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Success in the new economy is more dependent on successful relationships with internal and external stakeholders than ever before. The “business ecosystem” has created webs of interdependent relationships between organizations and their employees, suppliers, customers, and business partners. These relationships not only impact how firms add value to customers and create competitive advantage, but various internal processes as well. Unfortunately, these relationships often fail to capture their full potential due to misalignment between the organization and its stakeholders. This article presents a practical guide for organization‐based 360 degree leadership assessment, which should help organizations to identify gaps or “blind spots” with internal and external stakeholders. Borrowing from the multi‐rater feedback literature, a discussion of the steps in using the organization’s leadership as the focal point is provided. Self‐assessment on a series of organizational leadership dimensions is proposed, which is compared to evaluations by employees, customers, suppliers and business partners. The proposal should provide direction for practitioners seeking greater stakeholder feedback, and a foundation for further academic inquiry.

Though academic research into the marketing/ entrepreneurship interface is of only relatively recent origin, it would seem that the basic principles of marketing appear to be equally valuable to both large and small firms. This article provides a critical review of the research into the role and process of marketing in small firms and attempts to classify the existing studies. In so doing, it identifies four approaches, namely the stages/growth model; the management styles model; the marketing as a management function model and the contingency model. From this, it concludes that in order to advance the theory of small business marketing a theoretical framework integrating the contingency approach and the process model appears to hold the greatest potential.

Large-scale change involves modifying not only the structures and functions of multiple organizations, but also the mindsets and behaviours of diverse stakeholders. This paper focuses on the latter: the informal, less visible, and often neglected psychological and social factors implicated in change efforts. The purpose of this paper is to differentiate between the concepts of organizational culture and mental models, to argue for the value of applying a shared mental models (SMM) framework to large-scale change, and to suggest directions for future research.

The authors provide an overview of SMM theory and use it to explore the dynamic relationship between culture and cognition. The contributions and limitations of the theory to change efforts are also discussed.

Culture and cognition are complementary perspectives, providing insight into two different levels of the change process. SMM theory draws attention to important questions that add value to existing perspectives on large-scale change. The authors outline these questions for future research and argue that research and practice in this domain may be best served by focusing less on the potentially narrow goal of “achieving consensus” and more on identifying, understanding, and managing cognitive convergences and divergences as part of broader research and change management programmes.

Drawing from both cultural and cognitive paradigms can provide researchers with a more complete picture of the processes by which coordinated action are achieved in complex change initiatives in the healthcare domain.

The purpose of this paper is to examine, through a microeconomic analysis, the extent to which trip characteristics influence tourism expenditure in 14 emerging urban-cultural cities in Andalusia (Spain).

This analysis was carried out using an ordinary least squares method, which measures influence on tourism expenditure based on the trip characteristics of tourists visiting emerging urban-cultural cities. For this, the authors used 3,030 surveys conducted on tourists who, in 2013, visited 14 emerging urban-cultural cities in Andalusia (Spain).

It was confirmed that certain trip characteristics – type of accommodation, length of stay, trip planning and internet use – determine tourism expenditure in these destinations. The findings provide stakeholders in these destinations with information for the implementation of policies aiming to increase revenue in destinations where tourism development levels are still in their infancy and where, therefore, there are many unexploited opportunities.

First, this study identifies those trip characteristics which influence tourist expenditure in emerging urban tourist destinations. These destinations, to date, had not been previously analysed in expenditure segmentation studies. Second, aside from the factors traditionally analysed in scientific literature, other trip-specific variables were considered; these relate to the means by which tourists familiarise themselves with their destination and the way in which they plan their trip (use of the internet), as the rise of new technologies has radically changed tourism.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the way in which organizational culture affects alliance performance. The literature has begun to focus on intra-firm antecedents of alliance success, but so far has mainly focused on structural aspects like the presence of an alliance department. This paper proposes that interrelated processes of sense-making in alliances and sense-making about alliances shape organizational culture to make it more supportive of alliances.

A survey was developed to operationalize an alliance supportive culture construct. Results from 179 alliance managers were analyzed to investigate the inter-relationship of alliance experience, alliance supportive culture and alliance performance.

Alliance supportive culture was found to fully mediate the relationship between alliance experience and performance. This finding suggests that experience with alliances leads to better alliance performance when this experience is translated into the organizational culture.

Further research may explore how alliance culture interacts with structural elements of alliance management as identified in the alliance capability literature. The interaction between alliance culture and alliance capability is as yet unexplored. In addition, research may take place to explore which elements determine sense-making about alliances.

Managers should not only focus on tools and processes to improve their alliance success. They should also augment the sense-making process about alliances and remove cultural impediments to working with alliances.

Many studies have found a relationship between alliance experience and success. This paper shows this is not a direct relationship, but that it operates via cultural change based on sense-making about alliance experience. This mediation effect has not been established before.

Extant literature has looked at the effect of alliance capability and organizational culture on alliance portfolio performance, but the relationship between the two has not been explored. The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that an alliance supportive culture is not only fostered by a firm’s alliance capabilities, but that it mediates the relationship between capabilities and performance.

Survey responses from 190 alliance managers, collected using a two-stage process, were analyzed to investigate the interrelationship of firm-level alliance capability, alliance supportive culture and portfolio performance.

Alliance supportive culture was found to mediate the relationship between alliance capability and alliance portfolio performance. This finding suggests that in order to effectively manage a firm’s portfolio of alliances, the benefits of alliance capability must be transferred broadly into the organization’s cultural orientation toward alliances.

Further research may extend this analysis to explore the effect of subcomponents of alliance capability and alliance culture to better understand fine-grained influences on alliance performance. The findings of this study also may be extended to inform how supportive culture orientation affects partner selection, negotiation and time to performance.

Managers should utilize culture-building actions as a way of extending the value of their firms’ alliance capabilities in order to improve their effectiveness across the portfolio.

Extant studies have considered the discrete effects of capability and cultural orientation on alliance portfolio success, but the mediation effect has not previously been investigated. The findings also identify a boundary condition for the benefit of alliance capabilities on portfolio performance.

To stay competitive on both local and global scales, companies have to respond rapidly to their customers and to the increasing role of information technology. One way of answering the demands that face today’s management, is to increase employees’ implication in the organization by empowering them. The shift from top to bottom authority to a team‐oriented organization is part of this process. Self‐directed teams (SDT) are a key element in making this shift work. In this paper, after a brief definition and description of this kind of team, we will focus on conflict management as an important factor for their success. Conflict and its mechanisms will first be developed, its consequences on group decision making will be studied at the SDTs level, and a set of conflict management alternatives will finally be presented.

Despite years of advice from researchers that trainee reactions provide training evaluation information that is of very limited use, trainee reactions remain the most commonly used measure of training effectiveness. Because the technology that supports online training facilitates the collection of trainee reaction information during and after training, organizations will likely expand their use of trainee reactions in training evaluation. Thus, the need to understand the utility of trainee reactions in online training is significant. The purpose of this study is to propose a model of trainee reactions based upon the theory of reasoned action and the technology acceptance model.

The model was tested using students participating in online training courses provided by a large landscaping company based in the USA.

Analyses provided partial support for the model. Findings include a negative relationship between computer anxiety and pre‐training motivation, a positive main effect on perceived effort for both pre‐training motivation and trainee reactions, and a positive relationship between trainee reactions and intent to take future online courses.

The generalizability of the results of this study is limited due to the use of student subjects. Also, a small sample size limited the ability to test the full model using path analytic testing.

These results provide meaningful guidance both for researchers and for practitioners responsible for the design and implementation of online training courses.

As disaster resilience activities are increasingly occurring at the neighbourhood level, there is a growing recognition in research and in practice of the contributions that community stakeholders can make in assessing the resilience of their communities. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process in deriving a disaster resilience measurement framework by soliciting the perspectives of stakeholders from urban neighbourhoods in two countries. The authors examined their community values, and their perspectives on both the concept of resilience and the essential elements that they believe would contribute to the resiliency of their neighbourhoods.

The authors used an appreciative inquiry approach to draw out the perspectives of 58 stakeholders from nine focus groups in five urban neighbourhoods in New Zealand and in the USA.

Results of this research show common values and recurring perceived characteristics of disaster resilience across the study sites. A neighbourhood-based disaster resilience measurement framework is developed that encompasses individual/psychological, socio-cultural, economic, infrastructural/built, and institutional/governance dimensions of disaster resilience. In the process of developing the framework, the authors identified challenges in engaging certain segments of the population and in accounting for wider structural influences on neighbourhood resilience.

Issues relating to inclusive community engagement and linkages to cross-scalar resilience factors need to be addressed in future studies.

Results of this research provide insights and guidance for policy makers and practitioners when engaging communities in the development of resilience metrics.

This study fills the literature gap in evaluating community values and stakeholders’ perspectives on disaster resilience when identifying metrics for resilience interventions in urban neighbourhoods. The proposed measurement framework is derived from cross-cultural and diverse socioeconomic settings.

This exploratory study uses a punctuated equilibrium paradigm (PEP) framework to examine the impact and adaptation of an entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) to the COVID-19 pandemic at the organizational and ecosystem level. The aim is to provide guidance to EEs on ways to adapt to future external shocks.

As this study is exploratory in nature, the authors use a sequential mixed method whereby a qualitative method is used first to identify emergent themes from in-depth interviews with EE members, followed by a quantitative method (survey) based on those themes across a broader cross section of EE members.

Entrepreneurial ecosystem’s geographical advantages have declined during the pandemic as EE firms adapted to this external shock by developing more digitally distributed organizations.

Based on the findings, the authors propose an emerging model of EEs that extends the traditional clustering model focused on geography to account for more digitally distributed entrepreneurial clusters. However, the results, based on an in-depth study of one ecosystem, may not be fully generalizable to all EEs.

Given the widespread pandemic impact, the findings may be instructive to EEs and organizations in EEs that aim to become more resilient in the face of potential future external shocks.

As part of the qualitative interview process the interviewees were asked what they would change in San Francisco Bay Area if they had a magic wand right now. They discussed a variety of inspiring ideas, but the most frequently mentioned was their wish to change the focus of business to solve societal problems with a global citizen mindset (e.g. recycling energy, climate change, income inequality, access to education and funding, inequity, wealth gaps, housing crisis and homelessness) to make the world a better place. Additionally, the pandemic exposed some inequality in work conditions across demographics. As firms reorganize to increase resiliency, attention to these issues should be addressed.

This study is unique in applying the PEP to EEs to deepen our understanding about how an EE evolves during periods of sudden external shocks.