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Studies of inter-organizational relationships have traditionally overlooked the human resource management (HRM) field, with most research focusing on collaborations in the technical domain. This study endeavors to explore the impact of organizational human resources (HR) collaborations on HR innovativeness, drawing on theories about organizational learning capabilities to explain this connection. By analyzing the synergies arising from inter-organizational HR collaborations, this study aims to seek to shed light on the potential for HRM to contribute to organizational performance and foster innovation.

The study is based on a quantitative survey conducted among 326 Dutch companies. The survey aims to find out whether these companies collaborate with other organizations on HR-related issues, the extent to which they renew their HRM function, and whether they apply organizational learning practices. The data collected for the survey are analyzed using Hayes PROCESS macro to investigate mediation effects.

As per the study, HR collaboration results in innovation. The research suggests that collaborating with HR across different organizations significantly contributes to HR innovation. This relationship can be explained by the inter-organizational learning practices that organizations adopt. Therefore, when organizations collaborate with each other, they learn from each other, which enhances their learning capabilities and ultimately leads to HR innovation.

This study delves into the extent to which organizations collaborate on HR-related issues, which is a relatively new field. Moreover, it contributes to the research on the connection between inter-organizational relationships and innovation by showing how much of it is explained by organizational learning.

The purpose of this paper is to help better understand the translation process of the management control system (MCS) of privatised solid waste management (SWM) towards creating a stable network.

Drawing on the actor network theory (ANT), the case of a privatised SWM was studied. Data were collected from all entities involved in the privatisation process of SWM, which include Department A, Corporation X and the private sector concessionaire. Six documents were reviewed, 20 interviews were conducted and two observations were carried out.

The findings reveal that the control mechanism of SWM is complex, involving the interaction between human and non-human actors. Non-human actors include the key performance indicators (KPIs) and the concessionaire agreement (CA), which are the main control mechanisms towards creating a stable SWM network. Essentially, stability is achieved when the KPIs and CA can influence the activities of both intra- and inter-organisational relationships.

This paper provides a better understanding of the translation process of the MCS that adds to the stability of the network of a privatised SWM from the lens of the ANT.

This study focuses on the reasons leading health organisations to adopt a cooperation strategy and the benefits they can draw from that inter-organisational relation.

To this end, a mixed research approach – qualitative and quantitative – was adopted, taking a real case between a Health Centre Group in inland Portugal (ACeS-CB) and the Faculty of Health Sciences at a university situated in the same region (FCS-UBI). To gather information, a questionnaire survey was directed to medical students in this faculty, together with semi-structured interviews with those in charge of both types of organisation in the inter-organisational cooperation studied here.

After content analysis of the interviews and descriptive analysis of the questionnaires, it was concluded that this cooperation is based on a relation of a formal nature, as each organisation is independent from the other, as are their administrative and management organs. The benefits obtained from this cooperative relation regard mainly the share of human resources, particularly elements of the clinical staff in ACeS-CB who have taken on teaching duties at FCS-UBI.

Articulation of theoretical training with clinical practice and the exchange of knowledge were other benefits identified. The study also reveals that students perceive this inter-organisational cooperation as satisfactory, corresponding to what was defined by those in charge of the institutions as its main objectives.

This study focuses on the reasons leading health organisations to adopt a strategy of cooperation with other organisations in the same sector and the benefits they can obtain from that relation. It represents a tool to support managers in health organisations and other stakeholders in an inter-organisational cooperation relation, in planning strategies and understanding the impact of this type of cooperation.

This paper aims to identify how a public client’s use of control systems (process, output and social control) affect innovation possibilities in construction projects.

Semi-structured interviews about six infrastructure projects were conducted to identify respondents’ views on innovation possibilities. These possibilities were then analyzed from an organizational control perspective within principal–agent relationships between the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) and their contractors.

How the client uses control systems affects innovation possibilities. Relying on process control could negatively affect innovation opportunities, whereas output control could have a positive influence. In addition, social control seems to have a weak effect, as the STA appears not to use social control to facilitate joint innovation. Public clients must comply with the Public Procurement Act and, therefore, retain the requirements specified in the tendering documents. Much of the steering of the execution is connected to the ex ante phase (before signing the contract), which affects innovation possibilities in the design and execution phases for the contractor.

This study was conducted with only one client, thus limiting its generalizability. However, the findings provide an important stepping stone to further investigation into balancing control systems and creating innovation possibilities in a principal–agent relationship.

Although public procurement has increasingly been emphasized as a major potential source of innovation, studying how a public client’s use of organizational control systems affects innovation possibilities in the construction sector has received scant attention.

With the evolution of the turbulent environment constantly triggering the emergence of a trust crisis between organizations, how can university–industry (U–I) alliances respond to the trust crisis when conducting green technology innovation (GTI) activities? This paper aims to address this issue.

The authors examined the process of trust crisis damage, including trust first suffering instantaneous impair as well as subsequently indirectly affecting GTI level, and ultimately hurting the profitability of green innovations. In this paper, a piecewise deterministic dynamic model is deployed to portray the trust and the GTI levels in GTI activities of U–I alliances.

The authors analyze the equilibrium results under decentralized and centralized decision-making modes to obtain the following conclusions: Trust levels are affected by a combination of hazard and damage (short and long term) rates, shifting from steady growth to decline in the presence of low hazard and damage rates. However, the GTI level has been growing steadily. It is essential to consider factors such as the hazard rate, the damage rate in the short and long terms, and the change in marginal profit in determining whether to pursue an efficiency- or recovery-friendly strategy in the face of a trust crisis. The authors found that two approaches can mitigate trust crisis losses: implementing a centralized decision-making mode (i.e. shared governance) and reducing pre-crisis trust-building investments. This study offers several insights for businesses and academics to respond to a trust crisis.

The present research can be extended in several directions. Instead of distinguishing attribution of trust crisis, the authors use hazard rate, short- and long-term damage rates and change in marginal profitability to distinguish the scale of trust crises. Future scholars can further add an attribution approach to enrich the classification of trust crises. Moreover, the authors only consider trust crises because of unexpected events in a turbulent environment; in fact, a trust crisis may also be a plateauing process, yet the authors do not study this situation.

First, the authors explore what factors affect the level of trust and the level of GTI when a trust crisis occurs. Second, the authors provide guidelines on how businesses and academics can coordinate their trust-building and GTI efforts when faced with a trust crisis in a turbulent environment.

First, the interaction between psychology and innovation management is explored in this paper. Although empirical studies have shown that trust in U–I alliances is related to innovation performance, and scholars have developed differential game models to portray the GTI process, building a differential game model to explore such an interaction is still scarce. Second, the authors incorporate inter-organizational trust level into the GTI level in university–industry collaboration, applying differential equations to portray the trust building and GTI processes, respectively, to reveal the importance of trust in CTI activities. Third, the authors establish a piecewise deterministic dynamic game model wherein the impact of crisis shocks is not equal to zero, which is inconsistent with most previous studies of Brownian motion.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how inter-firm cooperation and firm age moderate the relationship between family ownership and productivity.

We first estimate the total factor productivity (TFP) of a large sample of Italian firms observed over the period 2010–2018 and then apply a Poisson random effects model.

TFP is, on average, higher for non-family firms (non-FFs) than for FF. Furthermore, inter-organizational cooperation and firm age mitigate the negative effect of family ownership. In detail, it is found that belonging to a network acts as a moderator in different ways according to firm age. Indeed, young FFs underperform non-FF peers, although the TFP gap decreases with age. In contrast, the benefits of a formal network are high for older FFs, suggesting that an age-related learning process is at work.

The study provides evidence that FFs can outperform non-FFs when they move away from Socio-Emotional Wealth-centered reference points and exploit knowledge flows arising from high levels of social capital. In the case of mature FFs, networking is a driver of TFP, allowing them to acquire external resources. Since FFs often do not have sufficient in-house knowledge and resources, they must be aware of the value of business cooperation. While preserving the familiar identity of small companies, networks grant FFs the competitive and scale advantages of being large.

Despite the wide but ambiguous body of research on the performance gap between FFs and non-FFs, little is known about the role of FFs’ heterogeneity. This study has proven successful in detecting age as a factor in heterogeneity, specifically to explain the network effect on the link between ownership and TFP. Based on a representative sample, the study provides a solid framework for FFs, policymakers and academic research on family-owned companies.

This study analyzes the performance implications of adopting blockchain to support supply chain business processes. The technology holds as many promises as implementation challenges, so interest in its impact on operational performance has grown steadily over the last few years.

Drawing on transaction cost economics and the contingency theory, we built a set of hypotheses. These were tested through a long-term event study and an ordinary least squares regression involving 130 adopters listed in North America.

Compared with the control sample, adopters displayed significant abnormal performance in terms of labor productivity, operating cycle and profitability, whereas sales appeared unaffected. Firms in regulated settings and closer to the end customer showed more positive effects. Neither industry-level competition nor the early involvement of a project partner emerged as relevant contextual factors.

This research presents the first extensive analysis of operational performance based on objective measures. In contrast to previous studies and theoretical predictions, the results indicate that blockchain adoption is not associated with sales improvement. This can be explained considering that secure data storage and sharing do not guarantee the factual credibility of recorded data, which needs to be proved to customers in alternative ways. Conversely, improvements in other operational performance dimensions confirm that blockchain can support inter-organizational transactions more efficiently. The results are relevant in times when, following hype, there are signs of disengagement with the technology.

This paper aims to investigate sustainability-led innovation, focusing on the interplay between product and process innovation for sustainability goals and the underlying supplier–customer relationships. Thus, the paper delves into sustainability-led innovation and how it affects supplier–customer relationships, and vice versa, thus providing a twofold perspective.

The textile industry is the empirical context of this study, which is exploratory research based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs, managers and experts in the textile industry.

In the textile industry, sustainability-led product innovation concerns mainly product durability and performance, product recyclability and the use of waste for new product development. Process innovation deals with circular economy, traceability and water and chemical use minimization. The paper also shows how sustainability-led innovation is implemented in more technical terms and regarding supplier–customer relationships.

The paper adopts an original perspective on how processes take place in the relationships between suppliers and customers, where there is no dominance of one actor, but innovation emerges from interdependence and interaction. Such perspective allows to provide an in-depth analysis of the supplier–customer relationships and underlying dynamics that affect sustainability-led innovation; moreover, the authors study how such innovation impacts supplier–customer relationships and the underlying relational dynamics. The value of the paper also stands in delivering a real representation of the innovation processes grounded in the textile industry.

This study is exploratory in nature and designed to address poorly documented issues in the literature. The dimensions of regional distribution or spatial organisation of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), including the potential role of clusters, have only recently been addressed, with most available studies focusing on advanced, mainly Western European countries. Although developing fast, the literature on I4.0 in other countries, such as the Central and Eastern European or post-transition economies like Poland, needs to pay more attention to the spatial distribution or geographical and organisational aspects. In response to the identified knowledge gap, this paper aims to identify the role of clusters in the transformation towards I4.0. This explains why clusters may matter for advancing the fourth digital transformation, how advanced in implementing I4.0 solutions are the residents of Polish clusters and how they perceive the advantages of cluster membership for such implementation. Finally, it seeks to formulate policy recommendations based on the evidence gathered.

The methodology used in this study combines quantitative analysis of secondary data from a cluster benchmarking survey with a case study approach. The benchmarking survey, conducted by the polish agency for enterprise development in 2021, gathered responses from 435 cluster members and 41 cluster managers, representing an estimated 57% of the current clusters in Poland. In addition to quantitative analysis, a case study approach was used, incorporating primary sources such as interview with cluster managers and surveys of cluster members, as well as secondary sources like company documents and information from cluster organisation websites. Statistical analysis involved assessing the relationship between technology implementation and the adoption of management systems, as well as exploring potential correlations between technology use and company characteristics such as revenue, export revenue share and number of employees using Pearson correlation coefficient.

In Poland, implementing I4.0 technologies by cluster companies is still modest. The cluster has influenced the use of I4.0 technologies in 23% of surveyed companies. Every second surveyed company declared a positive impact of a cluster on technological advancement. The use of I4.0 technologies is not correlated with the revenue of clustered companies. A rather bleak picture emerges from the results, revealing a need for more interest among cluster members in advancing I4.0 technologies. This may be due to a comfortable situation in which firms still enjoy alternative competitive advantages that do not force them to seek new advanced advantages brought about by I4.0. It also reflects the sober approach and awareness of associated high costs and necessary investments, which are paramount and prevent successful I4.0 implementation.

The limitations inherent in this study reflect the scarcity of the available data. This paper draws on the elementary survey administered centrally and is confined by the type of questions asked. The empirical section focuses on an important, though only one selected sector of the economy – the automotive industry. Nevertheless, the diagnosis of the Polish cluster’s role in advancing I4.0 should complement the existing literature.

The exploratory study concludes with policy recommendations and sets the stage for more detailed studies. Amidst the research’s limitations, this study pioneers a path for future comprehensive investigations, enabling a deeper understanding of Polish clusters’ maturity in I4.0 adoption. By comparing the authors’ analysis of the Polish Automotive Group (PGM) cluster with existing literature, the authors uncover a distinct disparity between the theoretical prominence of cluster catalysis and the current Polish reality. Future detailed dedicated enquiries will address these constraints and provide a more comprehensive map of Polish clusters’ I4.0 maturity.

This study identifies patterns of I4.0 implementation and diagnoses the role of clusters in the transformation towards I4.0. It investigates how advanced is the adoption of I4.0 solutions among the residents of Polish clusters and how they perceive the advantages of cluster membership for such transformation. Special attention was paid to the analysis of the automotive sector. Comparing the conclusions drawn from the analysis of the Polish PGM cluster in this case study to those from the literature on the subject, it becomes clear that the catalytic role of clusters in the implementation of I4.0 technologies by enterprises, as emphasised in the literature, is not yet fully reflected in the Polish reality.

Modern slavery in global value chains is an emerging topic of interest across various fields, including in international business, but is often fragmented in its approach. This study aims to provide a practical framework for studying relationships between participants in global value chains by exploring the nexus of three concepts – vulnerability, resilience and empowerment (VRE) – in the context of modern slavery.

This article offers a deductive thematic analysis of 51 empirical and conceptual business research studies on modern slavery in global value chains published until mid-2021 according to the three categories of interest at the micro (within individuals and organisations), meso (between individuals and organisations) and macro (structural) levels.

The findings have informed the development of three themes, each of which is an opportunity for future research with clear policy implications: a reductionist approach to vulnerability obscures its complexity; externalising the empowerment process and locating it outside of the agency of workers serves to further disempower them; and focusing exclusively on organisational resilience conceals the essentiality of resilience within individuals, communities and societies.

This article is among the first to extend the focus of business literature on modern slavery in global value chains beyond its current largely facile engagement with VRE, offering an original descriptive VRE typology to engage with the nexus between these three concepts.