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This paper aims to illustrate how business ethics research is progressing in the tourism and hospitality (T/H) industries and suggest a research agenda.

This study applies bibliometric analysis to articles related to business ethics topics in the T/H fields published between 1995 and 2014 in six, nine and five leading hospitality-, tourism- and business ethics-oriented journals, respectively.

This study provides a broad view on business ethics research in the T/H fields based on leading authors, institutions, themes and methods used over the past two decades.

This study assesses the progress of business ethics research in the hospitality and tourism fields. Only articles published in select, prominent Social Sciences Citation Index journals were analyzed.

This analysis focuses on published articles related to business ethics in the T/H fields. As such, it facilitates researchers, academic scholars and professionals in contributing to the field more effectively and advancing scientific progress in the literature. It aids practitioners by evaluating the extent to which scholars have investigated key issues in the field.

This study is the first to utilize bibliometric analysis to assess business ethics research focusing on T/H activities published in leading tourism, hospitality and business ethics journals.

The purpose of this paper is to test the feasibility of using a biodata inventory to measure service‐orientation – one's disposition to be helpful, thoughtful, considerate, and cooperative – across cultures in a sample of 1,324 owners of businesses.

Subjects in Austria, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia, and Slovenia are given the inventory in order to predict their on‐the‐job service‐oriented performance.

Within the samples, the service‐orientation ratings are highly correlated with extroversion and openness to experience in all six countries, and agreeableness in five countries and conscientiousness in four countries. The correlations of these scales with service‐orientation are as high as or higher than those generally obtained with measures of service‐orientation with customer service representatives.

The analysis lends credence to the notion that service‐orientation may be effectively measured by biodata within small organizations across multiple cultures.

This paper examines the utility of a personality‐oriented biodata inventory for explaining levels of customer service‐oriented performance across six countries. Little cross‐country research has been done on the owners of business thus this paper helps to fill in gaps in the literature dealing with business owners and the importance of personality attributes to explain service‐oriented performance.

Strategic management scholars seek to link strategic factors to performance. When specific causal links cannot be identified, however, other potential explanations should be considered, including the notion of luck. This paper aims to introduce a distinction between scholarly and practitioner perspectives of luck and identifies why this distinction is critical to both scholars and practitioners.

This paper proposes a framework linking luck and competitive advantage. It also reports the results of an exploratory empirical investigation on the perceived role of luck in firm performance.

Scholars and practitioners have different views of luck's role in organizational performance. Managers are more likely to assign luck for bad outcomes rather than good. In addition, the more quantitative a manager's work function, the less likely he or she is to perceive a luck‐performance linkage, and the higher the manager is in the organization, the more likely he or she is to perceive luck as affecting outcomes.

There are a number of reasons why luck should receive prominence when considering the strategy‐performance relationship: many of the linkages between strategic factors and performance are identified after the fact – they are viewed as causal when they were actually lucky; empirical research may identify relationships whether they actually exist; researchers tend to find what they are looking for; and academics will be more likely to explain “luck” if they are using the appropriate tools to reveal it.

The positive link between management level and luck's role in performance identified in this study suggests that the more a manager knows about a firm's resources and attributes, the more likely he or she is to downplay the role they actually play in performance. From this perspective, managers seem more willing to acknowledge the role played by luck as they progress into greater levels of responsibility and control.

A significant portion of empirical work seeks to explain differences in performance across organizations by identifying the links between various strategic factors and performance. Although this research has contributed much to the knowledge about the strategy‐performance nexus, it assumes that strategy‐performance linkages necessarily exist and that they can be readily identified. In other words, most scholarly work in this area is based on assumptions that minimize or preclude the role of luck or randomness in the determination of firm performance. Building on previous work, this paper adopts an alternative perspective on the strategy‐performance relationship, highlighting the often overlooked role of luck.

Much of the literature suggests that strategies are formulated in light of perceived environmental conditions and internal capabilities. This study supports the notion that strategy is formulated in part as a response to management uncertainties about competitors, customers, and the environment. Responses from 137 wholesale grocers demonstrate that uncertainty varies by generic strategy, suggesting that businesses consider both the type and degree of uncertainty when crafting a competitive strategy. Specifically, the data suggest that viable strategic options may be limited more by the cognitive and perceptual abilities of an organization’s managers than by objective measures of factors such as organizational resources and industry competitiveness. The premise that strategy must “fit” with organizational or environmental factors to be effective may be incomplete. Rather, a strategy – to be successful – should also fit with the psychological characteristics and constraints of the managers responsible for its formulation and implementation.

To examine how a manager's strategic philosophy is influenced by his or her management level in the organization.

Scales are developed to measure managers' philosophical perspectives along three key dimensions and tested with 289 managers in the United States. Refined scales are administered to 237 managers.

A manager's level in the organization influences his or her strategic philosophy. As compared to middle‐and lower‐level managers, top managers were more likely to view strategy formulation as an art, to emphasize strategic flexibility as opposed to strategic consistency, and to see strategy as top‐down process.

No single strategic philosophy is suggested as the optimal perspective. In addition, there are multiple possible explanations for the findings. Additional research is needed. Recognizing differences in strategic philosophy can also enhance training and development efforts at the lower and middle management levels.

Findings lend support to the notion that one's strategic philosophy is not independent of one's management position and suggests that managers at each level may adopt perspectives that facilitate the managerial responsibilities at that level.

This paper provides empirical evidence for a nexus between management level and strategic philosophy, a stream of research that received only limited research interest to date.

Many managers and scholars agree that diversity is a positive factor that leads to competitive economic advantage for organisations. However, this assertion remains largely untested. To examine the implied relationship between firm performance and diversity, performance at minority‐friendly organisations was compared to that at other organisations within the same industry. Results indicated that minority friendly firms significantly outperformed the market, indicating that diversity in organisations may be related to economic success. This finding has significant strategic implications.

Organizations struggling to compete can do nothing while revenues and profits decline, putting their very survival at risk. Or they can recreate themselves by altering their situation, strategy, structure, or decision‐making style. The second choice, organizational renewal, is the focus of this study of five diverse businesses that renewed themselves through the proactive alteration of one or more of these four factors. Four research questions were explored using extensive qualitative methodology. Results highlight the need for alignment among situation, strategy, structure, and decision‐making style, as well as the importance of timing in the process.

Current RBV‐grounded research has provided keen and valuable insight into the business‐strategy‐performance relationship. However, the accompanying shift away from the continued refinement of generic business strategy typologies has left a number of research opportunities uncultivated. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the generic strategy approach to strategy formulation can be applied today, especially in the development of parsimonious, prescriptive, and relevant tools for strategic managers.

A new business strategy typology is developed and grounded in recent developments in the literature and in business practice.

Building on Porter's low cost‐differentiation framework, this paper integrates research founded on the resource‐based view of the firm, and proposes value and market control as the two prominent overarching factors in business strategies.

The framework proposed in this paper incorporates several research perspectives, but can also be applied by strategic managers when assessing firm and competitor strategies at the business level.

This paper builds on previous work in the field, but proposes an original framework for assessing and evaluating competitive strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the utility of a selection instrument in predicting service and technologically oriented performance in technologically oriented businesses in mainland China and Japan.

Data was collected from 262 employees in mainland China and 236 employees in Japan pertaining to their service and technology orientations with regard to on‐the‐job performance in a high technology management environment. Employees completed a personality‐oriented employment questionnaire that has been previously examined.

Each dimension predicted performance in both samples, although the structures were not consistent across the two countries. In China, the seven dimensions consist of extroversion, emotional stability, the desire to make good impressions on others, conscientiousness, life satisfaction, performance orientation, and helpfulness. In Japan, the seven dimensions consisted of extroversion, emotional stability, the desire to make good impressions on others, conscientiousness, closed mindedness, empathy, and helpfulness. Results from multiple regression analyses suggested that substantially less of the variance in service‐oriented and technologically oriented performance could be explained in China than in Japan.

Researchers and practitioners alike should be careful when applying surveys developed and validated in western countries because they may not measure the same constructs in China. Further, although countries in Asia share physical proximity, their cultures are so diverse that the utility of such assessments may vary substantially from one country to another.

There is a dearth of empirical research examining on‐the‐job performance in China. This paper, however, adds to the literature by examining high technology businesses in China and demonstrating how their internal processes may differ both from western organizations and those in other Asian cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an organizing lens for viewing the distinct contributions to knowledge production from those research communities addressing the impact of competitive strategy on company performance in general, and the influence of cost leadership and differentiation strategy on organizational performance in detail.

The research methodology was based on the PRISMA review, and thematic analysis based on an iterative process of open coding was analyzed and then the sample was analyzed by illustrating the research title, objectives, method, data analysis, sample size, variables and country.

The main factor that influenced the competitive strategy is strategic growth; strategic growth has a significant influence on competitive strategy. Furthermore, competitive strategy will boost firm network, performance measurement and organization behavior. In the same way, the internal goal factor will enhance organizational effectiveness. Also, a differentiation strategy will support management practice factors, strategic positions, product price, product characteristics and company performance.

This study contributes to the literature by identifying a framework of competitive strategy factors, company performance factors, cost leadership strategy factors, differentiation strategy factors and competitive strategy with global market factors. This study provides a complete picture and description of the resulting body knowledge in competitive strategy and organizational performance.