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This study aims to examine the impacts of inward international licensing (IIL) on the absorptive capacity (ACAP) of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in a developing economy.

The study is explorative, qualitative and elaborative in nature. Therefore, a multiple case study was selected and performed as the research strategy. The data were collected from four pharmaceutical SMEs licensed from European pharmaceutical large-scale enterprises.

The results confirm that IIL has a strong effect on acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation as absorptive factors. Furthermore, the results have been enhanced by several contextual factors of ACAP human resources, inter-and intra-firm relationships, internal knowledge and managerial and strategic aspects. These contextual factors have also been influenced by IIL.

From the licensee perspective in a developing context, examining the extant literature on non-equity strategic alliances shows that very few studies have empirically examined the impact of this kind of alliance, such as IIL, on SMEs’ ACAP. On this basis, the study provides evidence that non-equity strategic alliances, particularly IIL, enhance SMEs’ capabilities such as ACAP. In other words, to overcome SMEs’ resource limitations and inadequate capabilities, IIL provides opportunities for them to obtain capabilities and critical resources.

Absorptive capacity (AC) is a key competitive advantage and is defined as the capacity to absorb knowledge from the environment. Although some studies have examined how various antecedents to AC differ between family firms and non-family firms, no studies have set out to specifically analyze AC in the context of family firms. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ability of family firms to absorb external knowledge by analyzing the relationship between “familiness” and “AC”.

By reviewing and combining studies on AC and knowledge-management practices of family firms, new insights into the AC of family firms are developed.

It is argued that due to higher levels of social capital, familiness is positively related to the ability to transform and use external knowledge (i.e. realized AC). However, firms with high levels of familiness are likely to be inferior in acquiring and assimilating external knowledge (i.e. potential AC).

Although previous studies have analyzed various knowledge-management practices of family firms, no studies have set out to specifically explore how familiness affects various dimensions of AC.

Practitioners argue that the way they treat their employees has an impact on firm success. However, they frequently do not equate this with relationship building. On the other hand, the academic relationship marketing literature does highlight internal relationships as having an important impact on external customer relationships. However, this relationship suffers from a lack of academic empirical evidence. Neither seems to recognize the knowledge of the other leading to incongruence between marketing theory and practice. The purpose of this paper is to bring the two literature streams together demonstrating that the practitioners are talking about, and practising, relationship marketing.

Exploration and comparison of the academic and practitioner literature bases to elaborate on the value of relationship building within organizations.

Competitive advantage can be attained through development of a relationship‐building culture which includes building relationships inside the organization as well as customer relationships. In fact, successful customer relationships rely on successful internal relationships.

A broad research agenda is outlined for understanding the nature of internal relationships and their impact on a firm's success.

Organizational success can be gained through building strong internal relationships and the development of a relationship‐building organizational culture.

Links practitioner cases and reflections to the concept of relationship marketing, demonstrating further how relationship marketing activities provide a competitive advantage.

This paper aims to explore the role of personal relationships (friendships) in mitigating knowledge hiding behaviour between managers.

This study uses a phenomenological methodology by studying seven UAE-based firms. Furthermore, 30 semi-structured (15 dyadic) interviews with senior managers are undertaken. The senior managers were chosen from multiple industries including plastic, frozen food, logistics, etc.

Based on 30 semi-structured interviews and comprehensive data analysis, results reveal that the development of personal relationships between managers results in higher interpersonal trust, mutual loyalty, higher cooperation, strong mutual goals and cultivation of reciprocity. The result further states that these factors diminish knowledge hiding behaviour between them.

This study has some limitations. First, this study explores behavioural patterns concerning the United Arab Emirates culture only. Second, the results presented in this study should be quantitatively tested to demonstrate their generalizability.

Firms can use this study’s findings to understand how and why personal relationships between managers within firms diminish knowledge hiding behaviour.

There is a dire need for research exploring how knowledge hiding can be mitigated in firms. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the role of personal relationships in the knowledge hiding literature.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to explain the firm growth process based on an integration and extension, through empirical research, of Penrose’s theory of the growth of the firm and the resource-based view. Theoretical development within the firm growth literature has been noticeably limited. Firm growth studies use different theoretical bases and what is needed is integration of multiple theories and empirical testing of these to form a new conceptual framework capable of explaining the modern growth process fully.

The key perspectives are critically reviewed and integrated and empirical qualitative research is undertaken analysing the process of growth in two firms. Semi-structured interviews, participant observation and analysis of company documentation are utilised.

The key insight this research provides is detailed information with regard to which resources, mediators and outputs are vital to firm growth, how they need to be developed and why this is the case. The study shows that these act in a cyclical nature to enable firm growth and development.

These findings could be used by practitioners to determine which part of the conceptual framework requires the most amount of improvement and which are developed to an acceptable state, enabling them to make plans for the achievement of growth.

This research is able to reconceptualise two dominant theoretical perspectives resulting in the generation of a new firm growth framework, thereby addressing a distinct gap in the firm growth literature.

This study aims to fill the void of previous research in organizational innovation. The understanding of the factors that affect intra-firm diffusion of innovations, which include the proactive management support and participation comprehensiveness from the adopting firm, as well as the provider’s support of innovation utilization has been advanced. In addition, the extent to which the consequent intra-firm diffusion affects both the adopter’s and provider’s benefits has been explored based on their relationship.

A mail questionnaire on the organizational purchase and utilization of customer relationship management (CRM)-type database systems was developed for collecting data. A random sample of 480 firms from the Hong Kong Chambers of Commerce Directory was obtained. From the initial phone calls, 343 firms currently using a CRM-type database system were identified, and the questionnaires were mailed to the managers of these firms. In total, 163 responses were finally returned with usable data, for a response rate of 47.5 per cent.

The current study focuses on the causes and the effects associated with successful diffusion and utilization of innovation within a firm. Using data from business-to-business markets, the results find that the two parties involved benefit when both proactively participate in the intra-firm diffusion process; that is, benefits are created for the adopter via improvement in efficiency; and for the provider via establishment of a long-term relationship and switching costs.

First, any moderating impact of the adopting firm’s technological capabilities was not analyzed. Second, the research results were obtained from a sample of software product innovations (especially database management system). Even though it could be assumed that these results can also be applicable to other types of innovations (e.g. process innovations), empirical tests of our framework based on different innovation typologies are still warranted.

First, for an innovation-adopting firm, we have shown that a wide use of purchased innovations among the organizational members is at least as important as the adoption of new innovations. Second, we have included the participation comprehensiveness of adoption decision, arguing that the organizational decision-making process is also crucial to stimulating intra-firm diffusion. Finally, and more importantly, our study calls attention to the provider’s role in expediting intra-firm diffusion.

First, we have suggested an analytic framework for intra-firm diffusion of an innovation and also provided its empirical support. Particularly, the current study has focused on the subsequent effects of intra-firm diffusion on both the adopter’s and the provider’s benefits. Second, we have examined further impact of the comprehensive participation of adoption decision on spreading innovation information, which subsequently stimulates the innovation’s intra-firm diffusion.

The aim of this paper is to examine when it is appropriate to provide dedicated support for a sales activity, and in cases where support is desirable, to explore the choice between core team support and external support.

Sales transactions typically require a diverse range of sales activities, including customer contact, scheduling appointments, internal meetings, processing orders, and preparing financing applications. This research develops a framework for understanding how to structure sales support for specific sales activities.

Each sales activity has four dimensions, i.e. workload, customization, complexity, and prequalification risk. Support structure (self‐support, core team support, and external support) moderates the influence of the four sales activity dimensions on sales activity performance and salesperson role stress. These, in turn, impact overall sales performance.

This research presents a broad conceptual model of sales support structure. Further research should test this framework using empirical data.

Normative recommendations are made for managers about how to allocate sales activities to sales support.

This research proposes four relevant dimensions of sales activities that should be considered when allocating sales activities to members of the selling center. The framework will help managers, academicians, and business students understand how sales support structure impacts sales performance.

For over four decades, IB scholars have been conceptualizing and empirically examining the organizational structure of the multinational corporation (MNC) without really placing relationships at the center of attention. It therefore remains unclear what characterizes those relationships beyond subunits’ roles, motivation, or control mechanisms. Relationship as a term has often been used but rarely defined in the IB literature on intra-firm networks. We develop arguments that position such relationships as the focal unit of analysis. We extend current IB literature to examine in detail the nature and dynamics of relationships in MNCs by borrowing insights from Industrial Marketing and Purchasing research, which focuses on the relational nature and dynamics of interactions between actors. We offer a theoretical framework and develop a conceptual model that brings to the fore the multiplexity and temporality of relationships in MNCs. We also argue that intra-MNC network relationships can be seen as an evolving process and advocate for shifting away from variance-based and typological views toward a process view for examining relationships. Theoretically, understanding what characterizes the nature of MNC intra-firm relationships and what processes contribute to structuring them provides important insights into the global configuration of the MNC and the required organizational design mechanisms needed for MNC existence and resilience. The study is timely and practically relevant in the sense that considering intra-firm relationships deserves even more attention in the current global economic environment when accessing external resources becomes costly and/or inefficient.

This study aims to theorize a knowledge-based perspective on organizational commitment and turnover intentions among knowledge workers. The authors contribute by examining the impact of knowledge sharing, and managerial human capital respectively, on commitment and turnover in a sample of 274 knowledge workers (engineers) from India. Additionally, the authors examine the crucial moderating role of intra-firm causal ambiguity on these relationships.

Using structural equation modeling and analysis of survey responses, the authors test a moderated mediation model to provide evidence of the positive impact of knowledge sharing and human capital, respectively, on turnover intention, mediated by organizational commitment. More importantly, the authors theorize and present evidence on the moderating role of intra-firm causal ambiguity, on these relationships.

The authors find that knowledge sharing behaviors are both intrinsically and extrinsically motivating for knowledge workers, which results in their emotional attachments and higher levels of identification and commitment, which subsequently results in lower turnover intention. Our findings also highlight the role of intra-firm causal ambiguity in making things difficult for organizations to retain talented employees in tough environments.

The authors provide a knowledge-based perspective of commitment and turnover in knowledge-intensive work contexts. The authors also contribute by provide an interesting account of the role of intra-firm causal ambiguity in knowledge processes leading to commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the negative effect of intra-firm causal ambiguity on the project team’s performance—efficiency and effectiveness, and also examine the moderating role of openness and the integrative capabilities.

The population in this study is teams that come from a variety of companies which work with cross-functional teams or matrices, such as advertising agencies, recreational or amusement parks, television companies, production houses, radio stations, private education providers, manufacturing enterprises and IT companies. The sample population was chosen based on their tendency to form creative teams to respond to environmental/market dynamics by involving employees from different backgrounds and levels in the planning and implementation of projects.

As hypothesized, intra-firm causal ambiguity negatively influenced the project team’s efficiency and effectiveness, while openness moderated the effect of intra-firm causal ambiguity to efficiency, but not to effectiveness, and the team’s integrative capabilities did not moderate the above relationship.

First, the sample in this study only focused on teams with creativity doing a project. Any future research is expected to focus more on the selection of sample types which also have a tendency to apply openness, and focus their activities on improving their integrative capabilities. Second, there are no data about the background experience of the members of the teams in working together on previous projects, so future studies need to discover whether that experience also affects the variables included in this study. Third, the category of the time horizon samples for the project’s implementation, which were between one month and two years, is still too wide. It may have contributed to the overlapping of the moderating effect, so future studies need the sample project’s categories to have a much narrower range (one to three months, four to six months, or one year). Fourth, the regression results for the moderating variables are partially not supported. This may relate to the characteristics of the respondents. To obtain the data and a more complete knowledge, further research can be done into creative on-going team types, such as an interior design team, a company’s production performance team and others.

A practical implication based on the research that has been done is that, when the condition of intra-firm causal ambiguity occurs, strategies to reduce the condition are needed. First, before a project starts, all the team members must understand the systemic process of the project’s resources related to the environment and the objectives. Systemic understanding of the resources system can help the team to effectively manage any causal ambiguity in the resources system. Second, referring that the higher the intra-firm causal ambiguity is, the efforts to codify the resources and the systemic process of the project should also be higher as well. So the second strategy is to codify/create tools that guide the project, in order to make it easily understandable, accessible and always up to date, over the lifespan of the project.

The results of research into the impacts of intra-firm causal ambiguity on the organizational performance are still inconsistent. Some researchers claim that intra-firm causal ambiguity has a negative effect on performance, but there are also studies that show the opposite result. This research accommodates these inconsistencies by examining the effects of a moderating variable on the impact of intra-firm causal ambiguity on a cross-functional team’s performance, in its contextual and internal aspects. The contextual aspect is represented by the openness of the team, while the team’s ability to integrate the diversity of knowledge, i.e. its integrative capability, is represented as the internal aspect.