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In the high-speed trains (HSTs) production process, assembly sequence planning (ASP) problems is an extremely core issue. ASP problems influence the economic cost, amount of workers and the working time in the assembly process, seriously. In the design process of HSTs, the assembly sequence is usually given by experience, and the correctness of the assembly sequence is difficult to guarantee by experience and low effectiveness. The ASP based on improved discrete particle swarm optimization (IDPSO) algorithm was proposed to address these issues.

In view of the local convergence problem with basic DPSO in ASP, this paper presents an IDPSO, in which a chosen strategy of global optimal particle is introduced in, to solve the ASP problems in the assembly process of HSTs operation panel. The geometric feasibility, the assembly stability, and the number of assembly orientation changes of the assembly are chosen to be the optimization objective. Furthermore, the influences of the population size, the weight coefficient, and the learning factors to the stability and efficiency of IDPSO algorithm were discussed.

The results show that the IDPSO algorithm can obtain the global optimum efficiently, which is proved to be a more useful method for solving ASP problems than basic DPSO. The IDPSO approach could reduce the working time and economic cost of ASP problems in HSTs significantly.

The method may save the economic cost, reduce the amount of workers and save the time in the assembly process of HSTs. And also may change the method of ASP in design and manufacturing process, and make the production process in HSTs more efficiently.

A chosen strategy of global optimal particle is presented, which can overcome the local convergence problem with basic DPSO for solving ASP problems.

The purpose of this study of Google and Baidu in mainland China is to identify the key contingencies to firm strategic responses to technical and institutional pressures. From an institutional logic perspective and Hirschman's model of exit, voice, and loyalty, this research proposes a few propositions which are intended to explain why foreign and local companies adopt different responses to similar institutional requirements or under similar institutional pressures.

This study applies a historical chronological method by the recognition of certain types of events and key strategic activities conducted by two sample organizations from their foundations in mainland China till March 2010 when Google exited from China's internet search market. These activities were identified as the measurement of firm strategic responses to institutional pressures. Data were gathered from various sources, including documents published by sample organizations, online and media reports, etc.

It is found that firms adopted similar responses to technical pressures which were determined by characteristics of the internet industry. However, their responses to institutional pressures, which were driven by the state logic for control of the internet, were dramatically different. As a multinational corporation, Google was faced with inherent tensions between home and host institutional requirements. When the state control pressures increased, Google eventually selected a voice and exit strategy. Baidu, as a local leading player in China's internet market, adopted a loyalty strategy through closer collaboration with local institutional constituents, including government agencies and clients, in addition to its investment in creating corporate images and reputation among local internet users.

This research explores the dynamic and diverse responses of foreign and local companies to institutional pressures and advances our understanding of political properties in firm strategies and the importance of firm nationality in strategy making.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the building of a theoretical model to explore how team pay disparity and resource slack moderate the effects of top management team (TMT) diversity on strategic change and if the moderating effects of resource slack differ in firms with a low or high level of pay disparity.

Nine hypotheses are proposed and tested with a sample from 391 listed Chinese firms. Archival data are collected from annual reports to form the sample. The hypothesized model relationships are tested through regression analysis.

The findings show that pay imparity negatively moderates the effects of TMT diversity and resource slack also has important moderating effects. Furthermore, the moderating effects of resource slack differ in firms with low and high team pay imparity.

TMT demography diversity has an important effect on strategic change. However, two conflicting views exist on the relationship. Although some literature suggests that diversity may be sources of explorative activities such as strategic change, others suggest that diversity may cause integration difficulty and thus has a negative effect on strategic change. This paper contributes to extant debate regarding the effects of TMT diversity on strategic change by including TMT pay imparity and resource slack to explain that the effect of diversity on strategic change is contingent on the level of pay imparity, resources slack, and their interactive effects. This research also contributes to understanding organization slack by reasoning that the moderating effect is contingent on pay imparity level.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the topic of the Chinese business model and provide a brief introduction to the papers in this special issue.

The paper explores the importance of studying business model in the Chinese market and summarises the eight papers in this issue.

The papers in this special issue address what the business model is in China, how it influences organizational outcomes, and how to build the business model in the Chinese market. These papers may be germane to both researchers and practitioners concerned with managing business model in China. For scholars, these papers broaden the understanding of business model and extend the theoretical boundaries of the business model from the Western to the Eastern context. For practitioners doing business in China, these papers give implications on how to build business models in China as well as what institutional and technological factors should be considered when designing their business models.

Further investigation is needed into the interaction among Chinese firms' activities on business model design and operation and the institutional, technological, and market environment.

Overall, these papers make remarkable contributions to our understanding of Chinese business model. The topics of these studies are various and the methods are also multiplex. Several interesting Chinese business models are addressed such as Bandit business model and “a company + farmers”.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the indigenous concept of suzhi at individual and organizational levels, and identify its dimensions for human resource management (HRM) research and practice in China.

Based on a comprehensive review of suzhi literature, Chinese cultural and historical literature, as well as Western mainstream HRM research, a multidimensional suzhi framework is conceptualized.

As an indigenous expression, suzhi can be and has been adopted for Chinese HRM research and practice. As a multidimensional construct, one’s cognitive suzhi is jointly determined by corresponding moral suzhi, wenhua (knowledge-based) suzhi and zhuanye (professional) suzhi. Cognitive suzhi, in turn, determines one’s behavioral suzhi that drives employees to enhance organizational performance, and this relationship is moderated by psychological suzhi.

The proposed framework provides new insight for Chinese indigenous management research, particularly in developing suzhi measurement for different dimensions. It also informs HRM practices in recruiting, selection, performance analysis and employee career development.

The complexity of suzhi dimensions from an organizational HRM perspective is analyzed. The resulting suzhi framework offers new insight for HRM research and practices in China.

China after 1949, especially since entering the 21st century, significant progress has been made in leadership research under Chinese context. However, so far there has been no systematic review and prospect of China's leadership research in the past 70 years. Therefore, with the help of scientific visualization software Citespace, this paper analyzes the research papers on leadership in the context of China from the top international journals of management science and applied psychology (1949–2018), supplemented and verified the previous research conclusions based on qualitative review, and quantitatively demonstrated the research evolution of leadership field.

Using a scientific visualization tool CiteSpace and 145 international leadership works, which were published in 64 top international journals and collected from the Web of Science database, and 852 domestic works which were published in 28 top domestic journals and collected from the CNKI database from 1949 to 2018, we draws keyword co-occurrence knowledge graph and keyword strategy map to visualize the landscape and evolution of leadership research and analyze the hot topics and research trends in the field of leadership.

The research found that: (1) Before 2002, there were only 7 articles published in 64 international top journal, mainly focusing on Western leadership theories such as transformational, cross-cultural comparison and the adaptability in Chinese context; (2) From 2003 to 2012, scholars had begun to introduce mainstream quantitative research paradigm in international academic community; (3) From 2013 to 2018, researches tended to be synchronized, with 461 and 99 papers published respectively. How emerging leaderships (such as ethical leadership) affect on various emerging outcome variables (such as creativity, voice behavior, unethical pro-organizational behavior etc.) is hot topic for future research.

Different from the previous qualitative reviews on organizational culture research, this paper, for the first time, uses bibliometric research methods to systematically analyze the evolution path of leadership research during the 70 years of China(1949–2018, and puts forward the future research prospects.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chinese leader–follower interaction model in school cases considering followers’ effect at varying social distances.

This study uses a case study approach.

First, Chinese leader–follower interactions in school cases are flexible in practice. Second, within leader–follower flexible interactions, contradictory perceptions and field-of-work consciousness foster different behavior choices between leaders and followers. Third, perceptions concerning the proximity of leaders to followers are positively influenced in relation to hierarchical distinctions and negatively influenced owing to private connections. Finally, the perceived leader distance of leaders from followers further influences the contradictory perceptions and field-of-work consciousness of leaders and followers and positively influences the degree of flexible leader–follower interaction.

This study examined a single institution; hence, results may have been influenced by school-specific features and conditions. Future research should study more organizations to explore whether their unique characteristics and contexts could affect leader–follower interactions, thus providing more generalized and universally applicable conclusions.

First, this study proposed a leader–follower flexible interaction model in school cases and the concepts of field-of-work consciousness and contradictory perceptions, exploring the active effects of followers in the leadership process to offer guidance toward better understanding the leadership process. Second, it was found that private connections between leaders and followers, as well as hierarchical differences, influenced the perceptions of both leaders and followers concerning leader distance in a Chinese context, and the influence of leader distance on leader–follower interactions was also analyzed.

This paper aims to examine the internal logical relationship between two intergenerational inheritance ways of passing property rights and residual control rights (RCR) and to construct a conceptual model comprising transfer elements, paths and timing of succession in this process.

Driven by the cases of Haixin, Tianyijiao and Changhe Group, this paper applies research methods of copying and expanding analysis logic, progressive deduction, content analysis and comparative research based on the perspective of HeXie theory to explore the deep interrelation of transfer elements, paths and timing during family business succession.

The findings present that the content of intergenerational inheritance of a family firm is the inheritance of property rights and RCR. First, the inheritance of property rights is a static inheritance of time-point delivery, whereas the inheritance of RCR is a dynamic inheritance process for a period of time. Second, the inheritance of property rights and RCR are not independent; only a “HeXie” succession of both rights can realize a successful inheritance of family firms.

This paper constructs the paths and timing model of intergenerational inheritance of property rights and RCR in family firms. This paper integrates the current literature studies on the family inheritance of property rights and RCR and explains their internal mechanisms. This paper also provides a theoretical foundation and empirical evidence for family business transitions in the business world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between team heterogeneity and team performance in entrepreneurial team and is also of significance in guiding the management practice of an entrepreneurial team.

The study is carried out based on an experiment, in which a 2×2 experimental group is devised to collect data concerned with the heterogeneity of entrepreneurial team’s expertise and the attitude toward heterogeneity.

The entrepreneurial team’s heterogeneity has a significant effect on entrepreneurial performance; the entrepreneurial team’s heterogeneity influences entrepreneurial performance through team task conflict; attitudes toward heterogeneity play a mediating role in the above process.

This paper is carried out based on an experiment which can be used to determine the mediating effects of team conflict on the relationship between team expertise heterogeneity and the entrepreneurial performance.

Fillet welding is one of the most widespread types of welding in the industry, which is still carried out manually or automated by contact. This paper aims to describe an online programming system for noncontact fillet welding robots with “U”- and “L”-shaped structures, which responds to the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In this paper, the authors propose an online robot programming methodology that eliminates unnecessary steps traditionally performed in robotic welding, so that the operator only performs three steps to complete the welding task. First, choose the piece to weld. Then, enter the welding parameters. Finally, it sends the automatically generated program to the robot.

The system finally managed to perform the fillet welding task with the proposed method in a more efficient preparation time than the compared methods. For this, a reduced number of components was used compared to other systems: a structured light 3 D camera, two computers and a concentrator, in addition to the six-axis industrial robotic arm. The operating complexity of the system has been reduced as much as possible.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no scientific or commercial evidence of an online robot programming system capable of performing a fillet welding process, simplifying the process so that it is completely transparent for the operator and framed in the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Its commercial potential lies mainly in its simple and low-cost implementation in a flexible system capable of adapting to any industrial fillet welding job and to any support that can accommodate it.

In this study, a robotic robust system is achieved, aligned to Industry 4.0, with a friendly, intuitive and simple interface for an operator who does not need to have knowledge of industrial robotics, allowing him to perform a fillet welding saving time and increasing productivity.