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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine a customer orientation mechanism through which abusive supervision influences retail salespeople’s job performance; and second, to investigate how abusive supervision’s effects may be moderated by the same leader’s use of contingent punishment and contingent reward.

Two studies provide consistent findings. Study 1 used the field survey data from 129 salespeople in 42 retail stores. The proposed moderated mediation model was estimated using the random coefficient modeling technique. Findings were replicated in Study 2, in which data were collected from a sample of 679 US retail salespeople recruited through M-Turk.

Results from both studies show that abusive supervision reduces salespeople’s job performance through lowering their customer orientation. Furthermore, the use of contingent punishment from the same supervisor buffers abusive supervision’s detrimental effect, whereas the use of contingent reward augments it.

The issues the authors address in this research have significant implications for the literature of abusive supervision and retail selling. First, the authors contribute to the abusive supervision literature by pointing it out that the negative effect of abusive supervision can spill over to organizations’ external stakeholders, namely, customers. Previous research on abusive supervision has mainly focused on how abused subordinates exhibit hostile acts directed against the supervisor, coworkers and the organization (Tepper et al., 2017), with little attention paid to abusive supervision’s impact on organizations’ external stakeholders such as customers. This research fills the void by placing impaired customer-orientation as a critical consequence of abusive supervision. Second, this research tests a contingent self-regulation impairment model of abusive supervision and advances our understanding about how the same supervisor’s functional leadership behaviors (contingent reward/punishment) may set contingencies for the effect of abusive supervision on employee outcomes. This investigation clears the doubts about whether the use of functional leadership behaviors along with abusive supervision buffers or aggravates the detrimental effect of the latter. Finally, this study’s findings shed new insights to marketing practitioners, especially in understanding how salespeople may vent their stress on the customers when being abused by their supervisors. Without this in mind, supervisors may not be aware of the consequences of their abusive behavior and may even develop an illusion that such a practice worked. This research shows that abusive supervision can lower employees’ customer orientation, which will hurt the company in the long run.

The findings intend to provide important guidelines for companies to develop effective workshops and training programs to combat the detrimental effects of abusive supervision in the retailing industry. For example, the findings shed new insights in understanding how employees may vent their stress on the customers when being abused by their supervisors. Without this in mind, supervisors may not be aware of the consequences of their abusive behavior and may even develop an illusion that such a practice worked. Another important managerial implication of this research is that the use of contingent reward after mistreating subordinates can backfire. Supervisor abuses, followed by a contingent reward, send an inconsistent signal to the employee that creates confusion and strain. Inconsistent actions from the supervisor also produce ethical tensions that reduce customer-oriented behaviors and a company’s ability to serve the customer (Friend et al., 2020). These training programs are important methods to combat the detrimental effects of abusive supervision in the workforce.

This research draws on the contingent self-regulation impairment model as an overarching framework to unpack the relationship between abusive supervision and salespeople’s job performance. Integrating three research streams (i.e. abusive supervision, leadership reinforcement and retail selling), this study proposes customer orientation as a novel mechanism and sheds light on how abusive supervision interplays with contingent punishment/reward to impact salespeople’s outcomes.

Taking issue with the predominance of reviews of James March’s writings that focus on his technical contributions to organizational studies, this study aims to emphasize the central significance and contemporary relevance of his critical reflections on the meaning of life and work in modern organizations.

The paper uses a novel framework illustrated by extensive original quotations for capturing and making more accessible March’s profound contribution to organization studies. His work on organizational behaviour and decision-making is viewed as identifying and grappling with three key paradoxes of modernity: of rationality, performance and meaning. His prescriptions on how to handle and address these paradoxes are explored through a focus on his reflections on the poetry of leadership.

Whilst March himself emphasized that not all of his insights can be captured in an article level overview, March, his collaborator Olsen and others who worked with and studied under him have confirmed the accuracy of the review and the value of the enterprise.

Capturing March’s advocacy of sensible foolishness and playful seriousness in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty and contestation hopefully contribute to enhancing practitioners’ “lightness of being” in coping with and finding meaning in challenging environments.

Through the range of ideas covered, the framework used and the extensive use of March’s own worlds, the study, hopefully, communicates the depth and richness of March’s humanitarian enterprise and the “playfully serious spirit” that he advocates and exemplifies – in a way that is often omitted from narrower, more technical and somewhat dry treatments of his work.

Many models of markets are based on assumptions of rationality, transparency, efficiency, and homogeneity in various combinations. This paper aims to explain why markets routinely and repeatedly make “mistakes” that are inconsistent with these simplifying assumptions.

System dynamics models are used to show how misestimating demand growth, allowing financial discipline to lapse, unrealistic business planning, and misperception of technology trajectories can produce disastrously wrong business decisions. Examples are drawn from airlines, telecommunications, IT, aerospace, energy, and media.

The undesirable outcomes can include vicious cycles of investment and profitability, market bubbles, accelerated commoditization, excessive investment in dead‐end technologies, giving up on a product that becomes a huge success, waiting too long to reinvent legacy companies, and changes in market leadership. Differentiating transient phenomena from the longer term trends, movement away from vertically integrated business models, and effective use of early warning signs avoid these mistakes, or at least limit the damage that they cause.

Decision makers tend to rely on simple mental models which have serious limitations. They become increasingly deficient as problems grow more complex, as the environment changes more rapidly, and as the number of decision makers increases. The amplification and tipping dynamics typical of highly coupled systems, for example, bandwagon, network, and lemming effects, are not anticipated. Behavioural factors that play critical roles in the evolution of markets often are misunderstood or ignored.

The paper illuminates the effects of bounded rationality, imperfect information, and fragmentation of decision making on the behavior of markets. Models which assume, at least implicitly, that decision makers understand the structure of the market and how it produces the dynamics which can be observed or might potentially occur can be dangerous simplifications and seriously misleading.

Free trial is an effective strategy to gaining users’ data so as to strengthen and optimize product design. The purpose of this paper is to understand the IT companies' dynamic decision-making behavior in the free trial of IT products and services context based on a three-stage theoretical framework and users' decision-making behavior in the respective stage.

A three-stage methodology is proposed to clarify relevant decision problems and actions in each stage from IT companies' and users' perspectives, respectively. It then investigates relating variables on IT companies' decision-making based on extant research and users' decision-making.

In this study, the authors argue that the IT companies have to make the offering, implementation and retention decision in different stage during the whole free trial process. Each decision is determined by several variables from their own and users, namely the offering decision is determined by product characteristics, network effects, product life cycle and WOM (word of mouth); the implementation decision is determined by the quality of products and services, trial type, incentive measures on user's usage and communication strategy; and the retention decision is determined by the product and price strategy.

The results are practical and can be used by IT companies as a decision basis or reference to make reliable decisions so that IT companies can take target measures to ensure the effectiveness of their free trial strategy so as to meet their users' needs based on products designed by data driven. Thus, the ultimate goal of supply chain management is achieved.

In this study, the decision-making process in the free trial of IT products and services context is investigated as a whole for the first time. From the IT companies' perspective, the process includes offering, implementation and retention decision stages, which are continuous and inseparable. The variables that determine IT companies' decision-making are identified based on users' decision and action. Hence, it represents a brand-new whole process perception to clearly understand the dynamic of the IT companies' decision-making. Considering users' decision and action, the final decisions of the IT companies will be more practical in respect of motivating, retaining and upgrading users.

The purpose of this paper is to refract March’s views on leadership to re-frame them within an authentic model that understands optimistic failure and mindful resilience as likely byproducts of enabling ambiguous innovation. An analysis of March’s theories of slack, and the concepts of exploration and exploitation, as well as that of foolishness, are used to support the adoption of authentic and ethical leadership as an intelligent practice and, more concretely, to portray the leader as a resilient “juggling fool.”

This paper makes use of primary data by focusing on March’s published works, as well as on interviews and other materials written about him, or those discussing his contributions. A post-hoc practice of “appreciation” facilitated a fresh refraction of the “evidence” to identify or recognize new perspectives and/or challenges to March’s conceptualization of leadership, while relying on literature and metaphor to engage in “polymorphic research.”

This paper presents March as a complex thinker, whose thoughts on leadership have received, perhaps, less attention for being thought to be more refractive and less empirical. Nonetheless, his reflections on leadership re-discover him as a solid leadership philosopher. His use of literature, his theories of slack and the concepts of exploration and exploitation, as well as that of foolishness, may help leadership scholars to understand the essence of authentic and ethical leadership as an intelligent practice.

This paper proposes to extrapolate March’s vast insights about organizational theory to further develop the framework of authentic leadership. This re-framing of the leader as a “juggling fool” constitutes an empowered view of leadership that comes closer to balancing the complementary purposes of leadership and management; an effort that rests at the core of the future of leadership.

Despite the ostensible popularity of leadership over management as a desired organizational outcome, March’s phenomenal insights remind current and developing leaders of just how much the two fields must overlap in constant tension. It is, perhaps, the conceptualization of a leader as an authentic and resilient “juggling fool” what adds depth of meaning to March’s contributions to the field of leadership beyond that of management.

This paper aims to use the institutional perspective to jointly explore the underlying motives that drive Chinese private small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to invest in the developed economy of Germany and the role China’s institutional environment is playing in this context.

Given the lack of recent in-depth studies, the authors use multiple case study method to present rich insights from elite interviews with executives belonging to seven Chinese SMEs and industry experts, as well as the study of firm documents, social media and the latest governmental policies.

The results indicate not only market-, resource- and strategic asset-seeking motives, but contrary to the literature, also efficiency-seeking goals. Further driving factors are the integration in global value chains and high degrees of entrepreneurial orientation. The second major finding is that China’s institutional environment induces widely divergent effects. Its ministries established new outward foreign direct investments (OFDI) support measures that are beneficial for some SMEs’ post-entry operations. However, some firms are not aware of any support measures or suffer from discrimination that hinders innovation and from which they try to escape by investing abroad.

This paper considers different levels of analysis (firm, entrepreneur, institutional environment) to investigate Chinese SMEs’ motives in Europe’s largest market. By examining why and how these firms use OFDI to a developed economy, the authors address an essential question for China’s economy that is of primary political and academic concern (“How can China get that improved innovation that often seeds entrepreneurial growth?”). In addition, the study contributes to the growing discussion of institutional escapism in emerging markets by revealing five institutional hardships Chinese SMEs are facing and how this relates to their internationalization.

Supplementing an earlier review paper on the internationalization of Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (ICS) that covers the period 1991–2012, the purpose of this paper is to examine how research on this topic has thematically expanded in recent years. Specifically, the authors aim to examine the literature between 2013 and 2020, highlight advancements and synthesize potential avenues for future research.

Based on the systematic literature review method (Denyer and Tranfield, 2009; Kraus et al., 2020), the authors considered more than 5,700 peer-reviewed journal articles, of which 107 were included in the narrative synthesis.

Research on the ICS has become more widespread and mature in the period since 2013. First, there are more papers investigating firm-level characteristics and sources of internal capabilities. Second, the state of knowledge regarding social networks and institutional contexts in the internationalization process has increased. Consequently, new knowledge exists regarding push and pull patterns and the role China’s institutional environment is playing. Third, growing interest can be noted in studying entrepreneurship in the context of Chinese SMEs’ global expansion. Additionally, the paper exposes promising areas for future research and suggests more than 20 potential research questions.

This review in the growing debate on the ICS is the first of its kind that consciously drives the work of a previous review study forward. This enables tracking the progress of research (“mapping of the field”) and identifying important avenues for future research that can further advance the debate. The comprehensive review also discovered one relatively new variable – the role of Chinese returnee entrepreneurs – which shows the significant influence on SME internationalization and attracts growing scholarly attention.

Agonistic antagonistic system theory and praxis were born in the medical field, but may be defined now from an epistemological and biomathematical point of view. Describes new developments in agonistic antagonistic (AA) theory and presents new applications. These include new mathematical approaches that involve variable parameters and partial derivatives in models for the regulation of AA couples (MRAAC). Gives new biomedical applications and, in explanation, a mechanism called “pathological homeostasis” (PH) is introduced. Also provides details of therapeutical trials. Suggests systems science or cybernetical strategies which are likely to have a broad field of application, particularly among decision makers in general.

The present paper aims to investigate the impact of two different dimensions of supply chain integration on two aspects of firm performance in the emerging economy of China. In addition, the moderating effects of market orientation on the relationship between supply chain integration and firm performance are explored.

Data were obtained from a survey administered to 246 firms in the manufacturing and services industry in China. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

Operational coordination is positively associated with operational performance and business performance. Information sharing affects only operational performance; it has no impact on business performance. Furthermore, the results provide empirical support for the moderating effects of market orientation on the association of supply chain integration and firm performance.

The current paper contributes knowledge on the value‐realizing mechanism of supply chain integration from a resource‐based view. It presents a multidimensional explanation of the relationship among supply chain integration, market orientation, and firm performance in the context of China.