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Researchers have adopted a somewhat narrow conceptualization of organizational culture, founded on specific assumptions about the impact of founders or top leadership. The purpose of this paper is to address this research gap.

Based on 356 Chinese employees, this paper examines the relationships between organizational culture, leadership and employee outcomes. Specifically, the paper focuses on a mediation model by looking at how different leadership processes impact the relationship between culture and outcomes.

Supportive and task leadership styles and a persuasive influence strategy are correlated with team, detail and innovation cultures, respectively, and are significantly stronger than that of other leadership styles/strategies. Partial support is found for the mediating effect of task and change leadership styles, and assertive and persuasive influence strategies. Contrary to the authors’ second assumption regarding the social learning effect on outcomes, the study provides a tentative conclusion that different culture types may have different levels of strength in molding middle management and consequently influencing subordinate outcomes. The model of “culture-leadership-outcome” generally shows a similar pattern with the reverse effect of “leadership-culture-outcome.”

This study was the first to examine the impact of organizational culture on leadership and their effect on organizational outcomes, and to compare the reverse relationship. It suggests a new model that combines social cognitive theory with concepts drawn from the social learning perspective. Both the significant and non-significant results enhance our understanding on the mediating effects of leadership and culture. The findings also enrich leadership theory because no empirical studies systematically examined the similarities and differences between style approaches and influence strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanism through which stressors influence job crafting. Based on regulatory focus theory, this study explores the mediating role of work regulatory focus between the challenge-hindrance stressors and approach-avoidance job crafting and the moderating role of trait regulatory focus.

The authors collected survey data in a northwestern city of China from 578 employees working in the finance, real estate and IT industries. Results were analyzed using Mplus 7.

The results reveal that challenge stressors have a positive effect on both approach job crafting (i.e. increasing structural job resources, increasing social job resources and increasing challenging job demands) and avoidance job crafting (i.e. decreasing hindering job demands) via work promotion focus. On the other hand, hindrance stressors have a positive effect on only avoidance job crafting via work prevention focus. In addition, trait promotion focus accentuates the influence of challenge-hindrance stressors on work regulatory focus, as well as the indirect effect of challenge-hindrance stressors on approach-avoidance job crafting respectively. Trait prevention focus only weakens the influence of challenge stressors on work promotion focus.

This study unfolds how stressors relate to job crafting. However, the cross-sectional design may limit the causal inferences.

This study provides new insight into the relationship between stressors and job crafting by explicating the motivational mechanism and boundary conditions.

The authors explain the conditions under which positive personality traits and work environment factors either interact synergistically or yield diminishing-gains when creative individuals are in a supportive working environment.

Data were obtained using a time-lagged design. The final sample includes 350 researchers from 64 scientific research teams.

The results indicate that the need for cognition is positively associated with individual creativity. Furthermore, this study suggests that perceived organizational support for creativity can complement an individual's need for cognition when it comes to individual creativity. This indicates a synergistic pattern. On the other hand, psychological safety can substitute for an individual's need for cognition when influencing individual creativity. Thus, a diminishing-gains pattern also exists.

The results suggest that when individuals are stuck in environments of low psychological safety, yet perceive higher levels of organizational support for creativity, their levels of creativity can be boosted.

This study is among one of the first to explore a supportive context's complementary or substitution effect on positive personality traits by demonstrating the complementary effect of perceived organizational support for creativity and the substitution effect of psychological safety. This study validates the positive effect of the need for cognition on creativity. This study also enriches the psychological safety literature by showing that psychological safety is not always necessary for individuals with a high need for cognition.

Organizations use enterprise social media (ESM) platforms to operate, function, and develop. However, the effectiveness of the use of ESM is inconclusive. This study aims to explore the mechanism and boundary conditions of the relationship between employee ESM use and job performance.

This study uses a 2-wave survey design, with a final sample of 481 employees from a large automobile company.

The results indicate that ESM use is beneficial and detrimental to job performance. On the one hand, ESM use is positively related to work overload, decreasing job performance. On the other hand, ESM use is positively associated with informational support, increasing job performance. A mediation test revealed that both work overload and informational support mediate the relationship between ESM use and job performance. Furthermore, job autonomy weakens the positive relationship between ESM use and work overload, but strengthens the positive relationship between ESM use and informational support.

This study provides a more balanced view of how ESM use influences job performance by demonstrating the opposing mediating roles of work overload and informational support. Further, this study fills a research gap by considering job characteristics when examining the boundary conditions of ESM use. Third, this study validates the generalization of the job demands-resources model in social media research.

Many studies of control and international joint venture (IJV) performance have focused on ownership and management control. We develop a conceptual framework to explain how strategies affect the relationship between management control and joint venture performance. Specifically, we focus on serving the host-country customer and extending the life cycle of the foreign partner's products. Using a sample of Sino–U.S. and Sino–Japanese joint ventures, we found that serving the host-country customer strengthens the positive relationship between management control by the foreign partner and IJV performance. However, extending the product life cycle of the foreign partner's products weakens the positive relationship between management control by the foreign partner and IJV performance. We discuss the performance implications of dealing with both strategies and reveal a complex relationship between equity ownership, management control, and IJV performance.

While these three studies investigated different aspects of MNE operations in China, they all seem to converge on one important research topic: the multifaceted role of learning in the choice of a firm's international expansion strategy (e.g., timing of entry into the Chinese market) or the choice of an organizational form as the vehicle for expansion (e.g., mode and extent of managerial control). The results show that learning occurs not only between foreign and local Chinese partners but also between existing and potential entrants from the same or culturally similar countries. In addition, they also suggest that learning affects not only the initial entry decision and mode choice but also the evolution of the relationship between the MNE entrant and its local partner over time. Furthermore, the study by Wang and Nicholas demonstrates that a MNE entrant into the highly dynamic Chinese market can expect to acquire new information about the country's evolving institutional environment and may find it advantageous to modify its strategic or organizational choices as the country's institutional reform progresses.