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This study seeks to examine the impact of owner's knowledge of information technology (IT) on business and IT strategic alignment, as well as on IT use in the small firm context, using the resource‐based view as a theoretical foundation.

A random sample of 217 small manufacturers and financial services firms in the USA answered a two‐page survey containing questions pertaining to the company's business strategies, the extent IT supported each business strategy, types of IT used, and the level of owner's IT knowledge.

Owner's knowledge of IT was found to be a significant predictor of IT strategic alignment, as well as adoption of traditional IT and internet technologies, while controlling for differences in firm attributes (size, age, industry affiliation, and strategic focus).

Small firm owners are well advised to seek ways of improving their knowledge of IT, integrating IT use in firm‐level business planning, as well as reexamining their business strategy and IT use to detect and correct misalignments, if any.

From the resource‐based view, the owner's IT knowledge is a critical resource that cannot be easily codified, hence less susceptible to competitive erosion, since it is embedded in the owner's tacit knowledge and expressed in the unique but complementary use of IT in support of the firm's strategic goals. This study confirmed small firm owner's knowledge of IT as an important, knowledge‐based capability and a vital component of business‐IT strategic alignment.

This study seeks to understand the college‐to‐work transition process from the perspectives of a group of new management consultants.

This study focuses on the experience of a group of management consultants, how they construct meaning in their work, and the workplace itself. Participants in this study consisted of 25 consultants of a major management consulting firm in the USA. As the main source of information, interviews elicited the consultants’ accounts of their experiences since they were hired and their opinions about issues and events related to their professional development.

From the study, it is clear that learning from project experience and work relationships facilitated the new consultants’ organizational acculturation process and their journeys of becoming management consultants required more than development of competencies. The study shows that development of professional identities and career adaptation to organizational priorities is an equally important agenda for these young professionals. Legitimate peripheral participation in this study highlights the progressive nature of the consultants’ learning trajectories in the consulting practice. From an initially limited involvement in the practice to greatly increased responsibilities, the consultants moved toward full participation as their competencies developed along with their knowledge of the enterprise's social‐political context.

The consultants’ journeys of becoming were idiosyncratic in their specifics, but evidenced clear common patterns of complex workplace socialization.

The effective transfer of knowledge within an organization is critical for its sustainable competitive advantage. Based on the norm of reciprocity, it can be concluded that individuals’ primary motivation to transfer their treasured knowledge can be summarized as “trust,” that is, the individuals trust their selfless transfer behavior can be reciprocated by the recipients in the future.

In this study, a simulation model based on knowledge transfer behavior and reciprocal trust between individuals is built through agent-based modeling and simulation to investigate the factors that influence the efficiency of knowledge transfer within an organization.

Experiments are performed to test the impact of reciprocal trust and organizational structure on the efficiency of knowledge transfer.

The results indicate a significant role of key elements of reciprocal trust and organizational structure, which provides relevant practical guidance for both individuals and organization managers in the context of knowledge transfer.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the literature on the relationship between international experience (IE) and cultural intelligence (CQ) development, and advocate for the utilization of theory to explain this relationship.

On the basis of the premise that CQ can be developed through IE, the authors review existing empirical research in regards to this relationship. The authors conducted a search of the main business, education, and psychology databases for articles published from 2003, the year when the CQ construct was introduced, through 2017. The search focused on studies where CQ was tested as a dependent variable or as a mediator between IE and a dependent variable, and resulted in 15 empirical articles and three book chapters.

A critical analysis of the relationship between IE and CQ reveals considerable variation and inconsistencies among findings within the extant empirical literature. The authors argue that this is mainly because most studies fail to apply a theory to explain the link between these two constructs. The authors draw from social learning theory (SLT) to illustrate how it can be utilized to detail the relationship between IE and CQ development. The authors also suggest how future research can advance the understanding of this relationship, and outline the implications of such examinations for practice.

While substantive knowledge has been generated to understand CQ as an antecedent, the authors investigate CQ development as the dependent variable. The critical review of this literature identifies a specific weakness within previous research and the authors offer a way to resolve it. SLT, which views learning as being affected by both observation and experience, and includes attention, retention, and participative reproduction, is one potentially powerful tool that can explain why and how IE can lead to CQ development. This is a far more fine- grained and detailed approach to understanding and explaining the relationship between the two constructs than provided by previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interactions among the key factors of supply chain (SC) in the Indian automotive industry. These key factors are helpful to measure supply chain performance (SCP) and to improve the firm’s effectiveness.

In this paper, an interpretive structural modeling with a fuzzy cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification-based approach is used to examine the interactions among the key factors of SCP measurement.

The authors have identified the most dominant key factors used for measuring the performance in automotive SC. The results exhibit that the order lead-time and order entry method are the most significant key factors. These key factors have high driving power to measure SCP whereas the post-transaction measure of customer service and customer query time are highly dependent on other factors. Such relationships among the key factors can help a firm’s top management to make essential judgments in order to solve the overall SC problems and provide a better approach to proactively deal with problems.

In this paper, the authors have explored the interactions among the key factors of the SCP in the Indian automotive industry.

Drawing on cultural intelligence and social exchange theories, this study examines cultural intelligence and its effects on proactive service performance and the mediating role of leader's collaborative nature and the moderating role of cultural training and emotional labor, particularly deep acting and surface acting, in the relationship between cultural intelligence and proactive service performance.

The study sample comprised 510 healthcare practitioners. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the hypotheses.

The results show that cultural intelligence positively influences proactive service performance. Additionally, leadership's collaborative nature influences proactive service performance. The moderating effect of cultural training and deep acting positively influences the relationship between cultural intelligence and proactive service performance. In contrast, surface acting reveals a reverse effect, thus exhibiting a positive effect on this relationship.

These findings suggest that public healthcare organizations should pay more attention in improving deep acting, cultural training and leadership's collaborative nature for optimal service performance.

The novelty of this study lies in its presentation of an integrated framework based on cultural intelligence and social exchange theories that can solve the contemporary challenges facing healthcare firms operating in emerging markets in integrating cultural intelligence and service performance.

This paper aims to introduce a joint DEMATEL and NK methodology to develop a process model for introducing and implementing relational supply chain practices for low-carbon supply chains. Using this process model as a guide, insights into specific practices and how to implement these relational practices to achieve competitive advantage across organizations are introduced.

Low-carbon cooperation practices framework based on the relational view is developed. A methodology based on DEMATEL and the NK model is used to construct a sequential process model for introducing and implementing these relational practices. Empirical data from three manufacturing organizations in China are utilized to validate the model.

Initial results provide a sequence of relational practices for guiding those organizations and their suppliers for healthy and low-carbon development. Interdependencies between relational practices are analyzed and evaluated from four aspects. Insights into the broader application of the methodology and initial results from both a research and managerial perspective are presented, especially with consideration of the China, an emerging economy, context.

The methodology remains relatively abstract in nature, yet the tool can provide very useful interpretations and information for both researchers and practitioners.

This paper stipulates that in addition to internal operational practices, the relational practices between buyer and supplier may be equally important to achieve a low-carbon outcome, especially in supply chain setting. This paper also shows that not only the relational practice itself but also the implementation sequence of the relational practices can relate to performance. According to the authors’ initial results, organizations in this study should first develop product development cooperation, then exchange carbon knowledge and implement effective governance and last build a trust relationship with its suppliers for low-carbon cooperation.

This is one of the few approaches that directly evaluates and identifies the interdependencies among relational practices and to construct a process model for introducing and implementing low-carbon supply chain cooperation. It is also the first time that the NK model has been integrated with DEMATEL. Focusing on Chinese supply chain carbon emissions concerns is also a unique perspective.