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This study aims to examine configurations of person-centered psychological change during organizational restructuring and downsizing in a public sector setting. Drawing on a social cognitive framework of organizational change the authors explore and identify the existence of different groups of employees who demonstrate varied responses (on commitment, engagement and anxiety) to restructuring and downsizing.

Surveys were collected from employees in three longitudinal waves (Time 1 N = 253; Time 2 N = 107; Time 3 N = 93, twelve months apart) at a UK public sector organization shortly before, during and after restructuring and downsizing.

Three classes of response emerged based on levels of and change in anxiety, organizational commitment and work engagement: a positive “Flourishers” profile was identified along with two relatively negative response profiles, labeled as “Recoverers” and “Ambivalents”. Higher levels of job control accounted for membership of the more positive response profile; higher structural uncertainty predicted membership of the most negative response group.

Using a person-centered approach, the authors form an understanding of different types of employee responses to downsizing; along with potential factors that help explain why groups of employees may exhibit certain psychological response patterns and may need to be managed differently during change. Thus, this approach provides greater understanding to researchers and managers of the varied impact that restructuring/downsizing has on the workforce.

To date there has been little research exploring employee responses to organizational restructuring and downsizing that has attempted to take a person-centered approach, which assumes population heterogeneity. Unlike variable centered approaches, this unique approach helps identify different patterns of employee responses to restructuring and downsizing.

This study aims to examine staff responses to management control systems (MCS) changes in an Australian university. Through the analysis of the category of staff responses, it aims to understand the perception gaps among the staff at different levels of the university.

Using a case study approach on an Australian university, data was collected from interviews with staff across three hierarchical levels to explore their behavioural responses.

This study finds that staff at all levels largely complied with MCS changes due to institutional enforcement. Top management emphasised aligning with government policies and funding, often using manipulation and compartmentalisation tactics in implementing the new MCS. Mid-level managers generally favour research strategies but feel excluded from decision-making and have limited influence over funding. They adopted a balancing tactic within a compromise strategy. Meanwhile, operating-level academics had mixed experiences, feeling largely powerless in influencing MCS while also showing instances of self-motivated compliance. Overall, the study reveals varying responses across different hierarchical levels, highlighting the complexities of MCS changes in staff behaviour and attitudes.

The insights from this study can guide university administrators and policymakers in understanding the intricate variations in staff reactions to institutional changes. By recognising the factors that drive compliance and defiance, institutions can better navigate and implement changes in MCS.

This research offers a unique perspective on the behavioural side of MCS changes in higher education. By focusing on varied hierarchical levels within a university, the study provides a granular understanding of individual responses, enriching the existing literature on MCS transitions in academia.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

Crisis response has emerged as a salient concern for firms in the onset of COVID-19. While research suggests that resilience is critical during such disruptions, there remains a need to examine how firms build resilience during evolving situations. This study focuses on resiliency created through operational flexibility and examines how firms developed resiliency to COVID-19 through an adaptation of three technology-based levers of flexibility: change in a firm's product and service offerings, the channel it uses for sales and the location of a firm's workforce.

This study uses a unique cross-sectional dataset generated from a survey administered by a reputable financial institution, from March 20 to June 20, during the inception of COVID crisis. This study uses ordinary least squares to analyze data from 6,076 firms across 20 countries.

Results indicate that flexibility through a combination of a change in a firm's product and service offerings, with movement to selling through a digital channel, had a positive impact on firm sales. However, flexibility through a combination of change in product and service offerings with workforce location changes had negative impacts. Robustness analysis indicates that negative impacts worsen in countries with higher digitization and in manufacturing and retail firms as compared to service firms, indicating the inflexibility of physical goods–based business models. Results highlight dimensions through which technology-based flexibility can take place and the benefits of flexibility on firm performance.

This study provides managerial insights into technology-based operational flexibility mechanisms that can be employed for building performance resilience during unexpected disruptions. Research findings inform firms facing supply chain challenges and inflation pressures of business today.

This paper aims to unravel the relationship between market-driven impacts of climate change and firms’ deployment of renewable energy (RE) innovation. The purpose is to understand how market-related forces, influenced by uncertainty, shape firms’ behaviour in response to climate change challenges.

Drawing on the behavioural theory of the firm (BTOF), the paper develops a conceptual model to decode the relationship between each category of market-driven impacts and the resulting RE innovation within firms. The model takes into account the role of uncertainty and differentiates between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and domestic firms.

The analysis reveals five key sources of market-driven impacts: investor sentiment, media coverage, competitors’ adoption of ISO 14001, customer satisfaction and shareholder activism. These forces influence the adoption of RE innovation differently across firms, depending on the level of uncertainty and the discrepancy between environmental performance and aspiration level.

This paper contributes to the literature in four ways. Firstly, it emphasises the importance of uncertainty associated with market-driven impacts, which stimulates different responses from firms. Secondly, it fills a research gap by focusing on the proactivity of firms in adopting RE innovation, rather than just operational strategies to curb emissions. Thirdly, the paper extends the BTOF by incorporating the concept of uncertainty in explaining firm behaviour. Finally, it provides insights into the green strategies of MNEs in the face of climate change, offering a comprehensive model that differentiates MNEs from domestic firms.

Global crises create an environment that is characterized by a fight for survival by countries, companies and citizens. While firms have adopted business initiatives to ensure survival in a global crisis, many measures are geared toward preventing customer churn, declining revenues and eroding market share. Such short-term focus raises an important question regarding long-term survival – how can firms survive a global crisis? The purpose of this study is to investigate how firms can survive a global crisis.

This study considers pandemics as the study context and uses a triangulation methodology (past research, managerial insights and popular press articles) to advance the organizing framework. Using the process study approach, the proposed framework recognizes the onset characteristics of a global crisis with a focus on pandemics and the government actions that reflect the pandemic onset. The framework also identifies a logical order of three marketplace reactions to the pandemic – management response, consumer response and critical business transformations that ultimately lead to firm survival – and advances related research propositions of such reactions.

By deploying critical business transformations, firms can ensure firm survival in a pandemic by fostering engagement with customers, employees and resources. Additionally, the moderators that influence the relationships between (1) management response and critical business transformations, (2) consumer response and critical business transformations, and (3) critical business transformations and firm survival are identified. Finally, this study presents an agenda for future research.

To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first study to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to study firm survival in a global crisis such as a pandemic. This study answers the call for more research to the growing field of pandemic research in the areas of marketing research and marketing strategy.

The learnings from this study can help firms on what to anticipate and how to respond in a crisis such as a pandemic.

Societal welfare is accounted for as firms plan to deal with a crisis.

This is the first study to propose a strategic framework to deal with a crisis that is largely unanticipated where the duration and the impact is not predictable.

This study investigates the impact of the Paris Agreement (and other factors) on carbon information disclosures to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

A sample of South African listed companies was selected and data analysed from 2013 to 2017. A random effect panel data model using SPSS was used to determine whether the Paris Agreement had an effect on carbon information disclosure.

The results indicate that (1) the Paris Agreement, as an example of an intergovernmental coordination initiative, is significant in creating awareness and increasing the carbon disclosures to the CDP. Furthermore, (2) in terms of the other factors examined, providing incentives for managing climate change and assessing climate risks further into the future improves disclosure quality, while no relationship was found between the CDP score and the approval by key management personnel.

This research examines CDP disclosures for an emerging market before and after the signing of the Paris Agreement.

This research shows the importance of supportive government policy. Furthermore, a commitment to climate change disclosure is manageable and achievable and needs to be implemented at the management level.

Are major and frequent disruptions transforming global supply chains? This study aims to investigate how multinational companies (MNCs) are responding to the phenomenon of accumulated major disruptions in recent years and plausible new paradigm of unstable conditions and environmental uncertainty from a supply chain resilience (SCRES) perspective.

Following an inductive interpretivist approach based on interpretive phenomenology, this study gathers insights from ten MNCs supply chain managers and international consultants who participated as key informants via semi-structured interviews, sharing their experience of the phenomenon. Additionally, secondary sources such as press releases, media articles and industry reports were used for data collection.

Findings include five categories of recovery actions, i.e. levelling, rationing, buffering, bridging and boundary redefining, key strategic changes in competitive priorities, internal organisation and coordination structures, and a hierarchy between SCRES characteristics, integrated in an empirically derived conceptual framework connecting these constructs. This contributes to middle-range theories within SCRES body of knowledge. The authors also identify a set of areas for future SCRES research.

Findings can support MNCs’ supply chain professionals in designing and managing resilient global supply chains, based on learnings from the recent highly disruptive environment, particularly, regarding recovery actions and resilience-building strategic changes contributing to agility and robustness in global supply chains.

Non-positivist interpretive and inductive works are scarce in SCRES research. By adopting this novel approach for this field, the authors broadened the categorisation of responses used in previous works and identified prominent strategic changes and SCRES characteristics and relations among constructs, thus bringing conceptual clarity to SCRES research within the context of the study.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how changes in creditors' rights affect the dividend policy behavior of corporate firms.

The authors use the implementation of the bankruptcy and insolvency code (IBC) in India in 2016 as a quasi-natural experiment setup. Differential application of this law allows them to use the Difference in Differences approach to extract the marginal impact of change in creditors' rights on the dividend policy.

The authors show that firms responded to strengthening creditors' rights by decreasing their dividend payout. Further, the authors observe that this negative response is conditioned on firm leverage and the nature of the creditor, i.e. public or private. The firms with a greater leverage ratio and a greater proportion of private debt in the total debt in the pre-event period have shown greater response to the change in the law. Lastly, the authors show that stock markets positively respond to the observed decrease in dividends only when a corresponding decrease in the leverage accompanies such a decrease.

The authors contribute to the finance and law literature from several aspects. First, the authors extend this stream by bringing to light the dividend policy response of firms when they are subjected to a change in creditors' rights. Second, the authors also show how firm-level factors like financial policy and the nature of the creditor condition their response to IBC. Lastly, the authors also examine the market reaction to the dividend policy response of firms to the change in bankruptcy law.