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The purpose of this paper is to propose that the resources that a firm owns and has full control (firm-level resources) and resources that a firm access through direct connection with other firms (network-level resources) will impact firm innovation when effectively deployed by the firm. While previous research examined these factors separately, the author takes a holistic view and looks into their effects on innovation simultaneously. The author also introduces the moderating effects, i.e. the variables that can enhance firm innovation through their interaction with internal and external resources.

The author tested the role of financial resources and slack resources in the form of cash slack and human slack at the firm level, and network size, network tie strength, and network diversity at the network level on the firm innovation. Using generalized negative binomial model with Huber-White procedure, the author analyzed 306 firms from the biotechnology industry over a span of 17 years.

The analysis suggests that cash slack impact innovation negatively. However, this link is moderated by firm size such that for large firms cash slack affects innovation positively. Network-level resources all positively impact innovation and have more economic impact on firm innovation than firm-level resources. Furthermore, although human slack negatively affects innovation, its interaction with network size enhances innovation.

The research makes important contributions to both strategic management and innovation literatures especially when, the author considers the role of firm-level slack in driving firm innovation. Previous research reported conflicting findings about the availability of slack resources and firm performance. The results showed that the relationship between slack resources and firm innovation is negative and significant, both for available slack and human slack. This finding parallels with previous research which reported that constraints such as lack of slack resources can actually facilitate innovation. The author also contributes to the literature by introducing boundary conditions which can enhance firm innovation through their interaction with firm-level internal and network-level external resources. In this respect, to the author’s knowledge, this is among the first studies to combine the slack literature focusing on firm-level resources with the literature on network-level resources.

This study aims to examine how servitization affects the environmental and social performance of manufacturing firms.

The hypotheses are tested using fixed-effect panel models based on secondary data of 1,413 manufacturing firms publicly listed in the USA.

Results show that servitization is positively related to the social performance of manufacturing firms; this positive relationship is more prominent under high levels of human resource slack. However, the impact of servitization on environmental performance depends on the level of absorptive capacity and human resource slack. Servitization improves environmental performance under high levels of absorptive capacity and human resource slack, while this positive impact is insignificant under low levels of absorptive capacity and human resource slack.

The study focuses on the degree (depth) of servitization but ignores the scope of services provided by manufacturing firms (breadth of servitization).

This research suggests that servitization is an effective way of achieving simultaneous improvements in environmental and social performance. However, high levels of absorptive capacity and human resource slack are needed to achieve this goal.

This study contributes to the servitization literature by demonstrating the environmental and social sustainability benefits of servitization. The findings also highlight the crucial role of absorptive capacity and human resource slack on improving environmental and social performance through servitization.

Scholars have recognized that formal hierarchical structures and slack resources are at the core of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) attainment of ambidexterity. Surprisingly, few studies on SMEs have analyzed the extent to which these structural and resource attributes are associated with exploration and exploitation. This study aims to examine how two structural attributes, formalization and structural empowerment, and two resource attributes, financial slack and human resource slack, affect exploration and exploitation in SMEs.

Data were gathered from a survey administered to the chief executive officers of 522 French SMEs. The research hypotheses were then tested using seemingly unrelated regressions to investigate the contrasts between the two components of ambidexterity.

The results show that structural empowerment and financial slack may be conducive to exploration and exploitation at the same time. By contrast, formalization and human resource slack impact only one of these two ambidexterity components in significant ways: the former may be a powerful lever for exploitation, while the latter may be a powerful lever for exploration.

Relying on a dual structure–resource perspective, this study allows us to discuss the distinct impacts that several organizational antecedents have on exploration and exploitation in the specific context of SMEs. It thus addresses the recent call to identify which antecedents are integrating and which are differentiating to help firms deal with ambidexterity.

This work aims to propose an alternative method of human capital calculation for research laboratories of public university, taking into account some drawbacks of the methods currently applied in this field.

This method is implemented via a linear program extracted from Data Envelopment Analysis based on slack movement. This is the formulation of Copper et al. (2000), which is used as the starting point for developing the proposed method through important transformations.

The proposed method is supported by an illustration related to a Moroccan public university. This illustration showed that 57 per cent of the laboratories and all the research activities that they perform are in deficit with respect to target scores.

The proposed method has technical limitations related to scores equal to 1 and to variables when those are numerous. To solve them, it is possible to use peer benchmarking system for the first limitation, and methods of regrouping the variables when those are numerous for the second limitation. Equally, the proposed method does not associate slack with important factors like governance and the impact analysis of research on innovation, competitiveness, and societal aspects. Likewise, it does not use the slack to measure individual efficiency at the same laboratory. Future research can fill these gaps.

This work allows making appropriate budgetary and research policy within university, through budgeting process and management control by using raw and adjusted target values as well as actual ones. Also, the highlighting of the excessive slacks leads the university to take actions to reduce them, according to the most loss-making research activities.

The proposed method is original, since it fills a deficit in terms of human capital target values calculation and of the slack movement concept in relation to the efficient frontier. Additionally, it transforms the Data Envelopment Analysis program into a program that eliminates the slacks linked to the inputs, the radial movement related to the outputs and treats only the outputs and slacks related to these outputs.

This study aims to analyse the impact of the degree of internationalisation (DOI) on firm performance (FP), with the moderating role of organisational slack resources, namely, absorbed slack human resources, absorbed financial slack resources and unabsorbed slack resources, in the context of Asian emerging markets.

Data includes 45 companies and 225 observations in 2014–2018. The authors adopted the generalised least squares method to test their hypotheses.

DOI negatively influences FP, indicating that the link between DOI and FP is not U-shaped but relatively linear. Absorbed human resources and absorbed slack financial resources significantly enhance FP, absorbing resources associated with DOI and FP. Unabsorbed slack resources play a minor role in mitigating the deleterious impact of DOIs on FP.

Firms in an emerging market should begin exploring and expanding into overseas markets with characteristics similar to the domestic market. The firm should optimise the benefits of slack resources by appropriately allocating resources to strategic operations.

This study reveals the beneficial effect of organisational slack resources on the DOI-FP relationship via the lens of the resource-based view.

Planning is a perennially popular management tool with an ambiguous relationship to learning and performance. The purpose of this study attempts to resolve this ambiguity. The authors suggest that the critical question is not whether firms need learning for planning to influence performance, but when different firms experience different performance outcomes. The authors propose firms will benefit from strategic planning only when they learn from planning and have the resources to act on their learning.

The authors collected data from a survey of 293 individuals from 191 publicly listed US firms.

Organizational learning mediates the relations between strategic planning and organizational performance. This mediated relationship is positively moderated by high levels of human resource slack and moderate to high levels of financial slack.

The study provides evidence for previous theoretical arguments on the planning–learning relationship while extending this research by finding a complicated moderating effect of slack. The study also adds to the existing debate on optimal slack levels by suggesting that having bundles of slack resources may matter more than having uniformly high or low levels of slack. A cross-sectional study means the authors cannot infer causation.

While strategic planning is a common practice, companies may vary in their planning methodologies, influencing the outcomes of planning. Firms seeking to benefit from planning need to have both the mechanisms to learn from planning and slack to deploy these mechanisms.

These findings clarify the planning–learning–performance relationship while challenging the assumption of an average effect of planning on performance across firms.

How does corporate downsizing contribute to a firm’s long-term value? While the extant empirical findings on this relationship are inconclusive, contradictory and equivocal, the answers to this question remain particularly important in today’s business environment. Considering that downsizing is often directed toward long-term growth and survival, the authors posit that scholars should account for the temporal nature of this strategic decision to understand its economic impact on the firm’s operations. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide a more rigorous empirical examination of how a firm’s decision to downsize its workforce affects that firm’s long-term value.

The authors used Wibbens and Siggelkow’s (2020) measure of long-term investor value appropriation (LIVA) to directly observe the effects of corporate downsizing on firm long-term value and growth. Using a sample of 3,149 US publicly traded manufacturing firms that operated between 2002 and 2018, the authors tested the main effect of downsizing on LIVA and three boundary condition hypotheses.

The authors found a positive relationship between corporate downsizing and a firm’s long-term value. Interestingly, this positive relationship is stronger among firms that had high human resource slack and R&D intensity. Contrary to our expectations, the authors did not find support for the moderation effect of the proximity to bankruptcy on the relationship between corporate downsizing and a firm’s long-term value.

With these findings, this paper sheds light on the long-term implications of a firm’s decision to downsize its workforce.

The proposed theoretical model offers a systematic approach to synthesize the fragmented research on organizational crisis, disasters and extreme events.

This paper offers a theoretical model of organizational responses to extreme threats.

The paper explains that organizations choose between hypervigilance (freeze), exit (flight), growth (fight) and dormancy (fright) when faced with extreme threats. The authors explain how the choice between these responses are informed by the interplay between slack and routines.

The study’s theoretical model contributes by explaining the nature of organizational responses to extreme threats and how the two underlying mechanisms, slack and routines, determine heterogeneity between organizations.

The authors advance four key managerial considerations: the need to distinguish between discrete and chronic threats, the critical role of hypervigilance in the face of extreme threats, the distinction between resources and routines during threat mitigation, and the recognition that organizational exit may sometimes be the most effective means for survival.

The novelty of this paper pertains to the authors’ use of the comparative developmental approach to incorporate insights from the study of individual responses to life-threatening events to explain organizational responses to extreme threats.

This study aims to investigate the impact of digital orientation (DO) on organizational resilience (OR) and explore the contingency effects of human resource slack and nature of enterprise ownership.

The model hypotheses were tested using fixed effects regression on panel data collected from Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms spanning from 2007 to 2020.

DO has a positive effect on OR. Human resource slack positively moderates the relationship between DO and OR. Additionally, DO enhances OR more effectively in non-state-owned firms than in state-owned firms.

This study relies on data from a single industry from a single country.

The study supports that firms facing uncertainty, risk and pressure should promptly develop their DO strategy. Firms can derive greater resilience from implementing a DO strategy when they have a high-level human resource pool. State-owned enterprises will benefit from a DO strategy if they make some adaptive changes in leadership, structure, culture and mindset aspects.

This study is the first to examine the relationship between DO and OR, contributing to the existing literature on digital transformation and organizational resilience. It offers valuable insights for practitioners and policymakers seeking to adapt their organizations for the digital era and foster predictive, defensive and growth responses strategies in a dynamic business environment.

This paper systematically reviews the past four years of research on human resource management (HRM) in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to better understand: (1) recent theoretical and empirical developments and where scholarship in the field is headed (i.e. trends); (2) what topics and findings are especially important to understanding how the thought and practice of nonprofit HRM differs from that in public and for-profit organizations (i.e. insights); and (3) what gaps exist in current knowledge and scholarship and some real-world, practice-driven developments in people management that illuminate promising future research directions (i.e. opportunities).

Sixty-seven peer-reviewed journal articles covering the period 2015–2018 were identified using a university library database search, as well as by-hand searches through every issue of 22 nonprofit and 36 human resources-related journals during the four-year period.

The findings highlight strong continued interest by scholars in a wide range of nonprofit HRM issues, coverage of these issues by a worldwide network of researchers who bring global perspectives and contexts to the study of nonprofit HRM, and rich theoretical and methodological diversity. Yet, compared with the universe of possible human resource topics and several leading-edge developments in organizations and societies that might affect the way people are managed in nonprofits, the paper uncovers gaps in the most recent knowledge base.

The paper creates a compilation of the most recent nonprofit human resource research to be used as a tool for scholars, students, and practitioners for many years to come.