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The authors aim to contribute to current knowledge on women's networks in organizations by exploring the strategies employed by members of women's networks, Human Resources (HR) management and senior line management to negotiate the role of these networks in their organizations.

The authors employ the theoretical perspective of micro-politics to analyze qualitative data they collected in an action research project using open-ended interviews and participant observation. The interviews were conducted with network board and active members, and members of their organizations' HR departments and senior management. Participant observation of the interviewees' interactions took place during facilitated workshops.

Adding to the literature, the authors find that members of the different parties employ different micro-political strategies. Many senior HR and management members demand that the networks' activities contribute to the organizations' diversity aims and bottom line. They largely avoid strategic cooperation with the networks. Most network members, in turn, resist the restricted role of the networks as an instrument to realize their organizations' business case. They claim some freedom to independently decide on the networks' strategies and activities. They resist being attributed tasks and responsibilities that they consider to reside with their organizations. Moreover, they try to sustain cooperative relationships with senior HR and management in an advisory role.

The action research approach enabled the authors to contribute to existing knowledge and extend the micro-politics theoretical perspective to include the collective agency of members of organizational groups and cooperation between these groups.

The European Union (EU) has recently adopted gender quotas for corporate boards (CBQ), anticipating ripple effects on women’s careers in the companies concerned, as well as throughout the economy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether CBQ has spurred ripple effects and discuss mechanisms hindering or facilitating women’s occupancy of top executive positions.

Norway was the first country in the world to introduce CBQ in 2003, with full effect from 2008. The policy requires company boards to be composed of 40% of each gender. Drawing on original data mapping boards and executive committees in Norway’s 200 largest companies, the authors analyze the association between CBQ and the gender composition of executive management almost 15 years after the full implementation. The data include both companies covered by the CBQ and large companies not covered.

The investigation does not find a positive association between CBQ and more women in executive positions. Thus, the ripple effect hypothesis of CBQ is not supported. CBQ may have contributed to an increased awareness of gender imbalances, yet these findings indicate that to achieve more gender balance in executive positions, scholars and practitioners may need to focus more on gendered conditions and processes in organizations and society throughout executive careers than on the gender composition of boards.

This paper provides empirical analyses of original data 15 years after the implementation of CBQ. The authors further contribute to scholarly debate by identifying and discussing possible mechanisms that explain how requiring more women on corporate boards may – or may not – have ripple effects on executive management.

While the three lines model (TLM) provides an organizational structure to execute risk and control duties, research and practice show limitations in the model's implementation. These limitations result in governance issues. Such issues, together with control weaknesses, could be addressed by leveraging properties of distribution, transparency, and immutability of blockchain technology. To this end, in this paper the authors propose a conceptual control framework based on blockchain technology to augment control practice.

The design of the resulting blockchain-based control framework (BBCF) and its prototype, based on the design science research methodology (DSRM), is presented and discussed in terms of the potential impact in the context of the identified problems within the TLM.

One potential outcome of BBCF could be to redefine the scope and boundaries of some of the activities in audit and control practices from a more static to a more dynamic and prospective role. In a larger context of improving governance practices, the BBCF could set the path for a more inclusive and participatory interaction between the different governance actors of an organization.

However, this assumes that blockchain is more widely adopted despite its complexity and rigidity.

BBCF covering both a conceptual model design and a reference implementation provides an innovation in audit and control. BBCF could include all relevant stakeholders who have an interest in corporate governance and control activities, including the regulators.

The contribution intends to serve both as a starting point for discussing the evolution of audit and control practice based on blockchain technology, as well as an initial actionable prototype for experimentation and further development.

The purpose of this study is to explore the mechanism of digitalized transformation in organizations’ human resource management (HRM). This study summarizes three basic factors driving the digital transformation process in China: level of perception, level of application and speed of transformation.

This study analyzes the strategic transformation process of HRM in Haier, Hisense and Chambroad to explore the human resource digital transformation mechanism in Chinese enterprises.

The results of this study show that three HR value chain models can be constructed based on how well HRM deals with business: the efficiency-oriented HRM value chain, quasi-business-oriented HRM value chain and business-oriented HRM value chain. The basic factors – level of perception, level of application and speed of transformation – are observed in the entire HRM digital transformation process.

This study provides theoretical and empirical insights for enterprises to explore the value of digital technology in HRM and facilitate the digital transformation of HRM.

This empirical study aims to explore how actors in specific human resource practices (HRPs) such as line managers (LMs) impact employee productivity measures in the context of financial institutions (FI) banks.

This cross-country study adopted a qualitative methodology. It employed semi-structured interviews to collect data from purposefully selected 12 business facing directors (BFDs) working in the top 10 banks in Nigeria and the UK. The data collected were analysed with the help of the trans-positional cognition approach (TPCA) phenomenological method.

The findings of a TPCA analytical process imply that in the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, the BFDs line managers’ human resources practices (LMHRPs) resulted in a highly regulated workplace, knowledge gap, service operations challenges and subjective quantitatively driven key performance indicators, considered service productivity paradoxical elements. Although the practices in the UK and Nigerian FIs had similar labels, their aggregates were underpinned by different contextual issues.

To support LMs in better understanding and managing FIs BFDs productivity measures and outcomes, we propose the Managerial Employee Productivity Operational Definition framework as part of their toolkit. This study will be helpful for banking sectors, their regulators, policymakers, other FIs’ industry stakeholders and future researchers in the field.

Within the context of the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, this study is the first attempt to understand how LMHRPs impact BFDs productivity in this manner. It confirms that LMHRPs result in service productivity paradoxical elements with perceived or lost productivity implications.

This paper uses dialectical inquiry to explore tensions that arise when adopting Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system and their reconciliation mechanisms.

We conducted an in-depth qualitative case study over a 3-year period on an Italian division of an international electrotechnical organisation that produces electrical switches. This organisation successfully adopted Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system. The study is based on primary data such as observations and semi-structured interviews, along with secondary data.

We identify four empirically validated dialectic tensions arising across different Industry 4.0 adoption stages due to managers’ and workers’ contrasting interpretations of technologies. Consequently, we define the related reconciliation mechanisms that allow the effective adoption of various Industry 4.0 technologies to support a lean production system.

This is the first empirical investigation of tensions in the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system. Furthermore, the paper presents four theoretical propositions and a conceptual model describing which tensions arise during the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in a lean production system and the reconciliation mechanisms that prevent lean production system deterioration.

The 170-year-old Master in Business Administration (MBA) program is becoming obsolete and inefficient to address today's real-world problems, and is facing mounting criticism from business scholars, management deans, and academic scholars alike. Reviewing major criticisms, this chapter suggests a new design for the MBA program that will not only address the criticisms but also accept a paradigm shift that will spearhead it in coming decades. The redesigned MBA “structure” proposes a four-semester full-time program, during which each semester delves into deeper marketplace problems of increasing complexity (i.e., from simple to complex to unstructured to wicked problems) and deals with these problems with new levels of critical thinking skills and ethical reasoning processes tempered by corresponding entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, and values. The “content” of the redesigned program is anchored around five major themes of business learning: namely, intrinsic motivation management, creativity and innovation management, productivity management, revenue management, and eco-sustainability management, each geared to generate professional entrepreneurial knowledge, and skills and values urgently needed today. Numerous beneficial features of this newly redesigned integrated business management program (MBA) are also discussed.

Based on social cognitive theory, this study aims to explore the influence of supervisor bottom-line mentality (SBLM) on employee knowledge behavior (knowledge territorial behavior and knowledge sabotage behavior). The study first investigates the role of an ethical decision-making mechanism (moral disengagement) in mediating this relationship. In addition, it considers the possible boundary conditions to supplement research on the influence of SBLM in the knowledge management field.

The authors collected 256 data points from employees across three stages using convenience sampling. The authors then tested the proposed hypothesis using hierarchical regression and bootstrap methods.

The results demonstrated that SBLM promotes employees’ moral disengagement, leading to more knowledge territorial behavior and knowledge sabotage behavior. Furthermore, high power distance orientation among employees exacerbates the ill effects of SBLM according to the first stage of a moderated mediation model. Employees with such an orientation are more likely to respond to a SBLM by exhibiting a higher level of moral disengagement, thus increasing their knowledge territorial behavior and knowledge sabotage behavior.

Research on the influence of SBLM in the knowledge management field is limited. This study not only clarifies the relationships between SBLM and two types of knowledge behavior (knowledge territorial behavior and knowledge sabotage behavior) but also enriches the research on the antecedents of these two types of knowledge behavior.

The Purpose of the study was to investigate the construct validity and internal consistency of the LaMI among staff in the context of elderly care in Sweden.

Questionnaire data from a longitudinal study of staff working in elderly care were used. Data were collected using the Leadership and Management Inventory. First data collection was for explorative factor analysis (n = 1,149), and the second collection, one year later, was for confirmatory factor analysis (n = 1,061).

The explorative factor analysis resulted in a two-factor solution that explained 70.2% of the total variance. Different models were tested in the confirmatory factor analysis. The final model, a two-factor solution where three items were omitted, showed acceptable results.

The instrument measures both leadership and management performance and can be used to continually measure managers’ performances as perceived by staff to identify areas for development.