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This study aims to analyse how a hotel company manages ambidexterity when operating different business models in different markets located in the same country.

This research was conducted using a qualitative case study, and the subjects were selected using the theoretical sampling technique. A corporation managing two hotel business units located in the same city but operating different business models – a premium and a low-cost business model – were selected as subjects.

The empirical evidence revealed that an ambidextrous business model can be realized through integration or separation of appropriate domains of business activities. The empirical findings further showed that exploitations are easier to integrate than explorations.

The authors found that firms using structural separation for managing premium and low-cost business models can avoid market cannibalism and achieve synergies between different business models if business model ambidexterity is well managed.

This study extends research in the area of ambidexterity and business models. It responds to calls to examine how firms using structural separation implement business model ambidexterity in practice, particularly in service sectors. By analysing the details of activities within the business model, the authors advance the understanding of which domains are suitable for an integration or separation approach.

This paper shares the conclusions of the authors with respect to a comparison of Beer’s viable systems model (VSM) and modern business process thinking. These conclusions have been arrived at as a result of extensive empirical research over the past five years. Modern business process thinking and the VSM provides the foundations for a viable business structure which maximises opportunities for managing agility. The paper provides a brief background to the research and explains VSM and modern business process thinking. It then goes on to demonstrate how VSM and modern business process thinking combine to provide a powerful structure for planning and managing today’s modern organisation in an uncertain and dynamic environment. In developing the theorythe paper also provides empirical evidence to support and demonstrate the application of the theory. The paper concludes with a summary of key messages and lessons learned.

Organisational trust is analysed through observation of operations or strategic prescription. The management and project management literature is largely prescriptive. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role and potential of strategic trust development and management to improve operations in the project business and enhance client satisfaction, analysing trust as social capital.

The analysis is supported by the method of and data gathered through CROL^®: a process for managing business relationships and interfaces. The case in question focuses on over 30,000 customer relationships covering five years of global operations by companies in the project business.

The analysis focuses on the connection between self‐awareness, performance, improvement and the impact upon both relationships and financial performance – social capital in the “balance sheet”. The objective is to identify the extent to which trust management can help bridge the gap between prescriptive strategy and operations. Bridging this gap entails linking trust as social capital with organisational culture, operational systems and routines, and behaviours.

The analysis shows the importance of self‐awareness in managing business relationships.

The paper outlines on a conceptual level how companies can manage trust and capture the value in business relationships.

The paper shows how companies through systematic forced reflection can manage trust in individual business relationships.

This article deals with the importance of managing cultural differences in developing countries for twenty‐first century organisations. With increasing business globalisation and different cultures we have in this world, maintaining and managing cultural differences becomes a challenge for managers and supervisors in the twenty‐first century. Thus, managing cultural differences is an essential skill all managers must master if they are to be successful in the global marketplace. This article also addresses how lack of understanding of cultural differences can cause serious mis‐communication, which can hinder the growth and the productivity of an organisation or company. It looks at how one’s own culture plays an important role in the way one manages, one must strive to learn, not only about the different culture which exists in the country where one wants to do business, but also, how to see one’s own culture in an objective manner. Finally, the article concludes by stressing why organisational leadership in a developing country requires a strong commitment to a high standard of conduct and being able to design and implement a bottom‐up management system which includes a two‐way exchange of ideas, values innovation and creativity that nurtures flexibility and offers members the freedom to experiment.

An issue of managing a business (unit) as a whole successfully is perceived to belong to the fundamental issues within strategic management. This paper proposes that a business unit can be managed successfully in short and longer term in its focal contexts as a set of three recursive, competence-based, and process-based systems. Many elements of Stafford Beer's (1985) viable system model along the key competence-based theoretical bases are applied to this system design task. The outcome is an ideal, recursive template for advancing competence-based business management (CBBM) and its conceptual modeling. It is assumed that it is possible to design a business unit as a viable system that is capable of sustaining a separate existence at only three levels of hierarchy, as part of single or multi-business firms. Business-process models and their redesign processes are chosen as the 2nd-order, focal system which produces a business unit's competitiveness and solves longitudinal CBBM problems. One level of recursion down includes a unit's value creating, capturing, releveraging, and respective processes that enable to solve cross-sectional problems. One level of recursion up includes a unit's existential foresights and their crafting processes that solve existential problems. Recursivity is designed inside each system in terms of three kinds of subsystems for (a) primary value releveraging, process-model redesign, and business-foresight crafting, (b) the management of varieties in releveraging, modeling, and foreseeing, and (c) the monitoring and probing of all three systems. Systemic competences are incorporated inside respective systems. Such competences possess three flexibilities of absorption, attenuation, and amplification. At each level of recursion, a competence-based process is a unit of conceptual modeling of CBBM. A business unit is defined as a set of its purposeful processes. No thing or one is left outside them. Viability is ensured by real-time interaction and the 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-order feedback loops between three systems. Overall, the suggested, recursive, 3-system template is intended to serve future, compatible modeling efforts among interested, pioneering firms, professional CBBM modelers, scholars, and alike. Its novelty is produced by choosing and designing the CBBM modeling as the 2nd-order system-in-focus with its two recursions, by designing and using systemic, competence-based processes as the units of conceptualization, and by choosing and drawing the figures to illustrate the 3-system template in the ways that allow also business managers comprehend and apply the suggested template in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of managerial performance in the success of men‐owned businesses (MOB) and women‐owned businesses (WOB) for Canadian and Israeli entrepreneurs.

A process‐oriented approach, a relatively overlooked perspective in this field, was used for this assessment. The methodology used was based on two national samples from Canada and Israel (n=235) which included mostly members of a private business networking organization. Questionnaires were distributed to the respondents; only entrepreneurs with at least one employee were included.

Multilevel analyses revealed that gender is significantly associated with some managerial functions, but except for the business longevity – it is not directly associated with measures of business success; nationality is associated with two measures of business success: turnover and growth. Women entrepreneurs, both Canadian and Israeli, ranked significantly higher in some functions of their managerial performance compared to their male counterparts.

This study's main implications are in deciphering the major role of managerial performance and nationality and the relatively marginal effect of gender in business success measures, implying that the gender gap in successful entrepreneurial businesses is decreasing. These findings can become foundations for better understanding broader entrepreneurship questions and practice‐based researched endeavors.

This paper's main contribution is in the identified need for developing training and education programs for entrepreneurs in the areas of managerial skills and practices; as well as in opening future avenues for cross‐national assessments of a process‐oriented perspective in these areas.

The purpose of this paper is to apply grounded theory methodology to report on an empirical case which develops emergent theories on the human complexities of managerial decision‐making and the synonymous task of managing.

A structured research approach was applied in gathering and analysing data from all actors within a small private sector enterprise. The key objective was to discover what the owner‐manager and all employees perceived as important issues with regard to the managing of the business during a period of post‐takeover. In‐depth on‐site and off‐site interviews were carried out over an extended period.

Emergent theory exposes actors' disputed perceptions of how the business had been managed and ought to be managed, and, the judgments and decisions that had been made and consequently should be made. Revealed is a complex cognitive and behavioural web of human interactions and deep‐seated management‐employee discord that whilst threatening the actual survival of the business appears not to impede questionable practices, both by management and staff. Through the application of grounded theory methodology emergent constructs are discussed against existing knowledge that exposes new insights into management decision theory and the managing of an enterprise.

The process of theory generation whilst grounded in a substantive inquiry has the capacity to generate further research and tentative explanations at higher levels of understanding. From the research reported, questions beyond the substantive case can develop a broader theoretical and practical agenda – for example, issues of other actors' involvement in management decision making and the intrinsic part psychological factors play in the structuring of decisions.

Based on the finding from an empirical study the paper reveals significant practical managerial issues in the day‐to‐day and strategic managing of an enterprise. From a researcher's perspective, the paper critically demonstrates the functionality of grounded theory in management inquiry.

This paper advances the theoretical and practical necessity for the enlargement of the stock of qualitatively bounded research that focuses on grounded theory applications, management practice and decision theory.