Search results

The literature advises managers that under certain conditions developing an entrepreneurial orientation (EO) may lead to superior financial performance. However, little guidance has been forthcoming about how to develop an EO and the impediments that may be encountered. Data collected from senior managers in 120 Canadian firms in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector reveal four sets of capabilities that enhance EO (research, recruiting and retention, building customer relationships, and decision-making processes), and three primary impediments (risk-aversity, complacency, and scarcity of capital or other resources). This study provides practical insight into how firms can develop their EO.

This chapter presents the outcome of an empirical study titled ‘Knowledge Sharing and Transfer (KST) that Really Works: An exploration of KST in Sub-Saharan South African Public Sector Institutions’. Enablers of KST were explored through the lens of lived experiences of managers working at Gautrain Management Agency (GMA), a rail transport public sector operator in South Africa. Qualitative data were collected from 15 managers and analysed using Thematic and Trans Positional Cognition Approach (TPCA) qualitative analytical tools. Four themes, essential originating antecedent factors, complementary people enabling factors, organisational enabling factors and effective KST implementing factors emerged. Rahman’s KST model was adopted as a theoretical framework and used to better understand the study findings. The current study affirms two elements within the theoretical framework, namely, complementary people enabling factors and organisational enabling factors, while the remaining two, essential originating antecedent factors and effective KST implementing factors, were not affirmed. This study contributes a new KST framework that helps business managers understand KST from the South African public sector practitioners’ perspectives, which represents this study’s contribution to the business performance measurement body of knowledge and practice.

The American National Red Cross is in many ways the iconic symbol for disaster response and recovery. The organization, founded in 1881, has a long track record for coming to the aid of those in need in the wake of wars, natural disasters, and other crises. However, in the wake of recent disasters, the Red Cross has been criticized for underperforming. By combining the literature on bureaucracy in Austrian economics and the literature on monocentricity in the work of Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, we provide an analysis of the Red Cross that helps explain the organization’s evolution over time and that also yields implications for disaster management more broadly. Specifically, the Red Cross is a bureaucracy that has become increasingly centralized and rigid as it has become further enmeshed with governmental responsibilities.

This chapter is set within global public sector reform processes, as policing is part of public service delivery. It explores the question of who is “vulnerable”, how vulnerability is assessed, and why? It considers the measurement of vulnerability, and how this influences policing practice and the role of the Police in contemporary policing.

The research is qualitative in nature and reliant on interview and documentary source data. It draws on concepts such as resilience, co-production, professionalisation and training as organising themes in which to make sense of how we reimagine the management of Vulnerability and the demands they place at the “core, the heart and the centre” of policing today.

Police management in the UK are attempting to stay true to the Peelian Principle of police efficiency alongside balancing the changing remit of what they have to contend with on a day-to-day basis – this is the paradox. Both Vulnerability and Risk are demonstrated to be increasingly interconnected alongside the developments of public health policing in the UK and elsewhere. Collectively, these concepts help to examine an increasingly complex landscape for the police to manoeuvre within, as they respond to a myriad of competing demands on services.

Vulnerability is the core, the heart and the centre of meaningful human experiences. With increasing pressures on resources, political scrutiny and changing roles and responsibilities, the police as an organisation (both in the UK and internationally) are increasingly responding to competing demands for their service. These demands are represented in this chapter as a paradox of change.

This chapter is based on a four-year literature review process that focused on conceptual business management research. A new platform for advancing business management in competence-related ways is compiled using 66 references that contain a population of 84 competence-related business management concepts published in English between the years 1990 and 2002. For the purposes of this study, the home bases of focal firms are limited to the OECD countries. Ex ante, various research traditions were regrouped into eight schools of thought on business management based on resources, competences, knowledge, organizations, processes, business dynamism, evolution, and Porter's frameworks. The eligible concepts were identified via an analysis of 50 journals and books of 18 publishers. The findings reveal that 99 authors have assigned primary or secondary roles to a firm's competences within their 84 concepts across the eight schools of thought. The two schools with primary emphasis on a firm's competences, the dynamism-based school (18 concepts) and the competence-based school (16 concepts), have produced 34 (41%) concepts. The six other schools have generated 50 (60%) concepts: 14 knowledge-based, ten resource-based, ten evolutionary, seven Porterian, seven organization-based, and two process-based concepts. The platform developed in this chapter may help researchers to focus on the most promising areas and ways to produce highly applicable concepts for managing a firm's dynamic business. Some suggestions to this end are put forth: (i) increase future collaboration between scholars, business managers, and business consultants, (ii) advance competence-based concepts primarily along the international business dimension, and (iii) conduct future competence-related literature reviews. The rigorous conduct of future reviews involves the replicable ways of searching, browsing, including or excluding, retrieving, inferring, coding, and presenting the conceptual data.

The vulnerability of capabilities – their susceptibility to depreciation of their strategic value – results from an unbalance between exploitation and exploration within a capability as well as between different levels of capabilities. This vulnerability is examined under the lens of bounded awareness in which the issues of timing, success, and beliefs affect the bias in the deployment of capabilities. Different levels of capabilities are prone to become vulnerable because of internal and external forces. Interfirm knowledge transfer is suggested as a way to reduce the vulnerability of capabilities.

Introduction: Organisations all over the world are experiencing skill gaps. One of the key factors contributing to the shortage of competent workers is the inability to find candidates that fit the profile. Most of the time, the market does not offer what organisations require.

Purpose: This research focuses on skill shortages and labour market rigidity in the information technology (IT) sector. It discusses the impact of labour shortage and strategies to overcome these challenges.

Need of the Study: The study is required to reduce the skill shortage in the IT sector and inflexibility in the labour market.

Methodology: The data are collected from secondary sources, that is, books, journals and other internet sources.

Findings: The labour market volatility is impacted by several external factors leading to rigidity and talent shortages. Different forecasts within the IT industry, manufacturing, media and telecommunications indicate large-scale labour shortages. The growing influence of digitalisation further creates challenges for organisations during the hiring process as the identified skill gaps for IT professionals are also identified.

Practical Implications: Labour market rigidity affects the labour market. Shifts in labour supply and demand do not always impact wages. Methods are suggested on how to reduce the rigidity in the labour market and, in turn, decrease the skill gaps.

Resource reconfiguration enables firms to adapt in dynamic environments by supplementing, removing, recombining, or redeploying resources. Whereas prior research has underscored the merits of resource reconfiguration and the modes for implementing it, little is known about the antecedents of this practice. According to prior research, under given industry conditions, resource reconfiguration is prompted by a firm’s corporate strategy and by characteristics of its knowledge assets. We complement this research by identifying learning from performance feedback as a fundamental driver of resource reconfiguration. We claim that performance decline relative to aspiration motivates the firm’s investment in knowledge reconfiguration, and that this investment is reinforced by the munificence of complementary resources in its industry, although uncertainty about the availability of such resources limits that investment. Testing our conjectures with a sample of 248 electronics firms during the period 1993–2001, we reveal a clear distinction between exploitative reconfiguration, which combines existing knowledge elements, and exploratory reconfiguration, which incorporates new knowledge elements. We demonstrate that performance decline relative to aspiration motivates a shift from exploitative reconfiguration to exploratory reconfiguration. Moreover, munificence of complementary resources mitigates the tradeoff between exploratory and exploitative reconfigurations, whereas uncertainty weakens the motivation to engage in both types of reconfiguration, despite the performance gap. Nevertheless, codeployment, which extends the deployment of knowledge assets to additional domains, is more susceptible to uncertainty than redeployment, which withdraws those assets from their original domain and reallocates them to new domains. Our study contributes to emerging research on resource reconfiguration, extends the literature on learning from performance feedback, and advances research on balancing exploration and exploitation.