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Given the complexity of inclusive business (IB) to combine social contribution and business sustainability, companies make strategic choices. One multinational corporation (MNC) avoided interconnections with villagers and used only market-based relations with stimulants and incentives in the market. Another one delegated management completely to local partners, succeeding in stimulating the poor’s self-initiated economic activities. MNCs seem to have difficulties in handling institutional interconnections. In such cases, market-based relations or delegating management to the local partners were found to be highly effective for covering missing capabilities. One foreign NGO, despite its well-developed institutional interconnections with the locals, is struggling to develop markets for its social enterprises. In contrast, one local trust successfully cooperated with many local partners, appealing to local institutions (values and beliefs). Also, poor farmers felt the social contributions of two local companies by being incorporated into the companies’ supply chains backed by their corporate social responsibility (CSR) orientations and activities. Hence, both foreign and domestic organizations seem to succeed in IB by embedding their projects to their original institutions and developing diverse mechanisms to compensate for missing capabilities. One exception is a local company which successfully coordinated MNCs’ CSR activities, local communities, and governments. However, its success is owing to governmental regulation for CSR contribution. In general, though restricted by institutional backgrounds and business orientations, each case tried to create a fit between business models and its contingencies, achieve scale (at the level of communities, nations, or the global market) and business sustainability, and generate socioeconomic effects.

Cross-boundary cooperation with shared goals and values involving the poor has been argued as an indispensable means for inclusive business (IB) success. Cooperation may become dynamic, especially when exploratory and creative attempts with effective cooperative learning among partners can be realized. Even so, not many companies have reported successful in building the cooperation. One case, providing clean, affordable drinking water to the poor in Tanzanian rural villages, suggests that a delegated and grassroots-based approach in cooperation with a highly trustworthy local partner can successfully promote cooperative learning and transfer know-how in both operations and management. This approach also stimulates local and self-initiated activities for expanding water facilities and generating local businesses in an area where employment is scarce. Deviation from mainstream-institution-based operations and management is one example of institutional interconnections that enable the rural poor to self-manage projects and stimulate self-initiated business activities, consequently contributing to rural development and sustainable development goals.

The complex and changeable working environment makes individual cross-boundary activities inevitable. Yet, how employee's boundary-spanning behavior (BSB) stimulates innovation performance remains to be further explored. This study aims to analyze the intermediary mechanism and boundary conditions between employee's BSB and innovation performance based on knowledge integration theory.

The authors collected data in two waves (July and August 2017) and from two hierarchical levels (from the final sample of 286 employees and their 29 direct supervisors) within ten manufacturing firms located in Nanjing and Anhui, China.

The results indicate that creative ideas generation mediates the relationship between employee's BSB and innovation performance. Moreover, employees with higher levels of team task interdependence (TTI) lead to a stronger relationship between ideas generation and innovation performance compared to lower levels of TTI (positively moderates the second stage of mediation).

By verifying the key effects of ideas generation and TTI between employee's BSB and innovation performance, the findings of this study provide practical guidance for enterprises to improve the efficiency of employee's BSB.

First, the authors use knowledge integration theory (Grant, 1996a) to deduce the formation process of the mechanism between employee's BSB and his/her innovation results, which clearly shows the driving forces and integral power of the formation process within an individual knowledge integrating system. The authors’ second contribution is further exploring the conditions under which engaging innovative ideas generated by the integration of employee's BSB is more likely to lead to ideas for implementation by examining TTI as a team-level moderator.

Team integration is a concept that has been widely fostered in alliances as a way of improving collaborative relationships between diverse organisations. However, deeper insights into the practice of high levels of team integration remain elusive. The purpose of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of team integration through the “lived experience” of practitioners in an alliance.

This study employed a qualitative research methodology. Using a phenomenological examination, via the lived experiences of 24 alliance practitioners, the practice of alliance team integration has been investigated based on the key indicators that foster alliance team integration: team leadership, trust and respect, single team focus on project objectives and key results areas, collective understanding, commitment from project alliance board, single and co-located alliance team, and free flow communication.

The findings highlight that alliancing gives the project teams’ flexibility to change and adapt, to advance the collaborative environment and that successful integration of multi-disciplinary project teams requires commitment to the identified indicators. These findings have led to the development of a framework of leadership for successful alliance integrated practices. It is proposed that to influence the leadership for the purpose of achieving successful integration practice, a team-centric approach is required which includes four elements: task and relationship-oriented behaviours; collaborative learning environments; cultivating cross-boundary networks; and collaborative governance.

As team integration is the central tenet of alliance projects, greater understanding regarding the leadership of integration practice is of value in leveraging the benefits of outstanding performance. Also, the results of the study are expected to be informative and provide insight for alliance teams to help them proactively recognise how the context of integrated teams is influenced by specific indicators, impacting on the extent of integration practice.

This study contributes to the current body of knowledge concerning the insights from the “lived experience” of alliance teams towards achieving a greater understanding of what contributes to the leadership of successful integration practices.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how inter-organizational learning (including supply chain learning and imitation prevention) mediates the relationships between supply chain integration (SCI) and two dimensions of focal firm performance (i.e. customer service performance and innovation performance).

A cross-sectional approach was adopted with primary data collected through a survey in China. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling with partial least-squares estimations.

The findings verify that inter-organizational learning mediates the relationship between SCI and focal firm performance. The results of sub-group model analysis illustrate that both powerful and weak focal firms benefit from inter-organizational learning, but in different ways.

The responses were all from young executives who had four years’ work experience on average. Top-level executives may provide more comprehensive and accurate input for similar future research.

The results suggest that successfully integrating the supply chain to create customer value requires both supply chain learning and imitation prevention.

This paper responds to calls for an inter-disciplinary research between supply chain management and inter-organizational learning by taking into account supply chain learning and imitation prevention as links between SCI and both customer service performance for current success and innovation performance for future prosperity.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how VVAA's decision to work with the Nyenrode Business University (EMDC) to develop and change the culture of its organization and improve the business proposition they offered to their members.

The paper details the consequences for VVAA decision to strengthen the existing management and key professionals. By offering the top 80 key people (managers and professionals) a developmental program which would raise the awareness of their own competences and the need for more cross boundary cooperation.

The paper reports that an organizational transformation program can only be successful if it is part of a set of interventions to really change the company. Consistency in behavior at the top is crucial because everybody watches the behavior of top management and becomes extremely aware of discrepancies and inconsistencies.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced the organizational transformation of VVAA culture.

The paper provides a structured approach to the process of building effective learning interventions based on a clear understanding of the need to change.

Past studies have paid extensive attention to investigate learning issues in individual, organizational and team contexts. Learning activities in the workplace, however, often occur in the interdisciplinary dyadic context. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to clarify what factors make interdisciplinary dyads lead to better learning effects. The authors attempted to clarify two major agendas: What knowledge factors (intellectual capitals) owned by the parties of the dyads can induce better learning effects? What contextual factors (learning tasks) can make better learning effects during the dyadic learning process?

To examine the previous agendas, the authors first conducted in-depth interviews and an exploratory survey so that a four-element dyadic intellectual capital (DIC) architecture was circumscribed: knowledge interdependency, expertise similarity, collaborative routines and mutual trust. Dyadic learning tasks were classified as exploitative and exploratory learning. The authors then sampled 248 respondents for the formal empirical survey to examine the relationship between DIC, dyadic learning tasks and knowledge sharing.

The statistical evidences confirmed the positive relationships between DIC and knowledge sharing, and the results also signified the previous relationships with a mediating effect from exploratory learning, while the effect of exploitative learning was not supported. Thus, only dyads (the two heads) with knowledge interdependency and mutual trust can make the exploratory task better than that of one individual (the one head).

This study provides a new insight into the learning issue with an interdisciplinary dyadic perspective to supplement the existing gap between academic efforts and learning practices in the workplace.

Although researchers have long recognized the importance of participating organizations’ (POs) relational behavior for mega construction projects (MCPs) performance, relational behavior may not be executed by POs without effective leadership from project owners. However, little is known about the mechanisms linking owners’ leadership styles to POs’ relational behavior. This study draws on full range leadership theory and role theory to examine the relationships between owners’ leadership styles (i.e. transformational and transactional) and relational behavior. POs’ role orientations (i.e. normative and economic) are considered as potential mediators.

Data were collected from 175 managers deeply involved in MCPs. Hierarchical regression model and bootstrapping methods were performed on the data to examine the direct effects of owners’ leadership on POs’ relational behavior and the mediating effects of POs’ role orientations.

The results revealed that both owners’ transformational and transactional leadership positively affect POs’ relational behavior, despite the former being higher than the latter, and indirectly influence relational behavior via POs’ normative and economic role orientation, respectively.

This study provides a clear picture of how owners’ leadership can motivate POs’ relational behavior to achieve high-quality inter-organizational relationships in MCPs. The findings can guide owners’ top manager selection by prioritizing those with transformational leadership, which is beneficial to achieving high-level relational behavior of POs. The results also imply that owners should pay greater attention to cultivating POs’ normative role orientation by encouraging teamwork and open communication to enhance their implementation of relational behavior.

Unlike previous research focusing more on intra-organizational leader–follower relationship within one PO, this study is one of the first to empirically confirm owners’ leadership as a critical antecedent of POs’ relational behavior, thus enhancing the theoretical understanding of inter-organizational relationship management in MCPs. Based on role theory, this study considers a novel organizational psychology mechanism, i.e. POs’ role orientations, as the mediator to unravel how owners’ leadership affects POs’ relational behavior, which was rarely invoked in MCP leadership literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of two typical relationship management approaches (trust relationship with suppliers and reciprocity) on manufacturer resilience in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Moreover, this paper aims to deepen the understanding of environmental uncertainty's moderating effect on the association between the trust relationship with suppliers (TRS) and reciprocity.

Structural equation modeling has been used to test the hypotheses on 361 Chinese manufacturing firms' managers and independent directors during the COVID-19 crisis.

The results reveal that reciprocity positively enhances three dimensions of manufacturer resilience, namely, preparedness, responsiveness and recovery capability. Reciprocity positively mediates the relationships between TRS and preparedness, responsiveness and recovery capability. Moreover, environmental uncertainty moderates the association between TRS and reciprocity.

This study highlights the critical role of reciprocity, the relational governance approach, in enhancing manufacturer resilience in practice. This paper suggests that during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, managers should adopt trust and reciprocity in supplier relationship governance to strengthen the resilience of manufacturing companies and adapt effective strategies according to the environment.

This study is unique in developing new scales of manufacturer resilience through interviews and surveys with Chinese manufacturers and theoretical research. Based on the social capital theory and social exchange theory, this study shed light on the role of trust and reciprocity. It also bridges relational governance theory with the literature on manufacturing firm resilience literature to help manufacturers better understand the transdisciplinary links between relationship management and resilient operations in emergencies.

The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of the transactive memory system (TMS) on green innovation and examine the mediation role of the social network at all hierarchical levels.

Three hypotheses were examined by performing regression analyses on survey data from manufacturing firms in China. Especially, the nested sets of data from 389 individual observations nested in 53 work teams, including individual level and collective level have been investigated.

The study results show that the TMS has a positive effect on green innovation. Furthermore, the results indicate that at the team level, structure holes' mediation in this relationship is stronger than degree centrality; at the individual level, weak ties mediation in the relationship of specialization and green innovation is stronger than strong ties, conversely, strong ties mediation in the relationship of credibility and green innovation is stronger than weak ties.

This study expands previous research by highlighting the significance of multilevel social network elements in the context of the TMS and sustainable development and enriches the present research on green innovation.