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This paper presents insights on expatriates in Africa and sets out a research agenda for Africa’s expatriation. The objective of the paper is to provide background and context on expatriation in Africa and to stimulate and guide further research in this important area.

The reviewed papers were drawn from journals and other sources that reported on expatriation to/from African countries. It also incorporates an array of literature on contextual African issues, exploring conceptually how these relate to expatriation.

The review confirmed that there is little research on the topic, particularly with respect to outward expatriation and the studies that exist are one of a kind and stand alone. There has been no attempt to build systematic theory or develop a wholistic picture. This means that the field is wide open for more research. The data provide a picture of the current expatriate situation, including numbers, demographics, host/home locations, success rates and so on, and are provide a basis for further research developing and testing hypotheses regarding individual, organizational and country/national characteristics and how these influence and relate to expatriate experiences and outcomes. Researchers can also draw on the existing expatriation literature from around the world for replication studies to identify uniquely African issues as well as similarities with other locations. As Selmer (2016) noted, replication research is widely used in the sciences and is at the core of the scientific method and thus should be considered for expatriation research.

Limited previous research means there is a need for further research.

Expatriation is a critical aspect of companies operating internationally and companies are increasingly interested in doing business in African countries. Africa's economic growth and development are strong and foreign direct investment (FDI) into Africa is growing with consequent increases in the number of expatriates going to Africa. Understanding expatriation in the African context is thus very important to a variety of companies.

Management literature focusing on Africa is limited and this is true regarding expatriation. This means there is a need for researchers and practitioners to understand expatriation issues in this context, particularly considering economic growth on the continent, increasing interest in doing business there, along with increasing FDI and use of expatriates, as well as the expansion of African companies. This paper provides a research agenda as a guide on which researchers, including those in Africa, can build.

Derived from leader–member exchange theory, this study hypothesises the relationships between work–family related managerial support and affective commitment and job satisfaction, and advocates that these relationships are mediated by work–family conflict.

The model was tested in an Australian manufacturing organisation using survey data from employees, using structural equation modelling in Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS).

The findings suggest that enhanced work–family related managerial support will decrease work–family conflict, eventually enhancing employees' affective commitment and job satisfaction.

This study provides important insights into the impact of managerial support on improvements in employees' work–family conflict, and, in turn, its impact on affective commitment and job satisfaction, in the Australian context.

源自領導者-成員交換理論，本研究就與工作、家庭有關的管理支援與情感承諾和工作滿足感之間的關係提出假設，並主張工作家庭衝突是引發這些關係的媒介。

有關的模型使用來自員工的調查數據，並使用AMOS內的結構方程式模式，在澳洲一個製造業組織內被測試。

研究結果暗示、若加強與工作家庭有關的管理支援，則工作家庭衝突便會減少，而這最後將會增加員工的情感承諾和工作滿足感。

本研究提出了重要的見解，使我們更了解在澳洲的背景下，管理支援對改善僱員工作家庭衝突之作用，進而更明白管理支援對情感承諾和工作滿足感的影響。

The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between collaborative innovation and the financial performance of information technology (IT) firms through the mediating role of strategic agility and absorptive capacity. Customer knowledge management capability (CKMC) is also explored as a potential moderator.

Data were collected from 300 respondents working in different small to medium IT enterprises operating in different cities around Portugal. The simple random sampling method was used for data collection, and Smart partial least squares-structural equation modeling (Smart PLS-SEM version 3.2.8) was used to test the hypotheses.

The findings demonstrate that collaborative innovation contributes significantly to the financial performance of IT firms in Portugal. The results also indicate that absorptive capacity and strategic agility both positively and significantly affect the relationship between collaborative innovation and firms’ financial performance. However, while the moderating role of CKMC has a positive and significant effect on the relation between collaborative innovation and strategic agility, CKMC insignificantly moderates the relation between collaborative innovation and absorptive capacity.

Few studies have explicitly connected collaborative innovation with firms’ financial performance; this study attempts to fill that gap. Moreover, this research investigates the mediating role of strategic agility and absorptive capacity in the relationship between collaborative innovation and financial performance. Finally, by discussing the moderating effect of CKMC, which leads to enhanced financial performance, this study proposes that when complex and unpredictable situations occur, managers should focus on customer-oriented strategies and innovation at the same time to outpace their competitors.

This study aims to assess how innovative organizational culture and innovative leadership generate market flexibility for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the service sector to enhance their competitiveness. Both organizational culture and leadership are seen as firm-level resources capable of influencing the flexibility of the firm in periods of market turbulence. The study argues that SME service firms must use their internal resources to develop their flexibility capability which is more valuable, rare, inimitable and not substitutable.

SME service firms from Ghana are used to test the study’s hypotheses through robust standard regression analysis. A sampling frame was developed from an online database of small and medium enterprises operating in the service sector.

The findings suggest that although organizational culture and leadership may influence a service firm’s competitiveness, it is more viable to use these firm-level resources to create market flexibility capability to amplify the effect. This means, when culture and leadership propel the flexibility drive, the service firm is able to connect, coordinate and synchronize functional units to take advantage of new product and market opportunities. Additionally, market flexibility emanating from organizational culture and leadership wields enough power and resource support to tackle the turbulent market conditions better than firms with less support.

The managerial implication from this study is that firms should use their organizational culture and leadership to create flexible organizations that afford them the opportunity to adapt to the environmental dynamics. If both leadership and culture work together, they are able to create strong market capabilities such as flexibility which determines how well the firm will respond to the competition, customer demand and all other external pressures. It is, therefore, the view of this paper that SMEs should use their organizational culture and leadership to build a market-flexible organization to create a competitive advantage.

This paper shows how internal resources/assets such as culture and leadership generate the needed flexibility to create a competitive advantage for SMEs. This paper explains the two dimensions of Volberda’s flexibility from a firm-level resource perspective and highlights flexibility as a second-order capability whose cultivation and effectiveness are dependent on a firm’s culture and leadership. Evidence of how a firm’s market flexibility is fuelled by organizational leadership and culture is demonstrated. Finally, this paper shows how resource-poor SMEs in emerging African economies can enhance their market competitiveness through internal systems and processes.

This study aims to explore which drivers of innovation in the hospitality industry optimise hospitality performance in a multivariate nexus of restaurants’ value system for hospitality (VSH) and internal–external power understanding capability.

The study applied a cross-sectional questionnaire survey research design, targeting employees who were working in full-service restaurants. Descriptive statistic, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling (SEM) were performed. A total of 364 respondent’s responses were used in the data analyses.

Results of the empirical analysis reveal that collaborative innovation capability has the closest relationship with hospitality performance optimisation (HPO), followed by VSH, employee creativity and knowledge management system capability. The analysis with the bootstrapping method shows that VSH mediates the relationship between the drivers of innovation and HPO. The empirical results also suggest that firms’ capabilities of understanding internal and external environments are significant moderators of the relationship between VSH and HPO.

The empirical findings provide restaurant managers with an improved understanding of how the drivers of innovation capability influence HPO. Findings from this research emphasise that hotel managers should consider internal and external environmental issues to adjust their strategies for improving hospitality performance in a competitive environment.

Findings suggest that restaurant managers should implement the drivers of innovation in their respective work environment, together with their adequate involvement with staff and understanding of environmental issues, to produce innovative hospitality strategies.

This research contributes a comprehensive framework of HPO in the restaurant business setting that leads to a competitive advantage. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the pioneer studies to contribute to the hospitality literature that investigates the effect of the drivers of innovation on VSH and HPO by considering the moderation role of internal and external environmental understanding capability.