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Why is it that highly trained and seasoned executives fail? On the surface, this doesn’t make sense because they are very successful; yet research in the organization sciences provides no shortage of evidence to prove just that. From the classic Mann Gulch fire disaster of Weick’s famous collapse of sensemaking study, to studies of myopia of learning, escalation of commitment, threat-rigidity, dominant logic, the architecture of simplicity, the Icarus Paradox, to core competencies turning into core rigidities, and navigating new competitive markets using “old” cognitive maps, and many more such examples point to a ubiquitous phenomenon where highly trained and experienced professionals find themselves “stuck” in the heat of battle, unable to move and progress. On the one hand, for some, there is a desperate need for change, but are unable to do so, due to their trained incapacities. On the other hand, some simply cannot see the need for change, and continue with their “business as usual” mentality. For both, their visions of the world shrink, they have a tendency to cling onto their past habitual practices and oversimplify the complexity of the situation. In moments like these: DROP YOUR TOOLS and UNLEARN! This book chapter introduces a framework (grounded in clinical psychology) that has had consistent success in helping seasoned executives and key decision-makers open up the alternatives whenever they find themselves stuck with complexity.

This research paper aims to explore how social intrapreneurs use serious games to generate social innovation. In particular, the study depicts the coproduction process between caregivers acting as intrapreneurs, patients and other stakeholders, and unveils the contributions of serious games and their key features in producing social innovation within healthcare facilities.

Through an original case study, the article analyzes a social innovation initiated by caregivers in the French care eco-system. Primary and secondary data were used to observe and examine the successful implementation of a serious game. Specifically, caregivers in hospital designed a game that helps children overcome the stress and anxiety inherent to their hospital journey.

Results unveil the role of social innovations as catalyst of social intrapreneurship and the coproduction of services. In the healthcare setting, serious games both participate in improving the stay of child in hospitals, and in facilitating the working conditions of caregivers.

This article brings together the theoretical background of social intrapreneurship, social innovation and serious games. The successful implementation of social innovation depends on the intrinsic features of social intrapreneurs, coupled with those pertaining to serious games. The positive outcome of social innovation benefits both internal and external stakeholders. Such innovation improves the end users' experience, as the latter participate in the coproduction of their own care.

The purpose of this study is to explore how the family firm identity is affected when it is no longer publicly communicated.

A case study approach was used to follow a third-generation family business, a large Swedish home electronics firm that acquired a competitor and, initially, continued using its family firm identity after the acquisition. This study longitudinally tracks the company and its owning family using archival data combined with interviews.

The case company decided to stop communicating their identity as a family business. Such a move initially appears counterintuitive, since it potentially threatens the family firm identity and leads the firm to forgo other advantages, e.g. in branding. However, the decision was based on arguments that were rational from a business perspective, leading to a decoupling of family and firm identity.

This study contributes to the literature by showing a decoupling of internally experienced and externally communicated identities. It further contributes to the understanding of the family firm identity concept.

This case replaces UVA-M-0837. It can be used in a variety of marketing and strategy classes to understand how (1) at a macro level, a shift in consumer and environmental factors can impact firm strategy and (2) at a micro level, an e-mail-based marketing campaign designed to address these changes can impact firm-level performance.

The case puts the students in the position of CEO Robert Huth as he is preparing for a board meeting. He had taken David's Bridal from a loss in 1996 to sales of over $1 billion by 2011, but he was concerned about future growth. People were waiting longer and longer to get married and, once they decided to, were spending much less than in the past, so the industry had seen year-over-year declines since 2007. How would David's Bridal establish its brand in the minds of a new generation of brides who shopped, purchased, and decided differently than had brides in past generations?

Human Resource Practices (HRPs) have undergone a revolutionary change, with their practices being more strategic for facilitating the change process. Extant literature studies the impact of Lean Thinking Practices (LTPs) on Organizational Performance (OP). However, the role of HRP as a strategic partner in the inculcation of LTP appears to have been explored sparingly. Hence, this paper aims to identify the specific HRPs that enhance the impact of Lean Thinking on OP.

A cross-sectional survey method was adopted. A total of 528 responses from IT organizations across various levels and processes were collected. The proposed conceptual framework was tested and validated SPSS-Process Macro.

Findings revealed that the presence of HRPs as moderators is significantly impacting the relationship between LTP and OP. LTP when moderated by HRPs significantly impacts employee well-being when compared to other performance variables.

This study is a maiden attempt to study the role of HRP in the inculcation of LTP in IT organizations. Earlier studies, which have mainly concentrated on the need for Human Resource (people) involvement, have spoken and researched less about the specific HRPs in the inculcation of LTP. An empirically validated specific HRP for inculcating LTP in IT organizations is a significant contribution.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

This case study was built from secondary data such as news articles and videos. Several drafts of the case study with teaching note were tested in classroom settings and shared at a case writing conference. The case was revised based on feedback from students and roundtable discussions from the conference.

“What’s next: Ever Given after the Suez Canal incident (Evergreen Marine Corporation in, 2022)” explores the situation of the firm Evergreen Marine Corporation, a world-leading cargo shipping company headquartered in Taiwan, and its efforts to deal with challenges stemming from a pandemic and the global supply chain transition. The case provides background on the latest changes in global business environments, the Suez Canal Incident stemming from the grounding of Ever Given and firm-specific information, which would help students to understand the context affecting Evergreen Marine Corporation’s (EMC) strategic decisions. The case enables students to evaluate EMC’s overall position and to analyze the actions that they can take to deal with these challenges in a dynamic global environment.

This case would be appropriate for a course in strategy or international business, especially with the topic of international supply chain management.

This study investigates how individuals' self-awareness (specifically, private and public self-awareness) and environment-awareness (perceived expertise, similarity and familiarity) shape herd behavior, encompassing discounting one’s information and imitating others. Drawing from latent state-trait theory, this research aims to discern the impact of these factors on purchase intention and behavior.

Longitudinal data from 231 users in Xiaohongshu, China’s leading social commerce platform, were collected to test the proposed model and hypotheses.

The findings from this study show that private self-awareness negatively influences discounting one’s own information and imitating others. Public self-awareness positively affects imitating others, while it does not affect discounting one’s own information. Perceived expertise diminishes discounting one’s own information but does not significantly affect imitating others. Perceived similarity and perceived familiarity are positively related to discounting one’s own information and imitating others. The results confirm different interaction effects between self-awareness and environment-awareness on herd behavior.

First, this contributes back to the latent state-trait theory by expanding the applicability of this theory to explain the phenomenon of herd behavior. Second, this study takes an important step toward theoretical advancement in the extant literature by qualifying that both self- and environment-awareness should be considered to trigger additional effects on herd behavior. Third, this study provides a more enlightened understanding of herd behavior by highlighting the significance of considering the interplay between self- and environment-awareness on herd behavior. Finally, this study also empirically confirms the validity of classifying self-awareness into private and public aspects.

The purpose of the current study is to explain best practices for attempting humor in the workplace. Research on humor in the workplace has emphasized the use of leader humor but has neglected to provide guidance on how to successfully use humor. This is an important gap because unsuccessful humor attempts are associated with lowered status and disruptive behavior.

This paper summarizes three types of humor theories (i.e. cognitive, social and contextual) and derives principles from these theories that can be applied to improve humor success. Then, the authors apply the understanding of humor to workplace applications, providing suggestions for future empirical research inferred from the humor theories.

Humor attempts are most likely to land (i.e. invoke mirth) when they include a benign violation of mental schemas, societal norms or other expectations or when humor evokes shared feelings of benign superiority in the audience. Humor is less effective in goal-directed situations. Mirth is expected to increase group cohesion, leader trust and organizational identification and mitigate the effects of job stressors. Finally, employee learning and development activities (e.g. onboarding, training) seem like a good place to use humor to facilitate cognitive flexibility.

These suggestions from across psychological disciplines are synthesized to inform best practices for leader humor.