Search results

While the potential for HR practices (HRPs) to improve organisational performance is well-established, the mechanisms by which this occurs are complex. Individual HRPs may affect organisational performance either by mutual gains (improving both organisational performance and employee well-being) or by conflicting outcomes (organisational performance is improved at the expense of employee well-being). Models which combine HRPs may mask these differences and this study therefore tests pathways for four individual HRPs.

HRPs (employee involvement, pay, performance management and training) were hypothesised to influence organisational performance directly and indirectly via employee experiences of work (communication, autonomy) and employee well-being. The study used a large secondary dataset, the UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey 2011, to test these relationships in a multi-level model.

Employee experiences of work strongly predicted well-being. In addition, three different pathways from HRP to organisational performance were identified. Pay showed indirect negative effects, involvement had direct positive effects and performance management had a mixture of both positive direct and negative indirect effects on performance.

Using a disaggregated analysis of HRP and demonstrating their differing effects, this study questions the feasibility of a universal model of HRP effects. By using multi-level modelling (MLM), the study develops understanding of employee perspectives and integrates these into organisational-level models, demonstrating that performance effects are partially mediated by both employee experiences of work and employee well-being. Finally, the study highlights the complexity of performance effects achieved via both employee benefits and an intensification of employee experiences.

By taking a social learning perspective, this study examines the trickle-down effect of empowering leadership across hierarchical levels in an organization. Specifically, this study aims to demonstrate that the empowering leadership of higher-level leaders promotes the task performance of employees through the mediation of the empowering leadership of lower-level leaders. It also seeks to confirm the role of performance pressure as a boundary condition in social learning process.

Under a moderated mediation framework, this study tests our hypotheses through a hierarchical regression analysis. The data used in the analysis is from the survey responses of 209 subordinate-supervisor dyads.

This study finds that the empowering leadership of higher-level leaders promotes the empowering leadership of lower-level leaders, which indirectly improves the task performance of employees. It also finds that performance pressure perceived by lower-level leaders moderates the relationship between the empowering leadership of higher- and lower-level leaders, thus moderating the proposed indirect effect.

This study complements the findings of previous studies by identifying the trickle-down effect of empowering leadership across different hierarchical levels in an organization and by highlighting its boundary condition. In addition, this study provides evidence for the presence of trickle-down effect of leadership in an Eastern culture.

This study suggests the necessity of leadership education and training programs within organizations by revealing the importance of social learning process for promoting empowering leadership. In addition, it also suggests that performance pressure in an organization not only dampens empowering leadership but also has a negative effect on the task performance of employees.

This study demonstrates the influence mechanism of empowering leadership through a systematic verification of its trickle-down effect, which has been lacking in previous studies. It also highlights the moderating role of performance pressure, as a contextual factor, in the social learning and influence process of empowering leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the inventory performance effect of advanced material planning modes and analyse how internal and external contextual difficulties moderate this relationship. This study also identifies avenues for future research.

The empirical analysis uses a survey of material planning for purchased items in 292 Swedish manufacturing and wholesaling companies. Three dimensions of inventory performance are dependent variables: material planning performance, inventory turnover rate, and service level.

Advanced material planning modes are directly associated with material planning performance, but this study could not verify direct associations with inventory turnover rate and service-level performances. External and internal contextual difficulties have direct effects on all inventory performance dimensions and moderate the inventory performance effect of advanced material planning modes. The moderating effect is stronger in non-difficult contexts, for which advanced material planning has significant inventory performance effects. Demand- and human-related contextual dimensions are especially critical.

The study identifies the following guidelines for companies to consider in order to unlock the potential of advanced material planning: consider full implementation of advanced material planning in non-difficult contexts; minimise the plan variability effects of high parameter revision and planning frequencies; minimise the need for, and use of, manual modification of planned orders before release; reduce demand uncertainty and variability; and secure appropriate human skills and working time.

This study somewhat contradicts the literature on material planning by not finding a direct positive effect on any inventory performance dimension from analytical design of order quantities and safety stocks. The research adds to the literature by identifying direct and moderating effects of external and internal contextual difficulties on all three-inventory performance dimensions. The relative importance of managing automatic order release identified in the study motivates future research as the effect has not been previously highlighted in the literature. Accordingly, avenues for future research and an agenda for practice-oriented research are suggested.

In this chapter, we analyzed the effects of internationalization on innovation, productivity, and firm performance among multinational pharmaceutical companies as representatives of a global knowledge-based industry. The empirical analysis used multiple stepwise regressions based on a sample of 149 firms headquartered in Europe and the US. The results indicate that innovation outcomes are positively correlated to the number of foreign subsidiaries (scope internationalization), whereas surprisingly, formal research and development (R&D) does not seem to directly influence innovation. This suggests that the firms benefit from local overseas subsidiaries to create and implement new innovative offerings. The number of foreign subsidiaries has a U-shaped relationship to patent productivity suggesting that firms can gain advantages by locating cost-intensive activities in low-cost countries and critical tasks in advanced market locations. Firm performance has a U-shaped relationship to sales abroad (scale internationalization) and the relationship is further enhanced by a high focus on R&D. This suggests that sales abroad enable scale economies, where R&D improves quality and relevance of products and thereby boosts performance. Finally, to validate the findings we conducted two semi-structured interviews with representative industry experts and gained further insights for an extended interpretation of results.

The paper tests if and to what extent lean management system adoption generates abnormal profitability, and how it accrues over time. Configurational approaches to lean management systems and “S-curve” effects in lean implementation are used to ground the paper's hypotheses and interpret its findings.

Using the emerging view of lean as enterprise-wide management systems, this quasi-experimental study uses a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the abnormal profitability (ROIC) attributable to lean management system adoption. The paper leverages a unique data set of lean adopters nested in a panel data set (19 years) of 2,088 industrial firms matched by industry and firm size. It applies a variety of regression methods (two-way fixed effect panel estimator, propensity score matching, instrumental variable two-stage-least squares) to estimate the size of the abnormal profitability attributable to lean management systems, addressing endogeneity issues related to non-random sampling, omitted variable bias and reverse causation. It also analyzes the cross-firm variability of such abnormal profitability and how it accrues over time.

For the average non-adopter in the sample (44.3 million euro revenues), lean adoption generates abnormal ROIC ranging from 1.4% to 3.9%. These results come into effect approximately three years after starting lean adoption and peak after eight years. While the average abnormal profitability attributable to lean adoption is sizable, it varies significantly across firms and over time. This significant variation is compatible with firms' diverse ability to understand the complex inner workings of lean systems, and to design and implement them so that they improve profitability.

The conceptualization of lean as enterprise-wide management system can be further refined to more effectively categorize the components of lean systems and investigate the nature of their relationships. Lean system adoption measurement can be fine-tuned to better capture cross-firm and longitudinal heterogeneity. Future work can explore other dependent variables of interest to different stakeholders including shareholders' value, employment and environmental and social sustainability.

The financial benefits of adopting lean can be reaped to the extent to which managers embrace lean as a philosophy and implement it pervasively in the organization. A firm can use the study's estimates as a basis for making calculations about the returns of investment in lean adoption. The paper also shows that “getting the lean system right” makes a significant difference in terms of abnormal profitability, which is twice as large for the best lean adopters..

Compared with the promises of many lean proponents and supporters, the paper provides a more realistic view of what to expect from lean adoption in terms of profitability. Adopting lean as a comprehensive, enterprise-wide management system is not a universal panacea, but a complex endeavor, characterized by multiple complex decisions that require considerable capabilities, coordinated efforts and consistency of action.

Differently from extant research, this study does not study the correlation between the adoption of lean operation practices and financial performance but focuses on the abnormal profitability generated by the adoption of lean as a pervasive, enterprise-wide management system. Its research design allows to identify the differential profitability attributable to lean adoption and documents that it accrues non-linearly.

Megaproject performance measurement (MPM) has received great attention in the project management community, but it primarily focused on the design of performance measures or frameworks. Yet, whether MPM utilization can improve megaproject performance and how project actors use MPM to improve megaproject performance is less well understood. This study aims to investigate whether and how the use of MPM can contribute to better megaproject performance.

Through the lens of the lever of control, this study conceptualizes MPM utilization as diagnostic use and interactive use. A holistic research model and related hypotheses integrating MPM use, project complexity and megaproject performance were established. The model was validated using a partial square-structural equation modeling method.

Based on 214-megaproject data collected through a questionnaire survey in China, the results show positive effects of diagnostic use and interactive use on megaproject performance. Both, however, have substitutional interaction effects. The moderating results suggest that the higher project complexity weakens the positive effects of MPM utilization on megaproject performance.

This study advances megaprojects performance measurement and management literature by validating the value of MPM utilization on performance. It also presents practical implications for project managers to improve performance by appropriate MPM utilization.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the supply chain learning (SCL)–performance relationship based on the existing empirical evidence.

We sampled 54 empirical studies on the SCL–performance relationship. We proposed a conceptual research framework and adopted a meta-analytical approach to analyse the SCL–performance relationship.

The results of the meta-analysis confirm the positive effects of SCL on the performance of both firms and supply chains. In addition, building on the knowledge-based view, we found that learning from customers has a stronger positive effect on performance than does learning from suppliers, while joint learning has a stronger positive effect on performance than does absorptive learning. Business knowledge had a greater effect on performance than did general knowledge, process knowledge or technical knowledge, while explicit knowledge had a stronger effect than tacit knowledge. Moreover, the SCL–performance relationship is moderated by performance measure and industry type but not by regional economic development, highlighting the broad applicability of SCL.

This study is the first meta-analysis on the SCL–performance relationship. It differentiates between learning from customers and learning from suppliers, examines a more comprehensive list of performance measures and tests five moderators to the main effect, significantly contributing to the SCL literature.

In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has become one of the most impactful disruptions which has imposed high levels of uncertainty on supply chains around the world. Supply chain integration (SCI) is highly recommended as an underlying mechanism that can facilitate the development of resilience and robustness as two dynamic capabilities. They can in turn positively influence firm performance and success during the disruptive conditions of COVID-19 era. The study aims to examine whether SCI as an enabler of resilience and robustness can improve firm performance during COVID-19 pandemic.

A theoretical model is developed to elaborate the relationship between SCI dimensions, resilience and robustness and firm’s operational and financial performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey method is then used to empirically examine the model using a sample of 94 companies in the food industry in the province of Tehran, Iran, during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study makes several contributions. It provides a novel theoretical model on the relationship between SCI, resilience and robustness and firm performance and tests this model in a less-studied yet critical context (i.e. Iranian food industry) and during a disruptive era (i.e. COVID-19 pandemic).

The results support the positive effect of three SCI dimensions of internal, product and process integration on operational and financial performance during corona virus pandemic. Furthermore, internal and process integration have positive effects on resilience. Internal, product and process integration have positive effects on robustness. In addition, resilience mediates the effects of internal and product integration on both operational and financial performance, whereas robustness mediates the effect of internal and product integration on financial performance.

This study was conducted in the Province of Tehran. To test and generalize the results, it is recommended to conduct this study in other places and countries.

These results highlight the importance of SCI dimensions as vital enablers of resilience and robustness and their consequent impact on firm’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of organizational change and privatization on the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) using the data from Iranian firms during the period 1998-2006, and to test whether privatization leads to improved performance.

The performance of these firms before and after privatization was examined. Pooled regression models were employed to assess the effect of privatization on performance indicators.

The results show that privatization has not had a positive effect on the profitability of the firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange; rather, the effect has been negative. Moreover, the results reveal that privatization of these firms has had no effect on their sales effectiveness and efficiency; instead, the debts and risks of these firms has increased. Further, ownership reform is needed to remedy the situation.

The paper focuses on the effect of privatization on firm performance. Future research can consider the effects of privatization on other aspects such as efficiency and productivity.

The implications of the study are discussed in relation to the organizational changes that occur in the transition from public to private ownership. This study shows that improved performance of privatized firms cannot be taken for granted merely by ownership change. In other words, privatization must be accompanied by other economic adjustments such as adjustment of the capital market and the national banking system as well as formulation of corporate rules and regulations.

Privatization and organizational change of Iranian firms is an important issue and this paper is the first to provide a new approach regarding the effect of privatization of SOEs on their performance.

Although the business model (BM) has become a top priority in management research, existing literature still offers a confusing and partial picture about how to leverage BM designs for new product development (NPD) because of two limitations. First, research has paid little attention to different BM designs' effects on NPD performance. Second, few empirical studies have examined the moderating roles of firms' learning capabilities, such as big data analytics capabilities (BDA capabilities). This study aims to investigate the effects of BM novelty design and BM efficiency design on NPD performance and the ways in which BDA capabilities moderate these effects.

A literature review provides the model and hypotheses. Using a sample of 208 Chinese firms, the authors conducted an empirical test following multiple regression analysis.

The results demonstrate that BM novelty design has a positive effect on NPD performance while BM efficiency design takes the form of an inverted U-shape. Moreover, BDA capabilities (i.e. BDA technology capability and BDA management capability) have complicated moderating effects on BM novelty design- and BM efficiency design-NPD performance relationships.

The results may be affected by both the context (solely in China) and type (cross-sectional) of the data set. This study has explored the moderating effects of BDA capabilities, further studies considering other significant practices such as social media usage, could yield richer insights that would help validate the results of this study.

First, we suggest that managers should be explicitly aware of the different impacts of BM novelty design and BM efficiency design on NPD performance. Second, this study encourages managers to build relevant BDA capabilities to work with BM designs to improve NPD performance.

This is one of the first studies to investigate BM designs' complicated influences on NPD success and explore BDA capabilities' moderating effects on the BM design-NPD performance linkage.