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In an industrial marketing context of manufacturer–distributor collaboration, this law and economics paper aims to contrast two approaches to contracting: conventional and strategic.

Based on relational rent theory, this paper provides an analytical framework for juxtaposing conventional and strategic contracting. A contingency approach is applied to formulate propositions as to when conventional versus strategic contracting is preferable.

The distinction between conventional and strategic contracting has implications as to whether relational governance substitutes or complements formal contracts (the substitution versus complements perspectives). Strategic contracting results in complementarity (rather than substitutability) between formal contracts and relational governance.

This paper argues that a more nuanced view on contract types, such as strategic versus conventional, may reconcile the enduring research controversy between the substitution and complements perspectives.

Today, formal contracts with foreign distributors tend to resemble “prenuptial agreements”. The opportunity for relational rent (e.g. manifested in higher export revenues) grows if conventional contracts are superseded by contracts following strategic contracting principles.

This study is interdisciplinary, not only by its combination of marketing, management and contractual economics but also through its law and economics amalgamation.

Fracture properties depend on the type of material, method of testing and type of specimen. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate fracture properties by adopting a stable test method, i.e., wedge split test.

Coarse aggregate of three different sizes (20 mm, 16 mm and 12.5 mm), three ratios of coarse aggregate, fine aggregate (CA:FA) (50:50, 45:55, 40:60), presence of steel fibers, and specimens without and with guide notch were chosen as parameters of the study.

Load-crack mouth opening displacement curves indicate that for both fibrous and non-fibrous mixes, higher volume of aggregate and higher size of coarse aggregate have high fracture energy.

For all volumes of coarse aggregate, it was noticed that specimens with 12.5 mm aggregate size achieved highest peak load and abrupt drop post-peak. The decrease in coarseness of internal structure of concrete (λ) resulted in the increase of fracture energy.

This paper aims to explore value creation configurations pursued by suppliers in high-cost countries. The proposed value creation configuration approaches are seen as means for supplier firms to strengthen their competitiveness when faced with increasing global sourcing.

Survey data on supplier firms in Denmark are used in a hierarchical cluster analysis. The identified clusters are interpreted as expressions of different value creation configurations pursued by suppliers with regards to relations with their most important customers.

Three types of suppliers are identified: detached suppliers, which seek to create customer net benefits through low costs; technology-focused suppliers, which design value creation around benefits linked to being at the technological forefront; and integrated suppliers, which share characteristics with technology-focused suppliers, but also align closely with a relatively broader range of customer activities.

Limitations include the specificity of findings from one small, open economy with an extensive supplier base.

For managers in supplier companies, the research suggest value configurations can be used as strategic templates for further specialization and as way to assess and address value creation potential in customer firms.

Previous studies tend to overlook suppliers’ developments of value-creating activities to maintain customer relationships. The paper takes a supplier perspective to deepen the empirically based understanding of value creation configurations followed by high-cost country suppliers in the context of increasing global competition and production relocation. Theoretical implications as well as lessons formanagers in supplier firms of the identification of the different approaches to value creation configurations are presented.

This chapter highlights the value offered by photographic research methods to the study of organizational compassion. We demonstrate this potential by first briefly reviewing the history and usage of photographic research methods in the social sciences and the state of compassion research. We then describe how compassion emerged as a key theme in a field study that utilized photographic methods. From this, we identify four approaches that photographic research methods can be used to extend our understanding of compassion in organizations. Specifically, we clarify how this stream of research can be enhanced by the inclusion of photographic methods. We highlight critical research decisions and possible concerns in implementing photographic methods. The chapter concludes with additional organizational phenomena that would benefit from using a photographic methods approach.

The various methods gathered under the umbrella label of qualitative (Guba & Lincoln, 1994), defined as the study of “things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 3), offer many benefits through their ability to access, explore, and experience real organizational people and problems in rich detail (Van Maanen, 1979). As an example, photographic research methods—primarily qualitative methods through which researchers use photographs to elicit information during interviews and focus groups—often result in deep and nuanced data (Collier & Collier, 1986; Harper, 2005; Vince & Warren, 2012). Photographic methodologies are well-suited to the exploration of new phenomena because they allow researchers to get close to the lived experience and organizational processes (Dion, 2007), attend simultaneously to the social and material world in organizations (Shortt & Warren, 2012), and offer the potential to “mine deeper shafts into a different part of human consciousness than do words-alone interviews” (Harper, 2002, p. 23). Organizational research has traditionally been dominated by a positivistic paradigm that focuses on theory evaluation through the use of quantitative methodologies (Lin, 1998; Sutton, 1997), whereas qualitative research offers the potential to build theory by illuminating underlying processes and causal mechanisms in specific contexts (Lee, 1999). Researchers developing theory may be particularly interested in the richness of the data gathered with qualitative methods (Edmondson & McManus, 2007) such as photographic methods. Qualitative research is thus well-matched to nascent literatures that require inductive study about a phenomenon to generate foundational knowledge (Edmondson & McManus, 2007).

One such nascent research stream that could benefit from photographic methodologies is organizational compassion (Rynes, Bartunek, Dutton, & Margolis, 2012). In its current state, compassion research within the organizational literature has generated many narratives of experiences of compassion in response to a specific tragedy (Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006), as an organizational capability (Lilius et al., 2011b), or as an organizational capacity that an organization can develop (Madden, Duchon, Madden, & Plowman, 2012). These stories demonstrate that the common elements of the compassion process are the noticing of someone else's pain, empathizing with that person, and then responding in a way designed to lessen that pain (Kanov et al., 2004); however, because this process is so individualized, photographic methodologies offer researchers a chance to capture valuable new information about this process and the experience of compassion within organizations. In this chapter, we describe many potential benefits of designing organizational compassion research based on photographic methodologies.

In doing so, we offer several contributions. First, we show how photographic methodologies can create deeper responses during interviews and observations that may lead to surprising insights for theory. Second, by suggesting some of the insights that have been generated about compassion through photographic methodologies, we offer novel research ideas for this growing body of literature. The following sections provide background on the development and history of photographic methodologies and review the studies and methodologies that have contributed to our understanding of compassion within organizations. Subsequently, we describe some of the ways in which compassion has surfaced during our own field study using photograph elicitation. Finally, we describe possible studies that could benefit from the use of four forms of photographic methodologies to explore more targeted research questions related to organizational compassion and also offer a range of other organizational phenomena that could benefit from a photographic methods approach.

Workplace voice is well-established and encompasses behaviors such as prosocial voice, informal complaints, grievance filing, and whistleblowing, and it focuses on interactions between the employee and supervisor or the employee and the organizational collective. In contrast, our chapter focuses on employee prosocial advocacy voice (PAV), which the authors define as prosocial voice behaviors aimed at preventing harm or promoting constructive changes by advocating on behalf of others. In the context of a healthcare organization, low quality and unsafe patient care are salient and objectionable states in which voice can motivate actions on behalf of the patient to improve information exchanges, governance, and outreach activities for safer outcomes. The authors draw from the theory and research on responsibility to intersect with theories on information processing, accountability, and stakeholders that operate through voice between the employee-patient, employee-coworker, and employee-profession, respectively, to propose a model of PAV in patient-centered healthcare. The authors complete the model by suggesting intervening influences and barriers to PAV that may affect patient-centered outcomes.

The use of teams in organizations given the current trend toward globalization, population changes, and an aging workforce, especially in high‐income countries, makes the issue of diverse team building critical. The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of team diversity and team performance through the examination of theory and empirical research. Specifically, the paper seeks to answer the question: “How might individuals with diverse characteristics such as culture, age, work experience, educational background, aptitude and values, become successful team members?”.

A review of theories that are pertinent to individual differences and team formation, including social identity theory, mental models, inter contact theory, social comparison theory, and chaos theory, was conducted. Team formation and diversity literature were reviewed to identify ways of developing diverse and effective teams.

It is a truism that working together in teams is a smart way of achieving organizational performance goals. This paper discusses the theories, research and practices that underlie the development of efficient and effective teams. It demonstrates that recognizing the underlying individual differences, mental models, and assumptions that team members bring to the organization can help build teams that are able to overcome dysfunctional barriers and ensure performance improvement of the individuals, teams and organizations.

The approach used to review the literature is a limitation of this study as the authors may have missed a discussion surrounding an important concept or theory related to team diversity and performance.

Human resource development interventions that target team building, team work and team learning include modules that raise awareness of the perspectives of team members' individual differences and appropriateness of actions. Training at the team level should focus on the interaction between factors that shape the identity of individuals. Procedures and work design systems should be redesigned to insure that the development of strong and functional teams is supported from a holistic and organizational perspective.

This paper highlights diversity issues related to individual differences that underlie team formation and suggests strategies needed to develop effective teams.

Understanding how other customers affect hotel consumption behavior is an important topic in the hospitality literature. While existing research has typically explored the effects of active interactions among consumers, this study aims to better understand the effects of passive interactions. Accordingly, this research conceptualizes the hotel social servicescape as a function of the mere presence of the other social actors that occupy the hotel’s shared consumption space.

To operationalize this construct, data were collected from a sample of 1,019 recent consumers of full-service hotel experience in the USA.

The findings suggest that the social servicescape can significantly affect satisfaction and behavioral intentions in the domain of leisure-driven hotel experiences.

The results support the hypothesis that the mere presence of others significantly affects leisure travelers’ perceptions of the hotel consumption experience. Accordingly, these findings indicate that the makeup of the hotel servicescape is not limited to the traditionally acknowledged physical elements of the space.

The results suggest that in addition to managing the physical aspects of the service environment, hotel managers should take steps to manage the social aspects of the servicescape as well.

This paper is the first to provide an operational account of the social servicescape in the domain of full-service hotels. Additionally, nomological validity is established by examining the downstream effects on satisfaction and behavioral intentions.

This paper aims to examine the effect of R&D teams’ gender diversity on different innovation outputs. The paper argues that some innovations are best positioned to capitalize on the benefits of gender diversity because of the greater relevance of market insight and personal interactions. Moreover, it argues that gender diversity is not a source of innovation for foreign firms because of the subsidiaries’ role in the multinational group, the tacit nature of gender policies and the institutional distance between multinationals’ home and host countries.

Drawing from data of the Spanish Survey of Technological Innovation Panel de Innovación Tecnológica (PITEC), this study uses multivariable probit models that allow for systematic correlations among the different innovation outcomes to determine the impact of R&D workforce gender diversity on the likelihood of introducing different innovation outputs.

Allowing for systematic correlations among different innovation outcomes, results indicate that the relationship between gender diversity and product and process innovation has the shape of an inverted-U, while there is a positive linear association with service innovation. Moreover, gender diversity produces a greater impact on product innovation than on process innovation. Results also indicate that while gender diversity fosters every innovation outcome of domestic firms, it only contributes to foreign firms’ services innovation in a positive non-linear way.

Because of the availability of data, this paper has focused on how firms’ multinationality and group affiliation influence the relationship between gender diversity and innovation; however, other firms’ differences might also play a role on the effectiveness of the R&D workforce’s gender diversity. Firms differ on strategies, structures and capabilities (Nelson, 1991), and these differences may condition the potential of gender diversity. Therefore, this paper opens future research lines.

Innovative firms should be concerned with human resource management practices for gender diversity regardless of their innovation output strategy. However, managers should not consider forming teams with equal proportions of men and women. Those firms aiming at introducing innovations that involve interactions among internal and external agents and those that require a better interface with the marketplace will benefit more from gender diversity than those firms pursuing innovations related to the solution of technical problems. Finally, the paper shows that foreign subsidiaries have problems with the implementation of gender policies, especially when it comes to service and process innovation activities.

This paper contributes by examining the influence of two contextual factors that may affect the relationship between gender diversity and innovation. First, it examines how gender diversity affects the likelihood of introducing different innovation outputs (product, service and process) as the different tasks required by each innovation represent different contexts that may affect the effectiveness of gender diversity. Second, the paper analyzes whether the influence of R&D workforce’s gender diversity on innovation outputs is different for domestic and foreign firms as foreign firms’ national culture, organizational culture, strategy and HR practices differ from those of domestic firms.

This paper aims to explore and compare the roles of brand’s experiential and transformational benefits in formation of consumer-brand relationships. Focusing on cosmetics consumption, the study investigates how brand’s experiential benefits (brand experience) and transformational benefits (self-esteem and self-expression) could impact the strength of consumer-brand relationships.

Data analysis was performed using structural equation modeling technique. The sample consisted of 373 university students, who completed self-administered questionnaires.

Results show that brand experience and self-expression have significant positive impacts on consumer-brand relationships. Brand experience plays a more important role, compared with transformational benefits, in this process. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Future research could study possible transformative experiences across various industries. It could also use a more divergent sample that better represents general population.

This study is among the first in the literature to investigate the impacts of emerging sources of brand value, i.e. experiential and transformational benefits, in formation of strong consumer-brand relationships. It is also among the first to compare the predictive power of those two types of benefits in shaping brand-related outcomes.