How to Promote the Agricultural Company Through Environmental Social Responsibility to Achieve Sustainable Production?

This survey employs the multilevel growth curve model to demonstrate how to promote the development of the company’s environmental innovation in agricultural companies specializing in the agricultural production and export of agricultural products to achieve sustainable production through environmental social responsibility and environmental engagement according to the engagement theory. The empirical data are collected 30 chief executive officers and their 90 supervisors of top management teams (TMTs) of Taiwanese agricultural companies in 2 months. The empirical results demonstrate that environmental social responsibility significantly influences the top management teams’ environmental engagement development, which in turn significantly influences the agricultural company’s environmental innovation. These empirical results can not only promote the sustainable production literature in the agricultural field but also help these agricultural companies implement environmental innovation to realize sustainable production of agricultural exports.

Environmental, social, and corporate governance activities with employee psychological well-being improvement

Background Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) engagement is expected to benefit corporations in terms of their efficiency and sustainability. The transformative change in management practices would not only provide support for employees but also bring about additional workload, which may affect employee psychological well-being. However, the examination of the relationship between corporate ESG activities and occupational stress is scarce; hence, this study aims to fill this knowledge gap. Methods In total, 110,351 observations were collected from 41,998 employees regarding occupational stress to reflect employee psychological well-being. The data were derived from 11 corporations in Japan from 2017 to 2019. Data on ESG activities were collected from the MSCI ESG database from 2015 to 2017. The effect of 1-year lagged corporate ESG activities on employee psychological well-being was investigated using a lagged variable linear regression model. Results Positive and negative relationships were found between corporate environmental activities and occupational stress. Activities that reduce water stress during operation and adopt clean technology were found to benefit employees’ psychological well-being. On the contrary, the program for reducing toxic emissions and waste lowered employees’ occupational stress levels significantly. Regarding corporate social activities, the improvement of job satisfaction or work-life balance was associated with occupational stress. However, corporate governance activities were found to have unfavorable effects on employees’ psychological well-being. Conclusion The effects of corporate ESG activities on employees’ psychological well-being are found. The managerial implications suggest that caring for employees’ occupational stress during the implementation of environmental activities is necessary, and the adoption of social activities could enhance employees’ psychological well-being. Notably, corporate governance activities are a stressor for employees; top management teams should pay attention to it.

Examining the cohesiveness and nestedness entrepreneurial ecosystems: evidence from British FinTechs

It is not clear if entrepreneurial ecosystems are cohesive wholes within a region that support high-growth entrepreneurship across a variety of sectors or if ecosystems are made up of several, nested sectoral-specific sub-ecosystems. This debate speaks to larger disagreements about what entrepreneurial ecosystems are and how they work. This paper addresses this research gap by using a novel methodology based on career history data of founders and top management teams of high-growth FinTech ventures. This method is used to classify the backgrounds of 1,570 individuals in 380 British FinTech firms based on their prior job histories and employers into categories such as technology or finance. The paper finds substantial evidence of nestedness in the ecosystems, but rather than FinTech ecosystems being specialized finance or technology clusters, more generic forms of managerial know-how remain crucial to firm innovation and growth. This suggests that even very advanced ecosystems remain nested, with few cross-over points between different communities.

Defence mechanisms as predictors of trust and positive relationships in top management teams

BACKGROUND: Top managers are heavily exposed to strong negative emotions due to the difficult decisive situations that they experience and the persistent pressure of time and uncertainty. At the same time, the relationships they build within TMTs shape their decisions, experiences and reactions at work. The paper refers to defence mechanisms as relatively persistent means of individual response to unwanted emotions and affects. OBJECTIVE: The aim of the paper is to examine the defence mechanisms of TMT members as antecedents of perceived trustworthiness of other team members and positive relationships in the team. METHODS: The empirical study was conducted in a sample of 123 members of top management teams representing furniture industry companies in Poland. RESULTS: The results show that defence mechanisms determine TMT members’ perception of trustworthiness of other team-members and that perceived trustworthiness mediates the relation between the defence mechanisms of TMT members and their evaluation of relationships within a team. CONCLUSIONS: The study explains links between individual characteristics of TMT members and processes within the teams. It contributes to upper echelon theory and literature on trust and positive relationships at work. It also contributes to the line of research introducing unconscious processes and emotions to management studies.

DOES BOARD USAGE OF KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS AFFECT INTERNATIONALIZATION PERFORMANCE OF SMES? A CASE OF LITHUANIA

Internationalization of SMEs is encouraged by the advantages of new environmental conditions and appealing business opportunities, but remains a challenging process. Top management teams and more specifically board of directors appear to be a critical determinant in addressing internationalization issues. In recent years, investigation of boards in small firms’ context has been an interest of scholars, however few investigated characteristics of human capital. This study aims to investigate whether board usage of knowledge and skills is a mediator linking characteristics of human capital of board and internationalization performance of SMEs in Lithuania. The results revealed that usage of knowledge and skills mediates the relationships between international business skills and internationalization performance. Obtained results contribute to international entrepreneurship and upper-echelons theories by highlighting the role of the board in SMEs and linking it to higher internationalization performance through their usage of knowledge and skills. This study fills the research gap and extends the extant studies in internationalization of SMEs. First, the study responds to the need to investigate how board’s capital affect internationalization. Secondly, the study responds to the need to go beyond input-output models.

The Aggregation–Learning Trade-off

Organizational decision making that leverages the collective wisdom and knowledge of multiple individuals is ubiquitous in management practice, occurring in settings such as top management teams, corporate boards, and the teams and groups that pervade modern organizations. Decision-making structures employed by organizations shape the effectiveness of knowledge aggregation. We argue that decision-making structures play a second crucial role in that they shape the learning of individuals that participate in organizational decision making. In organizational decision making, individuals do not engage in learning by doing but, rather, in what we call learning by participating, which is distinct in that individuals learn by receiving feedback not on their own choices but, rather, on the choice made by the organization. We examine how learning by participating influences the efficacy of aggregation and learning across alternative decision-making structures and group sizes. Our central insight is that learning by participating leads to an aggregation–learning trade-off in which structures that are effective in aggregating information can be ineffective in fostering individual learning. We discuss implications for research on organizations in the areas of learning, microfoundations, teams, and crowds.

CEO Self-Monitoring and Corporate Entrepreneurship: A Moderated Mediation Model of the CEO-TMT Interface

Focusing on the interface between CEOs and top management teams (TMTs), we argue that CEO self-monitoring positively impacts a firm's pursuit of corporate entrepreneurship through the intervening role of TMT behavioral integration. We additionally argue that the impact becomes stronger as the firm's discretionary slack decreases because decreased slack creates an organizational context more favorable to the influences of both CEO self-monitoring and TMT behavioral integration. Results based on multisource (CEOs and TMTs) and multiwave data from 110 firms support the model and associated hypotheses.