“Hey everyone, look at me helping you!”: A contingency view of the relationship between exhibitionism and peer-oriented helping behaviors

This research investigates how an understudied personal resource (exhibitionism) might positively connect with peer-oriented helping behavior, as well as how this connection might be invigorated by four pertinent contextual resources: two resources that speak to beliefs about fair organizational treatment (informational justice and procedural justice) and two resources that capture how employees feel about their work functioning (job satisfaction and organizational commitment). Two-wave survey data collected among banking sector employees reveal that their desire to be the center of attention is associated with an enhanced propensity to extend help to other organizational peers, voluntarily. This process also is more likely when employees (1) believe that organizational authorities provide them with sufficient information, (2) perceive organizational procedures as fair, (3) feel happy with their current job situation, and (4) experience a strong emotional bond with their employer. JEL Classification: M50

Not so different altogether: Putting Lean and sociotechnical design into practice in a process industry

Purpose: The shop-floor organization under lean production (LP) has been hotly debated for about three decades. As this organization concept leaves considerable room for interpretation, the content of lean-inspired changes can vary widely. This paper pleads for a contingency view of how LP is implemented and how the outcomes of lean-inspired changes rely on users’ interpretations of the concept in particular production contexts.Design/methodology/approach: A case study was conducted in two large Norwegian chemical plants. Data from the observations and interviews were supplemented by interviews with top managers in 2017 and 2018. The first author also followed a management audit in one plant, assessing the plant’s overall implementation of the company-specific production system.Findings: The lean-inspired changes in the company had brought about a shop-floor organization typically associated with sociotechnical design (STD), including extensive employee choice autonomy and a broad span of control.Originality/value: Our findings demonstrate the importance of understanding how lean is interpreted in different contexts. Our contingency view may aid organizational designers in making more-informed choices by clarifying relevant issues and trade-offs in lean implementations.

A Contingency Perspective for Knowledge Management Solutions in Different Decision-Making Contexts

A contingency perspective of knowledge management, as one of the popular ways of promoting decision making capabilities, recognizes the need for a fit between knowledge management solutions (KMS) and decision-making contexts which they support. In order to determine the best fit, a field survey was carried out to investigate the impact of two different types of KMS (technical and social) on decision makers' behavior and performance in different decision contexts (simple and complex). According to the results, there is a partial support for the contingency view. As expected, social KMS appears as the best fit for complex contexts, based on subjects' superior performance from comparable adoption of both KMS. In contrast, the results suggest that both KMS were an equally good fit for simple contexts, based on similar levels of subjects' performance, but social KMS was preferred in terms of adoption. These findings contribute to much necessary empirical evidence for research and provide useful guidance for practice. However, their limitations necessitate further study.

IJV’s political ties and R&D strategy: Asymmetric contingencies of market versus governmental policy turbulence

The purpose of this article is to empirically explore (1) the impact of political ties on international joint ventures’ (IJVs) R&D strategy and (2) the moderating effects of market turbulence and governmental policy turbulence on the relationship between IJV political ties and R&D investment in China. Our sample consists of 1,344 observations taken from 224 IJVs over a period of 6 years (2012–2017), and we applied hierarchical moderated regression analysis (HMRA) with panel data to analyze our three hypotheses. Our findings show that IJVs with political ties tend to invest more in R&D than their counterparts without political ties. Interestingly, this positive relationship grows stronger with high market turbulence, but wanes under high governmental policy turbulence. While the issues regarding the importance of political ties to IJVs competing in China have been discussed, the issues related to why political ties influence IJV’s decisions on R&D investment have been largely overlooked. Hence, this study applies the environmental contingency view to fill this gap and shows how asymmetric contingencies for market turbulence and governmental policy turbulence occur in this context. JEL CLASSIFICATION: M1

Factors affecting the effect of exploitation and exploration on performance: A meta-analysis

From a contingency view, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of how exploitation and exploration influence performance. By conducting a meta-analysis, we aim to answer the following research question: How do substantive moderators (slack resources, organizational structure, inter-organizational relationships, competitive intensity, and environmental dynamism), extrinsic moderators (region, size, and sector) and methodological moderators (data sources and performance measurement) affect the impact of exploitation and exploration on performance? The results of the meta-analysis, including 328 correlations, 102 studies, and a sample of 41,298 cases, suggest that the influence of exploitation and exploration on performance depends on the presence of the moderating factors included in our analysis. Furthermore, some of these factors are relevant for explaining a better performance of exploitation versus exploration, while other moderators do not determine a different effect of exploitation and exploration on performance. JEL CLASSIFICATION M10; M19; O3