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This study aims to shed lights on the dynamics of involving and sharing knowledge with stakeholders in the process of new service development (NSD) over time.

The paper is based on a paradigmatic case focused on the development of the digital MBA program by the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano. Primary and secondary data have been largely collected and analyzed, involving multiple stakeholders of the development process.

This study describes how several stakeholders have been involved during the phase of the NSD process, showing two variables that ruled their involvement: the level of control exerted by the School on the stakeholders and the level of flexibility of the stakeholders.

This research offers insights to the understanding of the dynamics of involving and sharing knowledge with multiple-stakeholders in NSD. From a theoretical perspective, it contributes to stakeholder theory linking it with the service management literature, highlighting the role of cyclical fluctuations in the involvement activities.

This research offers insights to managers dealing with the development of new services, offering them a novel view on how various stakeholders may be involved over time, in different moment and in different ways, to properly enhance the development process thanks to their knowledge sharing.

This paper contributes to the service management literature emphasizing the role of multiple stakeholders while providing insights and suggestions to manage the complex relationships created by their involvement and their knowledge.

India is the first country to have mandated compulsory corporate social responsibility (CSR) spends through changes in its legislative framework. Focus has thus shifted from the “why” to the “how” of CSR and, therefore, a shift in the “locus” of CSR responsibility from the “influencer” chief executive officer toward the “implementer” CSR professionals. The purpose of this paper is to study the role of management education in developing individual competencies among the implementers and impacting effective CSR implementation.

This paper, using a case study design, studies the role of management education in developing individual competencies among the implementers and impacting effective CSR implementation. Building on theoretical frameworks, this paper carries out an exploratory research of an Indian business school’s management education program for development practitioners. It uses qualitative inputs gathered from relevant stakeholders of the program to understand the role of management education in facilitating the paradigm shift in CSR in the Indian context.

The paper finds that the program has impacted outcomes at three levels, namely through developing key individual CSR-related competencies; impacting participants’ professional performance; and organizational impact in effective CSR implementation.

The case study provides a roadmap to business schools for designing and implementing programs for CSR professionals.

Extant research in the Indian context is silent on key competencies required for CSR implementation and also on the role of management education in developing the same. Such competencies can ensure the efficiency of the expected large CSR spends by private corporates under the new legal requirements and alter the country’s social development path.

Personality profiling in today’s business world has become an essential organisational development practice targeted at identifying a set of employees' traits, which differentiate an employee from one another. Given the assumption that personality traits form an essential indicator of developing the potential of an individual workforce, possible to establish how employees function in a certain job role and their suitability for the particular tasks in an organisation. This study aims to explore the relationship between personality traits, assessment centres (ACs) quality and management development in Nigeria telecommunication organisation among its managers.

The study employed multi-stage sampling techniques and further stratified the hierarchy of the management and finally used a simple random sampling strategy on each stratum. A combination of 482 managers in Nigerian telecommunication organisations participated in this study. The study investigated 12 hypotheses and 1 mediating postulation. Multiple scales were adapted to measure dimensions of endogenous and exogenous variables along the path of mediating variables of the study. The study employed a cross-sectional survey approach to administering the research instrument across all the departments among the managers of the organisations. A structural equation model of assessment was used to analyse the data collected from managers of the telecoms organisations.

The outcome of the study was significant, 10 of the postulated hypotheses were found to be significant while 3 were not significant. The study revealed that a combination of openness to experience, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness and extraversion personality have no significant relationship with the AC. Also, employees who are high in neuroticism like being emotionally unstable did not find a significant relationship with the AC. In a similar situation, the combined effect of all the big-five personalities was not significant in management development among the managers of the telecommunication industry. The AC is discovered to mediate between personality traits and management development. Individually, the big-five model finds a significant relationship with AC and management development, respectively.

The study is restricted to managers of the Nigerian telecoms industry alone and not all the entire workforce. It adopted cross-sectional analysis to make an inference on all the managers of the organisations. The implication is that the period of the view of a particular point in a sequence of the event may not be representative. Another implication is that the results from the cross-sectional design are for the relationship, and they do not indicate causation.

In practice, this study has shown that personality profiling is important to managing organisational behaviour to highlight a set of traits of employees suitable for peculiar roles. This study implies that personality elements constitute a vital signal of the potential development of the workforce. It helps to illuminate an individual functioning style in a certain task situation, therefore determining both professional and managerial suitability in performing a given role.

This study attempts to create new insights into innovation management through the integration of innovation management processes and sustainable, iterative circles. Through the exploration of the use of sustainable, iterative circles in a manufacturing environment, this paper explores their role in facilitating customer-focused innovation practices. Other supporting antecedences for innovative behavior are reviewed, and their combined effect upon delivering cost-effective product developments are assessed.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews in manufacturing organizations from the automotive industry. Interviews were conducted with senior functional managers to interpret the application of sustainable, iterative development circles. Analysis of the data was undertaken via thematic analysis based upon pertinent and emergent themes.

Sustainable, iterative development circles overcame the inherent path-dependency of traditional linear development approaches, whereas, traditional approaches structure the involvement of key business functions, iterative circles facilitate more flexible approaches to product development that more closely met the requirements of the customer, especially when those requirements are in a state of flux.

This iterative, customer-centric approach to product development reflects the increasingly dynamic market environments in which manufacturing organizations operate. Using this approach helps to focus the organization’s attention upon customer requirements rather than the challenges of adhering to the rigid dogma of a chosen development methodology.

This study proposes a new approach toward the development of innovations in manufacturing organizations utilizing the sustainable, iterative circles, and therefore, contrasts with the traditional, linear development methodologies that are usually employed.

Start-ups are the new avenues for innovation and employment. Strategic management is critical for employee engagement and skill development of start-ups. This study aims to understand the impact of strategic management on employee engagement and skill development.

The study attempts to identify principal factors of strategic management influencing employee engagement and skill development. Structural equation modeling has been used to understand effects of the study.

The study results have shown the challenges concerning employee skill development and reflected on importance of the employee engagement programmes for the growth of the human resource in the start-ups.

The study has confined to strategic management for employee engagement and skill development. However, studies related to challenges encountered by start-ups in the specific areas of marketing, operations and finance, etc. would provide more detailed impact on the growth of start-ups.

This study provides an insight into strategic management for employee engagement and skill development. The results would provide directions for improving strategy management from the perspective of employee engagement and skill development.

The study on start-ups provides a direction to the owners of start-ups to understand the importance of strategic management and human resource management for building strong enterprising which can provide employment opportunity for the youth of the nation and improve the society at large.

This paper is an attempt to provide directions for managing challenges from the perspective of employees’ engagement and skill development, which is essential for growth and sustainability in the future.

This two-part study aims to contribute to the body of knowledge on team development by examining the development of self-managing teams (SMTs) in healthcare. Based on an exploration of the team development literature, a perspective on SMT development was created, which suggested that SMTs develop along a non-sequential pattern of three processes–team management, task management and boundary management and improvement–that is largely the result of individual, team, organizational and environmental-level factors.

The perspective on SMT development was assessed in a Dutch mental healthcare organization by conducting 13 observations of primary mental healthcare SMTs as well as 14 retrospective interviews with the self-management process facilitator and advisors of all 100 primary mental healthcare SMTs.

Empirical results supported the perspective on SMT development. SMTs were found to develop along each of the three defined processes in a variety or possible patterns or simultaneously over time, depending on many of the identified factors and three others. These factors included individual human capital, team member attitudes and perceived workload at the individual level, psychological safety, team turnover, team size, nature of the task and bureaucratic history at the team level, and management style and material and social support at the organizational level.

This study provides a non-sequential model of SMT development in healthcare, which healthcare providers could use to understand and foster SMTs development. To foster SMT development, it is suggested that cultural change need to be secured alongside with structural change.

Even though various team development models have been described in the literature, this study is the first to indicate how SMTs in the healthcare context develop toward effective functioning.

Insufficient productivity development in the global and Finnish infrastructure sectors indicates that there are challenges in genuinely achieving the goals of resource efficiency and digitalization. This study adapts the approach of capability maturity model integration (CMMI) for examining the capabilities for productivity development that reveal the enablers of improving productivity in the infrastructure sector.

Civil engineering in Finland was selected as the study area, and a qualitative research approach was adopted. A novel maturity model was constructed deductively through a three-step analytical process. Previous research literature was adapted to form a framework with maturity levels and key process areas (KPAs). KPA attributes and their maturity criteria were formed through a thematic analysis of interview data from 12 semi-structured group interviews. Finally, validation and refinement of the model were performed with an expert panel.

This paper provides a novel maturity model for examining and enhancing the infrastructure sector’s maturity in productivity development. The model brings into discussion the current business logics, relevance of lifecycle-thinking, binding targets and outcomes of limited activities in the surrounding infrastructure system.

This paper provides a new approach for pursuing productivity development in the infrastructure sector by constructing a maturity model that adapts the concepts of CMMI and change management. The model and findings benefit all actors in the sector and provide an understanding of the required elements and means to achieve a more sustainable built environment and effective operations.

From the organisational perspective, the authors know that management, including innovation management, becomes less “organised” by bureaucracy and administrative tools, and much more impacted by organisational capabilities, competences and hidden, “soft” routines, bringing innovation and creativity to the core of organisation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on competency sets for open innovation (OI) and is to provide recommendations for OI competency development in companies, linked to the core OI processes.

The research is exploratory and aims at theory-based practical indication combining deductive identification of competency clusters and inductive model development. Thus, the authors apply quantitative methods to data collection and analysis. The authors conducted an extensive literature review on competence challenges with regard to execution of OI, and empirical data analysis based on a large-scale structured industrial survey in Europe (N=264), leading to the development of competency sets for companies. SPSS tools are applied for empirical tests.

The authors develop a generic OI competency model applicable across industries, combined with organisational implications for sustaining OI management capabilities. The research clusters competencies based on the empirical analysis, which addresses the various challenges of OI, leading to recommendations for competency management in an OI context.

The data were collected from one key informant per company. Although the authors made efforts to ensure that this was a senior manager responsible for innovation, the authors cannot exclude some bias in the way that OI activities and related competencies are perceived. Exploratory nature of the research, which calls for a more systematic investigation of the OI activity modes and the OI competencies resulting competency model. In particular, the competencies could be tested on an inter-professional sample of employees with involvement in and/or responsibility for innovation, development, and HR management, as well as on leaders of innovating companies. Third, although significant in size for the analyses undertaken, the sample is not large enough to enable a more fine-tuned analysis of regional differences across Europe in the way that OI is managed through the development and implementation of competencies.

The research contributes to the OI management field with an outlined OI competency profile that can be implemented flexibly and tailored to individual firm’s needs. It brings indications for both further theory building and practice of innovation organisation, especially with regard to human resource development and organisational capability building for OI.

The social implications of the paper result from the contribution to innovation management competency development in OI regimes, which is an important tool for designing contemporary educational programmes, contributes to OI management sophistication in business which is especially important during the economy slowdown and search for new sources of growth and productivity, and supports firms productive engagement in OI ecosystems and collective technology upgrading towards higher societal benefits and stakeholder involvement.

An empirically grounded OI competency model is proposed with an implication to support human resource development for OI. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has been no prior attempt to build such a model. The distinguished feature of the research is its extensive European coverage of 35 countries and multinational scope. The empirical validation strategy makes the research extremely relevant for management decisions related to human factors related OI capability development in organisations.

As part of a national plan to govern professional and organizational development in Norwegian specialist healthcare, the country’s hospital clinics are tasked with constructing development plans. Using the development plan as a case, the paper analyzes how managers navigate and legitimize the planning process among central actors and deals with the contingency of decisions in such strategy work.

This study applies a qualitative research design using a case study method. The material consists of public documents, observations and single interviews, covering the process of constructing a development plan at the clinical level.

The findings suggest that the development plan was shaped through a multilevel translation process consisting of different contending rationalities. At the clinical level, the management had difficulties in legitimizing the process. The underlying tension between top-down and bottom-up steering challenged involvement and made it difficult to manage the contingency of decisions.

The findings are relevant to public sector managers working on strategy documents and policymakers identifying challenges that might hinder the fulfillment of political intentions.

This paper draws on a case from Norway; however, the findings are of general interest. The study contributes to the academic discussion on how to consider both the health authorities’ perspective and the organizational perspective to understand the manager’s role in handling the contingency of decisions and managing paradoxes in the decision-making process.