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Board diversity has been a hotly debated topic in the field of corporate governance. The paper examines the role of board chairperson and its moderating effect on the relationship between job-related diversity and boards’ strategic tasks performance. The purpose of this paper is to add on our body of knowledge about the impact of job-related diversity on boards’ strategic tasks performance.

The paper applies the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique to examine survey responses from chief executive officers (CEOs). Both the measurement model and structural model have obtained good results, supporting the appropriateness of using the SEM approach.

The findings suggest that there is a positive association between job-related diversity and boards’ strategic tasks performance, which is moderated by a chairperson’s leadership efficacy and the option of a former-CEO as board chair.

To achieve the intended effect of job-related diversity in boards, policymakers need to be mindful about the importance of the board chairperson. Board chairperson’s characteristics such as leadership efficacy and a former-CEO experience would amplify the positive effect of diversity.

This research paper contributes to the literature on board diversity, board leadership and strategic management of firms. Findings validated researchers’ concern about the negligence of examining moderating factors in board diversity research. Moreover, results echo the concern that board leadership research should shift the attention from structural aspects to the behavioral issues. Finally, this study is the first to show the positive influence of a board chairperson in disseminating benefits of a diverse board.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of personality (intellectual curiosity, conscientiousness and negative emotionality) and approach to studying (deep, strategic and surface) on students’ learning-related information behaviour in inquiry tasks.

Data were collected from 219 senior high school students with the use of three questionnaires.

The findings showed that students’ individual traits influenced different aspects of their learning-related information behaviour from information need to information use.

The results were based on survey data. Reliability issues with the scales are discussed. In future research qualitative data would enrich the understanding of the phenomena.

The results are informative for teachers and librarians who guide students in inquiry tasks.

The study spanned learning-related information behaviour across the whole inquiry process: from task construction through task performance to task completion. The findings showed that individual traits were particularly influential at the task completion stage, that is on information use.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand dependency issues between the CEO and the board as well as the between the board and CEO through Emerson’s power dependency framework.

A symbolic management approach is integrated with a board-CEO power dependency model to study the dependency issues.

According to the symbolic management perspective, uncertainty increases the likelihood of symbolic actions. A high level of uncertainty in CEO dependency issues suggests a high likelihood that board power over the CEO is manifested on a symbolic level, whereas a low level of uncertainty in board dependency issues suggests otherwise for CEO power over the board. The core of board-dependency issues is information provision.

A focus on improving board control over CEO performance, compensation and strategic proposals is likely to generate symbolic actions without an effective result.

The paper advocates that an effective approach to enhance board power is through reducing board information dependency on the CEO.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between board diversity measured as relation-oriented, task-oriented and board overall diversity and firm’s investment efficiency.

This study estimates four dimensions of board diversity, including age, gender, tenure and education. The four dimensions are further categorized in relation-oriented diversity (i.e. age and gender), task-oriented diversity (i.e. tenure and education) and overall board diversity (relation and task oriented). Panel data analysis is used to examine the board diversity–investment efficiency relationship in Chinese listed firms during the years 2003–2018. The findings of the study are robust to a battery of econometric techniques.

This study finds relation-oriented, task-oriented and overall diversity of a board curb investment inefficiency by discouraging sub-optimal investment (over- or under-investment). In other words, board diversity improves firms’ investment efficiency.

The results suggest that board diversity plays a significant role in corporate decisions. The findings illustrate that board diversity disciplines the management, reduces agency conflicts and thereby improves corporate governance, resulting in higher investment efficiency.

This study has two important contributions. First, this study extends the prior literature of investment efficiency by considering socio-psychological dimension of the board diversity by constructing relation- and task-oriented diversity. Second, contrary to earlier studies on board diversity, this study takes four facets of board diversity, i.e. age, gender, education and tenure that improve corporate governance mechanism.

Lack of knowledge and performance information sharing between actors is one manifestation of fragmentation in public performance management. This study aims to understand what managerial means are used for connecting performance dialogues and how these means affect fragmentation in performance management.

In this cross-sectional research design, the authors reviewed documents, interviewed public managers, observed workshops and held thematic discussions with public managers in one Finnish municipality. To analyze the empirical data, the authors used thematic analysis and both inductive and deductive research approaches.

The analysis revealed nine managerial means that public managers use for connecting performance dialogues to decrease fragmentation. These were (1) defining the division of labor between different dialogues, (2) assigning resources for performance dialogues, (3) generating convincing narratives for promoting collaboration, (4) providing the same performance information to collaborators, (5) building joint information systems, (6) establishing integrative performance dialogue hubs, (7) naming the gatekeepers, (8) offering training for dialogues and (9) synchronizing performance dialogues. Based on our findings, most of these means can preserve, increase or decrease fragmentation depending on their design.

The results of the study are valuable because the performance management literature has not investigated what managerial means are used to connect performance dialogues and how these means can preserve, increase or decrease fragmentation.

Public sector has started exploiting artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, however, mainly for operational but much less for tactical or level tasks. The purpose of this study is to exploit AI for the highest strategic-level task of government: to develop an AI-based public sector data analytics methodology for supporting policymaking for one of the most serious and large-scale challenges that governments repeatedly face, the economic crises that lead to economic recessions (though the proposed methodology is of much more general applicability).

A public sector data analytics methodology has been developed, which enables the exploitation of existing public and private sector data, through advanced processing of them using a big data-oriented AI technique, “all-relevant” feature selection, to identify characteristics of firms as well as their external environment that affect (positively or negatively) their resilience to economic crisis.

A first application of the proposed public sector data analytics methodology has been conducted, using Greek firms’ data concerning the economic crisis period 2009–2014, which has led to interesting conclusions and insights, revealing factors affecting the extent of sales revenue decrease in Greek firms during the above crisis period and providing a first validation of the methodology used in this study.

This paper contributes to the advancement of two emerging highly important, for the society, but minimally researched, digital government research domains: public sector data analytics (and especially policy analytics) and government exploitation of AI. It exploits an AI feature selection algorithm, the Boruta “all-relevant” variables identification algorithm, which has been minimally exploited in the past for public sector data analytics, to support the design of public policies for addressing one of the most serious and large-scale economic challenges that governments repeatedly face: the economic crises.

The proposed methodology allows the identification of characteristics of firms as well as their external environment that affect positively or negatively their resilience to economic crisis. This enables a better understanding of the kinds of firms that are more strongly hit by the crisis, which is quite useful for the design of public policies for supporting them; and at the same time reveals firms’ practices, resources, capabilities, etc. that enhance their ability to cope with economic crisis, to design policies for promoting them through educational and support activities.

This methodology can be very useful for the design of more effective public policies for reducing the negative impacts of economic crises on firms, and therefore mitigating their negative consequences for the society, such as unemployment, poverty and social exclusion.

This study develops a novel approach to the exploitation of public and private sector data, based on a minimally exploited, for such purposes, AI technique (“all-relevant” feature selection), to support the design of public policies for addressing one of the most threatening disruptions that modern economies and societies repeatedly face, the economic crises.

For undergraduate students completing their senior seminar research, there is value in conceiving their study as a project. Research that is project-driven allows students to design the depth of their study with the target goal of degree completion and graduation. Fittingly, this chapter provides students with an applicable project performance strategy that works across academic disciplines and in tandem with the scientific research methodology. Along these lines, this work “connects the dots” between project performance and the student researcher’s capacity for investigative achievement. This notion of performance achievement capacity is referred to as research project performativity.

Accordingly, a blueprint for research project performativity is presented to show students a path to senior seminar success. To conclude, this chapter provides 10 useful tips to boost undergraduate student’s chances for surviving the experience of a senior seminar research.

This study aims to develop a Chinese core self-evaluations scale (CCSES) (Study 1) and examines the relationship between CCSES and self-reported job performance among entrepreneurs in private small and medium enterprises in People's Republic of China (Study 2).

In Study 1, the paper incorporated two indigenous Chinese constructs, team-based self-esteem and personal integrity, into the existing literature of CSE and developed a new CCSES using a sample of 300 Chinese entrepreneurs in Hangzhou, China. In Study 2, the paper validated the CCSES in a separate sample of 306 entrepreneurs and investigated the relationships between CCSES and self-reported job performance.

The paper identified four sub-constructs in the 13-item CCSES: personal self-esteem, team-based self-esteem, personal integrity, and self-competence. Results from exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed good psychometric properties and high reliability in Study 1. In Study 2, the paper found a good fit between the measurement model and the data, and a significant relationship between CCSES and the overall measure of job performance and its three components. Males had significantly higher Chinese core self-evaluations (CCSE) scores than females. There were no differences in CCSE scores across age and educational background.

Borrowing the CSE construct in the Western literature, the paper includes two indigenous Chinese constructs, team-based self-esteem and personal integrity, provides a new perspective of the CSE construct for entrepreneurs, and investigates its relationship with job performance in China.

The paper aims to use part of the distributed cognition literature to study how employees cope with organizational plasticity, in an attempt to identify the characteristics of cognitive plasticity.

Evidence is collected by designing and implementing an agent-based computational simulation model (the IOP 2.0) where employees have the option to use external resources and the social environment to perform tasks. As plasticity is more effective when change and uncertainty are high, the simulation features an increase in the difficulty and number of tasks to which employees need to cope.

Cooperation and sharing of competence and ability are key to cognitive plasticity. Being able to master the use of some resources, together with other employees’ competencies, make some achieve the most efficient task performance.

The findings suggest that under conditions of change and plasticity, human resource management (HRM) shall attempt to develop measures to support employees' cognitive skills necessary to cope with it, for example, mostly through diagnosis, training and facilitating on-the-job dialogue.

This is the first study that attempts a merger between organizational cognition and plasticity, and it is the first to match its results to HRM policy recommendations.

The purpose of this study is to examine how informational faultlines on a board affect the management of knowledge owned by directors and the consequences on organizational performance. In this study, informational faultlines are defined as hypothetical lines that divide a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups based on the alignment of several informational attributes among board members.

The study uses unique hand-collected panel data covering 7,247 board members at 106 publicly traded firms to provide strong support for the hypothesized U-shaped relationship. The authors use a fixed effects approach and a system generalized method of moments approach to test the hypothesis.

The study finds that the relationship between informational faultlines on a board and organizational performance is U shaped, with the least optimal organizational performance experienced when boards have moderate informational faultlines. More specifically, informational faultlines within boards are negatively related to organizational performance across the weak-to-moderate range of informational faultlines and positively related to organizational performance across the moderate-to-strong range.

By explaining the mechanisms through which informational faultlines are related to organizational performance, the authors contribute to the literature in a number of ways. By conceptualizing how the management of knowledge plays an important role in the particular setting of corporate boards, the authors add not only to literature on knowledge management but also to the faultline and corporate governance literature.

This study offers a rationale for prior mixed findings by providing an alternative theoretical basis to explain the effect of informational faultlines within boards on organizational performance. To advance the field, the authors build on the concept of knowledge demonstrability to illuminate how informational faultlines affect the management of knowledge within boards, which will translate to organizational performance.