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Within the globalized commercial context, Japanese business activity in India has increased significantly. The purpose of this paper is to highlight common attitudinal traits that would facilitate orientation of Indian executives towards Japanese management methods through, for instance “reverse adaptation”, using an approach other than cultural dimensions that have emerged in recent decades and consider how these play out in change management contexts.

A literature review was undertaken which found significant parallels between traditional Indian philosophy and modern Japanese management methods, inter alia long-term orientation, equanimity and Nemawashi (pre-arranged participative decision making) and shared spiritual dimensions. The paper employed a methodology of participant observation and semi-structured interview approaches contextualized through lived experience methodology (Van Manen, 2015). These events are described and analysed narratively using a blend of qualitative participant observation and reflexive critical incident review.

The findings, by examining the confluence of Indian and Japanese management, provide an innovative avenue of research and theory for change management.

The research employs an inductive methodology which employs vignettes to examine Indo-Japanese contexts. The limits to generalization are recognized within the study. The paper offers important implications on Indo-Japanese collaboration and change management.

These findings have important practical implications for Indian and Japanese managers who will be able to engage better within the dynamics of the Japanese work environment in Japanese subsidiaries in India. These same insights could also potentially facilitate wider examples of working in Japanese environments, either in Japan or outside Japan. At a more general level, the findings are relevant to all foreign investors in India for enhanced employee engagement by providing insights into spiritual values of Indian managers and their impact on change management situations.

There is emerging research on how traditional Indian philosophy tenets can be found in modern (western) management. This paper provides reasons, based in the extant literature, to believe that modern Japanese methods can trace their origin in Buddhist Indian philosophical thought and offer important implications for managing change.

The paper offers in-depth original insights into Indo-Japanese collaborative contexts.

This paper aims to deepen the understanding of resource integration for value co-creation within service-dominant logic (SDL), by drawing on key knowledge management (KM) concepts.

This conceptual study introduces three key KM concepts, namely, object, agent and context to SDL; thus, deepening the understanding of how resources are becoming when actors are engaged in co-creating value-in-context.

This paper extends understanding of actors’ uses of knowledge in their efforts to co-create value. Paradoxically, SDL takes a phenomenological approach to understanding value co-creation, whereas KM embraces a realist-phenomenological view. Emphasizing knowing rather than knowledge reveals that there is no object without an agent, no agency without context and no knowledge without value-alignment. Thus, the paper contributes to theorizing about resource integration through SDL by identifying the need for effective alignment between relevant objects, capable agents and meaningful contexts for value to emerge. The paper also contributes with four facilitators of object-agent-context alignment: tacit knowledge contextualization, collective sensemaking, shared values among engaged actors and feedback on alignment effectiveness.

It advances current conceptualizations of resource integration and value co-creation in SDL by paying explicit attention to a KM perspective.

Modern e‐health systems incorporate different healthcare providers in one system and provide an electronic platform to share medical information efficiently. In cross‐context communications between healthcare providers, the same information can be interpreted as different types or values, so that one patient will be issued different identifiers by different healthcare providers. This paper aims to provide a solution to ensure interoperability so that multiple healthcare providers will be able to collaborate in one e‐health system.

This paper primarily focuses on how different healthcare providers, instead of the patients, are able to interact and share information on a common e‐health platform.

In the course of the work, it was found that previous e‐health solutions mainly have a limited view of patient information, where a user‐centric approach for identity management is usually restricted to a single healthcare provider. Interoperability in an e‐health system becomes more problematic when more actors collaborate, and hence linkability from one context to another should not be straightforward. However, some form of linkability, such as the possibility to follow up a patient's medical treatment, is desirable in the e‐health sector, even when it needs to cross different contexts. Therefore, the authors have designed an identity management mechanism to ensure semantic interoperability when data is exchanged among different authorized healthcare providers.

The paper points out that the next generation of e‐health will move towards federated e‐health and will require user‐centricity and transparency properties so that patients are able to specify and verify the disclosure of their medical information.

This paper proposes a new service for cross‐context identity management in e‐health systems, improving interoperability between agencies when context‐specific information is transferred from one healthcare provider to another. How the proposed cross‐context identity management service can be integrated in an e‐health system is explained with a use case scenario.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the role that context plays in managerial decision making. The paper aims to argue that managers increasingly need to take into account broader contexts of information in decision making. It seeks to define managerial context, how it is of use, and to provide a set of recommendations about how to integrate context into the daily work of management.

The paper approaches the topic of context by providing a definition of the concept, examples, and description of benefits of integrating context into daily work. It concludes with a proposed methodology for doing that.

The paper finds that context is an increasingly important tool for managerial decision making, particularly the more senior an executive is or the more ambiguous an issue being addressed.

The paper offers useful guidelines and approaches to the application of context into managerial work.

This paper is one of the first – if not original – discussions of the role of context in managerial decision making. It is an outgrowth of many of the findings of students of KM and managerial practices. It provides management with specific hands‐on advice.

This research explores perceptions of knowledge management processes held by managers and employees in a service industry. To date, empirical research on knowledge management in the service industry is sparse. This research seeks to examine absorptive capacity and its four capabilities of acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation and their impact on effective knowledge management. All of these capabilities are strategies that enable external knowledge to be recognized, imported and integrated into, and further developed within the organization effectively. The research tests the relationships between absorptive capacity and effective knowledge management through analysis of quantitative data (n = 549) drawn from managers and employees in 35 residential aged care organizations in Western Australia. Responses were analysed using Partial Least Square-based Structural Equation Modelling. Additional analysis was conducted to assess if the job role (of manager or employee) and three industry context variables of profit motive, size of business and length of time the organization has been in business, impacted on the hypothesized relationships.

Structural model analysis examines the relationships between variables as hypothesized in the research framework. Analysis found that absorptive capacity and the four capabilities correlated significantly with effective knowledge management, with absorptive capacity explaining 56% of the total variability for effective knowledge management. Findings from this research also show that absorptive capacity and the four capabilities provide a useful framework for examining knowledge management in the service industry. Additionally, there were no significant differences in the perceptions held between managers and employees, nor between respondents in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Furthermore, the size of the organization and length of time the organization has been in business did not impact on absorptive capacity, the four capabilities and effective knowledge management.

The research considers implications for business in light of these findings. The role of managers in providing leadership across the knowledge management process was confirmed, as well as the importance of guiding routines and knowledge sharing throughout the organization. Further, the results indicate that within the participating organizations there are discernible differences in the way that some organizations manage their knowledge, compared to others. To achieve effective knowledge management, managers need to provide a supportive workplace culture, facilitate strong employee relationships, encourage employees to seek out new knowledge, continually engage in two-way communication with employees and provide up-to-date policies and procedures that guide employees in doing their work. The implementation of knowledge management strategies has also been shown in this research to enhance the delivery and quality of residential aged care.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate insights into cross‐cultural conflict, identity and values amongst selected managers within a South African management context. It aims to increase the understanding of these complexities from an academic managerial perspective, thereby providing in‐depth information which can lead to the development of managerial training tools for improving diversity and conflict management in the described context.

The authors selected qualitative data from a case study that was conducted in the international South African automotive industry. The case study was based on the post‐modernist premise by considering phenomenological and interpretative paradigms most relevant.

Findings show conflicts in managerial communication and treatment, position and competition, organisation, race and gender and are often defined as “cross‐racial” conflict fuelled by the society's past.

The generalisability is limited to this specific context and needs to be proven by follow‐up studies which expand the context and the methodological approach of the study.

Practical suggestions address the implementation of training tools, coaching and counselling in cross‐cultural conflict management. They are anticipated to create awareness on managing the present challenges and are aimed at managers and international organisations investing in South Africa.

The paper provides new insights into the discussion on human resource management in a specific South African management context by referring to the highly important topics of cross‐cultural conflict, values and identities.

This research seeks to unveil an integrative perspective on talent management (TM) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), particularly through a multilevel approach and within the French context. Drawing on dynamic capability theory and focusing on French SMEs as a rich domain for multilevel studies, the research aims to elucidate how these enterprises operationalize TM while addressing and integrating their distinct capabilities and requirements, internal dynamics and challenges.

Through an integrative study based on a qualitative approach, we collect data from 15 French SMEs. In total, 20 semi-structured interviews with individuals from different levels, managing and working in SMEs, were conducted and analyzed thematically to identify patterns across all SMEs. Companies and interviewees represented a variety of sectors such as telecommunication, high-tech, circular economy, etc.

We present an integrative multilevel approach through TM in French SMEs, describing how SMEs operationalize TM. Across three main levels (organizational, collective and individual) and key SMEs’ capabilities, our results underscore the significance of top management commitment capabilities and SMEs' assessment capabilities, the involvement of line managers in facilitating strategic agility and cultivating the talent ecosystem and the outcomes of TM in driving SMEs' reconfiguration, extending beyond mere TM-level integrations and articulations. We address these findings for foreign SMEs intending to enter the French context and SMEs’ actors on the importance of contextual issues and level articulations while calling for future research focusing on group-level and managers’ roles in TM.

This article moves the TM research towards an integrative multilevel view in SMEs as a fertile ground for studying multilevel TM. As part of recent studies on TM in French SMEs within the broader European competitive context, it expands the integrative approach in SMEs by accommodating the unique requirements, the multilevel dynamics and the challenges that they encounter with TM, especially when compared to multinational enterprises (MNEs).

This paper aims to analyze factors based on organizational knowledge management (KM; transactional memory systems and knowledge-oriented leadership [K-OL]) that help firms to mitigate conflicts based on task management at work, with the aim to improve their innovation capabilities (IC). The knowledge-based view of the firm, conflict management theory and cognitive collective engagement theory have been used to build a model of relationships that connects the development of positive KM contexts and management of dysfunctional conflict with IC improvement.

Data survey collected from inland hotel establishments in Spain is used to test seven hypotheses by means of structural equations modeling, applying the partial least squares technique. Direct, indirect and mediating relationships between variables are examined from the structural path model.

The results confirm that, as expected, IC improve when K-OL and transactive memory systems (TMSs) are properly implemented by hotel establishments, which leads them to reduce negative effects of task management conflict (TMC). Significant direct effects are found between the key variables of the study and also a significant indirect effect between K-OL and IC through TMS reinforcement and the mitigation of TMC.

This paper provides useful ideas for hotel managers about how to improve KM contexts in their establishments while avoiding TMC. Efforts devoted to creating those contexts by hotel establishments are shown to be effective to improve their IC and create competitive advantages.

The analysis of IC improvement by studying TMC mitigation had not been researched to date by the KM literature. The consideration and testing of a model that integrates KM-related tools such as K-OL and TMS to avoid TMC in the hotel industry is the main contribution of this study.

The antecedents and cost management methods and their effects on the value creation of inter-organization are essential topics of inter-organizational cost management (IOCM) in a hybrid relational perspective. This study aims to develop a synthesis coordinating mechanism theory which combines supply network theory and transaction cost economics. Using this modified theory, a structural model of IOCM and its hypotheses are developed by considering the organic connection among hybrid relational context, capabilities, methods and the effects of IOCM.

The data were collected under convenient sampling using the questionnaire survey method and analyzed using principal component analysis and structural equation modeling.

The results (significant at p < 0.01 and p < 0.05 level) show that there is a positive correlation among the hybrid relational context, capabilities (antecedents), methods and the effects of IOCM. Capabilities (antecedents) and cost management methods are also found to have a positive impact on synergic effect value and on improving collaborative efficiency in IOCM.

The managers of inter-firm networks may use the results of this study to ensure competitive advantages through collaboration with each other and building and retaining a long-term relationship.

This study demonstrates that the coordinating mechanism of IOCM can create the synergic effect value and improve the collaborative efficiency of the inter-organization relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea that the ideal manager is a social construct that is a product of the context within which it exists. The context chosen to illustrate this idea is that of the first two decades of the Cold War (1945‐1965) in the USA.

The methodology used is an analysis of 17 management textbooks published between 1945 and 1965 in the USA.

The analysis of the textbooks shows a typification of the ideal manager as an educated male who wielded authority effectively and accepted social responsibility. These four characteristics can all be tied to the social and political context of the early Cold War years.

Limited by its focus on management theory in the USA during the early Cold War era, and a selection of textbooks based on available resources. Future research could analyze the ideal manager construct during social and political contexts other than the Cold War, and across other social formations (e.g. the UK, Canada, France, etc.).

Practical implications apply to both organizations and academic institutions. Management educators should be attempting to use textbooks that present management theory in a problematic way and organizations should be aware of the impact of social and political context on the construct of the manager in order to determine the qualities and characteristics that are most needed today.

The paper looks at the ideal manager as a social construct, rather than an ideal that was created void of outside influence and assumed to be ideal for all contexts. It also uses the context of the Cold War period, which has been a neglected context in management research.