Organizational learning, innovativeness and performance of financial service firms in an emerging market: examining the mediation effects of customer-focused strategy

PurposeThe study investigates the extent to which organizational learning and innovativeness can improve the firms' performance through a customer-focused strategy.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from Indonesian financial service firms using a questionnaire-based survey. The 157 useable survey responses were analysed to test the proposed hypotheses using SmartPLS.FindingsThis study finds that both organizational learning and innovativeness have a positive effect on performance. The effect of organizational learning on performance depends on the variations of the customer-focused strategy. However, innovativeness does not mediate through customer-focused strategy to enhance performance.Practical implicationsIn firms that implement business model innovation, managers should focus on resource flexibility. Where it is responsive, managers need to be concerned with ensuring various uses of existing resources to understand the performance effectively.Social implicationsAs one of the types of dynamic capabilities, organizational learning and innovativeness are also important antecedents of performance.Originality/valueThis study extends the business innovation model from the adaptability of customer-focused strategy. The findings confirm that organizational learning has a prominent role in meeting customer needs for a dynamic market.

Executives’ Environmental Awareness and Eco-Innovation: An Attention-Based View

Eco-innovation is conducive to reducing the costs and impacts on the environment. Meanwhile, executives play an important role in the whole process of enterprise innovation. However, it is unclear whether and to what extent executives’ environmental awareness (EA) affects eco-innovation (EI). Based on the attention-based view, this study discussed the mediating effect of resource flexibility (RF) on the impact of EA on EI and explored the moderating effect of unabsorbed slack resources (USRs). Using surveys collected from 162 Chinese manufacturing firms, we found that (1) EA has a positive impact on EI; (2) RF partially mediates the relationship between EA and eco-management innovation (EMI) and EA and eco-product innovation (EPI); and (3) the effect of EA on EPI weakens with the level of USRs, but the effect of EA on EMI is not affected by the level of USRs. From the perspective of managers’ attention, this study not only enriches the main drivers of eco-innovation but also provides a theoretical and practical framework for the promotion and development of eco-innovation in China.

On the Learning Benefits of Resource Flexibility

Resource flexibility, arguably among the most celebrated operational concepts, is known to provide firms facing demand uncertainty with such benefits as risk pooling, revenue-maximization optionality, and operational hedging. In this paper, we uncover a heretofore unknown benefit: we establish that resource flexibility facilitates learning the demand when the latter is censored, which could, in turn, enable firms to make better-informed future operational decisions, thereby increasing profitability. Further, we quantify these learning benefits of flexibility and find that they could be of the same order of magnitude as the extensively studied risk-pooling benefits of flexibility. This suggests that flexibility’s learning benefits could be a first-order consideration and that extant theories, which view flexibility only as the ability to act ex post, could be underestimating its true value when learning the demand is desirable, for example, when it enables managers to make better ex ante capacity, assortment, or pricing decisions in future periods. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

Correlation among Human Resource Flexibility Strategy, Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Organizational Performance in Ecotourism Industry

To satisfy the demands for production peak, reduce personnel costs for labor, limit the increase of employees in enterprises, and focus on corporate specialty to develop the competitive advantage, enterprises would generally apply human resource flexibility strategy to achieve the objectives. The practice of human resource flexibility strategy would change work-related characteristics; besides, the effect of the system on employees would decide the effort, absenteeism, or turnover. Aiming at supervisors and employees in ecotourism, as the research objects, a total of 500 copies of questionnaire are distributed, and 351 valid copies are retrieved, with the retrieval rate of 70%. The research results reveal positive and significant effects of 1. human resource flexibility strategy on organizational citizenship behavior, 2. organizational citizenship behavior on organizational performance, and 3. human resource flexibility strategy on organizational performance. According to the results, suggestions are eventually proposed, expecting to provide essential assistance for the human resource flexibility strategy in ecotourism and assist in the sustainable development.

Learning, Dynamic Capabilities, and Firm Performance: The Case of Entrepreneurial Firms in the South Korean Fashion Industry

Given their small size and young age, entrepreneurial firms are resource deprived. However, to successfully compete in dynamic environments, these firms are still required to build their dynamic capabilities. Using the ever-changing Korean retail fashion industry, we suggest that entrepreneurial firms deprived of formal marketing departments can learn from their main external repositories of market and product knowledge and develop their strategic marketing (dynamic) capabilities as routines, which, in turn, improve the entrepreneurial firms’ performance. Moreover, following the microfoundations argument of dynamic capabilities, we argue that these strategic marketing capabilities in the form of routines can be further enhanced by the entrepreneurial firm’s human resource flexibility. Our data reveals support for our arguments.