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This conceptual paper seeks to bridge two existing theories in a bid to broaden our analytical scope when studying the process of onboarding, retention and exclusion of organizational members. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

The authors draw on the social systems theory to advance the fit theory demonstrating the pertinence of macro social factors for the determination of person–organization (P–O) fit.

The result of this conceptual groundwork is a framework for the creation of highly individual personal profiles that refrains from analyses of potentially discriminatory factors like age, race or gender.

The authors present an individualized, multidimensional and flexible framework for the analysis of dynamically changing constellations of P–O fit.

This paper aims to extend the existing views of coopetition into the broader context of open coopetition.

The authors build on the literature about open innovation cooperation between competitors in the open-source software industry, which we generalize to show that open coopetition between competitors and third parties can be observed in other industries and institutional settings.

The authors outline a research program on the management challenges of open coopetition-related and argue that open coopetition can not only be observed between business rivals but also between partners from university, industry, government and further institutional backgrounds.

The authors introduce to so-far neglected roots of the emerging research program on open coopetition and extend the prevailing business focus of open coopetition research to also systematically include open coopetition between partners from business and other spheres of society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how much value national governments worldwide place on political, economic, scientific, artistic, religious, legal, sportive, health-related, educational and mass media-related issues. This knowledge is critical as governments and policies are typically expected to be congruent with the importance these issues have for society.

Drawing on theories of polyphonic and multifunctional organization, the authors recoded and analyzed a US Central Intelligence Agency directory to test the cabinet portfolio of a total of 201 national governments for significant biases to the above issues.

The results suggest that governments worldwide massively over-allocate their attention to economic issues.

The authors conclude that this strong pro-economic governance-bias likely translates into dysfunctional governance and development at both the national and supra-national level.

The literature on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), cultural differences between organizations have frequently been identified as one of the main challenges in the process of post-merger integration (PMI). Existing research has explored a broad variety of cultural differences in perceptions, such as those relating to expectations, norms, values and beliefs within the respective organizations, and how these affect the process and success of PMI. However, less attention has been paid to the relevance of the macro-societal context to PMI. The ambition of this article is, therefore, to advance our understanding of how macro-level societal factors define organizational cultures and affect the success of PMI.

We draw on social systems theory as devised by Niklas Luhmann, assuming that organizations are always embedded in the macro-level societal context of distinctive realms of social reality—such as the economy, politics, religion and the arts—that make up the so-called “function systems”. Looking at the case of the integration of a Brazilian technology start-up into a market-leading corporation, we analyze the dominant orientations towards these function systems, and the changes in these orientations over time.

The results suggest that differences in organizational culture in PMI can be partly explained by differences in orientations to the function systems. Moreover, forcing dramatic changes of orientations towards the function systems within a merged entity can severely damage its raison d'etre in the first place, potentially leading to, in some sense, an account of “culture murder”.

This article is unique in demonstrating that organizations are multifunctional systems whose culture is defined by the highly specific and potentially varying degrees of importance they place on individual function systems and that knowledge or neglect of these functional profiles may seriously affect the success of post-merger integration. Against this backdrop, the article presents a multifunctional profiling method that may easily translate into PMI management tools.

The purpose of this paper is to identify in the specialized literature published in the past 20 years about sales training, some elements or key factors that could be applied to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) as a support for the learning of the detection of business opportunities.

This is a study of a documentary nature in which a method of systematic literature review was applied to 132 studies published in journals indexed in Scopus and Scielo on sales training processes. The analysis of the data combined a process of categorization and frequencies statistical analysis.

The results highlight the role of ICT and specifically the use of mobile devices to support the strengthening of training in sales in terms of relationship, opportunity and flexibility in communication with the client, the construction of positive emotional environments and experiential/situated training.

The originality of this study lies in the extraction and interpretation of key factors focused on addressing a guiding question about the relationships between the use of ICT and sales training.

This paper aims to examine the impact of predictive gamification, through a sales simulator game, as a strategy to minimize sales problems in organizations.

This empirical study was executed in a large global company that produces and markets footwear for B2B and B2C markets. The company operates in more than 18 countries and adopts the gamification to train 7,600 sellers and 10,052 professionals directly linked to the sales area. The methodology adopted followed a qualitative and exploratory approach based on an in-depth case study analysis.

Results indicated that the use of predictive gamification allowed mitigating future problems, in average, four months in advance of the arrival of the new products at the points of sale. The main findings included improvement in sales arguments, product knowledge and sales closure. The company assigns the results to the implementation of the gamification and the possibility to simulate the evaluation of the level of readiness of the sales force resources. For this, the following three primary variables emerged: adequate definition of training content, analysis of the learning process and simulation of store reality.

The authors introduced to the sales training literature the concept of predictive gamification. The predictive gamification allows anticipating and reducing future problems before the arrival of the new products in the market, improving the argument of sales, the knowledge about the products and the ratio of sales conversion of stores.

First, the content design of gamification needs to be carefully projected before the simulator development, considering the target audience and its particularities. Second, the construction of evaluation activities needs to consider contexts, actions and results. Third, monitoring the paths taken by the seller in the simulator environment is requisite. Fourth, the analysis of the results of vendor responses in the simulator environment can be obtained through learning management system reports. Fifth, the development of game simulators with advanced technologies may be done with low investment.

The findings have implications for the field vis-à-vis three main research gaps identified in the literature discussing gamification in sales training. First, the authors identified best practices from the application of gamification in sales training. Second, they showed the sales qualification processes, which can be improved by applying gamification. Third, they presented strategies of use of gamification as an approach allied to the training of sales professionals to generate enhanced sales results.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relations in the Marketing/Operations interface through the analysis of data of the operational reality of a Brazilian company with a low technological intensity. The study aims to quantify and determine the impacts of marketing decisions on delivery performance and on flexibility of the operations area.

A longitudinal case study was conducted and the variables used in the model were derived from established theories and were evaluated with artificial neural networks. The case of a food manufacturing company was selected to reflect the relations in the marketing/operations interface of a low technological intensity enterprise.

The results show that the decisions on Place/Channel, Price and Product dimensions of marketing exert a significant impact on flexibility and delivery performance of the operation area.

The findings of the case study cannot be generalised and the outcomes are specific to just one firm. However, the approach lends itself to replication, particularly within low technological intensity companies.

Prior studies have focussed on coordination among functional areas as marketing and operations at higher levels of abstraction. The study contemplate empirical propositions through the data analysis of a company with a low technological intensity that can be used to improve managers' decisions and alignment in the Marketing/Operation Interface.

This article is devoted to conditions and examples of how theories may be applied as methods in the fields of management research and organization studies.

An introduction to minimum requirements for a successful refunctionalization of theory as method as well as to nine contributions to a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management on “Theory as method” is provided.

The review of these nine cases suggests that the use of theories as methods is not necessarily harmful for the former, and particularly not for the more robust among them.

This article sheds new light on the value of theoretical monism or loyalty and calls for a reassessment of the relative value of expertise in a specific research field, method and or theory.

This paper aims at understanding how companies in the agri-food are reconfiguring their competitive strategies to face the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Literature has focused mainly on the effect of the pandemic on the supply chain or in its value chain but little has been said on the competitive strategies adopted to overcome the challenges posed by COVID-19 pandemic.

The study was conducted on Italian companies operating in the agri-food industry from May to September 2020, following a mixed method approach. First, a focus group with experts in competitive strategy and agri-food industry has been organized to identify the most important challenges that companies are facing. Second, through a structured questionnaire, data from 123 companies operating in the agri-food industry were gathered and analyzed with K-means clustering method.

Four clusters of companies were identified, each implementing different strategies to face the COVID-19 pandemic: “the cost fanatics”, “the brand focused”, “the sales centered” and “the strategists”. Furthermore, it was possible to identify new trends in competitive strategies to increase the added value that the Italian agri-food industry can provide to the customer.

The paper answers to the need for an investigation of the competitive strategies that agri-food companies have put in place to face the COVID-19 pandemic; moreover, it provides insights on how companies are adapting themselves to this rapidly changing environment. From a managerial point of view, it gives practitioners and managers useful insights on the different strategies that companies are undertaking to maintain a competitive advantage.