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This paper aims to analyse the extent to which health and safety action controls, results controls and informal controls affect the integration of health and safety issues into management actions, which in turn leads to improve health and safety performance. It also investigates the extent to which those health and safety control mechanisms contribute complementarily to the integration of health and safety issues.

A survey of 108 Italian non-listed firms tests a set of hypotheses based on complementarity theory and object of control framework.

Not all the health and safety control mechanisms positively influence the integration of health and safety issues into business practices and external stakeholder relations. Complementarity between health and safety control mechanisms is significant only for higher health and safety performance companies, indicating that the health and safety control mechanisms operate as a package.

The health and safety performance measure could be replaced in future research by improved inter-subjectively testable information, although collecting health and safety quantitative data is difficult. An additional limitation is the response rate.

The findings encourage companies to design and use a comprehensive set of health and safety control mechanisms to promote a healthy workplace.

The paper contributes to the management control, sustainability management control and health and safety accounting literature. The paper provides an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of the effectiveness of different control mechanisms in the context of health and safety that hitherto has rarely been investigated despite the multiple importance of the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to study management control mechanisms (social, behavioral, and output control mechanisms) and their complementary effects on firm performance in lean manufacturing firms.

The study uses second-order structural equation modeling to analyze survey data from 368 different lean manufacturing facilities.

The paper finds that the complementary effects of management control mechanisms in lean manufacturing firms outweigh their additive effects on firm performance.

Applying isolated lean management control mechanisms leads to inferior performance, as these management control mechanisms are complementary. Thus, to realize the full potential of lean manufacturing, this paper suggests that lean management control mechanisms should be implemented as an integrated control system.

Firms seeking to benefit from the implementation of lean manufacturing should understand the complementarity among the management control mechanisms, as the performance effects of lean management control mechanisms when applied together are greater than their isolated additive effects.

This paper is the first to provide empirical evidence of the superior firm performance effects of complementary lean management control mechanisms compared with their additive effects. This paper also expands the understanding of how to conceptualize lean management control mechanisms. Specifically, this is the first paper to distinguish between social cultural control and social visual control mechanisms as well as between non-financial and financial control mechanisms. This paper is also the first to use a second-order structural equation model to properly test and account for the complementary effects on firm performance that stem from multiple control mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of behaviour-based and buffer-based management mechanisms on enterprise agility using the lens of the agency theory.

This study is based on data collected from 185 manufacturing enterprises using a survey instrument. The authors employ structural equation modelling for data analysis.

The results of this study show that buffer-based mechanisms used for dealing with agency uncertainty of supplier/buyer not only have a positive impact on agility of enterprises, but are also contingent on the behavioural interventions used in the relationship with a supplier/buyer. Behaviour-based mechanisms also positively impact enterprise agility through mitigating the likelihood of supplier/buyer opportunism.

This study demonstrates that buffer- and behaviour-based management mechanisms can be used as complementary approaches against agency uncertainties for enhancing enterprise agility. Therefore, for enterprises to boost their agility, it is vital that their resources and capabilities are fairly distributed across entities responsible for creating buffers through functional flexibility, as well as individuals and teams dealing with stakeholder engagement, in particular, suppliers and buyers.

The authors use the lens of the agency theory to assimilate and model characteristic agency uncertainties and management mechanisms that enhance enterprise agility.

Based on the perspective of knowledge management, this study aims to discuss how to build cross-city emergency management collaboration mechanism in major emergencies and explore the important role of knowledge management in emergency management collaboration.

Based on the theoretical analysis of knowledge management and the typical case study of cross-city emergency management collaborative rescue, this study provides an in-depth analysis of how these cities achieve high emergency management performance through multidimensional and multilevel knowledge collaboration, thus revealing the mechanism of knowledge transfer, integration and sharing in achieving high emergency management performance.

Through analyzing typical cases, this study finds that building a smooth mechanism for multichannel emergency rescue information can promote the diversification of knowledge transfer methods, building a platform-based integration mechanism for emergency rescue information can enhance knowledge integration capabilities and building a linkage mechanism for emergency rescue materials between cities can promote knowledge-sharing level, thereby improving emergency management performance level.

This study has great significance for how to build cross-city emergency management collaboration mechanism in the digital era. In the future, the authors need to further discuss the following two aspects in depth: research on the impact of cross-city emergency management collaboration mechanism on improving the knowledge management capabilities of government emergency management departments; and research on the impact mechanism of knowledge management capabilities on city resilience.

Through case analysis of cross-city emergency management collaborative rescue for major emergencies in China in recent years, this study proposes three specific strategies for cross-city emergency management (smooth, integration and linkage mechanisms) and reveals that these three strategies are essentially aimed at improving the government’s knowledge management level.

This paper illuminates the distinction between individual and organizational actors in business-to-business markets as well as the coexistence of formal and informal mechanisms of coordination in multinational corporations. The main questions addressed include the following. (1) What factors influence the occurrence of personal contacts of foreign subsidiary managers in industrial multinational corporations? (2) How such personal contacts enable coordination in industrial markets and within multinational firms? The theoretical context of the paper is based on: (1) the interaction approach to industrial markets, (2) the network approach to industrial markets, and (3) the process approach to multinational management. The unit of analysis is the foreign subsidiary manager as the focal actor of a contact network. The paper is empirically focused on Portuguese sales subsidiaries of Finnish multinational corporations, which are managed by either a parent country national (Finnish), a host country national (Portuguese) or a third country national. The paper suggests eight scenarios of individual dependence and uncertainty, which are determined by individual, organizational, and/or market factors. Such scenarios are, in turn, thought to require personal contacts with specific functions. The paper suggests eight interpersonal roles of foreign subsidiary managers, by which the functions of their personal contacts enable inter-firm coordination in industrial markets. In addition, the paper suggests eight propositions on how the functions of their personal contacts enable centralization, formalization, socialization and horizontal communication in multinational corporations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different types of triad structures, and the management mechanisms adopted by the focal company, affect cooperative performance.

This paper uses a social network perspective to examine the triad management phenomenon in the military avionics maintenance context, which is closely associated with the field of operations management.

This paper demonstrates that different triad structures and management mechanisms influence perceived cooperative performance. Four main findings emerged: in a triad, a firm playing a bridging role perceives higher cooperative performance than when playing a peripheral role in the triad or being located in a fully connected triad. When a firm plays the bridging role in a triad, and has a high level of trust, this leads to higher perceived cooperative performance. When a firm plays a peripheral role in a triad, high levels of coordination mechanism combined with high levels of trust result in higher levels of perceived cooperative performance. In a fully linked triad, when the coordination mechanism is well developed, the level of trust is high, so that the resulting level of perceived cooperation is high.

This paper extends the knowledge of triad management by providing an in‐depth study of a well‐defined network setting with exceptionally high‐level access to the most senior executives. In practice, this paper shows how to manage different triads.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the governance mechanism of overcoming or solving three problems: cooperation problem, coordination problem and appropriation problem. Also to raise the value chain cost efficiency and to elevate the value chain competitive advantage.

The methodology is the experimental study. The authors design an experience simulating the transaction process across firms to explore the separate and joint governance effects of trust and incentive on the cost of value chain.

According to the experimental results it is found that the high level of trust between firms and the incentive based on the joint interests of value chain can effectively mitigate or avoid the cooperation, coordination and appropriation problems, and thus have significant governance effects on the cost of value chain. Incentive is out of effect when a much lower level of trust across firms exists, which reflects that there is a significant complementary relationship between trust and incentive mechanisms.

The research limitation is that the practical experience and the cognition of experimenters of the researchers will influence the conclusion of the experiment, so the research on the influences of other factors must be deepened.

The paper's value is in setting out a value chain cost management theory frame, demonstrating trust and incentive as two kinds of governance mechanism in the value chain cost management mechanism, adopting experiment method to verify the above theory, and providing the relevant behavior evidence for future research.

Increasing market pressures require organizations to rethink the development of change capability. Building a sustainable and flexible organization capable of responding in a timely manner to quickly changing customer demands without compromising technological excellence and quality is a complex task. This chapter builds on a five-year study of transformation efforts at a product development unit of Ericsson. The complexity of designing and managing learning mechanisms as both a transformation engine and a way to improve new product development is captured. The chapter points toward the challenges of designing and managing learning mechanisms that enhance organizational agility.

Many researchers and practitioners suggest a contingent instead of a “one size fits all” approach in business process management (BPM). The purpose of this paper is to offer a contingency theory of BPM, which proposes contingency factors relevant to the successful management of business processes and that explains how and why these contingencies impact the relationships between process management and performance.

The authors develop the theory by drawing on organizational information processing theory (OIPT) and applying an information processing (IP) perspective to the process level.

The premise of the model is that the process management mechanisms such as documentation, standardization or monitoring must compensate for the uncertainty and equivocality of the nature of the process that has to be managed. In turn, managing through successful adaptation is a prerequisite for process performance.

The theory provides a set of testable propositions that specify the relationship between process management mechanisms and process performance. The authors also discuss implications of the new theory for further theorizing and outline empirical research strategies that can be followed to enact, evaluate and extend the theory.

The theory developed in this paper allows an alternative way to describe organizational processes and supports the derivation of context-sensitive management approaches for process documentation, standardization, monitoring, execution and coordination.

The theoretical model is novel in that it provides a contextualized view on BPM that acknowledges different types of processes and suggests different mechanisms for managing these. The authors hope the paper serves as inspiration both for further theory development as well as to empirical studies that test, refute, support or otherwise augment the arguments.