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The purpose is to present the results of exploratory research which analysed firm‐employee relationship strength from the employee perspective. Three main research questions were explored: What indicators should be used to measure strong firm‐employee relationships? How important do employees see relationships to be in the work environment? and how do employees define relationship strength?

Qualitative research in the form of focus groups was utilised. Four focus groups of employees from medium to large regional and national Australian companies were held in a large Australian regional city.

Employees view relationships as being very important in the work environment. The findings revealed a greater degree of consistency between employees' viewpoints about important relationship elements and non‐marketing literature. Important elements found were cooperation, empowerment, communication, attachment, shared goals and values, trust and respect. The emphasis on commitment as a key relationship indicator was not supported by the findings. The findings are summarised in a proposed model of relationship strength, positing commitment as a relationship strength outcome. Employees defined relationship strength in terms of the identified elements.

This research enables commencement of examination of the value of internal relationships through empirical examination of the proposed model.

Management is informed as to what makes the best work environment from the perspective of employees.

This paper fulfills an identified gap in the literature in relation to the ability to measure internal firm relationships. It also clarifies the confusing literature on relationship elements, and it posits a model for the empirical assessment of firm‐employee relationship strength.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance implications of two major mechanisms for organizational learning (i.e. exploration and exploitation). Exploration refers to firm activities that explore new and novel knowledge, whereas exploitation reflects the extent to which a firm reuses its existing knowledge. The authors predict curvilinear (i.e. an inverted U-shape) relationships between exploration/exploitation and firm performance, respectively. That is, firm performance first increases with exploration/exploitation at a decreasing rate; then, firm performance decreases at an increasing rate after firm performance reaches a maximum point. Furthermore, the authors examine whether the curvilinear relationships are moderated by two types of firm–stakeholder relationships (i.e. firm–employee and firm–customer relationships).

Using the data from National Bureau of Economic Research, US Patent Citations Data File, KLD Research and Analytics Inc. and Compustat series, the authors construct an unbalanced panel data set of 3,070 observations in 554 firms from 1991 to 2006. To test the hypotheses, feasible generalized least squares regression is used.

In consistent with the prediction, the authors find inverted U-shape relationships between exploration/exploitation and firm performance. The authors also find that the curvilinear relationships are moderated by firm–employee relationships. The relationships between exploration/exploitation and firm performance become stronger when firms have better relationships with employees.

The study provides empirical evidence that better firm–employee relationships can strengthen the curvilinear relationships between exploration/exploitation and firm performance. The authors argue that future studies should extend to other stakeholder relationships, using more refined measures, and incorporating the concept of ambidexterity.

The findings suggest that managers should design innovation strategy based on performance implications of exploration/exploitation and that managers should also realize that stakeholder relationships can influence the relationships between exploration/exploitation and firm performance. First, the study shows that although exploration and exploitation can improve firm performance, too much exploration or exploitation is not good for firm performance. Therefore, managers should consider seriously the maximum point of performance that exploration and exploitation can reach and avoid too much exploration or exploitation. Second, firms can invest in firm–employee relationships to gain better performance implications from exploration/exploitation. The study shows that, as firms develop better firm–employee relationship, the relationships between exploration/exploitation and firm performance are stronger and firm performance is likely to reach a higher apex.

The authors find the inverted U-shape relationships between exploration/exploitation and firm performance, moreover, the authors add two contingent factors associated with stakeholders that can help exploration and exploitation contribute more to firm performance.

Practitioners argue that the way they treat their employees has an impact on firm success. However, they frequently do not equate this with relationship building. On the other hand, the academic relationship marketing literature does highlight internal relationships as having an important impact on external customer relationships. However, this relationship suffers from a lack of academic empirical evidence. Neither seems to recognize the knowledge of the other leading to incongruence between marketing theory and practice. The purpose of this paper is to bring the two literature streams together demonstrating that the practitioners are talking about, and practising, relationship marketing.

Exploration and comparison of the academic and practitioner literature bases to elaborate on the value of relationship building within organizations.

Competitive advantage can be attained through development of a relationship‐building culture which includes building relationships inside the organization as well as customer relationships. In fact, successful customer relationships rely on successful internal relationships.

A broad research agenda is outlined for understanding the nature of internal relationships and their impact on a firm's success.

Organizational success can be gained through building strong internal relationships and the development of a relationship‐building organizational culture.

Links practitioner cases and reflections to the concept of relationship marketing, demonstrating further how relationship marketing activities provide a competitive advantage.

This study aims to examine how highly innovative firms behave differently from their peers to become profitable. The authors investigate this through two distinct groups, one group of firms that have appeared on the Forbes 100 most innovative firms for 5 out of the past 10 years and a carefully curated control group.

Using a matched sample of 190 distinct firms, all with 10 years of historical data, the authors conduct a series of regressions and two mediated models. This method enables the examination of several possible differentiators for highly innovative firms, namely, CEO Pay, CEO Pay Ratio, Median Employee Pay and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

In all, the authors conducted five separate hypothesis tests, all with statistical significance. Of note, the authors find innovative companies do pay employees more, engage in more CSR acts and are more profitable than peer companies. In a mediated regression model, the authors also find that the median employee pay fully mediates the relationship between firm innovation and corporate financial performance.

The study first shows that these highly innovative firms do not reach a position to rely merely on their innovation reputation to be profitable or attract eager employees. The authors find no relationship between years on the Forbes 100 list and profitability, median pay or total CSR in the data.

This research uses commonly available data to explore how innovative firms behave. Rather than being single-mindedly focused on innovation, results indicate that innovative elite firms are more generous (in employee pay) and concerned about non-profit factors (CSR) than their peers. Innovative firms are then able to do all this and remain profitable. An additional implication of this research is that managers should prioritize CSR. CSR is not just a tool for less innovative companies to distinguish themselves or firms with low reputations to rehabilitate themselves.

As a society, we are living through unprecedented times concerning how we treat one another in the world. Often, the argument is made that firms should specialize, optimize and be strategically focused. However, highly innovative firms (often regarded as focused, specialized and optimized) in the sample show that paying people more and carrying out CSR is highly compatible with their success.

To the best of the researchers’ collective knowledge, this study is the only one of its kind to create and use such a robust data set, obtaining data from four different sources, namely, 10 years of Forbes top 100 innovative companies, SEC filing of the DEF 14 A for each company for two years, the Kinder, Lyndenberg and Domini database for 10 years and Compustat data for 10 years.

This paper aims to understand the factors that influence employee organizational identification in family firms, and through identification, the willingness to engage in citizenship behaviors.

Drawing from the stewardship theory, the authors develop a model to test the relationships between family relatedness and relational identification to the family firm owner, employee-focused stewardship practices, organizational identification and organizational citizenship behaviors. The authors test the hypotheses using regression and the Preacher and Hayes PROCESS macro on a sample of 292 family firm employees.

The findings suggest that both relational identification with the family firm owner and employee-focused stewardship practices positively influence organizational identification, and that familial ties to the family firm owner can influence relationships with citizenship behaviors for non-family employees.

The authors build on existing literature to investigate how employees identify themselves within a family firm and how stewardship practices from the employee's perspective (rather than managers' or founders' perspectives) can influence organizational identification and citizenship behaviors.

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological advancements observed nowadays, entrepreneurs as human beings will always strive to be social. During the COVID-19 pandemic many companies moved activities into the virtual world and as a result offline Social relationships became rarer, but as it turns out, even more valuable, likewise, the inter-organizational cooperation enabling many companies to survive.

This chapter aims to develop knowledge about entrepreneurs’ SR and their links with inter-organizational cooperation. The results of an integrative systematic literature review show that the concept of Social relationships, although often investigated, lacks a clear definition, conceptualization, and operationalization. This chapter revealed a great diversity of definitions for Social relationships, including different scopes of meaning and levels of analysis. The authors identify 10 building blocks and nine sources of entrepreneurs’ Social relationships. The authors offer an original typology of Social relationships using 12 criteria. Interestingly, with regard to building blocks, besides those frequently considered such as trust, reciprocity and commitment, the authors also point to others more rarely and narrowly discussed, such as gratitude, satisfaction and affection. Similarly, the authors discuss the varied scope of sources, including workplace, family/friendship, past relationships, and ethnic or religious bonds. The findings of this study point to a variety of links between Social relationships and inter-organizational cooperation, including their positive and negative influences on one another. These links appear to be extremely dynamic, bi-directional and highly complex.

The purpose of this paper is to model and investigate collaborative culture and relationship strength roles in supply chain collaboration. This research highlights critical role played by culture and relationship strength in collaboration.

Drawing from relational view, a conceptual model is developed with the help of literature, and the model is validated with data collected in India using partial least squares method.

Results and analyses revealed that culture and relationship strength significantly and strongly influence each collaborative activity. The relationship strength fully mediates between collaborative culture and supply chain performance. The research also finds that the relationship strength partially mediates between collaborative culture and market-based information sharing, operational resource planning and sharing. In the long-term, collaborative culture drives relationship strength and the element enhances collaborative activities.

This research attempted to explore collaborative culture and relationship strength which are crucial for collaborative relationship. Many mediation effects are studied which increase the understanding and give insights for its implementation. Its theoretical and practical implications are highlighted. This knowledge has enough potential to lead collaborative relationships towards success.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the multi-faceted role of metaroutines in dealing with nested ambidexterity challenges experienced during new product introductions (NPIs) at Tata Motors, an Indian automotive giant.

This study utilizes an in-depth multi-level case study highlighting the ambidexterity dynamics across strategic, business unit and functional levels.

The authors visualize the NPI system found in the firm, including the interactions between structure, process and governance, as a metaroutine. Based on this visualization, the authors argue that certain ostensive (like voice of customer, commonality) and performative (role of leadership and creative recombination) aspects of the metaroutine aid exploratory and exploitative learning across levels at Tata Motors. Further, the authors argue that the role of embedded NPI metaroutine aspects in promoting multi-level ambidexterity offers a distinct form when compared with other academically established forms of structural, contextual and temporal ambidexterity.

This study focuses on the aspects of the NPI metaroutine that enable ambidexterity within the studied firm. The authors argue that apart from the structural, temporal and contextual mechanisms, managers also need to focus on the nuances of NPI metaroutines and their potential to promote ambidexterity across levels.

The authors visualize the interactions between the process, structure and governance mechanisms, related to NPI, as a metaroutine. The authors argue that metaroutine enabled approaches to ambidexterity offer a distinct form when compared with other academically established forms of structural, contextual and temporal ambidexterity. Also, metaroutine enabled ambidexterity explains a possible way through which multi-level ambidexterity can be promoted and managed within organizations.

This study aims to develop a cross-level research model to explore the relationship between team-level contextual ambidexterity and employees' enterprise system (ES) ambidextrous use, and the mediating role of user empowerment in and moderating effect of leader–member exchange (LMX) on the relationship.

This study conducted a sequential mixed-methods approach, which included a quantitative survey and a qualitative case study. The survey, administered to 244 employees in 59 groups from a financial institution, analyzed the relationships between contextual ambidexterity and ES ambidextrous use. Furthermore, the cross-level mediation and moderation effects were explored. The case study, involving nine members in three groups from a manufacturing firm, served to reinforce the validity of the survey results.

Team-level contextual ambidexterity can affect ES ambidextrous use directly or through the partial mediator of user empowerment. Furthermore, this study highlights the moderating role of LMX in the relationship between contextual ambidexterity and user empowerment, thereby improving ES ambidextrous use.

This study contributes to the literature by uncovering the cross-level effect of contextual ambidexterity on ES ambidextrous use through user empowerment, thereby extending the ambidexterity perspective and self-determination theory to the ES context. Additionally, this study provides nuanced insights into how to enhance ES ambidextrous use by revealing the moderating role and moderated mediation effect of LMX anchoring on social exchange theory.