The aim of this paper is to determine whether Australian SMEs could be characterised as ‘deliberate’ or ‘emergent’ in their strategic approaches. More specifically, surveying 1230 Australian SMEs, this paper focuses on answers to the following questions: What is the nature and prevalence of strategic practices in Australian SMEs? and to what extent does firm size differentiate the patterning and prevalence of strategic practices? The findings add to the little empirical research showing the principal activities and tools that comprise the strategic practices undertaken in Australian SMEs. Overall, and in both small and medium enterprises respectively, strategic thinking and action seem to be undertaken with the use of a framework of a written business plan which is in line with the ‘deliberate’ approach; however few sophisticated strategy making techniques were employed. Researchers and practitioners may find it valuable to develop tools that will naturally suit SME firms so that these tools can be of more value. Academics and tertiary institutions will be well advised to develop strategic management courses which also specifically focus on more emergent approaches designed for smaller firms including specially developed techniques and tools that are less time-consuming and expensive to use and more suited to smaller firms. This would enable SMEs to expand the range of strategy making tools they employ.

Existing research suggests that leaders/supervisors are the major persons in work organizations to promote employee perception of job significance, which is an intrinsic motivator for employee productivity. However, the literature remains unclear on the relationship between workplace friendship and perceived job significance. Results from a survey of 290 Taiwanese employees indicated that workplace friendship enhanced perceived job significance, and such enhancement did not vary across organizational levels. Our findings suggest intrinsically motivating employees through workplace friendship, which extends extant literature on work role of leaders/supervisors in employee motivation. Further, although lower organizational levels have a disadvantage of objectively less job significance in work organizations, our findings suggest workplace friendship is an effective factor in promoting employee perception of job significance. Thus, organizations can embed the mechanism of workplace friendship into the factors of job design to promote employees' intrinsic motivation and thus job and organizational productivity.

Strategic alliance research emerged to explain alliance formation based upon transaction cost minimisation and opportunism reduction. Later research, and early research from Japan, emphasised the role of alliances in facilitating the transfer of knowledge between organisations. Most recently, alliance research has focussed on the development of shared, potentially idiosyncratic, resource stocks. This paper builds on this recent research, testing the proposition that alliances are important vehicles allowing firms to access or acquire external resources, hence shoring up capability gaps and building new capabilities as required during firm, product and industry life cycles. Using a sample from Australian manufacturing small-and-medium-sized enterprises, the paper reveals that alliances employed by firms can be viewed as initiatives to either fill a gap in the firm's resource stock or to exploit a perceived opportunity in its operational and strategic environment.

This research is an attempt to explore the impact of an innovative case assessment technique on a deep versus surface approach to learning as adopted by a large cohort of undergraduate management students studying in a reputed University. Specifically, a case assessment incorporating peer assessment in the form of a Case Challenge was introduced by the researchers to enhance deep learning, as an innovation to compartmentalized approaches to case assessment that may foster surface-level approaches to learning. Data collected through structured interviews suggest that inclusion of a challenge component in case analyses, directed and led by a peer group, substantially increased the level of preparation and ownership assumed by both the presenting team and challenging team in their own learning as also learning for the rest of the class. Results are discussed in the context of contemporary literature on learning-oriented assessment in general and the impact of peer assessments on deep versus surface approaches to learning in particular.

Dynamic capabilities ‘create, extend or modify’ the firm's current operating capabilities in order to enable strategic renewal. Although widely recognized, this conceptualization of the relationship between dynamic and operating capabilities lacks empirical grounding. Using process research into the difficult radical new product development path of a new influenza drug, our data reveal that dynamic and operating capabilities have a stage-gate type relationship. We demonstrate that dynamic capabilities need to achieve certain critical outputs if successful transfer to the operating capability stage is to be reached. Furthermore progress from one stage to the next is dependent on how well dynamic capabilities co-specialize with downstream operating capabilities. This co-specialization is enabled via three processes within a dynamic capability: value network knowledge generation, value schema development and value proposition development.

Managerial discourses on diversity invoke goals of inclusion and emancipation of suppressed individuals and groups as well as objectives of creating benefits for organizations and society. Partially due to this two-fold emphasis, diversity discourses may, however, be as restricting as they are liberating to the subjects of which they speak. In this article we suggest that utterances pertaining to diversity discourse should be understood as constitutive rhetoric marked by three discursive regularities: address, categorization, and invitation. These regularities underlie and restrain the multiple discursive practices of the developing field of diversity management, and as researchers and practitioners alike continue to explore and enhance this field it is important to understand – and seek to broaden – its conditions of possibility. Emphasizing the theoretical argument about discursive regularities and their articulation, we provide an illustrative example of the how different discursive practices may reproduce common limitations by exploring contributions to Danish diversity discourse.

The study focused on mentoring relationship effectiveness (RE) from the perspective of protégé in the healthcare environment. The purpose tried to examine the effects of interpersonal attraction, self-efficacy and transformational leadership (TL) on RE respectively, to test mentoring function as a mediator, and to verify the effect of RE on protégé work outcomes. Self-administered questionnaires were employed and 306 questionnaires from hospital nurses were collected in total. Structural equation model was used to test the research model. The results indicated that interpersonal attraction and TL do have positive effects on RE while self-efficacy was not; RE also showed a significant effect on job satisfaction and organizational commitment, which verified that the formal mentoring among nurses was good for improving relationship quality and relationship learning between mentors and protégés. Accordingly, to strengthen the antecedent variables would be helpful for mentoring RE, and also the protégé's work outcomes.

There is widespread agreement that organizational learning (OL) and firms' innovative culture (innovativeness) positively influence organizational innovation (OI), which ultimately fosters long-term competitiveness. However, there is more limited empirical evidence on the role of OL as a forerunner of innovativeness, or on the combined effects of OL and innovativeness on OI and how performance is ultimately improved. In this research, OI is evaluated as a firm's actual ability to regularly adopt and implement more technical and administrative innovations with a greater degree of incorporated novelty relative to their main competitors. The aim is to approach innovation from a comprehensive viewpoint and to assess the attainment of superior competitive advantage in the innovation field. Effects on performance are evaluated at both the organizational level and in the commercialization of new services by means of two different conceptual model. These models are tested on a sample of 246 knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) located in Spain. We used polychoric correlations (Lee, Poon, & Bentler, 1995), together with a robust methodological approach, to analyze categorical variables in structural equation systems in EQS. The empirical results show that OL is an important antecedent for innovativeness, and that the latter plays a key role in the adoption of more technical and administrative innovations with a greater degree of incorporated novelty. Organizational learning exerts a direct effect on administrative innovation efforts although, contrary to previous research, the mediating role of innovativeness is required for the former to affect technical innovation. The research also supports the influence of OI on the attainment of competitive advantages at the business level and in the performance of new services. The greater ability of KIBS to innovate thus constitutes an invaluable resource to foster customer performance and profitability at the business level and in the commercialization of new service offerings.

Using a content analysis on a sample of 77 internet companies that went public in the late 1990s, this paper tested the factors surrounding the legitimacy of new firms in a turbulent environment. Support was found for most of the hypotheses as to which factors were legitimating and which had the opposite effect. Legitimating factors included CEO Duality and Alliance inclusion while delegitimating factors included Capital Raising, Acquisitions, Restructuring, Delisting and Geographic Diversification. This paper adds to the theoretical issues surrounding legitimacy as a precursor to reputation. At the same time, this work fills a gap in the literature which currently lacks empirical testing of the notion of legitimacy.

As a transformative service, aged care has the capacity to create uplifting changes and improvements to the quality of life for individuals and communities. Recent studies have, however, highlighted the pressures faced by aged care workers and the impact that these pressures have on employee wellbeing and quality of care. This paper explores the relationship between employee wellbeing and service quality. We present a model for the aged care sector which suggests that by identifying and implementing appropriate HRM strategies both employee wellbeing and service quality will be enhanced thus ensuring that this transformative service meets the needs of its many stakeholders. Essentially, we argue that employee wellbeing is directly linked to service delivery outcomes and overall business performance and that HR practices that address issues such as learning and development, employee voice and involvement and workplace health and safety play a significant role in enhancing and maintaining employee wellbeing.

Despite a prolific research literature on the question of what makes teams effective, the literature is still limited on the role that team level emotions play in this process. In this article, we argue that the construct of workgroup emotional climate (WEC) provides a useful perspective from which to examine this matter. Following a discussion of the importance of considering emotions in organizational studies generally and team research, specifically, we draw on evidence of cultural differences in emotional experience and expression to develop a model explicating how cultural orientation can impact on the relationship between WEC and workgroup effectiveness. The model presented in the paper represents a significant development in our understanding of the role of cultural differences, specifically the influence of the individualism–collectivism identity orientation, in WEC and its relationship to workgroup effectiveness. Future directions for research and practice arising from the model are also presented.

The current study examined the use of biographical data to predict errors, tardiness, policy violations, overall job performance, and turnover among nurses. The results of the study indicate that biodata measures are valid selection devices for nurses and effective at predicting nurse errors, tardiness, policy violations, and overall job performance, but the instrument was not an effective predictor of turnover, voluntary or involuntary. Additionally, examination of group differences revealed that White subjects scored significantly higher on the biodata instrument compared to Black subjects but produced group differences considerably smaller than typically found with measures of cognitive ability. Future research directions and implications for practice are discussed.