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Do managers at different hierarchical levels in a firm perceive the effectiveness of a lean program differently, and does it matter for their commitment to it and the resulting lean implementation? This study answers these questions by analyzing the perceptions and behaviors of top and middle managers in a manufacturer deploying a global lean program.

The authors hypothesize that managers at different levels perceive lean programs differently, which, in turn, should affect their commitment to lean and the resulting implementation. To test these relationships empirically, the authors collect survey data from a global manufacturer in the process industry and analyze them using hierarchical linear regression and structural equation modeling.

The findings show that middle managers perceive lean programs as more effective than top managers do. They further show that higher commitment from the top and middle managers to the lean program is positively related to building the organizational infrastructure needed for lean implementation.

This research is conducted in one global company. Although the research setting implicitly controls for many possible confounding variables, such as the product and process complexity or organizational culture, future research can explore and test the findings in other organizational contexts.

This study is the first to empirically study the relations between perceptions of and commitment to lean programs across different hierarchical levels and what it means for program implementation. The paper contributes new plausible explanations for why many lean programs slow down.

Existing research suggests that organizational learning, jointly implemented by principals and teachers may reduce agency risks and improve school management effectiveness. However, research investigating how this process occurs is lacking. The relationship between school leaders promoting the involvement of teachers in school-wide processes focused on instructional improvement and the coherence characterizing a school's instructional program remains unclear.

The authors identified shared instructional leadership and instructional coherence, as two key variables describing the process of organizational learning and the outcome of agency risk reduction. The authors employed hierarchical linear modeling to test the hypothesis that shared leaderships positively predicts differences among schools in instructional coherence.

Based on a sample of 113 public high schools selected from a U.S. Midwestern state, the results confirm the hypothesis.

This study uses the existing theoretical and empirical findings to interpret the potential relationship between shared leadership and instructional coherence, and validates it through empirical data analysis. The findings expand the understanding of the shared leadership theory. Although the design of this study is strictly based on theoretical and empirical findings, and part of the purpose of the research is to find the reasons why shared leadership seems to be insignificant in some countries and regions, readers should still note that the sample source is American schools. The findings of this study are worth examining with different samples in future studies.

Since the direct relationship between shared leadership and student standardized test scores has been difficult to measure, and in some countries even negative, there is debate about the need for shared leadership. The difficulty of measurement is caused by the diversity of leadership subjects and the complexity of leadership tasks. This study finds out the direct object of shared leadership and the process of exerting its effects, which will expand the understanding of the positive meaning of shared leadership. This will help different countries and regions better identify and play the role of shared leadership.

Based on the combination of organizational learning theory, agency theory and shared leadership theory, the study modeled the process of collaborative organizational learning among principals and teachers. The study employed instructional coherence as a form of structured organizational learning that is a prerequisite for improvement in common measures of student learning such as standardized test scores. Do so provide practical guidance for educators seeking improvement through organizational learning.

Although emerging markets are distinctly known for the rapid growth and international expansion of their state-owned enterprises, little is known about the influence of parent resource advantages and mixed state ownership on a subsidiary’s performance. Using the resource-based view, this study aims to investigate how resource advantages from the parent company and state ownership influence the performance of subsidiaries.

This study included a unique data set of 207 subsidiaries from 33 large Brazilian multinationals located in 32 countries from 2000 to 2015. The authors used a hierarchical linear modeling and a multilevel structure based on data at different levels to analyze the influence of home-country parent resource advantages and state ownership on host-country subsidiary’s performance.

This study illustrates that state ownership can alleviate the resource advantages of parent companies. Evidence is presented, indicating that low and medium degrees of state ownership have a negative impact on the resource advantages of the parent company, consequently reducing the subsidiary’s performance. Moreover, this study highlights that low and medium degrees of state ownership lead to conflicting interests between state ownership and parent resource advantages, resulting in an overall decline in subsidiary performance.

This research contributes new evidence regarding state ownership and resource advantages to the field of international business studies and the domain of Latin American multinational enterprises, Multilatinas. The results suggest that low and medium levels of state ownership diminish the influx of resources from parent companies, thereby restricting the subsidiary’s performance.

The early care and education (ECE) workforce plays a pivotal role in shaping early childhood developmental trajectories and simultaneously experiences significant mental health disparities. The purpose of this study is to investigate how social determinants of health and external stressors are associated with the mental health of ECE staff, which represent a low-resourced segment of the workforce; how psychological capital (psycap) can mitigate these associations.

The authors administered an 89-item survey to 332 ECE staff employed in 42 Head Start centers in the USA. The authors ran three hierarchical linear regression models to analyze associations between social determinants of health, external sources of stress, psycap and potential moderation effects and mental health outcomes.

Individuals experiencing greater finance-related stress reported 0.15 higher scores on the depression scale and 0.20 higher scores on the anxiety scale than those experiencing less finance-related stress (p < 0.05). Individuals experiencing greater work-related stress reported 1.26 more days of poorer mental health in the past month than those experiencing less work-related stress (p < 0.01). After controlling for all sociodemographic variables and sources of stress, psycap was significantly and negatively associated with depressive symptomology (b-weight = −0.02, p < 0.01) and the number of poor mental health days reported in the past month (b-weight = −0.13, p < 0.05). Moderation models suggest that higher levels of psycap may mitigate the association between work-related stress and the number of poor mental health days reported in the past month (b-weight = −0.06, p = 0.02).

The implications of these findings suggest a need for policy change to mitigate social determinants of health and promote pay equity and multi-level interventio ns that target workplace-related stressors and psycap to combat poor mental health of the ECE workforce.

The effects of ownership concentration on firm performance usually considers two conflicting perspectives: monitoring and expropriation hypotheses. Past studies have produced mix findings. This study aims to shed light on this relationship by focusing on a specific measure of firm performance, firm growth. The moderating effect of industry growth in the aforementioned relationship is also considered, which advances knowledge on the role of moderators.

This study resorts to data from a sample of 21,476 Portuguese firms, which is examined using hierarchical linear modelling. This approach is adequate because the data has a hierarchical structure: the firms are nested within industries.

The results show that equity ownership concentration has a positive effect on firms’ growth and that industry growth amplifies this relationship. Ownership concentration can spur effective monitoring, thereby alleviating principal–agent conflicts of interest and speeding up decision-making, enabling timely competitive actions that promote growth.

The research conceives ownership structure in two groups. However, equity ownership concentration often acquires more complex shapes. In addition, the data used is from a single country.

The results show that firms pursuing growing strategies and operating in growing industries benefit from equity concentration.

Different from past studies, this study focuses on firm growth performance and considers the moderating effect of industry growth.

This study investigates the crucial link between sustainable practices and organizational development, focusing on sustainable knowledge management (SKM), green innovation (GI) and corporate sustainable development (CSD) in diverse Pakistani organizations.

This study employs a comprehensive research methodology involving advanced statistical techniques, such as confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling. These methods are instrumental in exploring the complex interrelationships between SKM, GI, moderating factors and CSD.

This research generates significant findings and actively contributes to sustainable development. The following sections (Sections 4 and 5) delve into the specific findings and in-depth discussions, shedding light on how industry regulation, organizational sustainability priorities, workplace culture collaboration and alignment between green culture and knowledge management practices influence the relationships between SKM, GI and CSD. These findings provide valuable insights for the research community and organizations striving for sustainability.

The study’s findings have practical implications for organizations seeking to enhance their sustainability efforts and embrace a socially and environmentally conscious approach to organizational growth.

This study contributes to the literature on sustainable practices and organizational development. Researchers and business people can learn a lot from it because it uses advanced econometric models in new ways and focuses on the link between knowledge management, GI and sustainable corporate development.

On the basis of the hierarchical organizational structure, this study investigated how empowering leadership influences hotel employees' proactive work behavior through multiple cross-level mediation processes. This study also investigated whether psychological empowerment, positive psychological capital, job characteristics and job embeddedness can activate the linkage of the aforementioned trickle-down effects.

This study draws data from 826 international tourist hotel employees at different times with hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses.

Multiple cross-level mediation analyses indicate that (1) psychological empowerment mediates the cross-level influences of empowering leadership on job characteristics and positive psychological capital; (2) positive psychological capital mediates the cross-level influences of empowering leadership on job embeddedness and proactive work behavior; and (3) job embeddedness mediates the cross-level influences of psychological empowerment and job characteristics on proactive work behavior.

In the post-pandemic era, the valuable trickle-down effects of empowering leadership could spill over into employees' positive beliefs of psychological empowerment, which ultimately benefit working responsibility and organizational operations.

The results support and suggest that maximizing the benefits of empowering leadership could eventually foster proactivity and performance in the workplace under hospitality and tourism settings.

The study aims to explore the effectiveness of performance-oriented practices like high-performance work practices (HPWPs) in higher education (HE), given its explicit focus on performance these days.

The study uses hierarchical linear modeling using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS 22.0) to test the hypotheses. An intertwined framework of the ability–motivation–opportunity (AMO) model and the job demand-resources (JD-R) model was proposed. The study considered strategic hiring, recognition and participatory decision-making as ability, motivation and opportunity-enhancing practices respectively. Further, the study addressed the impact of institutional level moderators, like administrative workload (AWL) and support staff (SS).

The findings based on the responses of 385 faculties and 443 students from 36 Indian institutes, indicated that HPWPs enhanced the education performance (EP) of HE institutes. Further, results revealed that both AWL and SS had differential effects on the relationship between HPWPs and EP. Contrary to authors’ expectations, SS showed a negative effect of the relationship between HPWPs and EP.

The increased AWL was debilitating the beneficial effects HPWPs. The negative interaction effect of SS sheds light on the hidden issues surrounding SS in HE institutes. Based on findings, the study offered important theoretical and practical implications.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, the impact of innovative human resource (HR) practices in academia remains relatively under-researched, and the current study is an attempt to fill this void.

Based on the conservation of resource theory, this paper explores the impact of differentiated transformational leadership on employees' taking charge in the context of Chinese organizations, with psychological availability as a mediator and collectivism orientation as a moderator.

The authors distributed paired questionnaires to 67 team managers and 219 team members to obtain research data and established a hierarchical linear model for the hypothesis testing.

The results show that team-focus transformational leadership has a significant positive impact on employees' taking charge, and individual-focus transformational leadership has a significant negative impact on employees' taking charge. Specifically, psychological availability plays a partial mediating role between differentiated transformational leadership and employees' taking charge. Moreover, collectivism orientation has no significant moderating effect between team-focus transformational leadership and psychological availability. But it has a significant moderating effect between individual-focus transformational leadership and psychological availability, i.e. the higher the level of collectivism orientation, the stronger the negative effect of individual-focus transformational leadership on psychological availability.

The paper notes the hierarchy of differentiated transformational leadership and divides it into team-focus transformational leadership and individual-focus transformational leadership. It also provides a new mechanism and boundary condition, i.e. differentiated transformational leadership has an impact on employees' taking charge through psychological availability and collectivism orientation is a moderator.

This study aims to explore the effects of expertise diversity on project efficiency and creativity in health-care project teams.

This study analyzes hierarchical linear models using multi-source data from 50 project teams in a large health-care organization in the USA. This data set includes self-reported survey responses from 274 team members and human resource information for all 515 members across the 50 teams. Expertise diversity is operationalized by professional diversity and positional diversity reflecting two dimensions, domain and level, of the concept of expertise.

This study reveals that professional diversity is negatively related to project efficiency and project creativity, whereas positional diversity is positively related to project efficiency.

Successfully managing a project team of experts within a limited time frame is a challenge for organizations. This study advances the understanding of the double-edged sword effect of expertise diversity on project teams, focusing on professional and positional diversity. It provides important insights for human resource development in terms of the composition of project teams regarding members’ expertise.