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Research examining the joint role of serial acquisitions and subsidiary autonomy in holistic value provision within servitizing industrial firms is scarce. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the role of serial acquisition and subsidiary autonomy in providing value within servitizing industrial networks.

A conceptual framework is developed based on the case study of a large Swedish industrial group specializing in selling industrial products and providing industrial solutions to business customers through its numerous subsidiaries.

The analysis of 14 interviews with the five subsidiaries and seven customer firms and secondary data reveals interesting findings concerning the role of serial niche acquisition strategy and subsidiary autonomy in customer value provision in servitizing organizations. In particular, the authors find that the role of acquisitions in industrial firms extends beyond growth to customer sensing and proximity. Likewise, the authors find that subsidiary autonomy facilitates value provision to customers in industrial networks.

The paper provides a more nuanced understanding of how serial acquisitions and subsidiary autonomy are intertwined and jointly affect industrial firms’ value provision activities amidst the servitization transition in an intraorganizational network.

This study examines how the characteristics of innovation knowledge exchanged among affiliate firms affect the ownership strategies adopted for their foreign subsidiaries.

This study employs a cross-classified multilevel model to examine a sample of 185 Korean manufacturing affiliates derived from 49 Chaebols engaged in international diversification, along with their 1,110 foreign manufacturing subsidiaries.

While exploratory innovation knowledge exchange lowers the affiliate's level of ownership in its foreign subsidiary, exploitative innovation knowledge exchange rather increases the affiliate's level of ownership in its foreign subsidiary.

This study advances the literature on intrafirm knowledge exchange by highlighting it as a determinant of ownership strategies. The study further shows that the characteristics of knowledge exchanged at the affiliate level not only determine the ownership structure but also have the potential to shape the direction in which the subsidiary develops its competencies.

This study has practical implications for the managers of business group affiliates. The results suggest that managers should adapt their ownership strategies according to the type of knowledge exchanged at the affiliate level to achieve a balanced and synergistic effect on intraorganizational knowledge exchange.

Previous studies have extensively explored the performance implications related to knowledge exchange. However, there is a notable gap in understanding the mechanisms through which the value of knowledge transferred within an affiliate is realized. To address this gap, this study focuses on ownership strategy as a crucial factor and empirically examines how the characteristics of innovation knowledge exchanged among affiliate firms influence the ownership strategies adopted for their foreign subsidiaries. By investigating this relationship, this study provides valuable insights into the complex dynamics of knowledge exchange and its effect on ownership decisions within business group affiliates.

This paper aims to address an important question of what makes companies succeed or not in their attempt to empower employees. As this study answers this question, the arguments suggest that coordination is essential to creation of employee empowerment climate in organizations.

This is conceptual paper rooted in extensive research on both – empowerment (culture, climate and organizational structure) and coordination (formal and informal).

To help managers to be effective in their roles, this study presents four insights to creating empowerment climate. The arguments conclude that coordination provides a vessel for successful realization of empowerment. Specifically, only informal coordination (vs formal) will fully realize empowerment’s benefits. Given that the topic of empowerment is highly germane to managers in today’s context of the increasing number of employees working remotely, this work presents an important and actionable advance for managers.

This study represents original research that has not been published and is not currently under review at any other journal.

This study aims to investigate the drivers of political embeddedness and the possible outcome in terms of autonomy and subsidiary unique competences.

This study draws on resource dependence theory and applies structural equation modeling on a sample of 193 subsidiaries.

Political embeddedness is confirmed as a source of potential autonomy and the development of competences and is usually boosted by previous existing networks at the internal and external levels.

The authors investigate and discuss how multinational corporations can leverage political resources in host-country political arenas, extending their understanding of the interplay between political activities and market strategies.

(Digital) servitization, referring to service-driven strategies and their increasing implementation in manufacturing, is one of the most rapidly growing areas in industrial service research. However, the cultural change involved in successful servitization is a phenomenon that is widely observed but poorly understood. This research aims to clarify the processes of social construction as manufacturers change their organizational culture to transform into industrial service providers.

This research takes a systematic approach to integrate disparate literature on servitization into a cohesive framework for cultural change, which is purposefully augmented by rationale culled from organizational learning and sensemaking literature.

The organizational learning framework for cultural change in servitization introduces a dynamic perspective on servitizing organizations by explaining social processes between organizational and member-level cultural properties. It identifies three major cultural orientations toward service, digital and learning that govern successful servitization.

This research contributes to the servitization literature by presenting a new approach to reframe and explore cultural change processes across multiple levels, thus providing a concrete starting point for further research in this area.

This study aims to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the relationship between auditors’ work stress and client participation with audit quality (AQ).

This study is a descriptive-survey type and the data were collected through a questionnaire distributed online. The statistical population consisted of auditors working in audit firms in Iran and the sample was selected using a random sampling method. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

The findings of this study suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the negative relationship between auditors’ work stress and AQ. In addition, the results indicate that client participation in the audit process did not significantly impact AQ during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given the global and widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’ lives and work settings, this study provides an opportunity to explore the challenges auditors face concerning health protocols and their well-being during the pandemic, specifically within the context of Iran. The unique circumstances of the pandemic have placed additional pressure on auditors to navigate and address the challenges arising from COVID-19 in their workplaces. Although research on the effects of the pandemic on accounting and auditing is ongoing, this study contributes to the literature by expanding our understanding of the specific implications and circumstances faced by auditors during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The purpose of this study is to explore the associations between leadership, trustworthiness, and employee engagement during COVID-19.

In this cross-sectional, quantitative study, surveys of Sri Lankan male and female managers were conducted via standardized questionnaires. The sample size was 297 respondents. The Smart-PLS version 3.36 structural equation model analyzed the data set.

Both leadership and employee engagement and trustworthiness and employee engagement were found to have a statistically significant relationship. It has been found that leadership indirectly contributes to a higher degree of employee engagement through increased trustworthiness. According to the findings, employee engagement rises when they have the trustworthiness of the leadership in the virtual environment.

According to the findings of this study, organizations need to introduce rules to improve leadership manager roles in a virtual environment, which can improve trustworthiness and employee engagement. It also suggests that organizations should build trustworthiness between employees and leadership through a positive culture in a virtual environment that can improve employee engagement and organizational performance.

Research on leadership and trustworthiness improves employee engagement in a virtual environment is the contribution of this study.

This study investigates the antecedents of career initiative, a proactive behavior, whereby individuals engage in activities to promote their career development. The authors first argue that organizational tenure – the length of time employed within a specific organization – will exhibit a curvilinear or inverted-U-shaped relationship with career initiative. In the early years of an employment relationship, career initiative gradually increases as employees overcome the initial challenges of joining a new organization. However, career initiative will plateau and eventually decline as employees struggle to envision further development.

This study uses a survey design with data collected from the North American operations of a large global telecommunications company.

This study identifies two key mechanisms, both concerning relational context, that drive the curvilinear relationship between organizational tenure and career initiative: mentoring and barriers to networking. Specifically, increased mentoring and reduced barriers to networking both significantly weaken the curvilinear effect.

The results suggest that organizations can promote proactive behaviors through employee mentoring and by removing network barriers, particularly for those most at risk for reduced career initiative: early- and especially later-tenure employees.

Career initiative is a valued behavior among employees, but individual-level phenomena can be fostered, or inhibited, by relational context. So, while some scholars have found a trend toward “boundaryless” careers, this study reveals the importance of considering how the boundaries and social context within organizations can create an environment in which employee proactivity can flourish.

The purpose of this study was to establish the cause-effect relationship between determinants of trust in the buyer–supplier integration and the procurement performance of large manufacturing firms in Tanzania.

The study surveyed 52 firms from Temeke Municipality, Tanzania using questionnaire subjected to one procurement manager and one stores manager tallying a sample size of 104 respondents. Explanatory design was employed due to the presence of cause–effect relationship and the null hypotheses were tested using binary logistic regression technique at p values < 0.05 and ExpB > 1.

Mutual goals, geographical vicinity among partners, and supplier reliability are significant for the procurement performance of the manufacturing firms in Tanzania, whereas interpersonal and inter-organizational trusts and perceived buyers’ confidence are of no significant impact.

Buyer–supplier integration is a recently embraced and paramount practice for the manufacturing firms in Tanzania. Therefore, longitudinal study would further add value. The presence of the causality from the tested hypothesis appeals for the necessity of progress tracking.

Causality has been established, and a framework has been developed for the performance of large manufacturing firms using trust of buyer–supplier integration.

There shall be creation of more employment opportunities and timely availability of materials from large manufacturing firms in Tanzania.

Anchored on transaction cost economics and resource dependency theories, the study disclosed the root cause of procurement performance in the context of manufacturing firms in Tanzania whilst considering trust as a resource advantage of buyer–supplier integration.

This study aims to demonstrate the importance of organizational networks in organizational performance is relatively rich; less understood are processes in organizational networking that entrepreneurs and organizations use in making sense of rapidly changing contexts for organizational performance.

This study conducts an exploratory organizational-level narrative analysis into firms’ experiences in two major emerging markets (EMs), namely, Russia and India – to identify organizational networking processes in the midst of institutional upheavals. The study is based on in-depth case studies of firms in EMs sourced from interview data from senior management and consolidated with secondary data.

The authors find that initially firms rely on informal networks (including blat/svyazi and jaan-pehchaan/jan-pehchan) and later formal (in the form of bureaucratic followed by proprietary) networks to make sense of the changes and uncertainties in turbulent environments. The authors also demonstrate the cyclical nature of strategic sensemaking in the process of developing organizational networks for performance.

The study has a number of theoretical and practical contributions. First, it extends the well-established business networking construct to a more inclusive organizational networking construct. Second, it demonstrates that sensemaking is dependent on interorganizational networking from the outset and throughout the growth of an organization in turbulent markets – from informal to formal bureaucratic and proprietary networks. Finally, this study is unique in documenting the entire process of sensemaking from scanning to performance as well as successfully demonstrating the cyclical nature of sensemaking.