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In this study the authors investigate the relationship of both social (SLMX) and economic (ELMX) leader–member exchange with innovative work behaviour (IWB) and the potential moderating effect of having a paradox mindset. A paradox mindset facilitates the recognition of tensions and the integration of competing demands and goals, which may fuel IWB.

At two points in time the authors gathered survey data from employees working in the mid and back office of a Dutch bank.

SLMX associates with innovative behaviour, whilst ELMX does not. However, when paradox mindset is included as a moderator, the authors find negative interaction effects of paradox mindset with both ELMX and SLMX.

The findings indicate that management should be aware of the impact that having a paradox mindset has on the innovative work behaviour of employees. Managers are well advised to assess the extent to which an employee entertains a paradox mindset and adjust the type of leadership appropriate to the situation, and in particular adjust the intensity of their exchange relationship with these employees.

Paradox mindset acts as a substitute for an employee's social relationship with the leader, as paradox mindset captures most of the variation in IWB, thereby drawing influence away from SLMX. This finding complements studies showing that a person's mindset can greatly influence innovative work behaviour.

Whereas many studies address ambidexterity at the organizational level, much less is known about individual level ambidexterity. Moreover, there is a lack of thorough understanding of how motivational orientations are related to individual level ambidexterity. Yet, it is crucial to have an understanding of what motivates employees who perform explorative and exploitative activities. This study aims to empirically test the link between the constellation of motivational orientations of employees and their ambidexterity.

The authors use polynomial regression analysis and surface response analysis to analyze data from 103 employees employed in one Dutch organization. Polynomial regressions allow for analyzing linear and nonlinear direct and interactive effects between different motivational orientations in relation to individual level ambidexterity.

For individual ambidexterity, it is important to have an assessment orientation that is balanced with a locomotion orientation. Alternatively, people high on only locomotion orientation or only assessment orientation are also ambidextrous.

Insights into the motivational orientation of employees in relation to ambidexterity help to advance the theoretical understanding of how employees may enhance their individual ambidexterity.

Agile manufacturing is largely dependent on the capabilities of its people to learn and evolve with change. However, while agile manufacturing uses e‐commerce enabled technology in a decentralized organizational setting, it remains unclear how these individual capabilities should be linked to other organizational resources to create an agile organization. Another important modern management research perspective is the internal resource‐based perspective, resulting in a phenomenon called competence‐based competition with renewed attention for competence management. Competence management comprises the management, building, leveraging and deployment of strategic and operational competencies, the causal relationships and linkages between them, and the way competencies are embedded in organizational and individual resources. In this paper, we explore the relation between agile management and time‐based competence management, and study its adoption in small batch discrete parts manufacturing environments with the help of a coarse fact‐finding survey research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interface between Lean strategy and organisational transformation by scrutinising the literature on why Lean strategies fail to be implemented and/or sustained.

As a conceptual and research paper, it develops a hypothesis. It encompasses philosophical discussions and comparative studies of others’ work and Lean thinking alongside its links to the principles, ideology, philosophy and underpinning values. The search involved a total of 1,931 articles spanning across 75 different journals. The content analysis approach suggested by Mayring (2004) was selected.

Successfully implementing Lean is more complex than often recognized within the literature, and the alignment between strategy and organisational transformation is repeatedly not undertaken. The investigation indicates policymakers need to view Lean as an ideology and not simply another process.

This paper addresses the inaccurate representation in the concept of Lean as a strategy. While a major evolution has occurred comprising the inputs perceived as imperative for Lean success, a translucent empathy of its philosophy alongside an acknowledgement of the magnitude of the change and transformation necessary has been comparatively perplexing. This paper has implications for academic scholars of strategy and organisational change, as well as for practitioners seeking to implement organisational change.

Empirical evidence suggests that most Lean strategies struggle. Customers are becoming more demanding, markets are becoming more customised, and product life-cycles getting shorter are dictating that Lean needs to be embraced as an ideology.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the quality of change information influences employees’ attitude toward organizational change and turnover intention. Additionally, the role of engagement, psychological contract fulfillment and trust in the relationship between change information and attitude toward change is assessed.

In a technology services organization that was implementing a “new way of working,” questionnaire data of 669 employees were gathered. The organizational change in question sought to increase employees’ autonomy by increasing management support and improving IT support to facilitate working at other locations (e.g. at home) or at hours outside of regular working hours (e.g. in evening).

The results showed that change information was positively related to psychological contract fulfillment and attitude toward change. Engagement and psychological contract fulfillment were positively related to attitude toward change and negatively related to turnover intention. Contrary to what was expected, trust did not influence attitude toward change but was negatively related to turnover intention.

The study presents a model that can help management to foster positive affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses to change, as well as to reduce employee turnover. Fulfilling employees’ psychological contracts and cultivating engagement is important in this respect, as well as continuously considering whether information about the organizational change is received in good time, is useful, is adequate and satisfies employees’ questions about the change.

As one of the first studies in its field, attitude toward change was conceptualized and operationalized as a multidimensional construct, comprising an affective, a behavioral and a cognitive dimension.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of process orientation at the employee level on operational performance (OP) and customer-focused performance (CP), where the components process thinking by staff, process mapping (PM) and process standardization (PS) are cumulative developments, building on each other.

Structural equations modeling is used to analyze survey data collected from 198 participants at a business school in the period 2012/2013.

The results show that the impact of process thinking by staff on both OP and CP is mediated by PM and PS and improvement. The study also shows that process thinking by staff is a prerequisite for PM and standardization.

This research makes several important theoretical and managerial contributions toward the objective of a better understanding of the working of process orientation. It shows that different components of process orientation reinforce each other; process orientation maturity depends on the effort being applied in creating a particular sequence of process management components and that these components should be considered as cumulative developments, building on each other.

Little attention has been paid to the employability of academic staff and the extent to which continuous learning contributes to academic career success. The purpose of this paper is to explore the contribution of formal and informal learning to employability.

Survey data were obtained from 139 academic staff members employed at the Open University in the Netherlands. The questionnaire included employee characteristics, job characteristics, organizational context factors, formal learning and informal learning and employability variables.

Informal learning, such as networking and learning value of the job, appeared to be solid contributors to employability, while the impact of formal learning activities was far less significant. Further, the study revealed the impact of employee and organizational context factors upon informal learning and employability. Age, salary and learning climate appeared to be strong predictors for informal learning, while promotions were shown to be highly positive contributors to employability.

The findings stress the value of informal learning, although human resource policies that encourage both formal and informal learning are recommended.

Academic careers comprise an under-researched area and the same applies to the relationship between learning and employability in the context of these types of careers.

The purpose of this article is expository in the main; critical to a lesser degree. It will attempt to show how Karl Marx, enraged by the imperfections and inhumanity of the capitalist society, “fought” for its supersession by the communist society on which he dwelt so fondly, that society which would emerge from the womb of a dying capitalism. It asks such questions as these: Is it possible to create the truly human society envisaged by Marx? Is perfection of man and society a mere will‐o'‐the‐wisp? A brief analysis, therefore, of the imperfections of capitalism is undertaken for the purpose of revealing the evils which Marx sought to eliminate by revolution of the most violent sort. In this sense, the nature of man under capitalism is analysed. Marx found the breed wanting, in a word, dehumanised. An attempt is, therefore, made to discuss the new man of Marxism, man's own creation, and the traits of that new man, one freed at last from the alienating effects of private property, division of labour, money, and religion. Another question that springs to mind is this: how does Marx propose to transcend alienation?

The authors argue that public project managers do not consider the iron triangle (cost, quality and schedule) primary important in measuring the success of their projects. To investigate which success criteria are important to public project managers, the authors interviewed 26 Dutch project managers who are employed by the government and who are responsible for managing infrastructural projects. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this research the Q-methodology is applied. Q-methodology helps to find for correlations between subjects across a sample of variables. Q-factor analysis reduces the individual viewpoints down to a few factors. A factor can be seen as the mathematical representation of an “average” perspective shared by a group of people.

Findings are based on the individual rankings of 19 success criteria; the authors distinguished three common perspectives: the holistic and cooperative leader, the socially engaged, ambiguous manager and the executor of a top-down assignment. In none of the perspectives the iron triangle criteria formed the top three to measure project success.

The research results may have a national character. The way project success is perceived by public project managers may be culture dependent. For this the authors expand the research to other countries in the near future.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the public project manager by their private collaboration partners, like consultants, engineers and contractors. This will help them to understand their client and contribute to better collaboration in projects.

This paper shows that the difference in work attitude and value frame in the public sector leads to a specific view on project success.

It is commonly acknowledged that service quality can be measured by using attribute‐based and incident‐based measurements. Both methods are distinct in nature, but can be used complementarily. However, in the literature a simultaneous empirical investigation of the power of critical incidents in relation to attribute scores is lacking. In this paper we merge both methods for assessing service quality in a professional services context. Subsequently, both measurements have been used to investigate the effect of service quality on short‐term customer satisfaction and long‐term trust in the service provider. Results indicate that the combined approach adds value to single‐method measurement for explaining customer satisfaction. Furthermore, negative incidents are more influential on satisfaction than positive experiences. However, the negative effect of a negative incident on satisfaction can be compensated for by paying attention to particular dimensions of service quality. Critical incidents do not seem to have an impact on the apparently stable construct of trust.