Large Australian and Swiss banks have been trimming their workforces since the mid-1990s. With further rounds of downsizing activities predicted, this study sought to identify, examine, and compare the adopted organizational downsizing implementation strategies. The primary purpose of this cross-cultural study was to determine how large Australian and Swiss banks implemented downsizing in their most recent endeavors. The research has revealed three key findings. First, Australian banks primarily adopted workforce reduction strategies, whereas Swiss banks employed a mixture of organization redesign, workforce reduction, and systemic strategies. Second, Australian banks had considerable depth in their downsizing, whereas Swiss banks had more breadth in their overall strategies. Third, Australian banks favored reorientation approaches, whereas Swiss banks embraced reinforcement approaches. It remains unclear as to why large Australian and Swiss banks differed in the selection of implementation strategies and why they diverged in their overall approaches to downsizing. Further research is required to explore aspects that are likely to influence the adoption of downsizing strategies in both Australia and Switzerland.

Within healthcare, studies support that nurse manager leadership behaviours positively influence nursing outcomes. However, how this behaviour promotes positive outcomes is less well understood. Integrating a ‘positive deviance framework’ and a ‘model for reflection’, this paper uniquely uncovers positive nurse manager behaviours that deviate from ‘business as usual’ in managing and leading healthcare staff. Applying an interpretivist lens to qualitative data collected from 24 nurse managers from Australia and Seychelles, the outcomes illustrate examples of positive leadership, exemplary performance, and uncommon behaviours and actions amongst nurse managers resulting in positive nursing experiences and positive organisational outcomes. Nurse managers practising positive leadership and taking on an employee champion role, underscore these behaviours. This study contributes to the research of positive outcomes, processes, and attributes of healthcare organisations and their members.

This research examines the impacts of workplace social support, namely organizational support, supervisory support, and co-worker support on job embeddedness, and whether these effects are moderated by work meaningfulness. Using a conditional process model, the current study also investigates how the relationship between workplace social support and turnover intention, mediated by job embeddedness, is affected by the moderator. Data were collected from 1,137 shared service employees in Thailand. Empirical results indicate that job embeddedness mediates the links between perceived organizational support as well as perceived co-worker support and intention to leave, and that work meaningfulness reduces employees' turnover intention by reinforcing the impacts of perceived supervisory support and perceived co-worker support on job embeddedness. The findings contribute to job embeddedness literature by describing moderated mediation mechanisms, through which social supportive constituents affect turnover intention, and guide practitioners by applying an integrated model of organizational practices in managing human resources.

As family shareholder support is essential for the ongoing viability of the business as a family business, multi-generation family businesses which allow ‘the ownership tree’ to grow need to monitor the attitudes and expectations of the expanding number of family member shareholders. This paper reports on a case study of a multi-generation family business where the shareholder group had grown to 50 individual shareholders. The study explored the shareholders' views about the business and particularly their attitudes to stewardship and whether and under what circumstances, they would hold their shareholdings, pass them to the next generation of family or possibly consider relinquishing their holdings. Data was obtained from a semi-structured questionnaire and follow-up interviews. While respondents indicated that they had immense pride in being a shareholder of the family business, they admitted that their knowledge of that business was less than optimal. Financial returns were viewed as important, but the intangible rewards relating to the heritage of forebears were more so. While they were keen to pass on their shares to their children, they were uncertain about the level of commitment the next generation members would have. Lessons from this case study are discussed for other multi-generation family businesses focusing on shareholders' responsibilities as owners and the board's need to ensure timely transfer of knowledge to the wider shareholder group.

The current study examined the use of biographical data to predict errors, tardiness, policy violations, overall job performance, and turnover among nurses. The results of the study indicate that biodata measures are valid selection devices for nurses and effective at predicting nurse errors, tardiness, policy violations, and overall job performance, but the instrument was not an effective predictor of turnover, voluntary or involuntary. Additionally, examination of group differences revealed that White subjects scored significantly higher on the biodata instrument compared to Black subjects but produced group differences considerably smaller than typically found with measures of cognitive ability. Future research directions and implications for practice are discussed.

Using data from 708 French-Canadian nurses, the present study relies on self-determination theory (SDT) and its proposed motivation mediation model to examine the associations between need satisfaction, work motivation, and various manifestations of psychological wellbeing (work satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and turnover intentions). To increase the precision and accuracy of these analyses, we relied on analytic approaches that explicitly account for the dual global/specific nature of both work motivation and need satisfaction. Results revealed that nurses' global psychological need satisfaction, and their specific autonomy and competence satisfaction, were positively associated with their global self-determined work motivation and specific intrinsic motivation. In turn, global self-determined work motivation and specific intrinsic motivation were associated with more desirable outcome levels. Nurses' global need satisfaction and specific autonomy satisfaction were also directly associated with more desirable outcome levels. Our results provided support for a partially mediated version of SDT's motivation mediation model.

Medium Enterprises (MEs) are significant contributors to global economic development. Integrating sustainability practices in their business can support MEs worldwide to become more sustainable, improving companies’ performance and stakeholders’ expectations. Nevertheless, few MEs adopt sustainable practices. Following Behavioral Decision Theory and Behavioral Strategy literature, we argue that this can be associated with their managers’ decision-making processes – apart from not possessing considerable resources like large companies. Via a mixed-method research design involving 277 Italian ME managers, we investigate the cognitive biases that hinder the development of a sustainable performance management system (SPMS) in MEs. We found the most prominent biases influencing SPMS development. Then, we developed a ‘SPMS de-biasing funnel’ framework. We propose some corrective actions to reduce the impact of the most critical cognitive biases that influence SPMS development, allowing related beneficial potential outcomes.

In a context of institutionalized regulation and academic framing determined by agency theory, we note paradoxes in board governance literature and practice. These paradoxes concern boards’ conflicting roles of monitoring/control, and innovation/strategy-making. We explore directors’ mind-sets about governance on which their resolution of paradoxes and their decisions and actions will be based. We do this by applying discourse analysis to the transcripts of 60 semistructured interviews conducted with New Zealand directors who described and evaluated their experience of board governance. We identify and discuss their various discourses, which we label discourses of conformance, of deliberation, of enterprise and of bounded innovation. We note the homogeneity of discourses across different organization types, the dominance of conformance, the nonresolution of paradoxes, and the likely effects in inhibiting board strategy-making and contribution to innovation. We recommend attention by boards to their mind-sets and processes, and the development of generativity.

The success and competitiveness of an organization recruiting the emerging workforce i.e., millennials can be ascribed in part to the organization's corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement. This study explores the impact of organizational CSR on Nigerian millennials' joining intention through CSR motive perceptions: CSR-based organizational attractiveness (CSR-based OA) and perceived altruism (PA). To examine the empirical relationship among variables, data were obtained from respondents who were seeking employment or in-between jobs. Results revealed that CSR-based OA and PA significantly mediate the relationship between CSR and millennial joining intention. Findings present a unique perspective that significantly expands the literature. The implications of results are discussed and recommendations to managers are presented.

This paper reports on the nature and extent of intrapreneurship (or corporate entrepreneurship) practiced by Australian businesses. We examined the relationship between measures of corporate entrepreneurship and finn growth and profitability. and utilised measures devised by earlier researchers attempting to assess corporate entrepreneurship, viz: new business venturing, innovativeness, self-renewal, and proactiveness. Control variables included industry, finn age, and finn size. Interestingly, we found that the items measuring corporate entrepreneurship loaded onto not four but five factors, effectively splitting the self-renewal measure into two distinct elements, Profitability was significantly correlated with self-renewal (negative) and organisational support (positive) while growth was found to be significantly and positively related to both new business venturing and environmental munificence.

This paper addresses the issue of services outsourcing by looking at both theoretical and empirical arguments. Previous debates have often concentrated on the motives for adopting the practice rather than the outcomes. These various themes can be discussed under the twin concepts of the cost and efficiency argument and the fashion and isomorphism approach. Our research provides strong evidence to support the cost efficiency argument. On average, significant cost advantages were sought and delivered, as well as improvements in service levels and systems. Many organisations in the current environment in Australia look at outsourcing not only as a method of increasing efficiency but also as gaining competitive advantage through harnessing the superior specialist skills and experience of the outsourcing provider who takes someone's back office function and transforms them into their front office. A 10% net cost saving was considered necessary by an organisation before embarking on an organisational change that was disruptive and in some cases involved downside risks. Even if other efficiency gains such as service levels or systems improvements were required, so were 10%+ cost savings. A number of the organisations thought their skills in managing outsourcing had improved considerably such that they were in a position to move from a client/server relationship to a partnership model (i.e. an alliance).

This study intends to explore the impact of the customer knowledge integration capability, customer knowledge absorptive capability, customer knowledge creation capability, and customer relationship capability on new service development (NSD) performance for Taiwan's hospitals from customer knowledge and customer relationship perspectives. We employ the self-administered mail survey to collect research data and select self-pay medical service managers or top managers as key informants. After testing the fitness of sample representativeness, non-response error, common method variance, reliability, and validity, we adopt structure equation model to test the research model. Empirical results indicate the customer knowledge absorptive capability of a hospital is positively associated with NSD performance, and the customer knowledge integration capability of a hospital fully mediates the relationship between customer knowledge absorptive capability and NSD performance. However, customer relationship capability and customer knowledge absorptive capability both have positive influence on customer knowledge creation capability. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.

The majority of the literature on high-growth firms focuses on two main aspects: growth factors and rates of growth, but little information exists on how SMEs grow. Past research has implicitly considered high-growth firms as a homogeneous category of businesses, however, in reality, they use different forms of growth: domestic and international geographical expansion, the launch of new related and unrelated products, product improvement, client retention and the acquisition of new clients. This work attempts to identify how high-growth SMEs benefit from different combinations of forms of growth to perform successfully. A sample of 89 high-growth SMEs was selected – with an annual growth rate of more than 10% over a 5-year period – and, by means of a cluster analysis, we found four significantly different combinations of forms of growth. To externally test the robustness of those combinations, a group of demographic variables was considered (size, age, sector), as well as a set of variables related to the growth strategy (personnel involvement, the extent to which growth is a priority, perceived growth with respect to competitors), which support the existence of significant differences between the groups.

Globally, organizations are increasingly embracing corporate social responsibility (CSR) to strengthen competitive advantage. Although CSR is recognized to be context-sensitive, the literature is still lacking studies that examine CSR in different contexts, particularly non-western ones. Our study adds to a deeper understanding of CSR in Vietnam by identifying the predictors of CSR attitudes of business students. Vietnam has rich cultural, social, and economic characteristics that offer new theoretical perspectives and insights on the contextual nature of CSR. Our findings showed that CSR attitudes related positively to idealism and student seniority, and negatively to materialism and male students. A positive CSR–relativism relationship was uncovered. Spirituality related positively to the importance of CSR to business sustainability and negatively to CSR's importance to short-term competitiveness. The findings have theoretical and practical implications on the understanding and practice of CSR that would benefit CSR researchers, business organizations, and education institutions.

This paper examines the role of core self-evaluations (CSEs) in the relationships among emotional demands, emotional dissonance, and depersonalization. Data were collected from a non-random sample of 423 teachers who worked in primary, secondary, and higher education institutions. Results from structural equation modeling analysis showed that CSEs displayed both direct and indirect effects on depersonalization through employees' perceptions and reactions to emotional labor. Specifically, those individuals with more positive CSEs tended to perceive the emotional aspects of their job as less demanding, thus being less likely to experience emotional dissonance and, in turn, depersonalization. This research demonstrated that CSEs play a vital role in explaining employees' reactions to emotional labor and, therefore, their effects should be properly accounted for in future studies. Implications for practice and future lines of research are discussed in this paper.

Little empirical research has explored whether or not firm strategy is linked with corporate social responsibility (CSR) and to that end we explore the impact of low-cost and differentiation strategies on CSR. Using a sample of 229 Italian firms, a low-cost strategy is negatively associated with ethical and discretionary CSR, while a differentiation strategy is positively associated with both. Given its focus on nonfinancial outcomes and stakeholders, we test if a performance management system (PM system) acts as a moderating influence. We find that a PM system positively moderates the negative association between a low-cost strategy and ethical and discretionary CSR, while also positively moderating these relationships with respect to a differentiation strategy. These findings advance the literature on strategy and CSR, while demonstrating the contingent effect of PM systems. The findings are discussed along with limitations and directions for future research.

We examine the link between firm resources and firm innovation intensity, especially the drivers of innovation and organizational slack. We extend the organizational slack and innovation literature by examining its interplay with CEO power and industry level constraints on that power. We examine the influence of human resource slack, CEO power, and industry concentration on R&D intensity. Our study examines all publicly traded US firms over a 10-year period, giving us over 13,400 firm years to look at. Our results indicate that organizations with excess human capacity do on average show higher investments in R&D. However, we also find that in concentrated industries, where CEOs are less constrained by competitive pressure, powerful CEOs do interfere in this strategic choice and weaken the slack–innovation relationship. Even though CEO's in these situations may have sufficient slack resources, they appear inclined to reallocate such resources to purposes other than innovation.

This paper examines how the characteristics of CEOs' social networks, such as the size of the network and the strength of the ties, influence strategic flexibility from a strategic change perspective. External social networks can affect strategic flexibility positively. Previous experience with strategic change will influence external social networks differently, in ways that have repercussions for strategic flexibility. The data were gathered from surveys completed by the CEOs of 203 Spanish firms. The methodology used is regression analysis. We observe that external social networks affect strategic flexibility positively, primarily through the greater size of the networks. We also find that the effects vary if previously the organization is involved in a process of strategic change.

This study examines the efficacy of the smiling curve, and clarifies the relationship between downsizing strategies (advertising, marketing, and research and development, respectively) and firm performance specifically in an economic downturn. This study tests hypotheses using 1996–2010 data from the Taiwan Economic Journal on 436 listed Taiwanese companies. The results indicate that the benefits for firms to follow the smiling curve may not occur in the short term and that downsizing strategies may not always be the appropriate strategy to improve firm performance. During an economic downturn, downsizing strategies do not appear to enhance firm performance, that is, the smiling curve should not frown during an economic downturn to enhance firm performance.

Commercialisation activities combining the discoveries of one occupational group, such as scientists, with the commercial skills of managers involve interactions across occupational and organisational cultures. This article explores the challenges posed by working across occupational and organisational boundaries, and describes management techniques developed informally in four Australian organisations to address barriers to knowledge transfer. It identifies the existence of Knowledge-stewarding Communities of Practice (CoP) that span organisational boundaries and impact commercialisation outcomes. It also presents recommendations for management practice based upon diversity management and innovation theories. The context of the study is Australian hybrid industry-research organisations composed of academic, government and industry personnel. Semi-structured interviews with a total of twenty scientists, engineers and managers focused on their experiences of knowledge sharing across organisational and occupational cultures, and methods used to manage these boundaries. The existence and efficacy of boundary-crossing individuals and boundary object strategies are explored. A generic process management model of innovation is extended to acknowledge and accommodate occupational and organisational cultural proclivities towards exploration or exploitation, and to stimulate future research.