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A significant body of literature suggests that shipping companies operate in an extremely volatile and risky environment, relying on the effective use of information to remain competitive. However, decision-making in this market is demanding because of the high uncertainty, market competition and significant capital investments. Moreover, the rapid spread of COVID-19 renders information uncertainty a daunting challenge for companies engaged in global trade. Hence, this study aims to explore the information behavior of managers in a time of crisis seems compelling.

This study provides novel insights into the information behavior of senior managers by adopting a qualitative approach. Forty-nine semi-structured face-to-face interviews with individuals from Hellenic shipping companies were conducted. Moreover, this study explores the extant theory qualitatively, using the grounded theory methodology and shows that an unprecedented event (pandemic crisis) can redefine the information behavior of managers.

This study highlights the importance of information in decision-making. Moreover, the results show that, during a pandemic, managers resort to alternative information sources, adopt collaborative information behaviors and take advantage of digital technology.

There is limited research in exploring the information behavior of managers in times of pandemics. This research underscores the fact that during a crisis, managers seek information from digital information resources and decision-making assumes a more decentralized form. This study concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

As the global presence of Chinese firms grows, increasing numbers of Chinese managers are working abroad as expatriates. However, little attention has been paid to such Chinese expatriate managers and their leadership challenges in an inter-cultural context, especially across a large cultural distance. To fill the gap in the literature concerning the leadership challenges for expatriate managers in an inter-cultural context, the purpose of this paper is to elucidate the leadership styles of Chinese expatriate managers from the perspectives of three traditional Chinese philosophies (i.e. Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism) in the inter-cultural context of the Netherlands.

The data for this qualitative study were collected via semi-structured, open-ended, narrative interviews with 30 Chinese expatriate managers in the Netherlands.

The results clearly show that the leadership style of Chinese expatriate managers is deeply rooted in the three traditional Chinese philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism, even in an inter-cultural context. Specifically, the study reveals two salient aspects of how Chinese expatriate managers frame and interact with a foreign cultural context from the perspectives of traditional Chinese philosophies. First, the Chinese expatriate managers reported an initial cultural shock related to frictions between the foreign cultural context and Confucianism or Taoism, but less so in the case of Legalism. Second, the Chinese expatriate managers also reported that their interactions with the Dutch culture are best described as a balance between partial conflict and partial complementarity (thus, a duality). In this sense, the leadership style of Chinese expatriate managers is influenced jointly by the three traditional Chinese philosophies and certain elements of the foreign cultural context. This is consistent with the Chinese perspective of yin-yang balancing.

This study is among the first to offer a more nuanced and highly contextualized understanding of leadership in the unique case of expatriate managers from an emerging market (e.g. China) in an advanced economy (e.g. the Netherlands). The authors call for more research to apply the unique perspective of yin-yang balancing in an inter-cultural context. The authors posit that this approach represents the most salient implication of this study. For practical implications, the authors argue that expatriate leaders should carefully manage the interplay between their deep-rooted home-country philosophies and their salient host-country culture. Reflecting on traditional philosophies in another culture can facilitate inter-cultural leadership training for Chinese expatriates.

While efforts at understanding how the entrepreneurial spirit is awakened (e.g., unwrapping the cognitive “black box”) have been productive in the new venture context, it remains largely unexplored in a corporate setting.This study extends previous research by investigating the relationship between organizational antecedents and perceptions of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and desirability of entrepreneurial activity. In a field study of organizations consistent with a corporate entrepreneurial archetype typology, we found that (1) individual work discretion and time availability impacted entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and (2) individual interest in work innovation influenced perceived desirability of innovative behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore managers’ learning-oriented leadership, and what conditions managers face when working with the promotion of employees’ learning.

Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with managers in three manufacturing firms. Verbatim expressions of the interview participants were analysed using stepwise analytical procedures.

The managers used many kinds of activities to promote learning. Most common were activities related to learning opportunities that arose during daily work. The identified activities ranged from being planned to occurring more spontaneously. Depending on the situation or the learning activity, the managers used different behaviours to promote learning. They supported, educated and confronted employees, and they acted as role models. Factors constraining the implementation of learning-oriented leadership included limited resources, and a lack of commitment from top management, employees or the managers themselves.

Future research should study learning-oriented leadership from the employees’ perspective.

Managers’ notions about learning and development constitute an important condition for learning-oriented leadership. Therefore, managers need to be trained in how to promote their employees’ learning at work.

This study adds to the limited knowledge of how managers carry out a learning-oriented leadership in their daily work. The findings contribute knowledge regarding managerial practices of promoting employees’ workplace learning by identifying different activities and behaviours that managers could incorporate into their leadership.

This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment that tested the effects of a new business intervention among managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in England.

Individual managers (learners) were randomly assigned in clusters (companies) to either an intervention group (265 learners; 40 SMEs) receiving a novel virtual, blended training program designed to stimulate a change in management behavior or a no-intervention group (118 learners; 22 SMEs).

The results show that the primary objective of changing management behavior to use more of an Operational Coaching™ style of management has been achieved (to a statistically significant level), and this is against the backdrop of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. Positive trends in SME productivity metrics were also observed in the intervention group companies.

These important results could be indicative of the economic and productivity impact that a change in management behavior could have, and they warrant serious further investigation.

While extant literature has advanced our understanding of senior and middle managers in corporate entrepreneurship, studies have only recently attended to the role of non-managerial employees (NMEs). These organizational members bring ideas, resources and energy to the pursuit of innovative opportunities, yet the determinants of their entrepreneurial behavior are poorly understood.

The authors performed a systematical literature review on the subject of NMEs in corporate entrepreneurship to identify gaps and recommend an agenda for future research.

The review revealed gaps regarding (1) the distance of NMEs from decisions on corporate strategic intent, (2) agentic choices made by NMEs to use their subject matter expertise for their employers' benefit, and the influences of (3) job characteristics and (4) organizational infrastructural support of entrepreneurial behavior.

The authors present a theoretical framework and directions for future research.

Proactive firms recognize that environmental and social issues are sources of competitive advantages, but whatever the motivation, organizations face challenges when implementing sustainable practices. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), sustainable practices have stemmed from multinational corporations (MNC), but SMEs cannot adopt sustainable practices from the knowledge and experiences of large corporations because the two entities differ critically. This study introduces an integrated model of employee adoption of sustainable practices in SMEs. It is based on five behaviors to select practical areas to which SMEs can make internal changes to achieve sustainable practices and the benefits gained from them. The theory of planned behavior is used to extend employee adoption of sustainable practices to SMEs.

Although the budgeting literature well documents managers' creation of budgetary slack in developed economies, lack of attention has been paid to this behaviour in emerging economies. It is doubtful that some unique characteristics, only existing in emerging economies, cause this behaviour to be different than the budgeting literature predicts. Since there is no study examining managers' creation of budgetary slack in emerging economies, such as Vietnam, to get insight into whether or not these characteristics cause the differences, the aim of this study is to replicate prior budgeting studies by using Vietnamese samples. Particularly, we investigated the impact of budgetary participation, budget emphasis, information asymmetry, and the interactions between these variables on managers' creation of budgetary slack. Data obtained from the questionnaire sent to 99 Vietnamese managers shows that the last two variables and the interaction between them induce managers' creation of budgetary slack. However, the results also indicate that the first variable and the interaction between this variable and the other two variables respectively have no impact on managers' creation of budgetary slack. These results provide some insight into the creation of budgetary slack of Vietnamese managers for future studies to extend the line of research.

Successful firms are important sources of productivity, employment and economic stability in societies. As the micro-level origins of firm innovations are increasingly attracting attention amongst innovation scholars, the purpose of this study is to investigate the role of managerial innovativeness, i.e. small firm managers' innovative behaviour for firm performance. Specifically, the present study investigates managerial innovativeness as a predictor of small firms' product innovativeness and market performance.

This research model suggests that managerial innovativeness is positively linked to firms' market performance and that product innovativeness partially mediates the relationship between managerial innovativeness and market performance. The model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with a dataset (N = 93) collected from small logistics firms in South-Eastern Finland.

The findings support the authors' hypotheses and show that managerial innovativeness had a direct effect on firms' product innovativeness and market performance. The authors also found that firms' product innovativeness mediated the relationship between managerial innovativeness and firms' market performance.

This is one of the few studies that shed light on and show that managerial innovativeness is significantly and positively related with small firms' product innovativeness and market performance, whereas earlier research tended to focus on managers' personalities, traits, characteristics or managerial actions, leaving managerial innovativeness unexplored.

How can a manager lead an organization or a team in a particularly turbulent time? How can management cope with chaos and uncertainty? Drawing on behavioral strategy theory, this study aims at investigating how hubristic managers can enable organizations to thrive, even over small time periods, in chaotic and uncertain contexts and settings.

This study uses a qualitative methodology to explore the possible positive effects of hubris in a behavioral strategy. In particular, 45 interviews with leaders and followers of particularly high-performing secondary schools have been administered to try to fully understand the origin, process and performance evolution of organizations led by hubristic managers.

The results showed that, in chaotic and uncertain times, hubris can prove to be a trump card for managers in dealing with the pitfalls and uncertainties of the context in which the organization operates. Three major attributes were identified – overconfidence and over-persistence, recklessness and contempt for critical feedback – defining the positive behavioral strategies implemented by hubristic managers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to highlight, by means of qualitative methodologies, the positive managerial hubristic-behavioral strategy during turbulent times in the school sector.