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A number of global crises, including financial crisis, global warming, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, have taken place over the past few decades. These have forced firms, the world over, to remodel their business processes to produce goods and services cost-effectively while retaining their competitive advantage and ensuring continuous improvement of organisational performance. To this end, frugal innovations, whose origins can be traced to India, are becoming increasingly prevalent in both developed and emerging economies due to their cost effectiveness. This chapter, therefore, explores how firms can deploy frugal disruptive technologies and modernised digital tools such as artificial intelligence (AI), social media, cloud computing, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), machine learning (ML) and robotics to create sustainable competitive advantage and improve organisational performance within the African context. These frugal disruptive technologies have made significant inroads in a number of developed economies bringing dynamism, efficiency, continuous quality improvement, speed, operational excellence and wider market reach in product and service delivery. Based on an analysis of the empirical evidence from the various case studies, it is concluded that the deployment of frugal disruptive technologies and modernised digital tools have a significant positive impact on firms' efforts to create sustainable competitive advantage and continuously improving their performance. The chapter ends by articulating some limitations and the implications for theory, policy and practice.

Firms use design capability across the globe to compete and increase sales, e.g. Apple. However, the payoff from design know-how has been overlooked thus far. Academic research lags in this space despite the intersection of sales, technology and design in practice. This paper provides researchers and managers with implications of the interplay between design capability and technological market conditions to enhance a firm's sales.

Firms' capability design, and sales impact have been studied in this paper across different technological market conditions. Primary technological conditions of the industry under which firms operate are captured, which are technological intensity (TI), technological competitive intensity (TCI) and technological maturity (TM). Their interplay has been studied using panel data analysis, examining fixed and random effects.

Design is an important, interesting and non-imitable capacity that yields positive firm execution results. It provides an urgent differentiator and improves deal development. This study found that all four hypotheses are generally supported. The main finding is that, provided underlying technology is good, design significantly improves sales, but design alone cannot substitute for poor technology.

The results of this study link the three technological environment conditions, namely, TI, TCI and TM with sales growth. The authors find that design can and does add to superior performance, provided technological excellence exists prior. But, in the absence of good technology, design alone will hinder performance.

This paper examines the effect of firm design capability on sales growth. The paper finds a positive moderating effect of TCI and TM but a negative moderating effect of TI. The researchers believe these aspects of the design have not been studied before.

Drawing on the health belief model and affective events theory, the main objectives of this study are to: (1) analyze which health beliefs about COVID-19 (probability, seriousness and worry) trigger feelings of social isolation; (2) investigate whether psychological capital buffers the escalation of social isolation and (3) analyze the role of the feelings of social isolation as a mechanism that yields drawbacks on mental health, life satisfaction and performance.

Data came from two waves of online surveys administered to 678 employees of a private university in Mexico.

Results of structural equation modeling showed that beliefs of worry of getting COVID-19 trigger social isolation feelings, which, in turn, yields drawbacks on mental health, life satisfaction and performance (i.e. task, creative and organizational citizenship behavior). Moreover, psychological capital buffers the increases in feelings of social isolation generated by beliefs of the COVID-19 severity.

This study provides insightful recommendations for handling future events that might imply social restrictions as a measure of contagion containment.

We contribute to Affective Events literature by linking it to the health belief model. A main criticism of affective events theory is its exogenous blindness and lack of attention to how affect reactions are triggered at work. We address this limitation by bridging health belief model and affective events theory to show what specific health beliefs of COVID-19 produce affects and behavioral reactions in employees.

As companies start using virtual reality (VR) for managing their workforce, it's important to think about the rules and morals involved. This book chapter looks closely at the legal and ethical aspects of using VR in human resource management (HRM). It examines the rapidly developing field of VR technology in HRM, emphasising the complex moral and legal issues it raises. VR is rapidly transforming human resources (HR) practices by providing innovative recruitment tools, remote collaboration platforms and immersive training experiences. However, at the same time, VR presents important concerns about discrimination, privacy and consent. Using case studies, ethical guidelines and regulatory frameworks as resources, this chapter breaks down important factors that businesses using VR in HR scenarios need to take into account. It also governs about the ethical questions, such as fairness, diversity and making sure that the employees feel respected. It explores how VR might create biases or unfairness in hiring or evaluating employees. It deliberates legal issues like keeping personal data safe, respecting intellectual property and following employment laws. Furthermore, it explains how VR can be used to monitor employees or train them and the ethical questions that come with it.

In short, this book chapter stresses the importance of considering both legal rules and ethical principles when using VR for HRM. By doing so, companies can benefit from VR while making sure they treat their employees fairly and respectfully.

Although outcome sharing in construction is a well-established concept in the literature, there is still an ongoing debate on the most effective approach for distributing project outcomes between an owner and downstream contracting parties (DCPs). To address this issue, this paper aims to investigate an optimal framework for distributing project outcomes among various levels of subcontracting in construction projects. The framework includes contractors, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors and other related parties.

To formulate the optimization problem, the principal–agent model is utilized. The theoretical development is validated through an experiment conducted with employees from road construction companies.

When distributing outcomes among various levels of subcontracting, the sharing should be determined by their contribution to the outcome, effort costs, level of outcome uncertainty and risk preference.

This paper expands on the existing principal–agent theory by incorporating multiple levels of agents, transforming the conventional view of outcome sharing among downstream subcontracting levels into testable hypotheses and well-defined concepts. The paper has practical implications for industry practitioners seeking to effectively allocate benefits and costs throughout a project's subcontracting chain.

This inquiry extends the discourse on job satisfaction and employee referral. It aims to examine the moderating effects of perceived business outlook and CEO approval in the dynamics of job satisfaction and employee referral. A model predicting job satisfaction and employee referral through the lens of Herzberg’s two-factor theory is developed and tested.

To remedy the overreliance on self-reported surveys, impeding generalization and representativeness, this study uses large evidence from 14,840 voluntary disclosures of US employees. A structural equation modeling technique is adopted to test the hypotheses.

The inherent robust path analysis revealed intriguing findings highlighting culture and values as exerting the most substantial positive impact on job satisfaction, while diversity and inclusion played a relatively trivial role. Moreover, employees’ view of the firms’ outlook and their approval of the incumbent CEO were found to strengthen the job satisfaction–referral nexus.

The study revisits the relationship between job satisfaction and employee referral by capturing the moderating effects of perceived business outlook and CEO approval. We believe that this investigation is one of the first to capture the impact of these two pivotal factors.

Schools provide high priorities to offer innovative curricular and cocurricular programs, and leaders make necessary efforts to promote enablers and overcome disablers for sustaining their innovativeness. With the background of quality management and stakeholder theories, the present study examines the interplay of hindrances to quality between empowering leadership, stakeholder involvement and organizational innovativeness.

Responses of 157 American school principals collected through the Teaching and Learning International Survey 2018 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development were used and analyzed to test the proposed hypotheses.

Results show that empowering leadership behaviors of school principals support promoting organizational innovativeness, and involvement of stakeholders with the school activities also promotes organizational innovativeness. Interestingly, when American schools faced a high level of hindrance to providing quality education to their students, principals’ high level of empowering leadership behaviors promoted organizational innovativeness.

This is the first time in the literature that the interplay between empowering leadership, stakeholder involvement and hindrance of quality education has been examined to promote organizational innovativeness.