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The causal conditions leading to successful human resources outsourcing (HRO) have until now attracted only limited research attention. To address this shortcoming, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how a firm and a HR provider should work together to ensure successful HRO.

By applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, the authors demonstrate how combining in different ways provider quality, business understanding, trust, and closed HRO networks can lead to HRO success. In addition, this study compares the causal combinations between cases with differing levels of HR-task interdependence and IT use.

The results of this study reveal three common solutions that lead to successful HRO from both economic and relational viewpoints. The findings also indicate that, from an economic viewpoint, trust is a core condition for achieving HRO success. Moreover, HR-task interdependence and IT use alter the number of solutions and the conditions for attaining HRO success.

Based on the solutions proposed herein, firms can consider different ways to achieve HRO success under diverse conditions.

This work also contributes to building new theories regarding HRO, trust, knowledge sharing, and IT use.

Managing resources is crucial for firms to gain competitive advantages and succeed, particularly for startups with limited resources. It is important to understand how digital startups in general and digital academic spin-offs (ASOs) in particular may orchestrate their resources to optimize value. This paper integrates the resource-based perspective with digital entrepreneurship to analyze the resource configurations leading to success of digital ASOs.

The paper adopts an inductive approach and applies qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) on a longitudinal dataset of digital ASOs to identify the resource configurations for a successful outcome.

The authors' paper identifies two main paths to success among digital ASOs, consisting of five distinct resource configurations. The first path is termed “market exploiters” that operate in favorable market conditions where specific technological resources and research collaboration resources are lacking. The second path involves “technology explorers” that combines both technological and commercial resources to achieve success.

By outlining distinct pathways to the success of digital ASOs, this paper contributes to the digital academic entrepreneurship literature and the resource-based view of entrepreneurial firms. The paper also suggests implications for policymakers and managers in managing resources for the success of digital ventures.

By exploring the resource configurations leading to the success of ASOs commercializing digital technologies, the paper shows that favorable market conditions and complementary resource configurations can be alternative pathways to success.

The purpose of this paper is to show that necessary condition hypotheses are important in operations management (OM), and to present a consistent methodology for building and testing them. Necessary condition hypotheses (“X is necessary for Y”) express conditions that must be present in order to have a desired outcome (e.g. “success”), and to prevent guaranteed failure. These hypotheses differ fundamentally from the common co‐variational hypotheses (“more X results in more Y”) and require another methodology for building and testing them.

The paper reviews OM literature for versions of necessary condition hypotheses and combines previous theoretical and methodological work into a comprehensive and consistent methodology for building and testing such hypotheses.

Necessary condition statements are common in OM, but current formulations are not precise, and methods used for building and testing them are not always adequate. The paper outlines the methodology of necessary condition analysis consisting of two stepwise methodological approaches, one for building and one for testing necessary conditions.

Because necessary condition statements are common in OM, using methodologies that can build and test such hypotheses contributes to the advancement of OM research and theory.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that determine two forms of crowdfunding campaign success: success in securing the necessary financial resources and personal success in terms of the entrepreneur’s satisfaction. Specifically, it studies factors linked to the relationship between entrepreneurs and funders (co-creation and feedback) and factors linked to the campaign’s content (dimensions of corporate social responsibility (CSR)).

An empirical study of 52 crowdfunding entrepreneurs was conducted. Data were gathered using a structured questionnaire. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was performed.

For financial and personal success, all factors, except the social dimension of CSR, are necessary conditions. Two configurations are sufficient for entrepreneurs to achieve financial success. The first configuration that is sufficient for personal success is the same as the first configuration for financial success. The second configuration for personal success is similar to the second configuration for financial success, except that it also includes financial success itself.

Entrepreneurs should invest in CSR and seek to improve the quality of their relationships with their funders. Crowdfunding platforms should design and manage co-creation and feedback tools that are capable of providing deep knowledge of users’ opinions and concerns whilst generating value. The limitations of this study are that only the reward-based crowdfunding model was considered, and the data covered just two platforms.

This study contributes to the literature by presenting empirical analysis of the factors that influence financial success and personal success in reward-based crowdfunding. It examines aspects that strictly refer to the content of the project and aspects that refer to the entrepreneur–funder relationship. Specifically, the roles of the four dimensions of CSR were considered. Moreover, the fsQCA method provides a fresh approach to research in this area.

Increasingly, how well organisations innovate is becoming the single most important issue in determining their ultimate success. Referencing a variety of cases primarily drawn from governmental organisations, this paper argues that the key to successful innovation implementation rests on the convergence of three different factors. First, an innovation must be properly framed in terms of stakeholders’ expectations. Secondly, a good internal innovation environment must be present. Finally, the pros of specific attributes of innovations must outweigh their cons. The Eight other conditions, in which one or more of these factors is not positive, result in differing degrees of success and failure, with different implications for organisational outcomes. These eight conditions, and their associated propositions, are discussed in terms of their heuristic value for bridging gaps in differing parties’ understanding of innovation processes and future directions for research, including the interaction of power and type of innovation.

The extensive research undertaken in studying the relationship between diversification and performance has been largely inconclusive. There have been a number of reasons for mixed results including heterogeneity of samples, pooling of data, and cross‐sectional analyses. One possible way to address these problems is to make comparisons based on homogeneity of samples, or some other well‐defined structural variable, and to study firms longitudinally. More than just the statistical analysis, this paper identifies the key role of critical antecedent conditions that affect outcomes from diversification strategies. A sample of 59 firms from three distinctly different industries (food, electronics, and petroleum) are used in this empirical study. Results indicate that statistically significant differences exist when industry homogeneity is maintained and critical antecedent variables are isolated. More importantly, the role of initial conditions and historical performance levels have an important bearing on diversification efforts and subsequent performance.

Many tools exist to chart the progress of an organisation in its quest to become a learning organization or achieve organizational learning. Aims to expand a tool already developed to include learning organization conditions as they occur through dialogue between individuals within an organisation with an emphasis on social learning theory.

Literature relating to creating learning organizations as well as undertaking organizational learning is reviewed and critiqued. An argument for a tool in identifying learning activity functions as they take place through dialogue is presented along with the argument for expanding the tool to incorporate learning organization conditions that have been identified within the literature. The tool this work expands is the DISCOUNT scheme as developed by Pilkington. The paper closes with a discussion on justifying the use of the scheme and the future work that is to be undertaken.

Demonstrates that a tool can be expanded to take into account learning organization and organizational learning conditions and how they could be identified.

Individuals who use the tool need a number of hours practice to become familiar with the scheme and its structure.

A tool has been expanded to look at learning activities as they take place within an organisation. By identifying these activities, more successful approaches to learning may be encouraged by looking at an individual's behaviour, personal and cognitive factors and the environment as is stated to apply when viewed through social learning theory.

This paper offers a practical tool that can be used on dialogue and other speech acts to look at learning activities within organizations with a specific focus on organizations wanting to improve organizational learning or try to create learning organizations.

The production and sale of counterfeit products is big business in the international economy. Nowhere is this more evident than in China. This paper aims to review the anti-counterfeiting strategies that have been identified in the literature on counterfeiting.

The paper takes the form of a literature review.

This paper reviews 11 anti-counterfeiting strategies that have been suggested by relevant literature and has identified some of the success conditions. It also finds that firms should seek to take a longer-term view and to protect their technology-based competitive advantage. This is already happening: Japanese blue chip companies have begun to relocate sensitive R&D and high-tech manufacturing away from risky locations and back to Japan.

The paper shows that the dominant legal enforcement (perspective) approach has been of limited success and explains the reasons for its failure.

The paper concludes that anti-counterfeiting strategies should be seen as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive and that in the long run, as countries get more technologically advanced, governments will develop a strong self-interest in tackling the counterfeit problem themselves.

The paper provides a systematic discussion of alternative anti-counterfeiting strategies that have been suggested by the literature and explores their success conditions in some detail.

Transformational leadership, flexibility and visibility improves project responsiveness to highly unpredictable and impactful events referred as the ‘black swans’ in mega projects (Bloch et al., 2012; Raziq et al., 2018; Zailani et al., 2016). However, these concepts have never been empirically tested in a single framework to determine their significant impact on multi-dimensional project success. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interactional effects of project flexibility and project visibility on the relationship between transformational leadership and “multi-dimensions” of project success including meeting design goals; impact on customers and benefits to project-based organization.

Empirical data derived from cross-sectional survey of 160 project managers from telecom intensive companies in Pakistan were used to test the conceptual framework developed from recent literature. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) provided detailed analysis of the measurement and structural model. The most recent reflective–formative PLS-SEM approach for higher-order constructs has been introduced.

The results indicate that project managers’ transformational leadership (β = 0.348, p < 0.01), project flexibility (β = 0.221, p < 0.01) and project visibility (β = 0.366, p < 0.01) are positively related with the multi-dimensional project success (second-order formative) construct. Interestingly, the relationship between transformational leadership and project success is influenced by significantly negative moderations established through project flexibility (β = −0.100, p < 0.01) and project visibility (β = −0.093, p < 0.05).

This study in the telecom sector examined the interactional effects of risk mitigating strategies (i.e. project flexibility and project visibility) on the relationship between transformational leadership and multi-dimensional project success. This study creates a basis for future investigations extending to various project types and relevant to different industries especially those involving higher-order (formative) assessments of project success.

The study findings assist project leaders to meet their escalating commitments in achieving project success from a multi-dimensional standpoint. Additionally, this study underscores a renewed perspective of transformational leadership and project outcomes. Despite prevailing understanding developed through prior research, transformational leadership may become less favorable for project success in conditions of increased flexibility and visibility in projects.

Earlier studies have overlooked the multi-dimensional nature of project success (second-order formative) construct, despite several attempts to examine the interplay between transformational leadership and project success. Based on the knowledge gap and non-existence of empirical evidence, the authors introduced and empirically tested the moderating role of project flexibility and project visibility in the relationship between transformational leadership and multi-dimensional project success.

The purpose of this paper is to identify critical success factors for the management of complex change processes in fire service organizations and to apply these in a case study of the Rotterdam-Rijnmond fire service.

The paper provides review of literature on organizational change, case study of the Rotterdam-Rijnmond fire service supported by the analysis of policy documents and 30 semi-structured interviews with key persons.

Combining different theoretical approaches helps to get a more complete picture of important issues and dilemma’s in the management of change processes – which is a first step in the successful implementation of changes – whereas other approaches tend to emphasize only some and overlook others. Applied in a case study, this approach revealed serious weaknesses in the management of change within the Rotterdam-Rijnmond fire service and offered practical guides for solutions.

This paper combines insights from different theoretical approaches into a more integrated perspective that aims to be helpful as a practical tool for designing and implementing complex changes in fire service organizations.