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Drawing on the Job Demands-Resource (JD-R) model, this paper examines innovative culture as the antecedent to employee engagement (EE), taking workplace digitalisation as the mediator and group diversity as the moderator on the workplace digitalisation–EE relationship.

The research model is tested using structural equation modelling, based on 256 online survey data representing the management-level executives of Selangor/Kuala Lumpur-based Malaysian companies.

Our findings support that innovative culture directly affects EE and indirectly through workplace digitalisation. Besides, group diversity moderates the workplace digitalisation–EE relationship.

The findings suggest that organisations can enhance EE in a diversity-oriented digital setting by cultivating an innovative culture to facilitate employees’ perception and acceptance of workplace digitalisation.

Our findings enrich the interdisciplinary literature on how innovative culture, employees’ perception and acceptance of workplace digitalisation and group diversity intersect in reshaping EE.

Drawing on the JD-R theory, this study investigates the effect of working from home on employee engagement and work-life balance considering work-life balance as the mediator in the working from home-employee engagement relationship and altruism as the moderator in the work-life balance-employee engagement relationship.

An online questionnaire using the snowball sampling approach was employed to collect data from 350 professional-level employees working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

The findings indicate that work-life balance significantly affects employee engagement and confirm the moderating role of altruism in the relationship between work-life balance and employee engagement. However, work-life balance does not mediate the relationship between working from home and employee engagement.

These findings advanced JD-R theory in human resource management by focusing on a more humanistic and compassionate approach towards managing employees, particularly in the remote working context during turbulent times.

For this paper, the authors focus on Porter’s competitive advantage. Hybrid strategy refers to how a firm creates value vis-à-vis competitors by simultaneously relying on lower costs and greater differentiation to achieve a competitive advantage. This strategy emphasises both and aims to provide much more monetary value to customers through the combination of reduced cost and a higher rate of differentiation. In addition, this research focuses on family small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), because they have particularities arising from the incorporation of family members both as owners of the SME and in managerial positions. The porpose of this study is to analyse whether the existing differences produced by the role of the family in strategic decision-making and the concentration of family power have a higher impact on performance and innovation than non-family SMEs.

Structural equation modelling was used to analyse Spanish firms with fewer than 250 employees. This study randomly selected SMEs operating in Spain from the Spanish Central Business Directory (2021) database. The overall sample design was based on stratified sampling.

SMEs are facing new challenges, and this has led to the emergence of new competitive strategies. Companies have started to combine differentiation strategies with cost strategies to achieve superior performance and better adapt to these changes. This study confirms a positive relationship between the adoption of hybrid strategies and market performance in SMEs. In addition, hybrid strategy reinforces innovation, which has a mediating role between hybrid strategy and market performance. Finally, the findings indicate that family SMEs achieve a greater impact of hybrid strategy on innovation than non-family SMEs. Moreover, innovation plays a mediating role only in the case of family firms, which enhances the relationship between hybrid strategy and market performance.

For SMEs to survive in turbulent environments, this study proposes the adoption of hybrid strategies instead of pure strategies. The novel model links hybrid strategy (as opposed to “stuck in the middle”), innovation and market performance. The research is valuable for owners and managers of family SMEs because this study finds differences in the relationships studied compared to non-family SMEs.