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The purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of why firms, specifically small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), participate in a programme for competence development and why firms use different strategies for competence development.

A study of 17 SMEs that all received support from the European Social Fund, Objective 3 programme. The collection of data is based on semi‐structured interviews with management/owners, internal project leaders, employees and union representatives, feedback seminars with representatives from the studied enterprises, and on analysis of documents.

The findings demonstrate that all SMEs reported driving forces for competence development relating to both external organizational conditions and internal organizational conditions, to at least a certain degree. Furthermore, there appears to be a strong relationship between observed patterns of driving forces and the strategy for competence development used by the firm.

The SMEs that experience a relatively stronger driving force for competence development initiate problem‐solving efforts to design and implement more elaborated strategies for competence development. The SMEs that experience a lesser degree of driving force for competence development implement less elaborated strategies for competence development.

The paper finds that both external and internal organizational conditions are important in understanding why SMEs undergo competence development programme. Furthermore, the importance of external and internal organizational conditions is not only limited to why the companies participate in a programme for competence development, but also for how they participate, i.e. the strategies used for competence development.

Elementary schools have been confronted with large-scale educational reforms as strategies to improve the educational quality. While building school-wide capacity for improvement is considered critical for changing teachers’ classroom practices, there is still little empirical evidence for link between enhanced school capacity for improvement and instructional change. In this study, the authors examined the impact of school improvement capacity on changes in teachers’ classroom practices over a period of time. Leadership practices, school organizational conditions, teacher motivation and teacher learning were used to measure school-wide capacity for improvement. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Mixed-model analysis of longitudinal data over a four years (2005-2008) period of time from 862 teachers of 32 Dutch elementary schools were used to test the impact of school improvement capacity on changing teachers’ instructional practices.

The results showed that organizational-level conditions and teacher-level conditions play an important, but different role in changing teachers’ classroom practices. Whereas teacher factors mainly affect changes in teachers’ classroom practices, organizational factors are of significant importance to enhance teacher motivation and teacher learning.

More longitudinal research is needed to gain better insight into the opportunities and limits of building school-wide capacity to stimulate instructional change.

By encouraging teachers to question their own beliefs, facilitating opportunities for teachers to work together to solve problems, and through the promotion of shared decision making, school leaders can reinforce the personal and social identification of teachers with the organization. As a consequence, teachers will feel increasingly committed and are more willing to change their classroom practices. Additionally, school leaders can use the findings from this study and the related instrument as a tool for school self-evaluation.

This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature of changes in conditions for school improvement and its influence on changes in teachers’ instructional practices over a period of time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the buffering effects of organizational virtuousness. More specifically, the study investigates employee reactions (job satisfaction, intent to quit and willingness to support the organization) to organizational virtuousness’ perceptions both in conditions without crisis and in conditions with crisis.

The paper adopts the experimental methodology to explore its main hypotheses and research question. The results of a field study are also presented in order to add generalizability to the experimental results. A post hoc qualitative analysis based on focus-group interviews sheds light on the above findings and enables their better understanding.

The results indicated that even during a financial crisis those perceiving higher organizational virtuousness expressed higher job satisfaction, lower intent to quit and higher willingness to support the organization compared to those perceiving lower organizational virtuousness. Organizational virtuousness’ perceptions have also been found to moderate (accentuate) the effects of the financial crisis on job satisfaction and intent to quit. Willingness to support the organization seems to be unaffected by the financial crisis.

Managers should be aware of how individuals respond to organizational virtuousness during conditions of financial crisis.

The study makes a unique contribution to the literature by being the first to investigate the effects of organizational virtuousness’ perceptions on employee reactions both pre- and during-financial crisis.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of organisational conditions and workplace characteristics in midcareer and senior employees’ intention to volitionally provide career support to junior organisational members, their protégés.

Hypotheses are tested using multilevel linear modelling on a heterogeneous sample of Dutch employees ages 29 to 69 who participated in a vignette study in the autumn of 2017.

In line with the hypotheses, the findings of this study show that volitional (informal) mentoring is positively related to an organisation’s endorsement of intrinsic values (e.g. learning opportunities) and negatively to the presence of hindrance demands (e.g. time pressure).

Practitioners could facilitate co-mentor consultation, employ autonomy-supportive direct supervisors and fulfil psychological contract obligations by providing job security and learning opportunities. Organisations could also lower time pressures through job carving.

This study extends extant mentoring research by combining insights from perceived organisational support (POS) and self-determination theory (SDT) to examine the role organisational conditions and workplace characteristics play in aiding or hindering volitional mentoring. It enriches extant knowledge management studies on the link between organisational aspects and (intended) knowledge sharing behaviour by showing that similar organisational motivators predict volitional mentoring, thereby launching a call to study knowledge management through volitional mentoring using a SDT- and POS-based lens. A methodological novelty is the reliance on a vignette study.

This paper aims to provide a synthesis of theoretical and empirical work related to the professionalization of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from a knowledge-based perspective.

A systematic literature review consisting of three major steps of planning, conducting and reporting is conducted. Papers are identified, selected and deductively coded. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to analyze the papers. The finalized list includes 78 papers and 48 journals, with the oldest paper published in 1980 and the most recent papers published in 2022.

The findings showed that the empirical works (n = 69) outnumbered the conceptual works (n = 9). Most papers focused on the organizational level of analysis and identified causal conditions, modes, intervening conditions and consequences. A multidimensional characteristic of professionalization emerged inductively as an additional attribute.

This paper provides a synthesis of the current literature and offers a research agenda to academics and practitioners interested in the professionalization of SMEs from a knowledge-based perspective.

This research aims to identify and organise the conditions of organisational readiness for digital transformation.

This qualitative study comprises three case studies within manufacturing companies from different sizes and industries located in Sweden. Plant visits and in-depth interviews bring to light companies' experiences with initial steps towards digital transformation. A set of conditions for digital organisational readiness was translated into a questionnaire and tested with one of the studied companies.

This paper organises and tests digital organisational readiness conditions to support companies' initial steps on digital transformation. The results are put in perspective of established change management theory and previous studies about digital transformation. The findings will conclude in a questionnaire to support dialogue and digital organisational readiness assessments.

Additional conditions for the initial phase of digital transformation could possibly be found if more cases had been included in the study.

The article identifies a set of conditions translated into a questionnaire that should be used as a dialogue tool to create strategic alignment and support companies in their initial discussions. If this process can be faster and more efficient, the company can achieve a competitive advantage against competitors.

This research's relevance relies on the fact that companies are advancing in adopting digital technologies without being ready from an organisational perspective. This gap creates barriers for companies' digital maturing processes, stopping them from having full access to digital technologies' benefits.

The literature on charismatic leadership in organizations has neglected the organizational context in which such leadership is embedded. The purpose of this article is to enrich and refine charismatic leadership theory by linking it to its organizational context. We argue that while charismatic leadership principles and processes potentially apply across a wide variety of situations, the emergence and effectiveness of such leadership may be facilitated by some contexts and inhibited by others. We develop and present a series of propositions linking contextual variable to the emergence and effectiveness of charismatic leadership. Among the contextual variable we examine are the organizational environment, life-cycle stage, technology, tasks, goals, structure, and culture, as well as the leader’s level in the organization and the circumstances surrounding his or her appointment.

Looking at the practical experience of organizations pursuing knowledge management, it is found that their efforts are primarily focused on creating the conditions and the context that will enable knowledge creation. This need for developing enabling conditions and contexts was identified more than a decade ago when Nonaka and associates introduced the concept of “ba.” This paper aims to map the development of the concept of “ba” in a number of disciplines in order to understand its theoretical evolution and practical application.

A comprehensive search and evaluation of the literature resulted in a database of 135 papers, four dissertations and four books. Using content analysis, citation analysis, and concept mapping, four categories of research findings are identified that in turn suggest four groups of conditions for enabling knowledge creation.

The paper discusses each of these conditions (the social/behavioral, cognitive/epistemic, information systems/management, and strategy/structural), and introduces a framework that relates these conditions to the type of knowledge process and the level of interaction that characterize a knowledge management activity in the organization.

It is concluded that managing knowledge in organizations is fundamentally about creating an environment in the organization that is conducive to and encourages knowledge creation, sharing and use. Organizations interested in pursuing knowledge management and innovation may wish to be guided by the enabling conditions presented here that have been discovered over ten years of research. These conditions and the frameworks of which they are part can help managers to analyze, discuss, and introduce specific combinations of enabling factors that are tailored according to the type of knowledge process and level of interaction needed to address a particular knowledge problem or vision.

This paper discusses the effects of enabling conditions of project knowledge management in building volatile organizational memory. The theoretical rationale underlies a recursive relationship among enabling conditions of project knowledge management, organizational learning and memory.

This research employs a qualitative descriptive single case study approach to examine a mobile application development project undertaken by a major software company in Brazil. The analysis focuses on the project execution using an abductive analytical framework. The study data were collected through in-depth interviews and company documents.

Based on the research findings, the factors that facilitate behavior and strategy in managing project knowledge pose a challenge when it comes to fostering organizational learning. While both these factors play a role in organizational learning, the exchange of information from previous experience could be strengthened, and the feedback from the learning process could be improved. These shortcomings arise from emotional tensions that stem from power struggles within knowledge hierarchies.

Based on the research, it is recommended that project-structured organizations should prioritize an individual’s professional experience to promote organizational learning. Organizations with well-defined connections between their projects and strategies can better establish interconnections among knowledge creation, sharing and coding.

The primary contribution is to provide a comprehensive view that incorporates the conditions required to manage project knowledge, organizational learning and memory. The findings lead to four propositions that relate to volatile memory, intuitive knowledge, learning and knowledge encoding.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the current understanding of organisational conditions that facilitate service design. Specifically, the focus is on organisational capabilities, interactive practices and individual abilities as units of analysis across service system levels. Grounded in design principles, the paper conceptualises and delineates illustrative service design conditions and introduces a respective service design capability-practice-ability (CPA) portfolio. In doing so, an emerging microfoundations perspective in the context of service design is advanced.

Conceptual paper.

This paper identifies and delineates a CPA that contributes to service design and ultimately customer experiences. The service design CPA consists of six illustrative constellations of service design capabilities, practices and abilities, which operate on different organisational levels. The service design CPA builds the foundation for in-depth research implications and future research opportunities.

The CPA framework suggests that if an organisation seeks to optimise service design and subsequent customer experiences, then individual- and organisational-level (cap)abilities and interactive practices should be optimised and synchronised across specific CPA constellations.

This paper provides the first microfoundations perspective for service design. It advances marketing theory through multilevel theorising around service design capabilities, practices and abilities and overcomes extant limitations of insular theorising in this context.