderstandings of what mothering meant for Michelle Obama as African-American woman. Cultural traditions and socio-historical conditions have led Black women, both relatives and non-kin, to form mothering relationships with others’ children and to appreciate the interdependence of “nurturing” one's own children, other children, and entire communities. Those practitioners whose nurturing activities encompassed commitment and contributions to the collectivity were referred to as community othermothering. Using primary sources, this chapter examines in detail Michelle Obama's socialization for and her practice of community othermothering in her role as First Lady. Attention is focused on her transformation of White House events by extending hospitality to more within Washington, DC, and the nation, plus broadening young people's exposure to inspiration, opportunities, and support for setting and accomplishing their dreams. Similarly, the concept of community othermothering is also used to explain Michelle Obama’s reinterpretation of the traditional First Lady's special project into the ambitious “Let's Move” initiative to end childhood obesity within a generation. The othermothering values and endeavors have helped establish the White House as “the People's House.”

Cyberloafing is an organization-directed counterproductive work behavior (CWB). One stream of literature deems cyberloafing to be bad for organizations and their employees, while another suggests cyberloafing is a coping response to stressful work events. Our work contributes to the latter stream of literature. The key objective of our study is to examine whether cyberloafing could be a means to cope with a stressful work event-abusive supervision, and if yes, what mediating and boundary conditions are involved. For this investigation, the authors leveraged the Stressor-Emotion-CWB theory which posits that individuals engage in CWB to cope with the negative affect generated by the stressors and that this relationship is moderated at the first stage by personality traits.

Using a multi-wave survey design, the authors collected data from 357 employees working in an Indian IT firm. Results revealed support for three out of the four hypotheses.

Based on the Stressor-Emotion-CWB theory, the authors found that work-related negative affect fully mediated the positive relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing, and work locus of control (WLOC) moderated the positive relationship between abusive supervision and work-related negative affect. The authors did not find any evidence of a direct relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing. Also, the positive indirect relationship between abusive supervision and cyberloafing through work-related negative affect was moderated at the first stage by the WLOC such that the indirect effect was stronger (weaker) at high (low) levels of WLOC.

This work demonstrates that cyberloafing could be a way for employees to cope with their abusive supervisors.

This paper aims to examine the impact of leadership style and team context on structural and psychological empowerment perceptions in project teams.

It was posited that span of control and within team interdependence will positively and significantly influence both structural and psychological empowerment. Person‐orientated leadership style was also expected to positively impact both structural and psychological empowerment while task orientated leadership style was expected to have a negative impact. These hypothesized relationships were examined using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) with data obtained through a parallel quantitative questionnaire survey of construction client, consultant and contractor organizations in Hong Kong.

No significant relationship was found between span of control and any facet of empowerment while team interdependence had a positive and significant relationship with psychological empowerment but not structural empowerment. Task‐orientated leadership was positively and significantly related to psychological empowerment in the full sample and contractor teams but not in consultant and client teams. Person‐orientated leadership was positively and significantly related to psychological empowerment in the full sample, consultant and client teams but not in contractor teams.

The link between leadership style, team context and three facets of empowerment are examined compared with previous studies often focusing on one facet. Sub‐sample analysis enabled more subtle differences of the impact of leadership style in different context to be revealed, an indication that samples may not be homogeneous.

This study aims to examine the relationship between transformational leadership, organizational commitment, motivation, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and employee performance.

This research is located in the province of Papua, and more specifically at the District Secretariat Papua Province. The study was conducted in the months from April to June 2016. This study tested the effect of transformational leadership, organizational commitment, work motivation, OCB and performance Officer Regional Secretariat Papua Province, then the variable research is transformational leadership, organizational commitment, work motivation, OCB and performance officer. Structural equation modeling (SEM) calculation tool is commonly used is the program analysis of moment structures.

The results of studies show that moderating OCB does not significantly affect the relationship between organizational commitment, transformational leadership, work motivation and the performance of employees at the District Secretariat in Papua Province.

Originality of this paper is on the comprehensive study that combines the variables of transformational leadership, organizational commitment, work motivation, OCB and performance into a complete model of study. Originality for this paper shows the moderation effect of OCB on the effect of organizational commitment, transformational leadership and work motivation on employee performance. This research is located in the Province of Papua, and more specifically at the District Secretariat Papua Province.