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Insufficient intra-organizational diffusion of prefabricated construction (PC) technology hinders its implementation benefits. More research on intra-organizational diffusion of PC technology is required to improve organizational performance in PC implementation. This study aims to explore the antecedents and consequence of intra-organizational diffusion of PC technology.

This study established an antecedent and consequence model of intra-organizational diffusion of PC technology from the perspective of contingency theory. The model was empirically tested by 91 valid questionnaires using partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results indicate that organizational support (OSU), organizational climate (OC) and mechanistic organizational structure (OST) positively influence intra-organizational diffusion of PC technology, which further positively influences organizational performance. The relationship between OC and intra-organizational diffusion of PC technology is mediated by OSU. Technological turbulence negatively moderates the relationship between OSU and intra-organizational diffusion.

This is the first paper to study the antecedents and consequence of intra-organizational diffusion of PC technology and an expansion of contingency theory in the research field of PC technology. This study helps to theoretically stimulate future research on intra-organizational diffusion and practically promote intra-organizational diffusion of PC technology along with improving organizational performance in its implementation.

Although researchers have long recognized the importance of participating organizations’ (POs) relational behavior for mega construction projects (MCPs) performance, relational behavior may not be executed by POs without effective leadership from project owners. However, little is known about the mechanisms linking owners’ leadership styles to POs’ relational behavior. This study draws on full range leadership theory and role theory to examine the relationships between owners’ leadership styles (i.e. transformational and transactional) and relational behavior. POs’ role orientations (i.e. normative and economic) are considered as potential mediators.

Data were collected from 175 managers deeply involved in MCPs. Hierarchical regression model and bootstrapping methods were performed on the data to examine the direct effects of owners’ leadership on POs’ relational behavior and the mediating effects of POs’ role orientations.

The results revealed that both owners’ transformational and transactional leadership positively affect POs’ relational behavior, despite the former being higher than the latter, and indirectly influence relational behavior via POs’ normative and economic role orientation, respectively.

This study provides a clear picture of how owners’ leadership can motivate POs’ relational behavior to achieve high-quality inter-organizational relationships in MCPs. The findings can guide owners’ top manager selection by prioritizing those with transformational leadership, which is beneficial to achieving high-level relational behavior of POs. The results also imply that owners should pay greater attention to cultivating POs’ normative role orientation by encouraging teamwork and open communication to enhance their implementation of relational behavior.

Unlike previous research focusing more on intra-organizational leader–follower relationship within one PO, this study is one of the first to empirically confirm owners’ leadership as a critical antecedent of POs’ relational behavior, thus enhancing the theoretical understanding of inter-organizational relationship management in MCPs. Based on role theory, this study considers a novel organizational psychology mechanism, i.e. POs’ role orientations, as the mediator to unravel how owners’ leadership affects POs’ relational behavior, which was rarely invoked in MCP leadership literature.

The authors investigate conditions that drive innovation performance in foreign-owned subsidiaries. The authors study five variables affecting innovation performance: organizational agility and digital capabilities as the main drivers and competencies and embeddedness in internal and external networks as complementary antecedents of innovation.

The authors draw on the neo-configurational perspective and apply fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to empirically test survey data from subsidiaries located in the emerging economies of Thailand and Vietnam.

While the authors find no single condition on its own determining innovation performance, the authors do find that in concert they form four configurations of high innovation performance. The results indicate that all configurations contain competencies, as well as that subsidiaries should prioritize between internal and external networks to complement agility, digital capabilities, to achieve high innovation performance. The authors also reveal intriguing contextual differences in the innovation performance configurations between the two host countries.

By incorporating causal complexity as well as substitutability and complementarity of innovation drivers, the authors extend the current understanding of subsidiary innovation performance outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of two dimensions of technological relatedness, namely technological similarity and complementarity, on collaborative performance, plus the mediating role of collaboration network stickiness and the moderating role of partner expertise and geographical distance in interfirm collaboration contexts.

This study takes Chinese Scientific and Technological Achievements (STA) of inter-firm collaboration in five high-tech fields in 2010–2020 as the sample and uses OLS regression to test the hypothesis.

Technological similarity and complementarity positively affect collaborative performance. Partner expertise negatively moderates the relationship between similarity, complementarity and collaborative performance. Geographical distance positively moderates the relationship between similarity and collaborative performance while negatively moderates that between complementarity and collaborative performance. Collaboration network stickiness partly mediates the relationship between similarity and collaborative performance.

This study expands literature on inter-firm collaboration, especially research on the antecedents of collaborative performance. Moreover, this study not only compensates for lack of empirical analysis in partner selection research, but also utilizes second-hand data to enhance the objectivity of analysis. Additionally, we enrich the research on the moderating role of partner expertise and geographical distance as well as the mediating role of collaboration network stickiness.

To reconceptualize the organizational environment in a comprehensive manner, it is important to specify not just the velocity but also other aspects of turbulent environments. Concurrently, the purpose of this paper is to also propose that organizational adaptability and, particularly, the speed of adaptations are critical to moderate the impact of turbulence in the environment on organizational performance.

This paper uses a conceptual methodology to fully specify turbulent environments and commensurate managerial response appropriate for such environments. Based on a perspective borrowed from the field of fluid dynamics used to specify the phenomenon of turbulence, the authors develop a conceptual model with research propositions. Four dimensions that describe turbulence in fluid flow when applied metaphorically offer a comprehensive view of the organizational environment.

An extreme, unanticipated, sudden onslaught resulting in a prolonged disrupted environment such as during the recent coronavirus crisis is best characterized as having caused turbulent environmental conditions. Management theories have addressed disruptions as high-velocity environments in the context of rapid changes in information technology. With a broadened conceptualization of the organizational environment to better capture extreme disruptions, the authors provide a comprehensive model appropriate for turbulent environmental conditions and offer research directions for scholarly pursuit.

This paper provides a new perspective from the physical sciences to better conceptualize organizational environments during extreme disruptions such as in turbulent environmental conditions.

As a key driver of organizational agility, open innovation allows for improving time-to-market and complexity, which are the mechanisms that most significantly lower the risk of knowledge expropriation in emerging markets. For this reason, there is concern about the negative impacts of hiding knowledge in the context of inter-organizational collaborative work. Therefore, the research goal is to analyze the moderating effect of the three types of knowledge hiding (playing dumb, evasive hiding and rationalized hiding) on the relationship between open innovation (both inbound and outbound) and agility.

The research model was tested with survey data from a sample of 248 companies located in an emerging country, mostly from sectors of high turbulence in demand and technology.

None of the three types of knowledge hiding has a negative effect on the relationship between open innovation and agility. Surprisingly, evasive hiding has a positive and significant effect, specifically on the relationship between inbound open innovation and agility.

The study contributes to the discussion on the contradictory influence of knowledge hiding. Although the presence of knowledge hiding in business relationships with their external partners is undeniable, this research makes clear that, when faced with the particular need to be agile, businesses recognize that the benefits of open innovation in terms of time-to-market improvement and complexity outweigh the protectionism underlying hiding. Moreover, the study results suggest evasive hiding is essential for the inbound process to use time effectively and avoid wasting it in discussions that do not promote agility.

The organization of services can affect the adoption of sustainable practices within the relationship between a buyer (e.g. a shipper) and a supplier (e.g. a logistics service provider–LSP). The purpose of this paper is to analyse, within this relationship, the mechanisms affecting collaboration between shippers and LSPs towards adopting green logistics practices to reduce the negative environmental effects of logistics processes. The authors take the perspective of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which represent – although less investigated than large enterprises – a relevant field of investigation given their impact on the environmental sustainability of logistics processes.

The authors conducted a multiple case-study investigation on a set of dyads involving shippers and LSPs. The authors explored the antecedents shaping the approach to sustainability in logistics and, adopting the absorptive capacity (AC) theory, the learning and knowledge transfer processes leading to the adoption of green practices.

Collaboration between shippers and LSPs for better sustainability in logistics seems not to work when relationships are limited to simple annual (or pluriannual) contracts, and when shippers do not show ambition to improve the level of sustainability of their logistics processes (regardless of whether they show an interest in general sustainability matters). On the other hand, successful cases show higher commitment in the dyadic relationship with respect to improving logistics sustainability, good levels of communication and a more structured process of knowledge sharing, enabled by IT integration, shared performance monitoring, and creation of inter-organizational teams.

While most of the existing research focuses on the perspective of shippers or LSPs, this work is original since it explores collaborative mechanisms within a buyer-supplier relationship simultaneously taking the perspective of both parties, according to the lens of the AC. It identifies directions for improving collaboration within the shipper-LSP relationship in the context of SMEs to foster the adoption of collaborative green logistics practices to impact sustainability positively.

This paper aims to explore the challenges and opportunities faced by buying centers in small and medium enterprises (SME) manufacturing companies in view of recent technological changes and the virtualization of communication.

This study uses a qualitative approach with multiple case studies to portray complex realities within the buying centers in the manufacturing SME context. The authors selected five Italian companies to portray the diverse characteristics, practices and policies of relevant stakeholders before reaching saturation with the issues explored.

The authors find that interactions among buying center members are more effective with greater collaboration and exchange (as opposed to competition and a struggle for power). Virtual/hybrid relations require greater intra-group cooperation, whereas diverse backgrounds and collaborative interactions help the flexibility and performance of the buying center. Greater use of technology produces certainty and automation, but it may also cause overload and biases that can be solved with the ability to analyze and clear responsibility for decisions.

The authors studied only five Italian companies in this study. Future research in other countries with diverse cultural and socio-economic conditions and methods would help extend this research.

The findings would improve the understanding of the challenges of adopting new purchase process technologies that would help automate routine tasks, produce useful data and support decision-making.

Unlike prior studies, this study uses an exploratory design to study the evolution of buying centers in SMEs to seek deeper insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by SMEs because of the growing use of emerging technologies.

This study investigated the relationship between last-mile distribution or delivery (LMD) and commodity access through the mediating role of commodity availability and commodity security and the moderating effect of supply chain integration (SCI).

The study adopted the survey research design and employed the questionnaire instrument in collecting primary data from respondents in Eastern Regional Health Institutions in Ghana. The total number of valid responses received was 204. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was adopted to analyze the relationship between the study variables.

The findings showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between LMD and commodity availability as well as LMD and commodity security. Moreover, while the relationship between commodity availability and commodity access is positive and significant, that between commodity security and commodity access is positive but insignificant. Furthermore, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between LMD and commodity access. The study discovered that the interaction between LMD and commodity access is insignificant and negatively affected by SCI.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, no previous studies have empirically verified the effect of LMD on commodity access in the presence of mediating factors such as commodity availability and commodity security and SCI as the moderating factors.

The study sets out to demonstrate how a lifecycle perspective on complex, public-sector procurement projects can be used for making qualitative assessments of procurement policy and practice and reveal those procurement capabilities that are most impactful for operating effectively.

Agency theory, institutional theory and the lifecycle analysis technique are combined to abductively develop a framework to identify, analyse and compare complex procurement policies and practices in public sector organisations. Defence is the focal case and is compared with cases in the Nuclear, Local Government and Health sectors.

The study provides a framework for undertaking a lifecycle analysis to understand the challenges and capabilities of complex, public-sector buyers. Eighteen hierarchically-arranged themes are identified and used in conjunction with agency theory and institutional theory to explain complex procurement policy and practice variation in some of the UK’s highest-profile public buyers. The study findings provide a classification of complex buyers and offer valuable guidance for practitioners and researchers navigating complex procurement contexts.

The lifecycle approach proposed is a new research tool providing a bespoke application of theory by considering each lifecycle phase as an individual but related element that is governed by unique institutional pressures and principal-agent relationships.