Our paper contributes to progress on the conceptualization and the operationalization of the alliance portfolio configuration. A variance-based structural equation modeling (partial least squares) has been applied to a sample made up of top global contractors. Previous works on alliance portfolio have analyzed the dimensions of alliance portfolio configuration independently and therefore, the interrelationships between them have not been studied. Results from the data analysis show that the dimensions of alliance portfolio configuration are interrelated in such a way that the relational and the partner alliance portfolio dimensions (a) fully mediate the effect of structural alliance portfolio on the value of the alliance portfolio capital; and (b) this capital exerts significant and positive influences on the growth of the international market share.

Much of careers research in recent times has focused on the so called move away from traditional ‘organisational careers’ to what Arthur (1994) coined the ‘boundaryless career’. This paper discusses research that challenges the applicability of the boundaryless career and the claim that ‘organisational careers are dead’. Drawing on interviews with nearly 60 accountants in Australia, the research demonstrates that employees are pursuing an organisational career. For this occupational group, the lack of proactive HR involvement in career development and the emphasis on self-direction was not appreciated. Rather, the research highlighted that the lack of organisational career management had negative implications for employee attitudes and motivation. The issues raised by the participants suggest it is timely to consider whether the unique characteristics of the accounting profession represent an ideal environment for the maintenance of an ‘organisational career’.

The study focused on mentoring relationship effectiveness (RE) from the perspective of protégé in the healthcare environment. The purpose tried to examine the effects of interpersonal attraction, self-efficacy and transformational leadership (TL) on RE respectively, to test mentoring function as a mediator, and to verify the effect of RE on protégé work outcomes. Self-administered questionnaires were employed and 306 questionnaires from hospital nurses were collected in total. Structural equation model was used to test the research model. The results indicated that interpersonal attraction and TL do have positive effects on RE while self-efficacy was not; RE also showed a significant effect on job satisfaction and organizational commitment, which verified that the formal mentoring among nurses was good for improving relationship quality and relationship learning between mentors and protégés. Accordingly, to strengthen the antecedent variables would be helpful for mentoring RE, and also the protégé's work outcomes.

Responding to calls for more knowledge about the motivations (and changing motivations) of self-initiated expatriates (SIEs), this qualitative research examines 58 Australian SIEs working in culturally (dis)similar host contexts, to address the question: Why are Australian SIEs motivated to expatriate to South Korea or the United Kingdom? The findings demonstrate that, although personal/lifestyle considerations are important to SIEs, career-related considerations are either primary or become more prevalent following expatriation. The findings reveal that, while SIEs expatriate with particular motivations, over time their motivations may change as other factors determine desire to stay/leave a host country. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), the research highlights variations in extrinsic and intrinsic motivations of SIEs including those who intended to utilise their expatriation as part of a boundaryless career and those who unintentionally found themselves focused on career. Knowledge of (changing) motivations is salient to organisations' selection decisions and support for international employees.

This study develops a relational model of institutional work. The past research implies that the nature of relationships between individual actors actually shapes the nature of institutional work the actors engage in. However, the research falls short of an explicit, systematic analysis of different relationships between the actors and their work implications. This study basically argues that the actors’ power positions, which might be dominant or subordinate in relation to those of other actors, and their meaning frameworks, which might diverge from or converge with those of other actors, lead the actors to engage in a particular type of relationship with those other actors, and this relationship gives a particular form to the institutional work of the actors in relation. Hence, this study explicitly locates institutional work within the context of the relationships and highlights that institutional work is a relational rather than structural or individual phenomenon.

Downsizing as a systematic reduction of employees is frequently utilized in order to increase productivity, efficiency, profitability, and competitiveness of organizations. As a strategy of choice for many firms around the world, downsizing produces far-reaching financial, organizational, and social consequences. Despite the large body of literature, there is inconclusive evidence as to whether downsizing is effective and whether it generates the widely anticipated benefits. Employee downsizing as a change management strategy has been actively adopted for more than three decades. This downsizing article presents a phase typology of job cutting including three distinct phases and three levels of argument. As a conceptual paper, it aims to examine, update, and extend Littler and Gandolfi's (2008) seminal work. The research paper culminates with a discussion of current downsizing practices, and posits that the downsizing phenomenon has remained a popular restructuring.

We extend charismatic leadership research by identifying conditions under which charismatic leadership reduces individual performance. Previous research found a positive impact of charismatic leadership, especially in crisis situations. However, we expect that followers with high self-determination reject charismatic leadership so that performance is reduced. In a laboratory experiment built as a brainstorming competition, 88 participants were randomly assigned to a condition with a team crisis or a control condition. Half of the participants received a charismatic leadership intervention after the crisis, which led to the ostentatious departure of a group member, while the other half was led laissez-faire. The results support our hypotheses. Although charismatic leadership was overall beneficial in a team crisis, our study provides experimental evidence of how charismatic leadership reduces the performance of certain team members in crises. Future research should investigate how leadership can best meet the specific needs of followers in different types of critical team situations.

In this paper, the author, a freelance writer and researcher who has worked in this way for over 30 years, draws on his own experience of independent working to present freelancing and well-being as an important yet neglected area of research. The paper is therefore presents a brief overview of the context of freelancing, particularly in the United Kingdom and Europe as this is the working environment of the author. This overview is blended with a review the existing research on the topic of freelancer well-being. The aim is to reveal the questions and issues that the author feels encompass well-being in this context as well as to highlight some recent initiatives where independent workers and their clients have worked together to support key areas of their vulnerability compared with those in full-time employment. Setting this often intensely personal perspective set against the wider context of academic and practitioner research reveals that, in contrast to some the common public opinion that freelance and contract work is ‘second-rate’ option, many independent professionals are happy about the way they work and experience high levels of job satisfaction. However, what does also emerge is that beyond local professional bodies and associations, many feel almost completely unsupported. Of greatest concern were reports of being treated with neglect and even suspicion by policy and law makers. The hope is that this paper heralds the beginnings of a wider research agenda into this important but neglected aspect of the independent professional workforce.

This paper presents the results of a consilience framework developed and tested to reconcile the varying definitions, methodologies and purposes of the data collected on independent contracting within Australia. The result is a multilayered profile of the self-employed contractor which draws together official labour market statistics, taxation office liabilities and marketing-based consumer data sources. The framework sees independent contractors emerge as a dynamic, entrepreneurial and complex group who defy many of the age, gender and industry stereotypes that law and policy makers confine them to. While these initial results are limited to Australia, the challenge independent contractors present to established systems of legal, social and government regulation are embedded within the wider contexts of self-employment and small business. These contexts are universal and the sooner these challenges are answered, the sooner the opportunities they also present can be realised.

While Islam is the second largest religion in the world with 1.6 billion Muslims, there are variations in the interpretations of that law (i.e., Sharia). This diversity and variation may hold the key in explaining the different behaviours among Muslim entrepreneurs because of their views on the concept of work as worship. In this study, we examine how Malay entrepreneurs are guided in their sourcing and shaping of entrepreneurial opportunities through Shafii practice. Our contributions include identifying five central values that guided the participant’s sourcing of opportunities: Fardhu Kifayah (communal obligation), Wasatiyyah (balanced), Dakwah1 (the call of joining the good and forbidding the bad), Amanah (trust), and Barakah (blessings). We also contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how these macro-level values of worship gave the entrepreneurs confidence in creating their new ventures.

Aggression at the service delivery interface (the point of contact between service provider and service recipient) has become a focus of much recent research attention. However, much of what we know is based on cross-sectional survey data – which tells us little about the underlying dynamics within specific aggressive incidents. Further, these data are often collected from the perspective of the service provider alone. For this study, we focused on specific hostile interactions during the delivery of healthcare services and gathered data from the perspectives of service providers and service recipients. Drawing on interviews with US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) staff and US military veterans, we categorised and compared each party's attributions for the initiation of hostile (unpleasant) encounters. We found that staff and veterans had different perspectives on the nature of precipitating factors and that the initial attribution for the event was linked to differences in subsequent responding. These findings are discussed in terms of their insight into the temporal dynamics of aggressive events and their implications for the prevention and management of hostility at the service delivery interface.

A recent trend throughout Australia has been to develop multi-purpose indoor public aquatic centres in favour of outdoor pools. Such major policy and planning decisions often rely on consultants' feasibility studies, yet there is limited comprehensive industry-wide data available on which to base such decisions. The industry-wide performance measures discussed in this paper help fill this void by providing objective data to support the contention that multi-purpose indoor aquatic centres tend to outperform centres with solely outdoor pools. The key indicators of performance are based on financial viability and community participation data for a sample of Australian public aquatic centres.

This paper adapts and extends the technological community perspective (e.g., Van de Ven, 1993), to review and analyze the outcomes of a series of three research projects funded by the Australian Government as reported in a number of publicly available documents. The projects were designed to support education for sustainability within Australian business schools and to promote knowledge sharing between the business schools and industry around sustainability. Project participants included seven business schools and their industry collaborators.

The technological community perspective, which is particularly well-suited to examining this innovative education for sustainability project, is a theoretical framework that examines evolution of innovation at the community level; this includes multiple internal and external stakeholders, and is beyond the more traditional uni-dimensional focus on organization or industry levels. This approach provides lessons with respect to complex and dynamic interactions between and among multiple stakeholders responsible for successful development and dissemination of sustainability in business schools, corporations, and beyond.

Hence, this paper addresses issues raised in the call for papers for the special issue of Journal of Management and Organization, ‘Educating for Sustainability and CSR: What is the role of business schools?’ The paper addresses the questions: (1) What are the barriers for business schools with respect to integrating sustainability in the curricula; (2) What role do partnerships with other stakeholders play in such initiatives?

Cyberbullying presents a new workplace issue with initial research demonstrating strong links to negative outcomes for individuals and organisations across a range of sectors. Yet, detailed accounts of target experiences of cyberbullying remain largely unexamined. To address this crucial research gap, this study explores nurses' experiences of workplace cyberbullying – a profession with high rates of workplace bullying. Adopting a work environment perspective, this paper provides an in-depth examination of eight cases of workplace cyberbullying that emphasise the practical and theoretical complexities associated with this emerging workplace hazard. Specifically, workplace cyberbullying is often experienced within a broader pattern of bullying behaviours, leading to a potentially wider scope of harm for those involved. A new typology of cyberbullying based on the source of perpetration is also presented that contributes to our growing understanding of the issue while extending the knowledge base for the effective management of workplace cyberbullying.

This study explored how individual and team-level goal orientation influence individual creativity in a work setting. By creating a cross-level theoretical framework, we tested 562 members of 81 teams currently working in various companies in China. The study analyzed the relationships between individual goal orientation, team goal orientation, and individual creativity from cross-level perspective linked by motivated information processing theory. Applying multilevel research method and hierarchical-level modeling, we found that team learning goal orientation and individual learning goal orientation influence individual creativity through different information activities at their own levels. Moreover, team learning goal orientation has a positive and team performance-avoidance goal orientation has a negative effect on individual creativity through team information exchange, while individual learning goal orientation poses a positive effect on individual creativity through individual information elaboration. In conclusion, it was indicated that team members tend to elaborate more work-related information when teams are more learning-orientated. Conversely, team members do not tend to elaborate information when their team has higher performance-avoidance goal orientation.

This paper reports an exploratory and qualitative study of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) beliefs of leaders of large Australian financial institutions. The findings are presented in four sections. The first discusses whether leaders have a mental model of the firm that is most closely aligned with the traditional shareholder or the stakeholder view of the firm. It then examines how they frame the organization's responsibilities, particularly as they relate to balancing the needs of shareholders and other stakeholders. The third section identifies how they view CSR and the fulfilment of potential economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibilities of organizations. The final section examines the driving factors that lead to their promotion of corporate social responsibility. We find that although many leaders support the wealth creation model's central premise that the organization's primary responsibility is to maximise its value in order to meet its fiduciary obligations to its shareholders, they also believe that CSR activities benefit the organization financially and in building corporate sustainability, employee engagement and performance, and social capital. CSR activities are also believed to increase the legitimacy of the organization, although philanthropy is not supported unless there is a business case. This has implications for those seeking support from organizations for community causes. We also find the view of employees as primary stakeholders is strong and widespread; an implication of this is that employee influence is a strong lever for positive change towards CSR behaviour in a firm.

This paper reports on an exploratory study into critical success factors as they are perceived by Māori small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners in the Otago/Southland regions of New Zealand. We draw on interview responses from 11 Māori business owners and four representatives of SME support services. The aim of this study is to explore Māori SME characteristics in terms of the critical success factors that help or hinder the achievement of their business aspirations. The findings indicate three main thematic concerns: Māori SME owners’ perception of being Māori impacts on how they position themselves as a business; the regional business environment has particular features that impact in a particular way on Māori SMEs; and, notions of business strategy are culturally nuanced. We propose that a culturally constituted regional business support system will better enable Māori SMEs to achieve their aspirations.

Scholars often assume that reference groups are industry-wide, homogeneous, and stable. We examine this assumption and suggest hypotheses based on managers’ motivations such as self-enhancement and self-improvement, social identity, and affiliation-based impression management. We test hypotheses on failure-induced changes in reference groups and their direction in terms of upward and downward comparisons. An empirical examination of changes in reference groups for firms listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index between 1993 and 2008 shows that performance below social aspirations induces changes in reference groups and toward upward comparisons. The results indicate that managers can choose to change the reference group – a cognition-centered response – as an alternative to such action-centered responses as organizational search and risk-taking in response to poor performance from social aspirations and that upward comparisons may be the result of social performance shortfalls to give a better impression and to improve firm performance.

This study investigated the interactive effects of on-the-job training (OJT), co-worker support (CWS), and supervisor support (SS) with newcomer job-related education (JRE), on newcomer adjustment. Given that socialisation is a learning process, an important factor in socialisation is job-related knowledge. Although many studies on organisational socialisation drew on new graduates making the school-to-work transition, they have not considered the role of JRE and associated job-related knowledge for socialisation. It was hypothesised that JRE and newcomer information-seeking will moderate the effects of OJT, CWS, and SS on role clarity, role conflict, and role orientation. The study was conducted with a sample 244 business and engineering graduates of an Asian university. Results provide some support for the moderating effects of JRE on role clarity and conflict. It was also found that SS was positively related to newcomer innovative role orientation. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

In the past, alliance portfolio configuration (APC) studies concentrated mostly on the direct alliances or partners of a focal firm. However, a focal firm is also influenced by indirect alliances or partners. This study endeavors to focus on this aspect of APC. It contributes to APC research by extending the scope to three degrees from a focal firm. To assess the effects of extended APCs, 186 3-year window snapshots were created of the extended APCs of 31 Korean bio-pharmaceutical firms. These snapshots range from 2007 to 2014. The effects of structure (density), size (number of alliances and partners), and relationships to firm innovation were measured using the two-step generalized method of moments estimates. The results show that structural sparseness and larger-sized extended APCs are more favorable conditions for innovation, and that structural sparseness and size have a positive relationship to innovation performance.