John Blenkinsopp and Gill Owens
The paper aims to develop an expanded conceptualisation of copreneurship, locating it within the family embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship.
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to develop an expanded conceptualisation of copreneurship, locating it within the family embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws upon entrepreneurship and family business literatures in order to identify the concept of copreneurship within both traditions.
Findings
Copreneurship has been examined by researchers in both fields and, although there are limitations to the current understanding, it clearly represents an important phenomenon, and the role of spousal support in entrepreneurship being identified as particularly significant.
Research limitations/implications
By locating copreneurship as a key link between the entrepreneurship and family business literatures, this paper offers a useful basis for framing subsequent work using insight from both fields.
Practical implications
Copreneurship, and other forms of small family firms, represent a high proportion of new ventures and there are, therefore, considerable policy benefits to gaining greater understanding of the dynamics of such ventures.
Originality/value
The paper offers an expanded conceptualisation of copreneurship which both increases its utility as a construct and highlight key definitional issues for future research.
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Michele Rigolizzo, Zhu Zhu and Jean-François Harvey
This study aims to empirically examine the relationship between the leader characteristic of humility and the informal learning of team members. It also evaluates the role of…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to empirically examine the relationship between the leader characteristic of humility and the informal learning of team members. It also evaluates the role of leader authenticity in mediating that relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected on 518 salespeople reporting to 66 managers in a time-lagged study of a financial services firm. Generalized structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data and test a multi-hierarchical mediation model.
Findings
Leader humility has a significant positive direct and indirect effect on individual informal learning in team contexts, and leader authenticity partially mediates this relationship.
Research limitations/implications
This study advances research on how leaders can help transform learning from a risky endeavor to a daily practice. It shows the impact of the leadership characteristic of humility and explains how humble behaviors provide a model for individual learning in team contexts. It also reveals that leader authenticity is a key mechanism through which leader humility comes to influence employees’ informal learning within work teams.
Originality/value
This study provides empirical support for the importance of leader humility in engendering the trust required for employees to engage in everyday workplace learning. It integrates social information processing theory with social learning theory to show that humble leaders provide critical information about the value, cost and methods of individual informal learning in team contexts. Leader humility increases employees’ beliefs that they can and do learn from working in teams because employees perceive the humble leader’s behaviors as representing the leader’s true intentions.
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Ilay H. Ozturk, John M. Amis and Royston Greenwood
The Scottish civil justice system is undergoing its most substantive transformation in over 150 years. This reformation will create new judicial bodies, alter the jurisdictional…
Abstract
The Scottish civil justice system is undergoing its most substantive transformation in over 150 years. This reformation will create new judicial bodies, alter the jurisdictional reach of courts, and drastically unsettle what has been, up to now, a highly stable institutional field. These changes have caused pronounced threats to the status of different groups of actors in the field. Our work examines the impact of these threats, and the varying responses among groups of professional actors. In so doing, we detail how intra-professional status differences and uncertainty hindered attempts to maintain threatened institutions.
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The long‐term survival of a business often hinges on its ability to successfully introduce new products into the marketplace. These new products and their successful development…
Abstract
Purpose
The long‐term survival of a business often hinges on its ability to successfully introduce new products into the marketplace. These new products and their successful development can be the lifeblood of a company. This paper aims to examine why product development delays occur in SMEs, the nature of these delays, and what can be done in order to avoid them.
Design/methodology/approach
This research is exploratory in nature and provides empirical support to several propositions found in the innovation management literature on the development of new products.
Findings
Various reasons for delays in new product development are found, including poor definition of product requirements, technological uncertainties, senior management support, lack of resources, and poor project management. Major concerns raised included management and organisational style, lack of attention to detail, limited support for innovation, lack of strategic thinking, and poor manufacturing capabilities.
Originality/value
The consistent development and introduction of new products that customers value can be an important criterion for business growth and prosperity. Suggestions to help accelerate the NPD process in SMEs are presented, including active and visible senior management commitment, early involvement of functional groups, the introduction of new work methods, early market/technical testing, and effective new product organisations.
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Jia-Bo Guo, Hao-Chieh Lin and Yi-Hsien Wang
Because of the interest of enterprises and unions are often conflicting. For unions, how to promote union instrumentality is a critical issue. This study aims to apply the…
Abstract
Purpose
Because of the interest of enterprises and unions are often conflicting. For unions, how to promote union instrumentality is a critical issue. This study aims to apply the resource dependence theory to examine the role of cooperative approach to conflict in the relationship between union–enterprise guanxi and union instrumentality under the moderation of union leader humility.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire survey was undertaken to collect data from enterprise human resource (HR) manager and union stewards in Taiwanese firms using a dyadic approach. Hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping with a mediation model and moderated-mediation model were used to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The results show that cooperative approach to conflict is a prominent mediator between union–enterprise guanxi and union instrumentality, while union leader humility strengthens the positive association between cooperative approach to conflict and union instrumentality. Moderated-mediation analysis further demonstrates that the influence of the cooperative approach to conflict is stronger when there is a higher level of union leader humility.
Originality/value
The study offers an integrated picture about how union–enterprise social relationships promote union instrumentality.
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Elizabeth Gammie, Erica Cargill and Bob Gammie
The ever‐increasing cost of seeing a graduate training contract through to its successful completion has made the selection decision, and indeed the choice of selection techniques…
Abstract
The ever‐increasing cost of seeing a graduate training contract through to its successful completion has made the selection decision, and indeed the choice of selection techniques used, increasingly vital. This paper identifies the selection methods currently used by the Scottish accountancy profession to recruit graduate trainees, compares these against best practice and highlights a number of areas where improvements to current practice would be recommended. Analysis of the selection literature revealed the range of selection techniques on offer, and from a consideration of the validity and reliability of each technique, it was possible to identify best practice in graduate selection. Data was collected by sending a questionnaire to 79 firms of Scottish Chartered Accountants. The targeted firms constituted the entire population of Scottish firms seeking to recruit a graduate trainee to commence in Autumn 2002 (as detailed within the annual ICAS Directory of Training Vacancies). Using the results of the primary and secondary data, the skills currently being sought by firms of Chartered Accountants in their graduate trainees were identified. The methods used by firms to identify these skills were then examined with each method being examined in terms of its current use as well as its value and effectiveness in practice. It was found that there have been significant changes to the skill‐set sought by firms in the early 21st Century as compared with a decade ago, with less emphasis on numeracy and more interest in softer skills such as communication and problem‐solving. As regards the techniques currently employed by firms to identify these skills, it was found that there has been some progress made over the last decade. However, the majority of firms are still reluctant to let go of what is now considered to be the more traditional interview‐based approach to selection, favouring this above what might be considered the more innovative techniques on offer. Further, it was found that few firms have designed their selection process specifically to identify the skill‐set that they have delineated. Thus, a consequent lack of consistency throughout the selection decisions was evidenced.
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Dirk van Dierendonck and Milton Sousa
Modern organizations are going through continuous changes and have to deal with high uncertainty due to the still growing worldwide competition and a quickly changing economic…
Abstract
Modern organizations are going through continuous changes and have to deal with high uncertainty due to the still growing worldwide competition and a quickly changing economic climate. This may have serious social implication for the wellbeing of the employees involved, which potentially leads to economic losses due to reduced productivity. The premise of this chapter is that servant leadership may make a significant difference in the successful rolling out of organizational change. Leaders play an essential role in shaping meaningful working conditions. This process of sense giving is even more important in times of change. The core reasoning is that servant leaders enhance a sense of meaningfulness through a combination of personal attention and by their ability to relate change to a larger picture that goes beyond the organization. Our model shows how servant leadership can be effective by working through four pathways (self-connection, unification, contribution, and individuation) in order to encourage a greater sense of meaningfulness among employees.
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Tomika Ferguson and Mahauganee Shaw Bonds
With heightened national attention placed on race and gender identity, the ability and preparedness of students to engage in critical conversations on such topics and with diverse…
Abstract
With heightened national attention placed on race and gender identity, the ability and preparedness of students to engage in critical conversations on such topics and with diverse groups is of much concern to educators. High school student-athletes are frequently thrust into the spotlight on topics related to race and racial identity, due to their hypervisibility and role as representatives of their schools. This chapter uses current events involving Black girl, high school, student-athletes to demonstrate how racialized and gendered experiences may shape how they understand themselves as well as their school and non-school environments. Further, this chapter includes a study that highlights the narratives of two Black female college athletes who, when prompted to discuss racialized and gendered experiences, shared stories that highlighted their primary and secondary educational experiences. These narratives identify school diversity and fitting in, and the coach as influencer as salient themes from the study. This illuminates the influence of early racialized encounters and the salience of those occurrences in shaping the way Black girls think about their own racial and gender identity development. In closing, this chapter calls on educators to prepare themselves to facilitate conversations about race through the use of equity audits, effective programming for Black girls, and a call for education advocates for Black girls in preK-12 environments.
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Maggie La Rochelle and Patsy Eubanks Owens
To provide insight into young people’s attitudes toward community, place, and public discourse on youth and the environment, and to constructively situate the concept of “a sense…
Abstract
Purpose
To provide insight into young people’s attitudes toward community, place, and public discourse on youth and the environment, and to constructively situate the concept of “a sense of place” within these insights for critical pedagogy and community development.
Design/methodology/approach
This project utilizes a grounded theory approach to identify salient themes in young people’s expressions of place relationships through poetry. About 677 poems about “local watersheds” written by youth aged 5–18 for the River of Words Poetry Contest between 1996 and 2009 are analyzed using poetic and content analysis.
Findings
Findings include the importance of place experiences that employ risk-taking and play, engage central family relationships, and provide access to historical and political narratives of place for the development of constructive place relationships. We also present findings regarding emotions in the sample, showing changing levels of hope and idealism, sadness, pessimism, and other emotions as expressed in the poems.
Research limitations/implications
Using poetic analysis to study attitudes, values, and feelings is a promising method for learning more about the perceptions and values of individuals that affect their self-efficacy and agency.
Practical and social implications
Engaging youth as active participants and empathetic knowledge-creators in their own places offers one opportunity for critical reflective development in order to combat and reframe disempowering public discourses about young people and their relationships to nature and community. Educators can use this research to adapt contextually and emotionally rooted methods of place-based learning with their students.
Original/value
The paper uses a nontraditional, mixed methods approach to research and a unique body of affective data. It makes a strong argument for reflective, experiential, and critical approaches to learning about nature and society issues in local contexts.