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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of mediation and moderation mechanisms between firm-level effects of transformational leadership (TFL) on unit-level performance across levels.

The authors used surveys to collect data from 800 senior managers at the firm level and 1,377 unit managers from 800 units of 100 firms from semiconductors, optoelectronics, computer electronics, and telecommunications industries. The industries were chosen because these firms focus on expanding their businesses and encourage extensive knowledge sharing among the firms and at all levels within the organizations.

In this study, the authors theorized that firm-level effects of TFL on unit-level performance across levels were positively related to unit-level performance. Unit-level knowledge sharing mediates the positive relationship between firm-level TFL and unit-level performance. A cross-level interaction effect of firm-level TFL and unit-level absorptive capacity showed that a positive unit-level absorptive capacity enhanced firm-level influence of TFL on unit-level knowledge sharing. Unit-level absorptive capacity moderates the positive relationship between unit-level knowledge sharing and unit-level performance.

First, the authors attempt to integrate the leadership and knowledge management research by exploring the critical mediator of unit-level knowledge sharing in explaining the effects of firm-level TFL on employees’ performance at the unit level. This approach is important because it extends the research areas of the two fields, and also clarifies issues regarding how and why TFL at the top of the organization positively impacts the performance of employees at a lower level of the organizational hierarchy. Second, the effectiveness of firm-level TFL depends on the absorptive capacity of each unit. The importance of absorptive capacity and the consequences of leadership behaviors have been emphasized in studies.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between top management team bricolage and performance and also examines unit ambidexterity's mediating role. More essentially, to understand the black box of organizational knowledge dynamism, a multilevel moderated mediating model is established by exploring the effects of two firm-level moderators, namely, potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity.

To test the cross-level moderated mediation model, this study used multisource data from 90 R&D units in 45 Taiwanese manufacturing firms through two-wave surveys and retrieving the archival data for assessing unit performance.

This study’s evidence revealed that unit-level ambidexterity mediates the effect between firm-level top management teams’ (TMT) bricolage and unit-level performance. This study also found that firm-level potential absorptive capacity positively moderates the effect between firm-level TMT bricolage and unit-level ambidexterity. Moreover, firm-level realized absorptive capacity strengthens the indirect relationships between firm-level TMT bricolage and unit-level performance via unit-level ambidexterity. The findings shed light on how and why TMT bricolage influences unit ambidexterity and performance in knowledge-intensive sectors.

This paper adds to the existing knowledge-based theory literature by disentangling the association between top management team bricolage and unit performance and identifying the pivotal role of absorptive capacity at both the firm and unit levels.

Adopting a knowledge-based view of the firm, this chapter explores how different contents of firm-level entrepreneurship may influence performance of SMEs in moderately dynamic industries, which represent the bulk of economic activity in several countries. More specifically, this study aims, first, at identifying what types of entrepreneurial behavior – new-market entry, new-product development, diversification – are more suitable in order to survive and prosper in industries characterized by moderate growth and dynamism. Second, the analysis aims at assessing whether knowledge sharing is to be promoted in order to successfully compete in these industries. Third, the study aims at identifying which type of knowledge – market knowledge or technology knowledge – is most needed to develop entrepreneurial behavior and performance in low-growth industrial contexts. Following a knowledge-driven approach, we propose a view on corporate renewal that may complement current streams of research focused on large firms in high-velocity settings. Emerging results contribute to advancing the literature on entrepreneurial renewal by providing both an investigation of such behaviors within an industrial setting different from the high-growth, high-technology industries in which investigations have been conducted so far, and by suggesting that rich insights may be gained by investigating entrepreneurial recombinations within smaller firms that operate in less-dynamic contexts.

The essence of core competitiveness in an enterprise is the ability to embed knowledge into the routine work of the enterprise and to transform personal knowledge into corporate assets. The purpose of this paper is to explore this area.

This study reviews three interoperated variables of external knowledge acquisition, enterprise knowledge accumulation, and knowledge accumulation mechanism to construct a model of knowledge interoperability within firms.

This study finds that in the thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT‐LCD) industry, implicit knowledge collected through the interactive coordination mechanism has a significant impact on the knowledge accumulation of the enterprise, where knowledge is accumulated in real technology systems and employees’ skills. The more willing companies are to invest resources in the shaping of knowledge and the environment, the more successful they will be in transforming implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge.

This study points to a new direction of interchanging implicit and explicit knowledge within firms.

This study argues that an improved interoperability of firm‐level knowledge can mitigate problems of knowledge integration and sharing, leading to better decisions and greater partner synergies.

Knowledge transformation allows employees to share and transfer valuable experience and knowledge within the enterprise and forms a knowledge‐intensive corporate culture or work environment, creating so‐called learning‐ and innovation‐oriented enterprises.

This study provides the impetus of valuable experience and knowledge of employees to be fully shared and passed on, resulting in a corporate culture and working atmosphere that creates the so‐called learning‐oriented enterprise or innovative enterprise.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the results from empirically testing the effects of different combinations of organizational forms and combinative capabilities on the efficiency, scope and flexibility of firm‐level knowledge integration, given the influence of knowledge types and forms.

The research is based on a case‐study methodology employed to collect data from ten firms of low, medium and high knowledge complexity environs; manual and automated data mining techniques were employed.

The findings suggest that organizational form and combinative capabilities explain the effects of efficiency, scope and flexibility on firm‐level knowledge integration. In turn, differences in knowledge types and forms necessitate the use of secondary combinative capabilities.

While the study provides a coherent and detailed understanding of firm‐level knowledge integration and explain the development of a firm's knowledge architecture through organizational structures and synthesize existing literature contributing to an emergent understanding of the ambiguities surrounding combinative capabilities, further research identifying the effects of and relationship with the deep knowledge in combinative capabilities on strategic capabilities and a firm's knowledge vision would be beneficial.

Of practical relevance is the strategic and operational management implications detailing the specific organizational structures to achieve desired firm‐level knowledge integration capacity and manage particular integration efficiency, scope and flexibility requirements to enhance the development of architectural knowledge and, thus, firm capabilities.

The original contribution of this paper is reflected in providing empiric and theoretic insights, which directly address the specific combinations of organizational structures that influence integration process characteristics and thus accommodate differences in knowledge types and forms.

The purpose of this study is to see how the economy-wide spillover effect affects company process innovation.

To account for national differences, the current study used a hierarchical model.

The findings of this study show that knowledge spillover is related to and influences the innovation process of businesses. Only a level two study that takes into account country-specific differences may reveal this. The current work uses a hierarchical model to try to capture knowledge spillover. Furthermore, the findings suggest that medium and large businesses, as well as businesses conducting research and development (R&D), are more inventive than small businesses and firms not conducting R&D. Furthermore, female-owned businesses are more likely than their male counterparts to innovate their processes.

This study is unique in that it makes predictions about how businesses innovate (behave) based on firm-level characteristics, or macroeconomic structure, without sacrificing information and variance. Furthermore, this study attempts to solve the difficulty of prior empirical research’s single-level analysis and cross-level inference. The research is based on data from the 2019 World Bank regular Enterprise Survey, which includes 18,148 businesses from 38 countries.

In the context of Saudi Arabia, this chapter investigates how clustering promotes knowledge sharing and transfer in an emerging, government-directed industry cluster. It is determined that lateral actors play a key facilitating role, and formal and informal mechanisms and interpersonal links among actors support that cluster knowledge exchange. Limited social capital strength and depth and a lack of trust that prevents knowledge sharing are partially explained by the cluster's limited vertical and horizontal actors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of top-down knowledge hiding in buying and supplying firms.

This study uses a multiple case study methodology by considering four UAE-based firms and further employing 20 semi-structured interviews with managers of buying and supplying firms having a local and foreign nationality.

Based on the qualitative interviews, senior managers were found to be intentionally hiding knowledge from their managers based on five individual, three interpersonal and two firm-level reasons.

This study has some limitations. First, the results of this study are not generalizable to a broader population. Second, this study explores behavioural patterns with respect to United Arab Emirates culture only.

Firms can use the findings of this study to understand what really motivates senior managers to intentionally hide knowledge from their subordinates. Also, this study provides some constructive guidelines to firms/senior management, which can discourage the culture of knowledge hiding in firms.

This study contributes to knowledge management literature by revealing multi-level and multi-faceted antecedents of top-down knowledge hiding in buying and supplying firms in the supply chain context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between change in organizational identity and knowledge creation of mobile research and development (R&D) workers by combining the literature on human mobility and mergers and acquisitions (M&As).

Negative binomial regression was used to test the hypotheses, based on knowledge creation of 410 mobile R&D workers in 75 high-technology M&As.

The findings showed that while a change in organizational identity after M&As decreased the knowledge creation by R&D workers who moved before M&As, a higher degree of human capital in mobile R&D workers could increase knowledge creation after M&As. A moderating effect of the change in organizational identity on the relationship between knowledge creation and human capital of mobile R&D workers was also found.

This paper augmented the research opportunity on the organizational change and knowledge creation during an M&A by combining study of individual-level human mobility during firm-level M&As, suggesting change in organizational identity affects knowledge creation of mobile R&D workers. A limitation of this study is the focus of human capital accumulated in the prior company before movement.

The study suggests that managers intending to acquire knowledge through human mobility and M&As must implement post-mergers activities such as structural integration with care.

Much of the literature on human mobility has focused on knowledge creation after movement, regardless of the changes that may occur in of focal dyadic companies during M&As. The paper might be one of the first studies of knowledge creation of mobile R&D workers within the context of M&As.

The purpose of this research is to better understand the human aspects of open innovation in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by exploring how intrinsic and extrinsic motivation influence enjoyment in helping others, knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding and consequently firms' open innovation.

We collected data with a survey among CEOs in 140 SMEs and performed confirmatory factor analysis applying structural equation modeling in IBM SPSS AMOS (v. 26).

Results reveal that intrinsic motivation is positively associated with helping behavior and knowledge sharing and negatively associated with knowledge hiding. We also confirm the positive relationship between extrinsic motivation and knowledge sharing. Moreover, we find that knowledge sharing increases and knowledge hiding decreases the firm-level open innovation. Especially in high-tech industry, knowledge sharing is a vital determinant of open innovation.

Responding to the calls for a deeper understanding of the individual-level factors that determine organization-level open innovation, in this research we focus on the human aspect of open innovation in SMEs. Open innovation is a widely recognized and implemented concept among large corporations and facilitates better understanding of new technological and market developments both within and outside of organizations. However, understanding of the microfoundations of open innovation in smaller firms is still limited, but this steam of research is growing rapidly.