There has been growing scholarly interest in the relationship between high-performance work systems and firm performance. Yet, limited research attention has been given to the impact of high-performance work systems on firm performance during skills shortages. In this study, we empirically examine the influence of high-performance work systems on firm performance in the midst of skills shortages. Results from a study of 211 US firms with 50 or more employees demonstrate that internal skills shortages are not related to firm profitability. Findings further show that the use of high-performance work systems is more detrimental to firm performance for firms when they face an internal skills shortage. These results are discussed and future research directions are offered.

Indigenous literature suggests Māori businesses are distinct within Aotearoa New Zealand, due to facing unique challenges and having different operating preferences. It could also be argued that Māori and non-Māori enterprises in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors are identical as a function of operating in similar markets. However, there is a paucity of empirical evidence, and the present article rectifies this with a study of 230 Aotearoa enterprises, including 24 Māori. We test differences and find Māori enterprises report higher cultural capital, which relates to employees' knowledge and skills towards working with and respecting cultural values. However, we find no differences across human capital, relational capital, entrepreneurial culture, and organisational performance. The findings suggest that apart from a culturally specific factor, Māori and non-Māori enterprises appear to be similarly enabled, which provides a useful benchmark for understanding Māori business. We discuss the implications for research.

This paper investigates the effects of environmental pressure, human capital, and social capital on organizational effectiveness and decline using a population ecology perspective. Panel data with 1,553 observations from 398 companies spanning 4 years in Taiwan were used for analyses. Research results indicate that several environmental pressure indicators significantly affect organization effectiveness and decline. Although human capital and social capital did not predict our outcome variables, human capital plays a moderating role in explaining the variation of the relationship between environmental pressure and organizational effectiveness. This paper provides a new perspective that suggests that organizations should accumulate intangible assets to resist the threat of external environmental pressure. The leading consumer electronics company Samsung is a good example supporting our argument that investment in human capital can produce commercial benefits, especially in tough economic times.

In Lewis Carroll's classic poem, ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, there is little understanding about what a ‘Snark’ actually might be. There is similar disagreement about the ways in which contemporary universities should be led and managed, and few writers move beyond broad generalisations for action. This is particularly truc for writers analysing higher education from the perspectives of sociological analyses (eg. Meek & Wood 1997) political economy, and institutional theory perspectivcs (eg. Marginson & Considine 2000). Building on recent research by Poole (2000, 2001a), the paper charts current understandings of university governance and leadership, identifies research gaps, and begins to explore how apparently dichotomous managerial choices may be reconciled by university leaders confronting the complexities of managing the enterprise university.

To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care
To pursue it with forks and hope
To threaten its life with a railway-share
To charm it with smiles and soap!
For the Snark's a peculiar creature that won't
Be caught in a commonplace way.
Do all that you know, and try all that you don't:
Not a chance must be wasted today!
(Carroll 1973)

The employer–employee relationship is underpinned by a psychological contract, which refers to employee beliefs about the exchange of employee contributions and employer inducements. However, there is limited understanding of how employers can shape psychological contracts to meet employees' needs and aspirations. Meeting these needs starts with an understanding of employees' preferences for psychological contract contributions and inducements. We propose that career stage models can be used to achieve that understanding. Using the career stage models of Dalton, Thompson, and Price (1977) and Super (1957), we derive insights into the preferred contributions and inducements, respectively, at various points of an employee's career lifecycle. These insights will help organizations create desirable psychological contracts and retain valued employees.

Museums are organizations that need to maintain relationships with several stakeholders in order to achieve their economic and social objectives. In this context, the current paper explores the effect of an organization’s bonding social capital and a manager’s social capital on the organization’s ability to build external relationships, in other words, bridging social capital. Results from the study indicate that the structure of internal social capital (cohesion and diversity) and the manager’s role as a bridging tie facilitate relations with stakeholders and other museum networks. Moreover, collective social capital (bonding and bridging) has a direct impact on innovative proposals, on the museum’s image and on incomes, all of which entail key management implications.

When seeking help or advice, one naturally wishes to get that aid from someone who does the task well, from an expert. Determining whether someone merits that label is not trivial, and the judgment can have important consequences. Experts in most domains, from athletes to plumbers, need to exhibit a high level of performance to maintain their status. But there is another group of professionals that is never examined. The expert status of such experts is conferred via criteria such as education or experience. While their credentials may be challenged, their work itself is not seen to bear upon their status. We refer to this group as privileged experts. These experts make assessments or predictions whose correctness is rarely evaluated. Even if prophecy fails, errors are forgiven. We account for this non-evidentiary perspective by positing a widely-held misconception that expertise generalizes. We outline a task-specific, performance-based, limited-term certification scheme that can supplant privilege.

This paper reports the results of a survey investigating the institutionalisation of business ethics among New Zealand's top 200 organisations. A majority of the respondents indicated that steps were being taken by their organisation to incorporate ethical values into daily operations. However, fewer than a quarter of those surveyed indicated that resources were being set aside to accomplish the objective. The most popular tech-nique for institutionalising ethics was the development of a code of ethics. Training in ethics, ethics officers, and ethics committees were not in common use amongst the companies surveyed. Furthermore, very few organisations indicated that ethical behaviour was specifically rewarded. In contrast, a clear majority indicated that they punished unethical actions and made use of disciplinary processes to regulate employee behaviour. Follow-up interviews with a sample of managers from the organisations surveyed high-lighted a preference for the use of informal processes for the institutionalisation of business ethics.

This study explores the assessment preferences of 453 postgraduate business students in New Zealand, Australia, and Thailand using a survey linking motivational and educational preferences. This study compares the needs of Western students (Australian and New Zealand), Asian (Thai) and international students (predominantly Chinese and Indian students) in Australia and New Zealand (ANZAC). One major finding is that students from these three countries who are socially motivated prefer ‘cooperative learning’. Further, the study specifically shows that students from Thailand are more socially motivated than students from Australia and New Zealand (ANZAC) while International ANZAC students have the greatest desire for cooperative learning. It also shows that group assessment poses quite significant challenges for local ANZAC students and therefore, remedial intervention from universities is essential if group assessments are to remain relevant and useful in achieving meaningful teaching and learning outcomes.

This research reviews the constructs and measurements of guanxi and concludes that colleague guanxi is appropriately conceptualized as a multidimensional construct that describes Chinese colleague relationships. The development of a colleague guanxi scale with four dimensions is described. Two studies test the convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity of the guanxi scale. In validation tests guanxi intensity increases with cognition features (subjective fit and cognitive trust) and results in a positive affect (affective trust). Contributions of the colleague guanxi scale are offered.

In order to understand the characteristics of bioentrepreneurs, this paper seeks to identify the entrepreneurial types present in the Australian biotechnology industry by using the four-way psychological typology (Miner 2000) and identifying linkages between the four-way psychological typology and the Big Five model of personality traits. We believe this is a new approach to using psychological typology in the study of entrepreneurship by mapping with the Big Five model of personality traits. Miner's four typological types are ‘personal achievers’ (PA), ‘super sales people’ (SS), ‘expert idea generators’ (EI) and ‘real managers’ (RM). The Big Five factors are extraversion (Ex), stability/emotion stability (Es), agreeableness (Ag), conscientiousness (Co), and openness to experience (Op). By combining the entrepreneurial types and the five-factor personality traits, we can map the linkage relationships as PA-ExEsCoOp; SS-ExAgCoOp; EI-ExEsOp and RM-ExEsCoOp.

In this pilot study, we find there are more ‘personal achiever’ and ‘expert idea generator’ bioentrepreneurs in the biotech industry with the linkage relationships of PA-ExEsCoOp and EI-Ex EsOp, which lead us to conclude there are strong demands for bioentrepreneurs with managerial skills, sales and marketing skills, skills in forming strategic alliance with partners and skills in securing the public and private capitals through finance channels such as public listing and venture capital. This implies that if PA entrepreneurs acquired more agreeableness personality traits and EI entrepreneurs also acquired more agreeableness and conscientiousness personality traits they would improve the ability of their businesses to attract more financial investments and form sustainable strategic alliance with partners in the Australian biotechnology industry.

In many countries self-employment has increased recently. But, despite evidence that many people enter self-employment willingly out of choice, there appears to be an instinctive aversion to it, possibly based on an assumption that employment is more desirable and beneficial and is, and should be, the norm. Often using a UK viewpoint, this paper examines the history of work and suggests that, in historical terms, employment is the exception not the norm. The age of the job, it is claimed, lasted only from 1840 to 1980, but its influence continues and many government regulations and union practices are still based on the era of the big business, big labour and big government triumvirate. Therefore, if the future is not to be constrained by laws and practices designed for the past, it is important to identify the perceptions and assumptions which prevail about employment and to highlight those which are incorrect.

Previous corporate governance research has paid little attention to the role of chief executive officer (CEO) labor markets in controlling CEO behaviors because the CEO labor market has been considered inefficient. With the increasing mobility of top executives across firms, however, the potential of CEO labor markets to serve as an external disciplining force has been growing. In this study, we argue that CEOs will be more pressured to engage in desirable behaviors as the CEO labor market becomes more efficient. Using a longitudinal sample of S&P 1500 firms in high-technology industries in United States from 2011 to 2019, we found that CEOs tend to increase R&D investment as CEO labor market supply increases. We also found that the tendency is greater when external CEO succession is more frequent in the market. Our results demonstrate that CEO labor markets have the potential to function as an effective external governance mechanism.

Transition from the military environment into a civilian environment is a topic that has seen increasing attention within the last two decades. There is, in the literature, a clearly articulated issue that transition from the military to the civilian world is somewhat different to transitioning from school to work, or from career to career, or from work to retirement. Many, but not all, of the extant examples regarding military transition are case studies, focus groups or small-scale qualitative surveys. The following article details a large-scale survey that took place in New Zealand in 2019. From just over 1400 responses, a wide range of information was gathered. The aim of the survey was to uncover the experiences of military who had undergone transition within New Zealand. In this respect, the survey was exploratory. We report here the qualitative results that expand the existing body of knowledge of military transition. Our results are in line with international results and demonstrate that a large majority of respondents had a less than desirable transition experience. The contribution made therefore is a reinforcement that current practice in this area is needing a great deal of attention. The following outlines the experiences our New Zealand-based respondents had and how this mirrors the extant international literature. As this was the first survey of its kind to attract large numbers of respondents within New Zealand, the results and discussion that follow present aspects of transition that the Ministry of Defence and the New Zealand Defence Force may wish to consider when planning future transition programmes.

Dynamic capabilities are central to firms' strategic decision-making and have received increasing attention in recent years due, in part, to the development of the information society. This research explores how web-based and human information sources interact and advance the development of dynamic capabilities. We use a mixed-methods approach executed in two studies. Study 1 reports insights gleaned from in-depth interviews with 12 senior managers. Study 2 provides the findings from a survey completed by 139 senior managers. The analysis indicates that the use of web-based and human information sources facilitates all dynamic capabilities types – sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring. Furthermore, sensing mediates the effects of the information sources on seizing and reconfiguring. This research highlights the strategic potential of using business information sources to advance dynamic capabilities while differentiating between the most commonly used information sources and inspecting their individual and synergistic effects on the advancement of dynamic capabilities.

Defending social and political positions other than those that a company's clients might support has always been an avoidable risk. However, this practice, called ‘corporate activism,’ has gradually been integrated into the strategies of organizations. The object of this work is thus to understand the antecedents of corporate activism from the consumer's point of view. To understand this, we carry out structural equation modeling (SEM) based on a sample of 1,521 consumers. The results demonstrate that: (i) institutional credibility, corporate credibility, and authenticity act as antecedents of corporate activism; (ii) corporate credibility has a positive influence on corporate activism, while institutional credibility has a negative impact. These findings represent an interesting and novel contribution that helps to understand how these types of high-risk strategies should be adopted. The application of these results could enable companies to determine the conditions that favor a positive evaluation of corporative activism by consumers and avoid the use of such strategies in less favorable situations.

Prof. Ken Parry's (1998) conceptualisation of leadership as a social process provoked a shift in the understanding of the processes of influence in the context of achieving adaptation and change in response to changes in an organisation's environment. Reflecting on the state of leadership literature in recent years, we answer Ken's (2013) challenge to broaden our understanding of the positive outcomes achieved by social processes of leadership. Building on Ken's work, we propose a research framework that makes a linkage between the social processes of leadership, positive organisational behaviour, and specifically psychological capital.

This study utilized social exchange and social learning perspectives to develop a theoretical model about how leader humility predicts follower unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). Using two-wave data obtained from 203 full-time employees nested within 46 work teams in eastern China, regression analyses revealed a nonmonotonic association between leader humility and follower UPB, such that follower UPB was most at intermediate levels of leader humility. Moreover, the strength of this curvilinear relationship was found to be moderated by the followers' organizational identification, such that the inverted U-curve relationship between leader humility and follower UPB will be stronger for followers with high organizational identification than for those with low organizational identification. Implications in theory and practice, along with limitations of our findings, were discussed.

Emerging research in the idiosyncratic deals literature is to examine its negative effects. Thus far, much remains unknown about how and when idiosyncratic deals are associated with employee creative process engagement. Invoking fairness heuristic theory and trait activation theory, we propose and test a model that coworker's idiosyncratic deals have a negative association with witness's creative process engagement through psychological contract violation. Furthermore, we theorize and test the combination of the responsibility for change and perceived exploitative leadership as important boundary conditions, associate interact with coworker's idiosyncratic deals to strengthen the positive impact on psychological contract violation, thereby reducing witness's creative process engagement. We use two time-lagged studies to provide support for these mediation and moderation effects, and also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.