Increasingly chaotic business environments of today demand organizations to be more resilient. While the concept of resilience is widely discussed in disaster (e.g., Wildavsky, 1991) and crisis management literatures (e.g., Manyena, 2006), the literature on organizational resilience is developing disjointedly in organizational studies. The literature review suggests that some factors that are suggested in the literature as components of organizational resilience are sources contributing to the emergence of resilience in organizations. This study proposes an integrative framework for organizational resilience and introduces a new outcome concept of organizational evolvability, emphasizing the heightened sensitivity and increased wisdom of the post-event organization. In this model, sources of organizational resilience are categorized as perceptual stance, contextual integrity, strategic capacity and strategic acting, and organizational resilience leads to organizational evolvability as its outcome. The proposed organizational resilience framework attempts to provide a synthesis of the divergent literature on resilience and aims to strengthen organizational resilience research for richer theoretical and empirical progress.

In the scholarly debate on how to deal with hypercompetition, a dominant logic has become that investing in ‘sensing’, ‘seizing’, and ‘transforming’ dynamic capabilities offers organization’s the potential to repetitively initiate business innovations. Actual research into the micro-foundations of these dynamic capabilities has been limited. This study explores whether modular organizing and lateral coordination are typical processes that support an organization’s sensing function. Empirically the study investigates how these two variables help The Netherlands armed forces to deal with its volatile crisis response environment. The findings show that both predictors stimulate the development of a broad knowledge base from which the organization can operationally benefit. Yet, the study has also uncovered that, when modularity's demand of organizational autonomy is not sufficiently satisfied, the organization becomes preoccupied with its own internal functioning at the expense of its external lateral sensing capacity.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relation between openness to diversity in terms of linguist, visible, value and informational heterogeneity and group processes depicted by group trust and group conflict. We collected data using a web-based survey among 498 academics in multicultural departments. The departments were located in four different Danish universities. We found openness to value diversity and informational diversity to have a positive association with group trust and a negative association with group conflict. Openness to linguistic diversity had positive relationships with group trust. The findings of this study suggest that openness to diversity should be highly prioritized by human resource managers in demographically diverse organizations. Possible interventions include organizational culture change programs, diversity training at individual and team levels as well as rewarding group oriented behavior.

Relationships between coworkers are an important, yet understudied, source of influence in people's lives. While psychological research widely supports the significance of peer relationships, too few studies have specifically examined the impact of relationships between coworkers. The present study was designed to add to the small but growing body of research on coworker relations. Drawing from a large sample of service-sector employees, we tested and found support for the hypotheses that positive coworker relationships independently increase employee motivation and intent to stay above and beyond two sources of supervisor support – immediate supervisors and senior managers. We also examined how employee job status moderates these relationships, finding that the impact of coworker relations on intent to stay was stronger for employees in high-status positions. Job status was not shown to moderate the relationship between coworker relations and motivation, with employees at both low- and high-status levels reporting higher motivation when coworker relationships were good.

Ethical leadership has been widely identified as the key variable in enhancing team-level organizational citizenship behavior (team-level OCB) in western economic and business contexts. This is challenged by empirical evidence in China and findings of this study. Our study examined the relationship between ethical leadership, organizational ethical context (ethical culture and corporate ethical values) and team-level OCB. Team-level data has been collected from 57 functional teams in 57 firms operating in China. The findings suggest that although ethical leadership is positively associated with team-level OCB, ethical context positively moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and team-level OCB. The higher ethical context is found to be, the greater is the (positive) effects of ethical leadership on team-level OCB and the opposite holds true when ethical context is low. Key implications are discussed on the role of contextual ethics for team-level OCB, while managerial implications include how non-Chinese firms could improve team-level OCB in the Chinese business context.

Viewing organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) engagement from the time cost perspective, this study not only investigates the direct effect of person—organization (P—O) fit on OCB but also examines the moderating effect of time evaluation on the effective magnitude of P—O fit on OCB. Specifically, I hypothesized that the positive relationship between P—O fit and OCB will be strengthened (weakened) if employees have a higher future (present) orientation time perspective. A sample of 262 bank financial specialists with supervisor-rated dependent variables is used to examine the hypothesized relationships. Research findings suggest that P—O fit can predict OCB engagement. I also found that time evaluation plays a moderating role in the relationship between P—O fit and OCB such that P—O fit will have a weaker predictive power if the employees have a higher present-orientation time perspective. The research results provide further understanding of why employees engage in OCB.

Export decisions depend on a wide variety of information stimuli. The current research focuses on the attention that international entrepreneurs (IEs) dedicate to different information stimuli relating to how the firm operates internationally, and examines whether the IE's attention varies in function of their experience and knowledge. For their empirical analysis, the authors study the information interests of the IEs in the Spanish natural stone industry. They identify three centres of interest: the strategic attractiveness of the foreign markets, barriers to exporting, and support programmes for exporters. The results show that the IEs are most interested in information about support programmes, and that is due to IEs with scant knowledge about the export markets. As the IEs accumulate knowledge about which are the main export markets, they become more interested in information about the strategic attractiveness of these markets. The authors conclude that a trade-off exists between the information about market attractiveness and the information about support programmes in the IE's attention. In contrast, attention towards export barriers behaves independently and depends on the IE's experience.

Strategic alliance research emerged to explain alliance formation based upon transaction cost minimisation and opportunism reduction. Later research, and early research from Japan, emphasised the role of alliances in facilitating the transfer of knowledge between organisations. Most recently, alliance research has focussed on the development of shared, potentially idiosyncratic, resource stocks. This paper builds on this recent research, testing the proposition that alliances are important vehicles allowing firms to access or acquire external resources, hence shoring up capability gaps and building new capabilities as required during firm, product and industry life cycles. Using a sample from Australian manufacturing small-and-medium-sized enterprises, the paper reveals that alliances employed by firms can be viewed as initiatives to either fill a gap in the firm's resource stock or to exploit a perceived opportunity in its operational and strategic environment.

There is widespread agreement that organizational learning (OL) and firms' innovative culture (innovativeness) positively influence organizational innovation (OI), which ultimately fosters long-term competitiveness. However, there is more limited empirical evidence on the role of OL as a forerunner of innovativeness, or on the combined effects of OL and innovativeness on OI and how performance is ultimately improved. In this research, OI is evaluated as a firm's actual ability to regularly adopt and implement more technical and administrative innovations with a greater degree of incorporated novelty relative to their main competitors. The aim is to approach innovation from a comprehensive viewpoint and to assess the attainment of superior competitive advantage in the innovation field. Effects on performance are evaluated at both the organizational level and in the commercialization of new services by means of two different conceptual model. These models are tested on a sample of 246 knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) located in Spain. We used polychoric correlations (Lee, Poon, & Bentler, 1995), together with a robust methodological approach, to analyze categorical variables in structural equation systems in EQS. The empirical results show that OL is an important antecedent for innovativeness, and that the latter plays a key role in the adoption of more technical and administrative innovations with a greater degree of incorporated novelty. Organizational learning exerts a direct effect on administrative innovation efforts although, contrary to previous research, the mediating role of innovativeness is required for the former to affect technical innovation. The research also supports the influence of OI on the attainment of competitive advantages at the business level and in the performance of new services. The greater ability of KIBS to innovate thus constitutes an invaluable resource to foster customer performance and profitability at the business level and in the commercialization of new service offerings.