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The essential investments in new product development (NPD) made by industrial companies entail effective management of NPD activities. In this context, performance measurement is one of the means that can be employed in the pursuit of effectiveness.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to analyse how academic staff cope with the new culture of performance measurement and assessment in universities. In particular, the study aims to shed light on how external pressures related to measurement of research performance are translated into organisational and individual academic responses within the university and the extent to which these responses are related specifically to the operational features of performance measurement systems (PMS).

The study is based on a case study conducted in an Italian public university and based on interviews with a cross-disciplinary sample of faculty members.

The study provides insights into how linking financial incentives and career progression to research performance metrics at the system and organisational levels may have important reorientation effects on individual behaviours and epistemic consequences for the academic work.

The study is based on interviews, so one limitation is related to the risk of researcher and interviewee personal bias. Moreover, this study is focused on one single case of a specific university setting, which cannot be fully representative of the experiences of others.

The study contributes to the literature on management accounting by exploring the factors that might explain why the unintended effects of PMS on academics’ behaviour reported by several studies might occur. From a practitioner’s point of view, it shows features of PMS that may produce unintended effects on academic activities. It also highlights the need to rethink PMS for the evaluation of university performance through the involvement of different stakeholders.

This paper aims to introduce the use of hazards functions for studying the relationship between internationalization and performance in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from emerging economies.

Hazards functions analysis is applied to a sample of 64 companies, previously grouped into two subsets of manufacturing SMEs from an emerging economy. The first group contains firms that have attained an accelerated internationalization. And the second one those that have followed a sequential internationalization.

The results show strong evidence that internationalization positively affects the probability of a better performance, and therefore more competitiveness of SMEs.

The proposed methodology is an invitation to use models other than linear regression to explain the relationship between internationalization and performance, studying the risk function of poor performance, whose characterization in the lifetime of SMEs. The result of this study clearly illustrates how internationalization affects the performance of SMEs for both those SMEs with accelerated internationalization and those with a sequential process of internationalization.

The implementation of quantitative methodologies, such as the analysis of hazards, has implications in the social practice of research in international business, by inviting the return of data from primary sources, obtained from direct sources, which, although they are not large samples, they are representative, and therefore the results of the well-applied methodology offer powerful and high-reliability information. Irreproducible and non-replicable research results threaten the credibility, usefulness and the very basis of all scientific fields. Studies in entrepreneurship, management and in international business are not exempt from this problem that affects the ethics and credibility of research works.

A literature review is presented exposing the disadvantages of the use of traditional correlation methodologies and proposes the methodology traditionally used in industrial engineering studies of hazard functions as a simple option, free of previous assumptions about the relation between internationalization and performance. Finally, the methodology is subjected to triple testing of conceptualization and measurement of internationalization, performance and the relation between internationalization and performance.

The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of subordinates’ individual differences or traits and their performance behavior on the formation of leaders’ LMX, based on leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, thus proposing that both who subordinates are and what they do may affect supervisors’ LMX perceptions.

Two studies were conducted. The first was a non-experimental field study and the second was a laboratory experiment.

Study 1, a non-experimental field study, HLM, showed that subordinates’ self-reported characteristics predict their leaders’ LMX ratings; Study 2, a laboratory experiment, showed that subordinate performance causes leaders’ LMX perceptions while holding subordinate’s individual differences constant.

The current research was the first to demonstrate experimentally that LMX develops over multiple interactions. Additionally, it demonstrates that task-oriented behavior (i.e. job performance) and personality characteristics (i.e. internal locus of control and self-efficacy) are predictors of LMX.

Relationship learning is viewed as an important factor in enhancing competitiveness and an important determinant of profitability in relationships. Prior studies have acknowledged the positive effects of interorganizational learning on performance, but the performance measures applied have varied. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between interorganizational learning and different types of performance. The paper also goes beyond direct effects by investigating the moderating effects of different research designs.

This paper applies a meta-analytic approach to systematically analyze 21 independent studies (N = 4,618) to reveal the relationship between interorganizational learning and performance.

The findings indicate that interorganizational learning is an important predictor of performance, and that the effects of interorganizational learning on performance differ in magnitude under different research conditions.

The paper focuses on interorganizational learning, and during the data collection, some related topics were excluded from the data search to retain the focus on learning.

The study evinces the breadth of the field of interorganizational learning and how different research designs affect research results. Moreover, this meta-analysis indicates the need for greater clarity when defining the concepts used in studies and for definitions of the concepts applied in the field of interorganizational learning to be unified.

This study is the first to meta-analytically synthesize literature on interorganizational learning. It also illuminates new perspectives for future studies within this field.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of different explanations in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research that deal with M&A performance. After five decades of M&A research, the findings on M&A performance are diverse and sometimes inconsistent with each other. The explanatory variables studied in the empirical works reflect primarily on researchers’ approach, construct, measurement techniques and data availability, leading to inconsistencies among the findings. In order to understand how researchers have measured M&A performance so far, the gaps in existing work and to identify the scope of future work, the authors conduct a systematic review of empirical M&A research on explaining M&A performance.

This research has been carried out as a structured assessment of past literature. The findings from selected research works have been categorized, grouped and summarized to discern a meta‐analytic view of the work carried out to date.

The M&A performance measures are diverse owing to heterogeneous views on what constitutes M&A performance and organization performance. They are categorized under Accounting Measures, Market Measures and Other Measures, including subjective assessments. The explanatory variables found in the studies are extensive and can be categorized under Deal Characteristics, Managerial Effects, Firm Characteristics and Environmental Factors.

The paper extracts some key trends in M&A performance studies carried out in empirical works over two decades. The findings help to identify drawbacks and set an agenda for future work.

This study aims to systematically explore the approaches used by previous studies in measuring the performance of Islamic banks based on maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah.

The data obtained in this study were derived from a review of empirical literature based on 15 articles published between 2012 and 2019. The sample articles on the performance of Islamic banks based on maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah were located by searching keywords in the most relevant social science research databases such as Scopus, Web of Science and EBSCOhost.

The emerging trend in measuring the performance of Islamic banks from the maqāṣid perspective highlighted that there is insufficient research on the determinants of Islamic bank performance.

The reviews undertaken in this paper will resolve the literature gaps in the area of maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah and Islamic banks, as this study serves as a reference for scholars, academicians and interested researchers in Islamic banking and finance studies to pursue more research in this area.

Performance measurement based on maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah enhances society’s confidence in supporting Islamic banking practices, particularly among the Muslim community. Islamic banks can also be exemplary financial intermediaries supporting fair and equitable financial systems for the entire community.

This paper is original in its nature, considering that understanding the relationship between maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah and the performance of Islamic banks is limited. This paper reveals a literature gap that can be explored by future studies theoretically and practically.

In the last 3 decades, organization-wide programs and practices based on the Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy have become central to continuous improvement (CI) strategy in both public and private enterprises. However, there is paradoxical evidence of TQM-firm performance linkage in non-Japanese contexts. This study presents a meta-analysis of empirical research on TQM-firm performance linkage and investigates the moderating influence of national cultural (NC) values on this relationship.

Meta-analytical procedures are adopted to analyse 364 effects accumulated from 135 independent samples across 31 nations, for 30,015 firm observations. Additionally, weighted least square (WLS) meta-regression is used to test the moderation effects of four NC dimensions based on the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) model.

The meta-analysis results reveal that the strengths of the association varied across five soft and hard TQM dimensions and three firm performance dimensions Meta-regression indicate that the effectiveness of the TQM program is high in cultures which reward collectivist behaviours, equity of power distribution and avoidance of ambiguity in rules/structures.

The study contributes to international operational management theory on cultural influences on the effectiveness of operations strategies and decisions.