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Purpose – We show that, although most private employer establishments are small, much reported research (and subsequent suggestions for practice) in management comes from large firms. In turn, we wanted to explore if organizational knowledge gained from studying one or more large firms is necessarily applicable to numerous smaller firms.

Design/methodology/approach – We computed firm size in the United States using existing databases, and we then considered published literature in human resources and strategy to see if the large sample results logically applied to smaller firms.

Findings – At the job-analytic level, it is suggested that jobs might be defined differently and more broadly in smaller establishments than in large organizations. Also, the feasibility of best corporate strategies may be moderated by the size of the firm. In addition, we noted that the underlying model of selection utility in human resource management (HRM), and several factors in its numerical estimation, might need to be modified as a function of firm size.

Originality/value – We hope that this chapter inspires HRM and strategy researchers by helping to focus future evidence-based efforts, creating new initiatives, and providing results that are useful (or scalable) to the large number of small, private-sector U.S. firms.

Welcome to volume 6 of Research Methodology in Strategy and Management! In creating this series about eight years ago, our belief was that the organizational sciences needed a forum wherein leading scholars could openly express their views about important and emerging issues within research methods. In particular, we wanted the book series to serve as a metaphorical bridge between areas of inquiry that could benefit from increased interaction with each other. This sixth volume of the series recalls these roots by being built around the theme of “Building methodological bridges.”

The purpose of this paper is to show how, by looking within one group of nonprofits, perceptions of ethical climate may differ in the nonprofit sector, both within and between separate country contexts.

Executive directors in two groups of social services nonprofits in the UK and Japan were surveyed, and several subsequently interviewed, in accordance with the Ethical Climate Scale developed by Agarwal and Molloy.

The paper finds that perceptions of the ethical climate types relating to “independence” and “law and codes” were polarized, with executive directors in the UK being more likely to base moral decisions on the evaluation of rights, values or principles than on public opinion. In Japan, however, such decisions were predominantly focused on how they would impact on others, both within and outside the organization, in the context of personal responsibility to society and the maintenance of social order.

Social service nonprofits nowadays occupy a major role in the delivery of services which the state used to provide alone. It has therefore become essential for governments to be able to assess the internal culture of nonprofits in order to determine their trustworthiness and reliability, and the best yardstick for this is ethical climate. This research will help state and local government policy makers toward a better understanding of their contractors.

The originality of this study lies primarily in the fact that it was the first time that this type of research had compared similar nonprofit organizations in different countries.

This is a study of ethical climates in nonprofit and government sectors in Japan, the aim of which is to determine the extent to which similarities (and differences) exist in ethical climate dimensions, what drives the differences and what are the implications for the sectors in this country.

Using survey data and structural equation modeling techniques, the factors structure equivalence and measurement invariance of ethical climates in the two sectors were tested. The original sample was made by 1,012 participants (500 public officials and 512 nonprofit executive directors). Due to some missing values, a net sample of 441 questionnaires (for nonprofit) and 321 questionnaires (for government) were used for the final analysis.

Results of this study indicate that there was a significant overlap in shared perception of all ethical climates in the two sectors. There should be an effort to continue building on these commonalities so as to provide an effective framework to build trusting relationships between the two sectors.

This study provides important insights that would allow policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using nonprofit partners to deliver services. It would also provide a theoretical and empirical starting point from which government‐nonprofits relationships in Japan can be better understood.

This was the first time that such a type of research was conducted in Japanese nonprofit and government sectors. Furthermore, among all the empirical studies on ethical climate, this is based on one of the largest sample of respondents in both sectors.