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We examine the role of two cognitive styles (intuitive and analytical) in students’ entrepreneurial intentions within two distinct cultural contexts (Kuwait and the United States). Specifically, we...

PurposeThis study examines how transformational leadership on the part of senior attorneys in law firms may affect their subordinate attorneys' performance in an industry experiencing both distinctive leadership challenges and widespread economic upheaval. Specifically, our multilevel theoretical model attempts to capture the moderated mediation relationships between transformational leadership, innovative climate, entrepreneurial orientation, and individual performance.Design/methodology/approachThe study employs of a multilevel path analysis to examine the earlier described conceptual model utilizing primary data collected from 484 attorneys at 31 professional service firms.FindingsThe authors used multilevel path analysis to examine the existence and the extent of a multilevel mediation effect. They found that a firm's entrepreneurial orientation mediates the relationship between supervising attorneys' transformational leadership and individual attorneys' performances. The authors also found that the indirect effect of supervising attorneys' transformational leadership on individual attorneys' performances through entrepreneurial orientation is conditional on the degree of firm innovative climate.Originality/valueThe authors draw on theories of social learning to construct a dual-level theoretical model that connects domains within the leadership and entrepreneurship literatures. It does so by examining the relationships between the law firms' supervising attorneys' change-oriented leadership and their subordinate attorneys' billable hours during a period of severe economic disruption.

This paper describes a classroom exercise related to career development that helps students explore career paths found in their major. While we primarily focus on the Human Resource Management (HRM) major, we provide guidance for adapting the exercise to different majors as well as first year business students. First, we summarize career development literature focusing on college students. We next provide background for the development of the exercise. Our major is required to assess the curriculum as part of university-wide curricular assessment, and we will describe how this exercise grew out of that assessment. We then describe the exercise and the positive outcomes for students. In the Appendices to this paper we provide: a template illustrating how our curriculum builds across years which can be adapted to help orient students in the context of their major, complete directions for the HRM version of the exercise, and instructor teaching notes which include suggestions on how this exercise can be adapted for other majors within business schools. The exercise supports our students’ concerns and university’s interest in assessment and assists students as they make the transition from student life to their professional careers.

While the field of Human Resources increasingly plays a strategic role, there is a call for organizations to become more employee-centered. To examine the tension between strategic and employee-centered approaches, this paper examines bereavement policy. Bereavement policy potentially affects all employees during their careers. The implementation of bereavement policies may have long-term effects on employee commitment and engagement. Additionally, while counseling and medical literature consider this topic, it has had little attention from management scholars and the current literature is disconnected from the work experiences of many employees. We review the literature on bereavement and grief from both scholarly and practitioner perspectives. This literature suggests that typical organizational bereavement policies are grounded in the strategic goals of efficiency and productivity. Next, we examine bereavement through several approaches that consider how work policies affect employees. In doing so, we suggest a conceptual framework that considers employee-centered human resources through the integration of several established literatures. First, we discuss work-life balance as a broader context for organizational bereavement policy. Second, we consider bereavement through an organizational justice framework. Third, we evaluate bereavement literature through virtue ethics to consider the role of community and compassion in organizational life. Based on these approaches we suggest future research as well as practical implementation of bereavement policies that help both the employee and the organization. Finally, the paper concludes with reflections on strategic versus employee-centered approaches in a changing work environment.

One of the world’s most pressing concerns in the next few decades will be job creation. The biggest cause for concern may be the accelerating advances in technology radically reducing the human role in production of goods and services. In this increasingly “autonomous economy”, managers and policy makers must develop strategies and policies to ensure that the impending technological progress leads to “net job creation,” that is, a net positive effect on the overall employment level in the economy. In this effort, this article presents a new perspective and analysis of the net job creation process and the challenges to employment that technology poses. Also discussed are potential managerial and public policy alternatives that may slow the job loss and help cope with the potential consequence of permanent underemployment.

Increases in the cost of benefit offerings have led organizations to cut back benefits in an effort to reduce overall labor costs. Since benefits are difficult to change within an employment contract, we investigated how entrepreneurs reconcile the need to stay fiscally competitive while retaining top talent. Using Entrepreneur Magazine’s list of “Hot 500” fast-growth firms, we surveyed the founders of these firms on their emotional self-management and combined these self-reported responses with objective firm-level data on employment and benefit offerings, gathered using Entrepreneur Magazine’s in-house experts, Princeton Review. Based on a review of the literature, we hypothesized that entrepreneurs’ emotional self-management moderates the relationship between the size of the firm and the total number of benefits offered to employees. Our results with 134 respondents supported this hypothesis. In addition, results showed that the total number of benefits offered to employees was positively related to employment growth as a short-term outcome.

Given that organizations need to manage complex situations, multiple organizational climates can coexist and these climates can jointly influence employee behaviors. However, the mechanisms through which the latter relationships operate are poorly understood. We take a multilevel approach to examine the mechanisms that link organizational innovative climate and employee innovative behavior, and the moderating effects of organizational proactive and risk-taking climates on these relationships. Using multisource data from 105 managers and 39 CEOs, we found that innovative climate was positively related to employee innovative behavior indirectly through employee passion for inventing. In addition, the relationship between innovative climate and passion for inventing became stronger as proactive climate increased, and the relationship between passion for inventing and employee innovative behavior became stronger as risk-taking climate increased. Our study contributes to entrepreneurial research by highlighting the interactive effects of multiple organizational climates on employee innovative behavior.

We examine the relationships and intervening mechanisms between founding CEOs' transformational/transactional leadership and the innovative behaviour of managers. We develop and test our hypotheses on a sample of 39 participating CEOs and 105 managers with the use of a multilevel structural equation model. The results show that both transformational and transactional leadership on the part of the CEO relate positively to managers' innovative behaviour. We also discover that firm's innovative climate mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and innovative behaviour. However, we fail to find the mediating effect of innovative climate between transactional leadership and innovative behaviour. Our findings contribute to an improved understanding of how founding CEOs' different leadership styles affect employees' innovative behaviour in start-ups and to what extent the innovative climate influences the relationship.

We advance understanding of the role that leaders play in promoting psychological empowerment and positive work outcomes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance) for employees who engage in a high degree of electronic communication in their job. By integrating leader–member exchange (LMX) theory and theories of electronic communication, we build and test a mediated moderation model in which employees’ degree of electronic communication in their job amplifies the positive relationship that LMX has to psychological empowerment and subsequent employee work outcomes. Based on a sample of 353 early-career professionals employed in a range of different types of organizations, we found general support for the hypothesized model. We discuss the study’s theoretical and practical implications for leading employees in electronically-enabled work environments.

Given that organizations need to manage complex situations, multiple organizational climates can coexist and these climates can jointly influence employee behaviors. However, the mechanisms through which the latter relationships operate are poorly understood. We take a multilevel approach to examine the mechanisms that link organizational innovative climate and employee innovative behavior, and the moderating effects of organizational proactive and risk-taking climates on these relationships. Using multisource data from 105 managers and 39 CEOs, we found that innovative climate was positively related to employee innovative behavior indirectly through employee passion for inventing. In addition, the relationship between innovative climate and passion for inventing became stronger as proactive climate increased, and the relationship between passion for inventing and employee innovative behavior became stronger as risk-taking climate increased. Our study contributes to entrepreneurial research by highlighting the interactive effects of multiple organizational climates on employee innovative behavior.

Research has shown that employees' affective and normative commitment to change (ACC and NCC, respectively) positively influence their behaviors supporting change; however, organizations are frequently unsuccessful in motivating appropriate levels of employee commitment to change. Using longitudinal, multilevel data collected from a large federal government agency implementing radical organizational change, we extend extant research related to antecedents of commitment to change by examining how employees' hierarchical distance (the number of reporting levels between an employee and the top management team) and the transformational leadership of their direct (immediate) manager both relate to their ACC and NCC. We also shed light on important mechanisms that explain these two relationships by examining the mediating role of employees' perceived effectiveness of top management's change-related communications (TMCs), including the top-down and bottom-up components of TMC. Taking advantage of a longitudinal field design, we tested these antecedents of commitment to change at Time 1 and the longitudinal effects of the Time 1 predictors on commitment to change 12 months later (Time 2). At Time 1, findings supported both the predicted direct and mediated effects. Hierarchical distance and perceived TMC remained significant predictors of ACC and NCC over a one-year follow-up period; however, direct managers' transformational leadership behaviors did not. The study extends previous findings related to antecedents of employee commitment to change and also shows the interplay between different levels of leadership in shaping employee affective and normative commitment to radical organizational change.

We examine the roles of two distinct cognitive styles and national culture in enhancing entrepreneurial intention within the theory of planned behavior framework. First, we examined which of two di...

Extant research on the performance implication of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has mainly focused on how CSR affects the external stakeholders, yet it is relatively understudied how CSR af...

Entreprenurial passion has been of great interest to scholars due to its impact on several key outcomes for entreprenurs, despite the mixed findings. We evaluate the role of emotional labor in infl...

Our paper contributes to the literature on spirituality and management by examining Confucian orientations towards perceived trust. Although Western scholars have rigorously studied the determinant...

Working overtime seems to be a chronic phenomenon for Asian employees and a prevalent aspect of Asian workplaces. Although predictors for overtime work have been rigorously studied so far, it is st...

This study examines how the entrepreneurial process may be driven and shaped by a founder’s passion for inventing. We propose a dual-level, theoretical model that connects domains from the organiza...

We examine the relationship and intervening mechanisms between transformational leadership and innovative behavior in an entrepreneurial context. Based on data from 39 participating CEOs and 105 ma...