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The purpose of this paper is to understand how CEO Joseph Abraham of Commercial Bank, Qatar, has shaped the culture of the bank and driven increased success during his tenure there. This is one of a series of interview-based studies that are focused on South Asian CEOs, with the goal of better understanding their management style in a multinational context. This short paper explores how leadership style can impact the development of workplace culture among a multinational workforce to build a collaborative, innovative and high-performing organization.

This paper uses primary interviews and supplements the analyses with secondary data sources and published research on leadership, organizational identity, culture and organizational ambidexterity.

The study found that cultural values and learned behaviors impact one's leadership and vision. In this instance, the CEO's leadership style demonstrated humility, an appreciation of diverse national cultures, and an ability to create organizational identity and cultivate a culture of ambidexterity, providing comfort to the organization in dynamically opposite contexts. All of these leadership features have enabled the organization to become more adaptive and perform better.

The narrative provides a glimpse of leadership humility and the implementation of those ideals in the workplace. The global experience of this South Asia-raised CEO provides an insider's view to decision-making and helps us understand how family, cultural background, and diverse work experience shape leadership behavior and culture in a multinational context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the entrepreneurs' social connections and types of employment differentially affect the survival of startup firms in the USA and India. Further, the authors analyze the differences during both the early stage and the later stages of new ventures.

The authors use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database between 2012 and 2014 and examine the hypothesized effects with logistic regression analyses.

The analysis reveals that an entrepreneur's social connections with other entrepreneurs favor the survival of the focal entrepreneur's early-stage business in the USA. However, social connections are more critical for later-stage ventures in India. During the early stage, new ventures of full-time entrepreneurs are more likely to survive in India, whereas those by hybrid entrepreneurs are more likely to survive in the USA. The differences between the importance of full-time and hybrid entrepreneurs across geographies are less discernible during the later stages of new ventures.

The novelty of this paper is that it demonstrates the significant differences in the way social connections and types of employment (hybrid versus full-time) affect the survival of entrepreneurial firms in the early and later stages. The study also expands the international business literature by shedding new light on country-level differences that affect the survival of new ventures.

With the growth in outsourcing it is imperative to understand the vendor’s satisfaction with IT outsourcing relationships since contractual and relationship factors affect the ability of vendors and clients to work together over time. A recent study demonstrated that relational factors such as trust and information exchange dominated in their ability to explain client satisfaction when compared to contractual factors. The purpose of this paper is to further examine how the relational factors work together to lead to vendor satisfaction in an outsourcing relationship.

A survey was developed and pre-tested with vendors in India and client firms in the USA that used international IT vendors. Using data collected from 214 vendor firms in the Indian subcontinent the paper examines the main effect of two client focused variables, namely, competence-based trust and client dependence on vendor satisfaction; it also explores whether social control moderate the main effect relationships.

The findings indicate that client dependence and competence-based trust were significant direct predictors of vendor satisfaction. Social control or the ability to resolve conflicts positively moderated the effect client dependence on vendor satisfaction. But it did not impact the effect of competence-based trust on vendor satisfaction.

The authors identify three limitations: a dyadic analysis using both the client and the vendor perspective would have provided a richer understanding of the relationship; since the data were collected on a cross-sectional basis, it is hard to make predictive assessments; and a limited response rate.

These findings help us understand the factors that impact vendor satisfaction in an outsourcing relationship and this is one of the keys to maintaining a long-term relationship between transacting parties.

Previous studies have explored the relational aspects of a vendor-client interaction from the client’s point of view and, here, the authors take the vendor’s perspective, which is increasingly important due to the increasing complexity of work outsourced. Besides exploring the direct effect competence-based trust and client dependence on vendor satisfaction, the authors also analyze the role of social control as a moderator.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate followers’ judgments of the culpability of their leaders and the organization’s external stakeholders in causing a crisis. The authors study the differences in effects of these judgments on their trust toward their leaders, their emotional exhaustion, and their levels of organizational identification.

Using the survey method the authors collected data from 354 individuals from an organization that filed for bankruptcy. Respondents’ comments also provided qualitative data that was used to triangulate the findings.

The authors find that individuals’ judgments that their leaders were culpable led to reduced trust, increased emotional exhaustion, and contrary to expectations reduced organizational identification. Therefore, it appears that in situations of perceived leader culpability during a crisis, followers tightly couple their leaders with the organization as a whole. In contrast, their judgments that external stakeholders were culpable were associated with increased trust toward their leaders, increased organizational identification, and they had no relationship with their levels of emotional exhaustion. The analysis of the qualitative data provides some insights into their judgments and the dependent variables.

Organizational members’ judgments of culpability are important factors that should be considered in crisis management research, and in research on trust, emotional exhaustion, and organizational identification. A limitation of the study is that it is cross-sectional in nature. Therefore, future research could test the findings in a longitudinal study.

Leaders need to understand the judgments of their followers during an organizational crisis. These judgments have implications for when and how leaders can mobilize their followers and the leadership tasks during crisis containment.

Extant research tends to focus on the judgments of external stakeholders during a crisis. This study is one of the first to examine the effects of internal stakeholders’ judgments of culpability for causing a crisis on their trust, emotional exhaustion, and organizational identification. Further, existing empirical studies on followers’ attributions during a crisis tend to be laboratory based. The study provides empirical evidence from individuals in an actual organization in crisis.

Organizational identification could play an important role during crises if it contributes to individuals' perceptions of control. This study examines this relationship and unpacks some of its complexities by investigating the mediating role of job satisfaction and citizenship behaviors that have previously been examined as outcomes of organizational identification in noncrisis contexts. The authors also investigate the moderating role of the perceived severity of the crisis on the relationships between organizational identification and job satisfaction and citizenship behaviors. There is limited empirical research on these relationships in a crisis context, and studying them is important for understanding the role of identification in diverse contexts and for crisis management research and practice.

Using the survey method, quantitative data were collected from 354 individuals from a nonprofit organization that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This was supplemented with qualitative data from respondents' comments in the survey.

Using process analysis, the authors find the following: (1) job satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between organizational identification and perceived control; (2) the perceived severity of the crisis moderates the relationship between organizational identification and job satisfaction; (3) citizenship behavior is associated with organizational identification but is not a significant mediator in the relationship between organizational identification and perceived control and (4) the perceived severity of the crisis is not a significant moderator of the relationship between organizational identification and citizenship behaviors.

This study’s model can be further tested in public and private organizations that are experiencing bankruptcies to examine the robustness of our findings. Also, due to the cross-sectional design of this study, the findings need to be tested in a longitudinal study to examine if they persist over time during the recovery and growth phases of a crisis.

Leaders can rely on individuals who identify with their organizations during a crisis, such as bankruptcies because they experience job satisfaction and a sense of control. Additionally, these individuals also demonstrate citizenship behaviors in these challenging situations.

This study is one of the first to empirically examine the association between organizational identification and perceived control, the mediating role of job satisfaction and citizenship behaviors and the moderating role of perceived severity in the context of an organizational crisis. An additional strength of this study is that it provides empirical evidence from individuals in an actual crisis rather than from laboratory studies.

This paper revisits the debate between environmental determinism and strategic choice. It compares the two theories on their philosophical underpinnings, their view of decision making, and the environment. Although we argue that the theory of strategic choice generally prevails, we recognize that there are factors that restrict the choice and discretion of managers. Here we look at three types of factors—industry related factors (extent of regulation and stage of life cycle), organization related factors (characteristics of top management and organization size), and time related factors and explain how each of these factors either inhibit or enhance managerial discretion. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Environmental volatility is a central construct in strategy studies. This paper argues that three factors confound the literature on volatility: asymmetry in conceptualization, asymmetry in operationalization, and lack of attention to level of analysis. These limitations inhibit the development of the concept and make much of the research on volatility non‐additive. However, environments do matter and to make better sense of it we need a meta‐conceptualization. To do this, the paper presents a process‐based resources‐oriented view of volatility that argues that the volatility experienced by the firm is largely a function of the resources it has available to meet the demands made of it. It is proposed that volatility originates from four basic resource configurations: managerial‐human resources configuration, physical resources‐conversion configuration, intangible resources configuration, and positional configuration. Propositions consistent with prior theories and incorporating the new resources‐oriented viewpoint are presented and discussed.