The effects of employee-perceived leadership paradigms on multiple measures of firm performance collected from managers and customers in small businesses were examined. Four leadership paradigms operating in Australian retail pharmacies were assessed against six performance measures – financial outcomes, staff and customer satisfaction, productivity, retaining staff, and manager retention. Structural equation modeling, regression, and analysis of variance were employed to test the hypotheses. Predictions that firms characterized by visionary and organic/distributed leadership would outperform those using classical and transactional leadership were supported on all measures. Furthermore, the emerging organic leadership paradigm outperformed the others on every measure.

In management studies, systems theory is an underexplored construct consistent with the dynamic capabilities framework. The systems approach received attention from management scholars in the middle of the last century, but, since then, has been largely abandoned. Meanwhile, academic disciplines have continued to narrow their focus. The capabilities and systems frameworks both adopt a holistic view that calls for all elements of an organization to be in alignment, and both recognize the importance of some form of learning for the purpose of adaptation. Dynamic capabilities go further by recognizing that organizations not only adapt to the business environment, they often try to shape it, too. While systems theory emphasizes internal stability over time and homogeneity across similar systems, dynamic capabilities include an explicit role for management/leadership that allows systemic change to start from within, which is the source of heterogeneity across firms. Dynamic capabilities are part of a system that includes resources and strategy. Together they determine the degree of competitive advantage an individual enterprise can gain over its rivals.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among human resource development (HRD) efforts, top management support, and employees’ attitudes (job satisfaction and organizational commitment) in the Korean context. Based on the Korean Human Capital Corporate Panel survey data, 3,899 responses from 159 large companies were analyzed by adopting hierarchical multiple regression analysis and a regression-based path analysis. The results indicated that HRD efforts positively affected organizational commitment through job satisfaction. In addition, job satisfaction had a moderated mediation effect on the interaction of HRD efforts and top management support on organization commitment. Finally, top management support moderates the relationship between HRD efforts and employees’ attitudes such that increased top management support for HRD efforts improves employees’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

This study examines the relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity with mediating role of trust in leader and moderating role of openness to experience. Data were collected from 205 supervisor–subordinate small textile firms across Pakistan. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the distinctiveness of variables used in our study. The results confirmed that ethical leadership promotes creativity at workplace, while trust in leader mediates the effect of ethical leadership on creativity. Furthermore, the results did not confirm the moderation of openness to experience on the relationship between trust in leader and employee creativity. The implications are discussed.

Given its positive relationship with valued organizational outcomes, worker-related engagement has become a prominent issue for practitioners and for scholars. While recent research has begun to validate various engagement antecedents and outcomes, little is known about the effects that work orientation and supportive leadership have on engagement, particularly among millennial workers, the soon to be dominant generational work group globally. To explore these gaps, we studied a particular form of work orientation – those indicating having a ‘calling’ – along with perceptions of how supportive leadership is for study subjects’ current work. Specifically, we posited positive worker engagement relationships for both worker calling and perceptions of leadership support, as well as for their interaction. Drawing upon a United States-based sample of 297 millennial workers, we found a positive relationship for each hypothesis. This study contributes to the expanding literature on the value of understanding how work orientation and leadership perceptions impact important organizational outcomes.

This study examines the influence of internationalization on corporate philanthropy, and further investigates the moderating effect of political participation of CEO (Chief Executive Officer). Using a sample of Chinese family firms and hand-collected data on corporate philanthropy, internationalization, and CEO’s political participation, our findings show that internationalization is significantly positively associated with corporate philanthropy, suggesting that internationalization plays an important role in promoting corporate philanthropy because of the mounting interaction of corporate philanthropic consciousness among multinational companies. In addition, CEO’s political participation reinforces the positive association between internationalization and corporate philanthropy. Above findings are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests and further our conclusions are still valid after controlling for the endogeneity between internationalization and corporate philanthropy.