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While uncertainty during emergency response operations necessitates adaptive performance, emergency response organizations, such as the fire service, tend to constrain adaptive behaviors due to their highly formalized bureaucratic structures. Structural theories suggest that leaders can empower employees to bypass these constraints.

Using survey data from four US fire departments, this research tests whether mid-level supervisors can empower firefighters by increasing their ability to improvise during complex emergency response operations, and whether this enhances department adaptive performance. Moderated mediation is also performed to assess whether senior leaders must also be effective, empowering leaders in order to achieve heightened levels of empowerment and subsequent adaptive performance, as many senior leaders in the fire service are criticized for being overly bureaucratic, risk averse, and resistant to change.

The findings support compensatory effects and show how immediate supervisors are key to overcoming senior leader deficiencies and producing adaptive performance during conditions of high uncertainty and complexity.

The lack of response organizations’ success during complex incidents is often attributed to senior leaders who are risk averse, overly bureaucratic, and resistant to change (Wankhade and Patnaik, 2020). This study is the first to show how empowering leadership can help overcome these constraints to enhance adaptive performance under complex conditions in the fire service.

Farmer, huntsman and one‐time business entrepreneur, John King would seem to typify the capitalist figure. But behind his current chairmanship of Babcock and Wilcox—the £126m engineering and contracting group —lies a diverse (and sometimes stormy) career which began as a social experiment in a depressed Yorkshire mining area. Ken Gooding reports.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact that HR departments have on alternative stakeholders when they focus on improving the organization’s information capability instead of focusing their information agenda on human resource (HR) departmental activities.

The findings are based on the 2016 offering of the HR Competency study that is sponsored by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the RBL Group. The data set consists of over 36,000 respondents from around the world. Data were gathered through a 360 methodology that includes self-ratings and HR and non-HR associate ratings.

The findings show that HR’s involvement in leveraging business information has more impact than any other HR department activity on creating value for key external stakeholders. When controlling for other HR activities, the analysis shows that 77.4 per cent of HR total impact on customer value and 55.6 per cent of shareholder value occurs through HR’s involvement in information management. This impact occurs as HR departments contribute to identifying important external information (including customer and competitive information), importing important external information into the firm, analyzing information through both quantitative and qualitative algorithms, disseminating key facts and findings throughout the firm and ensuring the full utilization of information in decision making. The authors provide examples of how HR departments in leading companies are contributing to each of these phases of organization information management.

These findings have potentially important implications for how HR professionals add value to their key stakeholders. It suggests that HR departments will add greater value to their firms as they shift the focus of their information agenda from application to internal HR processes and practices to creating competitive advantage through organization-wide information management capability.

A paucity of literature considers a growing trend within the retail space whereby franchise companies and their franchisees market and sell products and services across multiple channels, including company‐owned retail stores. This case study aims to explore the processes used to support the customer experience, the control mechanisms that are in place, and the channels by which these customer‐company interactions occur.

A qualitative approach employing an adaptation of the grounded theory method for data collection, coding, and analysis was used and this study specifically focused on an international van‐based service franchise during the integration of the franchise company's service into the retail brick‐and‐mortar locations of the parent company. Participants included retail employees of the parent company, franchise company support staff, franchisees, and third‐party call center agents working for the parent company.

Findings suggest a relationship exists between the alignment of the internal factors of the customer relationship management (CRM) experience (e.g. people, processes, and technology) and the relative strength or weakness of each external factor (e.g. customer, company, and competition). Moreover, it is postulated that weaker customer‐centric service results in greater misalignment of internal factors and leads to larger service variability, or sub‐optimized CRM.

The unique contribution of this research is the juxtaposition of the disparate marketing approaches of the parent company and franchisees and the subsequent impact on CRM efforts of the company. A conceptual model of internal and external factors of the CRM experience is presented.

A paucity of research on the motivations and goals of vendors who develop electronic customer relationship management (eCRM) tools and systems exists in the literature. This is an important gap in the literature because many eCRM systems are products of outsourcing (to vendors). This paper aims to discuss these issues.

This exploratory case study focuses on an international van‐based service franchise and the experiences of the vendor, company, and franchisees as they design, develop, and implement certain eCRM tools. Participants include the president and founder of the eCRM vendor company, the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and marketing director from the franchisor company, and six franchisees. This paper is triangulated via personal interviews, member‐checking interviews, and relevant literature from information systems (IS) and marketing.

Specifically, this paper sheds light on the role and influence of the vendor in the design, development, and delivery of eCRM tools. Managerial implications include: customer relationship management (CRM) requires a balance of online and offline activities; vendors may distort the balance between online and offline marketing efforts; and strategic policy should center on the priorities of the franchisor, franchisees, and end customers.

This paper fulfills an identified knowledge gap by capturing the “voice” of the vendor who has historically been overlooked in the literature. The research insights are particularly salient for company managers and marketing practitioners alike. Study limitations and suggestions for future research are also discussed.

The prominence of wheat as the world's largest crop (in 1981 world production was almost 1.7 thousand million tonnes, of which about 40% went directly to human food use) owes much to its almost unique ability to be baked into bread. This ability is largely attributable to the physico‐chemical properties of wheat proteins, which enable a leavened dough to rise by trapping the carbon dioxide, produced during yeast fermentation, as discrete, small gas cells — a structure that is ‘set’ during baking. Another important type of food made from wheat is pasta and the suitability of wheat for this end use is also governed by the properties of wheat proteins. The suitability of wheats for other uses, such as cracker, biscuit and cake manufacture and domestic flour is also affected by these proteins.

Executive compensation equations are estimated separately for three groups of firms, under the contention that the determinants of executive remuneration may depend upon the form of and degree of regulation in an industry. Empirical evidence obtained for three separate years lends support to that notion.