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Although individual exploration activities have been shown to promote organizational change and innovation, few studies have clarified the factors that quantitatively promote such aspects. This study aims to examine how individual exploration activities are facilitated by goal orientation and individual unlearning.

The data are analyzed from 1,474 employees in various jobs in a variety of organizations in Japan. This study uses structural equation modeling to test the research model.

The results of this study indicate three findings. First, unlearning is effective in promoting individual exploration activities. Second, goal orientation has not only a direct effect on individual exploration activities but also a significant indirect effect on such activities through unlearning. Third, performance goal orientation has an inhibitory effect on individual exploration activities.

Managers should encourage team members’ exploration activities by setting learning goals for members and providing opportunities for members to unlearn the outdated knowledge or skills they are familiar with and learn new ones.

These findings contribute to the existing literature by demonstrating that learning goal orientation and unlearning play important roles in promoting individual exploration activities.

It is increasingly recognised that managers play a central role in organisational ambidexterity. While some scholars have recently begun to explain the nature and antecedents of ambidextrous behaviour among managers, much remains to be learned about the micro-foundations of this behaviour. Adopting a people–situation interaction approach, this paper investigates the antecedents to managerial ambidexterity from both situational and individual difference considerations.

This study adopts a quantitative approach using a combination of survey and archival data from 305 managers.

The results indicate that learning goal orientation is positively related with managerial ambidexterity, whereas there is no significant relationship between functional experience breadth and managerial ambidexterity. In testing moderation effects, discretionary slack is found to positively moderate the association between learning goal orientation and ambidexterity and between functional experiences and ambidexterity.

This paper provides suggestions on employees selection and training, along with organisational support, in enacting managerial ambidexterity.

Guided by individual difference theory, this paper adds value to one’s understanding of the antecedents to managerial ambidexterity. It contributes to the ambidexterity literature from the micro-foundation perspective.

Despite the dramatic increase in people's use of social media, relatively few studies have examined its effect on careers. Drawing upon social comparison theory and self-regulation theory, this study aims to investigate how career-oriented social media usage interacts with social comparison orientation (SCO) to influence the career exploration of university students.

Three waves of survey data are collected from 482 university students in China. Hypotheses are tested through ordinary least squares analysis.

Results show that career-oriented social media usage increases career anxiety, which in turn promotes career exploration. Furthermore, SCO strengthens such influence of career-oriented social media usage.

Given the limited attention paid to the effects of social media in career contexts, this study distinguishes career-oriented social media usage and proposes insights into its effect on career exploration. In doing so, this study extends social media literature and provides implications for the transition of university students from school to work in the digital era.

The task of leading innovation is predominantly pictured as a supportive role vis-à-vis employees. Motivation is a crucial aspect of this task. To better understand the practice of this change-oriented leadership task, the actual behavior and activities of managers are investigated. The purpose of this paper is to reflect through practice and self-reports how this leadership challenge is executed.

In this longitudinal multi-method investigation, the service innovation literature constitutes the main theoretical framework. The investigation draws additionally on leadership literature about how to understand leadership through practice. The methodological design facilitated the drawing of causal inferences in the dynamics of service innovation.

The investigation enhances our understanding of managers’ particular context of innovation, and particularly the initiation context. It provides empirically grounded descriptions of what managers identify as potential opportunities, and how they take them further in the ideation stage. The results develop the suggestion that leadership roles, and specifically change-oriented roles, are not restricted to initiating or enabling activities related to the employees. Instead the much downplayed leadership role, i.e. the active practice-based involvement in innovation, is theorized as a role that is continuously activated, but tends to be set aside for contingency reasons.

Further research is needed to assess the importance of managers’ involvement in the practice of innovation, both through systematic mapping of ideas on a larger scale, and through the employee perspective. This paper provides useful insights on managers’ cognition and involvement in innovation for further investigations of innovation management.

The results provide awareness for managers regarding their diverse leadership roles related to innovation. First, the study embraces heterogeneous ideas that are useful to evaluate and constitute role-modeling. Second, it highlights how managers’ execution of innovation creates awareness about the challenges involved. Finally, but maybe most important, the results alert managers of the discontinuity, even in strategically anchored intentional innovation.

In a changing innovation landscape, individual firms need to draw on other firms to achieve their innovation strategies. In pursuit of this goal, this paper enhances the understanding of the role-modeling leadership task. It is a novel way of guiding individuals that are exposed to new and uncertain innovation contexts, and rethinking how innovation eventually can be achieved.

While earlier research has identified the multifaceted leadership behavior to support innovation, this paper outlines the contextual conditions and the practice of executing the suggested powerful role of being a role-model for others.

Although employees' innovative work behaviors are crucial for innovativeness and the success of modern organization, the impact of individual unlearning and critical reflection on innovative work behaviors is underresearched. This study's goal is to empirically examine relationships between job characteristics, critical reflection, unlearning and innovative work behaviors.

This study uses survey data from 252 Polish employees and the partial least squares method.

The results indicated that, among three considered job characteristics, only problem-solving demands were related to critical reflection. This study also shows that critical reflection is both direct and indirect, through individual unlearning, related to both idea generation and idea realization. However, nonmanagers have stronger relationships between unlearning and innovative work behaviors than do managers, while managers have stronger relationships between critical reflection and innovative work behaviors.

Results of this study may be used by human resource development managers to improve employees' innovative work behavior.

The study contributes to the limited empirical research on the role of critical reflection and individual unlearning for innovative work behavior. This study also explores which job characteristic affects critical reflection.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how universities' learning behavior (explorative or exploitative) and network structure (weak or strong inter‐organizational ties) can affect their capability to collect and diffuse knowledge, and thus to act as knowledge gatekeepers.

The research methodology is based on the longitudinal study (from 2000 to 2007) of three UK universities (University of Cambridge, London's Global University, and Imperial College London), located in the area of London and selected on the basis of their knowledge mobility. In particular, to evaluate the knowledge mobility for each university, the paper considers the collaborative R&D relationships established by each university, in terms of joint‐patents registered at the European Patent Office (EPO).

The analysis has revealed that the universities' knowledge mobility is positively affected by both the explorative learning behavior and the establishment of strong inter‐organizational ties. Moreover, results have shown that an increase of the explorative speed can entail a less positive effect of the exploration on the universities' knowledge mobility, since they can become less able to consolidate and implement the acquired new knowledge.

On the basis of these results, the present research provides interesting implications. In fact, recognizing the importance of explorative learning mechanisms, universities should enlarge and diversify their competencies and technological bases in order to be more effective knowledge sources and gatekeepers. Nevertheless, this shift towards new technologies and scientific fields should occur gradually, for instance towards more similar and contiguous technologies, so guaranteeing the necessary strengthening of skills and capabilities. Referring to the universities' network structure, the research suggests the importance of strong inter‐organizational ties as mechanisms that enable the transfer of knowledge. Hence, universities should promote the formation of stable and long‐lasting alliances and collaborations for favouring the creation of a trustworthy environment where knowledge can be exchanged and innovations rise.

The study contributes to the existing literature on knowledge gatekeepers, identifying its main performance, measuring it, and analyzing the impact exerted by two factors, as learning behavior and network structure.

Ambidexterity in teams represents powerful dynamic capabilities for innovation and adaptation in rapidly changing environments. This study focused on the emerging concept of team ambidexterity. Primary purposes were to consolidate emerging research on ambidexterity within teams and to synthesise antecedent inputs.

This study applied a systematic content-based review method to collect articles relevant to enabling ambidexterity within teams. The study integrated relevant studies on ambidexterity and on teams and teamwork. It analysed content through theoretical frameworks of ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities.

Team ambidexterity constitutes a distinct and increasingly important organisational concept beyond just supporting firm-level ambidexterity. Team ambidexterity depends on inputs that can include ambidexterity's multilevel, generic mechanisms and additional team-centric inputs specially characterising teams.

Organisational leaders need insights into the valuable potential of ambidextrous teams that can increase innovation and enable successful adaptation at an operational level for longterm survival and competitive advantage in volatile environments. The study highlights the essential inputs for designing and equipping ambidextrous teams.

Team ambidexterity research is growing, but so far it has mostly addressed team ambidexterity as a microfoundation supporting firm-level ambidexterity. Existing studies have remained mostly disparate and unorganized. This study appears unique in having identified and synthesised studies most relevant to developing ambidexterity within teams. The study articulated a more comprehensive understanding of team ambidexterity, derived a novel set of team-centric inputs and analysed ambidexterity as dynamic capabilities at operational unit level.

The brand management literature argues that the standardization of branding strategy across global markets leads to consistent and well‐defined brand meaning. The paper aims to challenge this thesis by empirically examining whether and how global brands travel with consumers. The paper studies how consumers create brand meanings at home and abroad as well as the impact of context (e.g. place) on the meaning of global brands for the same consumers.

The paper takes a qualitative approach to examine brand meanings for two prototypical global brands, McDonald's and Starbucks, at home and abroad. Data were collected through photo‐elicited interviews, personal diaries, and essays with 29 middle‐class American consumers before, during, and after a short‐term trip to China. Interviews lasted from 30 to 90 minutes and the data were analyzed using a hermeneutic approach.

Taking a cultural branding approach, the paper demonstrates that despite perceived standardized global brand platforms, consumers develop divergent brand meanings abroad. While at home, global brands have come to symbolize corporate excess, predatory intentions, and cultural homogenizations; abroad they evoke meanings of comfort, predictability, safety, and national pride. In foreign contexts, global brands become dwelling resources that enable travelers to sustain daily consumption rituals, evoke sensory experiences of home, as well as provide a comfortable and welcoming space.

The paper challenges the brand management literature assumption of a consistent brand image for standardized global brands. It shows that the cultural context (e.g. place) impacts consumer‐derived brand meanings even among the same group of consumers. Further, it argues that standardization offered by global brands provides an important symbolic value to mobile consumers of serving as an anchor to the home left behind.

This study aims to qualitatively investigate when and how individuals' paradox mindset influences their individual unlearning.

This study adopted Charmaz's constructivist grounded theory approach based on constructivist ontology and interpretive epistemology. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 16 employees of a research company. The employees were asked about their perceptions of their roles and other factors that stimulated them to unlearn in a tension-setting environment.

This study developed a process model of paradox mindset for enhancing individual unlearning through three relational mechanisms, namely, enabling motivation to unlearn, understanding to unlearn and engaging in the unlearning process. The unlearning process is found to be influenced by paradoxical frames and emotions. Moreover, external factors, such as organizational changes, stimulate the adoption of paradoxical cognition and emotions while resource availability facilitates the unlearning process.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to qualitatively investigate how a paradox mindset facilitates the process of unlearning through relational mechanisms. This model provides a holistic understanding of the cognitive, emotional and motivational processes involved in accepting the tensions of unlearning and promoting the unlearning process. The findings also have implications for research on paradox theory and the management of unlearning tensions at the micro level.