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Literature sparsely documents the association between the deviant behavior of a firm and its financial policies. Trade credit is one of the most critical financial policies of a firm. In this study, the authors examine the association between strategic deviance and trade credit.

The authors explore a strategy-based explanation for trade credit by examining whether strategic deviance affects trade credit using a sample of 33 countries from 1996 to 2020. The authors test the hypothesis using static OLS regression models. To address autocorrelation and endogeneity issues, the authors use dynamic OLS models, lag models, and instrumental variable approach.

The authors find that an increase in strategic deviance reduces both demand and supply of trade credit, and the study’s results indicate that a one standard deviation increase in strategic deviance leads to a 1.34% decrease in the demand for trade credit. Also, a one standard deviation increase in strategic deviance leads to a 2.26% fall in the supply of trade credit.

This study facilitates managers to formulate trade credit policies when choosing a deviant strategy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the association between strategic deviance and trade credit policies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of firm’s deviant strategy on analysts’ earnings forecasts and further examine the effects of firm’s information transparency and environmental uncertainty on these relationships from information asymmetry perspective.

The sample includes listed firms on Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange during the period 2007-2013.

The results indicate that firms’ deviant strategies have effects on analysts’ earnings forecasts, in particular, firms with extreme strategies have less analysts following, larger forecast error and dispersion compared with firms following industry norms. Moreover, information transparency and environmental uncertainty have effects on the relationship between strategic deviance and analysts’ earnings forecasts.

The empirical results of this paper provide strong evidence that strategy information is an important source of information for analysts’ earnings forecasts, which shows that analysts should pay attention to not only financial information but also the strategic information, especially when the information is related to strategic choice. In addition, it is necessary for investors to focus on strategic information to have a better understanding on financial information of enterprises and make better investment decisions.

The findings of this study indicate that corporate strategic deviance has an effect on analysts’ earnings forecasting behavior. This study enriches research studies on corporate strategy and external stakeholders and complements related research on analysts’ earnings forecasts from strategic perspective and information asymmetry perspective.

This study aims to investigate the positive side of employee deviance. Historically, research exploring employee deviance focussed on undesirable organisational and individual outcomes. Thus, previous research has empirically established that employee deviance harms both the organisation and organisation's employees. Recent studies argue that employee deviance also has a positive effect; however, such studies are limited in number. The extant research fails to consider the positive side of employee deviance, and therefore, the present studies bridge the gap through a systematic literature review on positive deviance.

The study examined peer-reviewed theoretical and empirical journal articles related to workplace deviance. An initial search resulted in 2,691 research articles, of which 40 papers were considered relevant for the study given the objective of this paper. Research papers were extracted from the Web of Science, EBSCO and Scopus. The extracted data were then synthesised to formulate the research questions and objectives for this study.

Basing on the systematic literature review, the study presents six main themes: positive deviance and younger workforce, positive deviant leader and subordinates and positive deviance as a strategic tool for employee engagement, positive deviance and positive organisational scholarship, positive deviance and entrepreneurial orientation. The study also proposes positive deviance as a mediator/moderator of other relationships within an organisation.

Systematic literature is a methodology that relies on the availability and accessibility of research studies based on the research criteria. The study considered three significant databases to identify the relevant papers for the study. Therefore, the research is limited, and the possibility of omitting the papers is not ruled out, although unintentional.

The paper is plausibly the first research to conduct a systematic literature review on positive deviance. The study establishes and reconfirms the encouraging side of employee deviance. The study extends the literature on workplace deviance in two significant ways. First, the paper systematically examines the empirical and review literature related to positive deviance and presents a greater understanding of the predictors, consequences, methodologies, etc. Second, the study highlights the critical research gaps in this area and suggests the course of action for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest positive deviance as a tool to enhance employee engagement.

The article offers the viewpoint of the author based on the pieces of the current research available on the subjects of positive deviance and employee engagement

The paper reveals that positive deviance may help the organizations to enhance their engagement levels.

Employee deviance has generally been regarded as negative, the paper suggests that positive deviance can be used to foster employee engagement.

Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.

This paper aims to build a new bridge between the literature in organizational behavior and the micro-foundations of strategy. The authors elaborate the concept of strategic voice, studying the extent to which employees express their strategic recommendations.

The authors gathered data from employees and supervisors of three distinct organizations, measuring determinants and outcomes of strategic voice, as compared to promotive voice.

Strategic voice is empirically distinct from promotive voice and predicted by opportunity/threat recognition, perceived organizational support and strategic voice opportunity. It has, surprisingly, either positive or negative effects on performance, through the mediation of supervisors' perceptions of strategic voice and the moderation of employee satisfaction with pay and career.

Unlike traditionally assumed by strategy research, employees at any level engage in strategic voice with considerable frequency. Yet, paradoxically, under certain conditions, strategic voice could harm individual performance, although potentially benefiting organizations. Managers could either value employees' strategic voice or perceive it negatively, raising the salience to fully comprehend this behavior.

Organizations should embrace practices that encourage employees to express their strategic opinions, give them access to resources to properly form their strategic opinions and ensure management considers employees' recommendations.

While scholars in the micro-foundations of strategy have theorized that strategy can emerge from the contribution of individuals, there has been no evidence, to date, on how each employee can contribute to strategy formulation. This paper is original as it fills this gap.

This study aims to employ a resource-based lens to explore the competitive implications of firm strategies under conditions of market commonality and shared resource pools.

The firms’ core capabilities in these environments may focus on operational efficiency, as firms seek to compete under significant resource heterogeneity constraints.

Using data from the USA airline industry from 1996-2011, we find that price has a positive relationship with firm performance, whereas quality has a negative relationship. Operational efficiency is a driver of both strategies.

The study uses US data. Extending the findings to the global setting may require recognizing other competitive dimensions.

Firms that focus on non-core activities perform less well. The results offer insights into an industry that has interested strategy researchers for many years and may suggest an application to other industries with similar characteristics.

The paper seeks to investigate how the information assurance (IA) efforts of organisations should be aligned with their business strategy. From this analysis, a conceptual model of alignment is presented. This framework shows several organisational factors that can influence alignment.

A number of published works on alignment are discussed in order to develop a conceptual model of IA fit. In addition, Venkatraman's six perspectives of alignment are used as a framework to suggest future research in this area.

The paper presents a definition of information assurance and proposes various reasons why IA is a strategic issue and should be aligned with both IT and corporate strategy. From the literature, a conceptual model illustrating the variables that can influence alignment is presented.

A clear conceptualisation of alignment is needed. Six potential research models and associated research questions are proposed.

The paper concludes with a number of management and research implications. In looking at the implications for managers, it is argued that any alignment framework should include adequate metrics for checking the strategic fit on a continuous basis.

This paper is an initial attempt to fulfil an identified gap in the literature, namely the lack of research undertaken on IA and corporate strategy alignment. It offers practical help for management so that they can improve the fit between IA and business strategy. It also offers several avenues of potential future research using Venkatraman's six perspectives of fit.

This study examines whether and how a client's business strategy can affect the relationship between auditor characteristics and financial reporting quality.

In this study, auditor industry specialization and tenure were used as proxies for auditor characteristics. The client business strategy was measured using the resource allocation index method. Finally, discretionary accruals are used to assess financial reporting quality. This study includes 1,450 firm-year observations and 145 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) over a ten-year period from 2011 to 2020. The research hypotheses were analyzed using a multivariate regression model and panel data.

The results show that auditor industry specialization increases financial reporting quality. This relationship improves when the client's business strategy deviates from the industry–normal strategy. The research findings state that auditor tenure has a positive association with financial reporting quality, and this relationship is strengthened when the company's business strategy deviates from the normal industry strategy.

The findings of this study provide important evidence for investors, firm management, and auditing firms. Investors must consider the auditor characteristics when selecting companies listed on the TSE. Managers of Iranian companies are advised to consider the auditor's characteristics when choosing an audit firm to increase financial reporting quality. Audit firms should evaluate their business strategies in audit planning to increase the quality of financial reporting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to examine the relationship between auditor characteristics and the financial reporting quality in the emerging capital market by considering the clients' business strategy.

Despite agency theory and resource dependence theory suggesting that – albeit through different mechanisms – board independence positively influences firm internationalization, empirical evidence on this relationship has been mixed and inconclusive. Based on this, the purpose of the present study is twofold: first, to analyze and synthesize the existing empirical literature and, second, to develop new theoretical insights on the effect of board independence on firm internationalization.

The authors used advanced meta-analytic techniques that allowed them, first, to synthesize the existing empirical literature on the board independence–firm internationalization relationship and, second, to examine the effect of several contingencies on such relationship. This study relies on data from 87 primary studies (published and unpublished) carried out in multiple academic fields in the period 1998–2021 and covering 49 countries.

The results confirm the established agency and resource-dependence arguments, suggesting that higher board independence is associated with greater firm internationalization. Moreover, the results show that the focal relationship is moderated by home-country formal and informal institutional factors, and in particular, the legal protection of minority shareholders and family business legitimacy. The authors do not find evidence that CEO duality and board size moderate the focal relationship or that board independence has a stronger effect on breadth than on depth of internationalization.

This study lies at the intersection of the literatures on corporate governance and firm internationalization and on comparative corporate governance of the multinational firm, shedding further light on the role played by institutional environments in determining the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms.