Search results

The aim of this paper is to explore the stakeholder exclusion practices of responsible leaders.

An interpretive multiple case analyses of seven responsibly led organisations was employed. Twenty-two qualitative interviews were undertaken to investigate and understand perceptions and practice of responsible leaders and their approach to stakeholder inclusion and exclusion.

The findings revealed new and surprising insights where responsible leaders compromised their espoused values of inclusivity through the application of a personal bias, resulting in the exclusion of certain stakeholders. This exclusivity practice focused on the informal evaluation of potential stakeholders’ values, and where they did not align with those of the responsible leader, these stakeholders were excluded from participation with the organisation. This resulted in the creation and continuity of a culture of shared moral purpose across the organisation.

This study focussed on responsible leader-led organisations, so the next stage of the research will include mainstream organisations (i.e. without explicit responsible leadership) to examine how personal values bias affects stakeholder selection in a wider setting.

The findings suggest that reflexive practice and critically appraising management methods in normative leadership approaches may lead to improvements in diversity management.

This paper presents original empirical data challenging current perceptions of responsible leader inclusivity practices and indicates areas of leadership development that may need to be addressed.

A vast amount of research has been carried out to help us understand the main factors influencing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) performance. Although the existing body of knowledge focuses mainly on macro-level factors, there is an increasing interest from scholars and practitioners in understanding the micro-foundational factors occurring at individual and team levels. This chapter focuses on the importance of emotions – a central facet in individual reactions to workplace events – in M&A processes. To this end, the authors carried out a multi-phased search for articles on micro-foundations in M&A settings published by Business and Management (B/M) and Organizational Behavior and Psychology (O/P) journals. The authors reviewed 41 papers and used the circumplex model to identify and categorize 19 themes related to individual emotions involved in M&A processes in terms of positive/negative valence and high/low activation. The findings show that scholars mainly assume a risk mitigation perspective and focus on themes related to change resistance (negative emotions with high activation) by providing prescriptions on how negative emotions could be mitigated to avoid eroding acquisition performance. Hence, the authors suggest that (a) there should be more efforts to integrate different streams of literature, namely between the strategic and operational/behavioral areas of knowledge and (b) future research should focus on understanding how positive emotions like change proactivity (positive emotions with high activation) might be essential to enhance acquisition performance.

Anyone seeking to influence another is a potential leader. Within higher education, determining what an institution should undertake on sustainability can be daunting. Sustainability leaders face labyrinthine, multifaceted sub-cultures, influencers and viewpoints across staff, students, government, business and alumni all with an opinion on whether, how and in what order of priority sustainability should be taken forward. In this paper we take on this challenge by synthesising and critically evaluating core principles and working models for influencing and leading for sustainability in higher education. We identify a series of eight challenges affecting delivery of sustainability and seek to understand how conceptual models and principles in sustainability decision-making and leadership could address these. We draw on the experience of both authors, in tandem with comments from workshop and leadership training programme participants who attended the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) Leadership Lab training in the UK, as well as reflections arising in a detailed case study from the University of Edinburgh. We bring key insights from theory and practice for the benefits of individuals or teams seeking to influence and persuade key decision-makers to embrace the sustainability agenda.

This study analyzed three years of data from the Collegiate Leadership Competition to investigate potential differences in longitudinal leader self-efficacy growth between students who identify as men and those who identify as women.

Survey design.

Results indicate that women participants enter their competition experience at higher levels of leader self-efficacy than men and that both groups were able to sustain moderate levels of growth measured several months after the end of the competition.

The gap between men and women in their leader self-efficacy did not change over the several months of measurement. Implications for leadership educators are discussed.

This chapter analyzes the link between the digital divide, infrastructure regulation, and disaster planning and relief through a case study of the flood in San Jose, California triggered by the Anderson dam’s overtopping in February 2017 and an examination of communication failures during the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. This chapter theorizes that regulatory decisions construct social and disaster vulnerability. Rooted in the Whole Community approach to disaster planning and relief espoused by the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this chapter calls for leadership to end the digital divide. It highlights the imperative of understanding community information needs and argues for linking strategies to close the digital divide with infrastructure and emergency planning. As the Internet’s integration into society increases, the digital divide diminishes access to societal resources including disaster aid, and exacerbates wildfire, flood, pandemic, and other risks. To mitigate climate change, climate-induced disaster, protect access to social services and the economy, and safeguard democracy, it argues for digital inclusion strategies as a centerpiece of community-centered infrastructure regulation and disaster relief.

Many emerging economy firms are under foreign owners' pressure to embrace the challenges of addressing corporate social responsibility (CSR) and consider adopting sustainability initiatives. However, it is not clear how foreign ownership plays a role to enable or inhibit these emerging economy firms from translating sustainability initiatives into improved financial performance. Utilizing neo-institutional theory, the authors argue that emerging economy firms that voluntarily report sustainability gain legitimacy in the eyes of shareholders and improve stock market performance. However, emerging economy firms may not have the resources to reconcile the internal stakeholders' various legitimacy requirements to promote sustainability practices, resulting in a negative association with accounting performance. Foreign ownership attenuates the relationship between sustainability reporting and firm performance due to the different legitimacy requirements in foreign markets.

To test the study’s hypotheses, the authors collected and analyzed a large sample of publicly listed firms between 2010 and 2016 in Taiwan where the types of foreign ownership include foreign trust funds, foreign financial institutions and other foreign legal entities. Regression analyses were conducted to investigate whether the firms that report their sustainable practices have better financial performance, including stock market performance and accounting performance. Additionally, a three-step procedure was employed to address the endogeneity issue with a binary explanatory variable.

The positive stock market reaction to the emerging economy firms' voluntary sustainability reporting supports legitimacy gained among investors. By contrast, sustainability reporting has a negative association with accounting performance due to the difficulty of reconciling different legitimacy requirements among various stakeholders in emerging economies. Further, foreign ownership, particularly the trust fund, exhibits a negative moderating effect on the relationship between sustainability reporting in aligning corporate practices with sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the company's stock market performance.

By examining the less tested contingent role played by foreign ownership in the emerging economy firms' sustainability reporting, the authors provide insights into the influence exerted by different types of foreign ownership on firms' financial performances beyond previous studies that focus on family ownership, state ownership, or managerial ownership in emerging economies. The findings shed light on corporate sustainability strategy and foreign direct investment policies for an emerging economy.

Organizations are full of contradictions and leadership dilemmas. Managers often face challenges such as selecting between two contradicting options such that which one is more important can hardly be judged. To manage contradicting dynamics, today’s managers can adopt the paradoxical leadership approach. We build a theoretical model to investigate the influence of paradoxical leadership on multi-dimensional project agility (proactivity, adaptability, and resilience), and multi-dimensional project success (management, investment, and ownership success).

Drawing on survey-based data from the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) megaproject (N = 209), we performed covariance-based structural equation modeling to test the conceptual model.

The findings show that (1) paradoxical leadership has a significant positive impact on megaproject success, (2) paradoxical leadership has a significant positive influence on project agility, (3) project agility has a significant positive effect on megaproject success, and (4) project agility has a significant effect that mediates the link between paradoxical leadership and megaproject success. This research provides a theoretical and practical comprehension of paradoxical leadership with a new perspective on megaprojects.

This study provides an extension of the existing studies on paradoxical leadership and identifies the role of contradicting dynamics and their impact on multiple facets of megaproject success. It not only clarifies the relationship between paradoxical leadership and megaproject success, but also identifies the mediating role of project agility that can play an effective role in mobilizing success in megaprojects.

The authors propose and test a theoretical framework that develops and analyzes precursors to firm acquisitions to determine if acquirers differ from other firms.

The authors use longitudinal, archival data from a sample of the largest firms in the global pharmaceutical industry from 1991 to 2012 with 1,327 firm-year observations.

The authors integrate prior research to show that the firm characteristics involving (1) R&D investment, (2) prior experience and (3) network centrality influence the likelihood that a firm will complete an acquisition.

In contrast to research focusing on the performance of acquiring firms, the authors show that firm characteristics predict acquisition activity by highlighting that acquiring firms differ from other firms. The authors also develop how network synergies can be realized by acquirers that have information advantages from more central network positions.

External institutional policy and its impact on corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been widely discussed by researchers, but its effect still remains controversial. This study aims to use the minimum wage policy as an illustrative example to analyze its impact on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of tourist enterprises. Furthermore, the research seeks to examine the boundary conditions that influence the minimum wage’s effect on CSR.

This paper takes the data of 42 listed tourism companies from 2010 to 2020 in China as samples and uses the mixed OLS regression method and the fixed effects panel model to examine the effect of the minimum wage on CSR.

Findings show that increasing wages has a significantly negative impact on their total CSR investment. Also, low-operating-capacity enterprises and private enterprises will react more adversely when faced with increasing minimum wages. And found that the increase of minimum wage has no significant negative impact on the strategic social responsibility of tourism enterprises; however, it has a significantly negative impact on their tactical social responsibility. In addition, as far as employees’ rights and interests are concerned, the minimum wage increase has effectively increased employee salaries, but the nonsalary benefits of the employees have significantly decreased.

The contribution of this paper not only expands the research on the antecedents and boundary mechanisms of CSR but also clarifies the specific effect of the rise of the minimum wage on corporate social responsibility; it further deepens the impact of institutional policy factors on CSR, which also opens new perspectives for policy evaluation and provides a theoretical basis for government policymakers.

This study aims to explore the patterns of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and investments across different ownership groups and relevance of CSR practices in the vision and mission (V&M) statements of firms.

The paper uses the neo-institutional theory approach, which explains similarities and differences in the CSR practices of organisations embedded within (and between) similar sectoral contexts. The study accounts the CSR activities of the top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock exchange (BSE) based on their ownership and checks the overlap of the CSR activities conducted by the companies with the ongoing social development schemes launched in India during the same of time. The time period between 2017 and 2020 is chosen to analyse the CSR studies. The study uses content analysis technique to derive conclusions. A textual analysis of top 100 listed firms across all ownership groups aimed at understanding patterns of CSR practices opted by the different groups and coherence of CSR patterns in the V&M statements. CSR related keywords were analysed in the V&M statements to understand what influence reporting of CSR practices in the strategic communication of firms.

Overall analysis indicated that top 100 firms prefer to invest in the areas of “Education”, “Sustainability” “Skill” where public-owned firms preferred towards “Sanitation” and “Environment/Sustainability” showing concurrence with local development goals. Private and foreign groups preferred to park their CSR funds in “Education” and “Skill” development showing coherence with the global agendas. Public-owned firms tend to report more CSR related specifically “Environment’ and “Sustainability” in the strategic documents. However, private and foreign firms do not pay any significance to CSR related keywords in their V&M statements.

Findings suggest that despite of huge CSR investments, private and foreign-owned firms lack CSR focus and communication in their V&M statements, which may create disintegration in the CSR investment and strategic alignment of near-term and future goals. The paper suggests that private and foreign firms should also communicate their CSR practices through their V&M to stakeholders so that CSR practices may not remain mere 2% mandated expenditure by the Government of India.

The study contributes in confirming the success of the CSR policy mandate in supplementing government’s social development programmes along with indications on the role of family firms in accelerating the process of community development as compared to foreign firms. The study also favours integration of CSR disclosures in the V&M statements to gain long-term benefit out of these investments.