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Mediating effects allow strategic management researchers to understand “black box” processes underlying complex relationships whereby the effect of an independent variable is transmitted to a dependent variable through a third variable. Since the seminal work of Baron and Kenny (1986), advancements have been made in mediation analysis. Thus, literature on the latest techniques for analyzing mediating and intervening varibales is presented. In addition, strategy literature published in the Academy of Management Journal and the Strategic Management Journal between 1986 and 2005 employing tests of mediation is reviewed to better understand how mediation techniques are used by strategy scholars. Finally, implications and limitations of current mediation analysis in strategy research are discussed, and recommendations are provided to strategy scholars examining mediation.

Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological System’s model, this study documented acculturation and parental involvement in low-income Chinese immigrant homes that serve as predictors of parental mediation. By surveying 165 parents of 3–13-year-old immigrant children, this study found that low-income Chinese parents enacted restrictive mediation the most and exhibited a slow acculturation process even after an average of seven years of emigration. Higher parental acculturation was related to a higher use of active and restrictive mediation. Additionally, different aspects of parental involvement also served as predictors of the three mediation strategies. Chinese cultural emphasis on academic excellence and success was used to help interpret the findings. Future research should consider implementing research-based adult media literacy programs for immigrant parents to help them practice their parental mediation skills in the host culture.

Mediating effects are often tested using hierarchical multiple regression (HMR) procedures. Typical of the HMR-based strategies is the very frequently cited and widely used procedure described by Baron and Kenny (1986). Unfortunately, there are several important problems with it. More specifically, as we demonstrate below, it: (a) is of virtually no value for buttressing claims of mediating effects for data from non-experimental research; (b) produces erroneous inferences about the existence of mediating effects for misspecified mediation models; and (c) is incapable of providing credible evidence of such effects in a large proportion of cases, even for properly specified mediation models. We detail a number of important implications of our analyses.

Mediation is defined as a process, whether referred and agreed to by the expression mediation, pre-litigation mediation, online mediation, community mediation, conciliation or any other expression of such similar import, whereby party or parties, request an independent third person referred to as mediator or mediation service provider to assist them in their attempt to reach a peaceful settlement of a dispute. The peaceful settlement of any dispute to be initiated, processed, guided and moderated in the process of successful mediation before parties, needs mediator to have four major new skills such as witness-awareness, stillness-concentration, empathy-motivation and a pragmatic-sensibility for fulfilling the aims and outcomes of mediation. These four skills are deeply inward and psychological, which can be accessed and empowered by an exercise of deepening experience called spiritual in content and application. However, a crucial interchange of meaning and value that very often come into this situation between spirituality and psychology is an important one to be mentioned here. The two seemingly distant disciplines of experience, one of psychology and another of spirituality lies in the orientation that an individual and a collective give to life and world as a whole. When life and world are accepted in totality, spirituality can be life-affirmative and world-embracing giving us a direction to the individual psychological states of though-emotion-sensation-behaviour complex to embrace and enhance values of inclusion, harmony and development at the collective and universal level. These psychological states, both individual and collective, gradually open the vision and mission of values to live within and outside, to be and to become, and finally manifest a future world of stability, order, richness and growing perfection by solving challenges that come to our existence. It makes life both spiritual and earthly. This chapter demonstrates that this kind of spiritual meaning, value and experience entering into and operating through psychological capacities give mediator four major new skills for easing the process and purpose of mediation exercise. One, an objective awareness to witness the proceedings of the mediation calmly within the conscious cognition and without having any bias and fixed beliefs towards any issues of the parties. Two, a stillness with sensory concentration to avoid unnecessary reactions or agitations that human nature is prone to in taking sides on issues or become lop-sided in approach and consequently affecting mediation's outcome of peaceful settlement. Three, an empathy that animates and motivates parties to look for win-win situation for both as against the adversarial method currently present in the legal system where one party loses and another party gains grounds, which results in bitterness in parties' relationships, rights and obligations. Four, a pragmatic sensibility or practical responsibility by which costs or damages or injuries of all kinds such as social, economic, profit-loss ratio, psychological or organizational stress etc., can be pre-calculated, meaningfully distributed and harmonized between parties by the mediator. With millions of pending legal cases in the existing system of the courts of law that are supposedly designed to provide access to justice and, unfortunately have become fragile as a result of severe shortage of resources of all kinds to deal with sheer quantity and intricate complexity of issues in the disputes, applied spirituality in mediation can pave way for easy, flexible, quick, cost-effective and satisfactory justice to both sides of the parties when these four major new skills are developed through application of spiritual experience and experiments in the whole process of mediation. The author explains in this article the method of acquiring these four major new skills in experiential form in any mediation scenario and the rationale for infusing applied spirituality in mediation. Author also discusses the Indian situation of mediation in the light of new developments sought for enhancing the alternative dispute resolution. At the end, this chapter demonstrates the bigger picture that represent the need of spirituality using these four major new skills while mediating challenges of sustainable development. It will be shown in the end how spirituality, sustainability and mediation for settlements of disputes of sustainable development have something common, core and collective. This is the premise based on which the relationship between applied spirituality and mediation in overcoming the challenges of sustainability are expressed with the help of intuitive, inspirational, integrative and intelligent actions for a sustaining our future age, new humanity and harmonious space.

In the current highly competitive market, most organizations are moving away from reactive and compliance-based to proactive environmental management. This proactive approach to environmental management calls for taking a strategic approach to adoption of green practices beyond an organization’s internal borders. In this respect, incorporating green practices into a firm’s supply chain has attracted interest of operations management scholar and practitioners. The influence of external pressures on the adoption of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices has been established in the literature. This research posits that the adoption of GSCM practices is also driven by a firm’s internal strategic factors including its key resources and competitive strategy. It also suggests that these direct effects are further mediated by the green strategies (GSs) adopted in companies. Theoretically, these relationships are supported by combining the institutional theory with the natural resource-based view. A structural equation modeling is applied to formulate and analyze the relationships and the mediating effect using a survey data collected from 139 ISO14001-certified manufacturers in Malaysia. The results verified the mediating effect of GS adoption on the relationship between internal and external strategic factors, and GSCM practices. This research has made an original contribution to knowledge by bridging the fields of strategic environmental management and GSCM.

The purpose of this study is to assess (a) the relationship between internal and external IS integration and their respective impacts on internal and external cost management strategies, (b) the relationship between internal and external cost management strategies, and (c) the effects of internal and external cost management strategies on profitability, controlling for firm size. Furthermore, this study investigates whether internal and external IS integrations produce direct significant effects on firm profitability or whether these relationships are established through cost management strategies.

The study uses survey data from a cross-section of 241 U.S. manufacturing firms. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that neither internal IS integration nor external IS integration has a direct significant impact on firm profitability. Rather, internal cost management strategy fully mediates the relationship between internal IS integration and profitability; similarly, the relationship between external IS integration and profitability is fully mediated through external cost management strategy. The results provide evidence that firms seeking profitability solely by investing in IS integration may not necessarily realize enhanced profitability; the firms must focus their attention on intervening processes, such as business strategy, in order to determine the profitability derived from IS integration.

As far as it can be ascertained, this study is the first to explore the impact of internal and external IS integration on firm profitability within the context of internal and external cost management strategies.

We test a multilevel exploratory predictive model, examining the relationships between emotional labor (EL) and workers' affectivity traits at a philanthropic hospital, where EL involves a process of emotional regulation at work involving emotional display rules, regulatory strategies, and emotional performance. Specifically, we test a model of the mediation effects of regulatory strategies and the moderation effects of emotional demands.

Participants were 306 workers from 45 different units of a hospital institution, whose performance was evaluated by 30 supervisors. Since workers' emotional display rules could not be represented as shared, unit-level beliefs, we chose two critical demands to test our hypotheses: (1) demand to express compassion and (2) demand to conceal anger or disapproval.

Using multilevel analysis, we found evidence that deep acting mediates between emotional demands to express compassion and emotional performance. We found further that demands to conceal anger toward coworkers increase the strength of the relationship between negative affectivity and surface acting.

Theoretical and practical implications of the study are also discussed.