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This editorial aims at providing a general framework for papers in this special issue. The main theme is to understand the organizational effectiveness from recent developments in technology innovation and human resources strategies.

The editorial first describes the need for technology innovation and HRM integration. A three‐strategy model for global technology innovation and organizational development was adopted: personnel strategy, system strategy, and organizational strategy.

The personnel strategy could play a crucial role in enhancing the effects of human resources management (HRM) and entrepreneurship by supporting the main dimensions of HRM. The system strategy was used to facilitate technology innovation through knowledge management while the organizational strategy was adopted to create positive organizational culture and high performance systems.

The paper suggests that globally distributed engineering and international technology entrepreneurship be new area for theory building. The strategies from this special issue have implications for the study of new information technology innovation and e‐HR developmental approaches as well as professional service, customer relations modeling and strategic HRM.

Strategic human resource management (SHRM) is seen as crucial for innovation and entrepreneurship in China. An empirical research was carried out to investigate main dimensions of the model of human resources management (HRM), practices and their effects on organisational performance in relation to innovation and entrepreneurship.

The research has two parts. The first part is a field survey on human resource management practices and its main dimensions. The study was conducted in the Chinese local companies and joint ventures across different partnerships. The second part is an in‐depth case‐set analysis of Chinese entrepreneurship models from a strategic HRM perspective.

The results showed that both functional and strategic dimensions of HRM could be identified which had differential effects upon organisational performance and that the most successful local entrepreneurial firms were among the collective‐based and globally‐oriented ones.

This study demonstrated that the fit between strategic HRM practices, innovation strategy and entrepreneurship model was significantly contributed to entrepreneurial performance. A regional comparative model of SHRM and entrepreneurship was proposed for sustainable business developments and organisational change.

Leadership has been an active area of research and practice in China over the past 30 years of economic reform and organizational change. The main purpose of this chapter is to summarize recent progress from leadership research in China and to propose a growth model for Chinese change leadership. There have been three key trends emerging from the recent research and applications under organizational change in China: (1) problem-driven trend emphasizing global leadership context and business practices; (2) high-performance human resources configuration trend integrating key competencies to build up the new work systems for global leadership; and (3) theory-building trend focusing upon the conceptual development for global leadership areas for future research and applications in China. These trends are discussed in connection with organizational change and global entrepreneurship. The recent progresses in leadership research and practice in China indicated that leadership development has become more and more strategic and embedded with the cultural and industrial contexts. A theory of “adaptation-selection-development” (ASD) is proposed for more systematic research and theory development in global leadership research and applications in China. This chapter demonstrates frontier approaches and implications of the ASD framework for global leadership development are highlighted.

To explore the effects of contingency and the position of R&D professionals on R&D performance measurement.

Adopting a bottom‐up approach that reflects R&D professionals' opinion, this study investigated the relationship between preferred performance measures and contingency factors (project phase, structure, technology, and the position of R&D professionals). Fifty two senior researchers at a Korean telecommunications laboratory were surveyed.

The results suggest that the goal achievement dimension and technology factors are more important in earlier phases of an R&D project while production, economy/market, and external evaluation factors become more significant in later stages.

The findings suggest that the weights of R&D performance measures should be aligned with the contingency factors and the position of R&D professionals.

While most studies have adopted a macro‐level approach, this study examined R&D performance measurement at the micro‐level. While most previous works are conceptual, this study made an empirical investigation that enables statistical tests. And the findings provide useful recommendations for human resource managers who are interested in measuring the performance of technology innovation.

To measure the factors contributing to corporate entrepreneurship cultivation and examine the relation between corporate entrepreneurship and innovation performance.

With interviews and questionnaires, 58 large‐middle size enterprises in China were randomly surveyed to test the hypotheses. Factor analysis is used to corporate entrepreneurship cultivation factors, corporate entrepreneurship and innovation performance. And then, a series of multiple linear regression analyzes have been conducted to test the causality between the above three aspects.

It is found that there are four factors contributing to corporate entrepreneurship, and it is suggested that corporations can cultivate corporate entrepreneurship to enhance corporate innovation performance.

It's not an exhaustive list of corporate entrepreneurship cultivation factors. And the size of samples is not large enough which perhaps limits its usefulness.

Lack of corporate entrepreneurship is a common problem of the large corporations in China, so the system model which proved in the paper is useful to offer a guideline.

The paper brings forth a system model to better the methods of cultivating corporate entrepreneurship to enhance corporate innovation performance based on an empirical study.

This study seeks to examine the relationships between corporate strategy, human resource management (HRM) strategy, and knowledge management (KM) strategy, as well as their interactive influence on KM effectiveness.

Samples studied are 147 Taiwanese large companies in banking, services, and manufacturing industries; responses from multiple informants are collected from each firm.

Results indicate that firms pursuing cost leadership strategy and buy‐bureaucratic HRM strategy are more likely to adopt codification KM strategy. Firms adopting differentiation strategy and make‐organic HRM strategy are associated with frequent use of personalization KM strategy.

This study finds that fit between KM strategy and both corporate as well as HRM strategy are significantly related to better KM effectiveness in terms of process outcome, learning capability, and organizational outcomes.

To provide an in‐depth empirical account demonstrating the danger of letting the innovative human resources of the business development function “slide” further out of orbit and thus becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the organisation can be further reinforced by a lack of serious attention at upper echelon managerial levels

This case study is based upon a participative action research methodology (for an overview of this methodology).

The practical innovation analysed in this study seems to have been both a success and a failure. The innovative and creative human resource within the Business Development Department did in fact rock the boat, but they were not so successful in finding a home and owner for the innovation.

One of the important findings of this in‐depth study is that there seems to be a lack of trust and mutual understanding about the value of different managerial functions in a company.

With regard to the internal dimension, managers of R&D and/or BDD functions also need to realize that they play several key roles, ranging from securing the updating and further development of the human resources to handling the constraints of time and budget.

This article clearly demonstrates the danger in letting critical and innovative human resources become more and more isolated from the rest of the organisation with the inescapable result that the human resources in question felt being trapped by their own passion in a position as self‐righteous missionaries.

The paper addresses the effect friendly and friendship relationships among members of innovation teams on the performance of the teams.

The members of innovation teams may develop friendly and friendship relationships over time. In our study, we focus on the effect of the frequency of such non‐work relationships on team performance. For this research, we collected full network data on non‐work relationships in a sample of 44 innovation teams and investigate how these “friendly and friendship networks” affect the performance of innovation teams.

As result turns out that the frequency of friendly ties has positive as well as negative consequences on team performance, whereas the frequency of friendship ties positively relates to the performance.

The results indicate the importance of informal relations for the performance of innovation teams. Further, it is shown that friendly and friendship relations have different theoretical and practical implications. Future research can overcome the limitations of the presented research by concentrating on larger sample sizes and longitudinal research designs.

Building on the results of the study managers can better orchestra innovation teams focussing not only on formal but also on informal contacts. The main practical implication is to strive for friendship contacts and to avoid too strong friendly contacts.

The study adds knowledge to the research on informal relationships and performance two‐fold. First, the findings testify that friendly and friendship contacts are different and not part of the same dimension, and there is strong evidence for the importance of informal contacts.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of organizational culture and human resource management (HRM) effectiveness on financial performance of a sample of Singapore‐based companies involved in mergers and acquisition activities.

The study used the method of content analysis to collect information on cultural values and HRM effectiveness, using Kabanoff's content analysis dictionary. Culture profiles were then assigned to organizations in the sample following the results from cluster analysis. Various financial ratios were used to measure organizational performance. Finally, regression analysis was performed to test various hypotheses.

The key finding of the study is that organizations with either elite or leader value profile, when complemented by human resource effectiveness, had a better financial performance as compared to organizations with meritocratic or collegial value profiles. It thus follows that, to achieve better financial results by undertaking merger and acquisition activities organizations need to have elite or leadership value profile.

This study makes a contribution to the literature by producing new empirical evidence to bear on the effect of organizational culture and human resource effectiveness on financial performance of merging acquiring organizations from a newly industrialized Asian country.

Little research to date has investigated how firm experience and industry experience in related inter‐organizational systems (IOS) affect the adoption of open IOS. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

Based on large‐scale archival data from European countries, logistic regression was used to test the research model.

It was found that firm experience in EDI and experience in proprietary IOS positively affect the adoption of open IOS; industry experience in EDI and experience in proprietary IOS have a negative effect on the adoption of open IOS; and industry experience in open IOS has a positive effect on the adoption of open IOS.

One main limitation is that the measures of the variables are based on single‐item and dichotomic scales. Also, this study only focused on the industry level and alternative explanations for the results have not been ruled out. The main implication is that IOS experience at firm and industry levels should be distinguished, as they can have different effects on the adoption of open IOS.

This paper is among the first that examines how the experience in prior generations of IOS affects the adoption of open IOS. Furthermore, the authors expand the literature by distinguishing IOS experience at two levels – firm level and industry level and show that it is necessary to recognize the different roles of different types of experience.