Although perceived overqualification is prevalent in the workplace, little is known about when and how it affects employee judgment about future status and thereby leads to political acts for personal benefit. Based on social comparison theory, we proposed that perceived overqualification influenced employees’ engagement in political acts through future status threat, with this indirect effect contingent on their social comparison orientation. We surveyed employees from 20 software companies in China to test our hypotheses. The findings demonstrated that perceived overqualification directly and indirectly promoted political acts, with the indirect effect mediated by future status threat. Additionally, social comparison orientation moderated the indirect relationship between perceived overqualification and political acts via future status threat. These findings constitute new insights for managing perceived overqualified employees.
This study examines how digital transformation influences employees’ work-related outcomes during the crisis and when the effects of technology use are contingent on contextual factors. Drawing on the Job Demands-Resources model and Conservation of Resources theory, we theorize that technology use during crises can shape employees’ negative attitudes and behaviors, whereas chief executive officer’s (CEO) challenging work experience and firm’s digital transformation strategic orientation can buffer these adverse effects. Based on data from 947 employees nested in 46 subsidiary firms, our multilevel analysis reveals that the technology use is negatively related to affective commitment, psychological safety, and change-oriented organizational citizenship behavior. However, the negative effects tend to be less severe when the firm’s CEO has more challenging work experience and when the firm demonstrates a stronger digital transformation strategic orientation. Our findings suggest that internal and external contexts jointly determine the impact of new and advanced technology usage.
We argue that business approaches to biodiversity can be improved by examining the ecological practices of Indigenous entrepreneurs. Drawing on a study with Indigenous entrepreneurs from Chiang Rai, Thailand, we show how specific ecological practices—e.g., self-identification with nature, individual process of information and collaborative restoration—are integrated into their work. These practices demonstrate a deep attachment to nature, yet they are also accompanied by tensions arising from these entrepreneurs’ encounters with biodiversity threats. Our article contributes to the business and biodiversity literature by developing an ‘endless loop’ model that conceives business approaches to biodiversity as an ongoing journey requiring the participation of business leaders, employees, and the wider business community, grounded in the imperative of moralizing biodiversity beyond market utility considerations. We conclude by underscoring the important role of Indigenous entrepreneurs as land stewards and as spokespeople for other Indigenous Peoples, thereby broadening policy discussions on the green economy
This study examines whether China’s mixed-ownership reform (MOR) improves corporate social responsibility (CSR) alongside productivity. Using listed firms from 2000–2021 and staggered MOR adoption, we estimate staggered difference-in-differences models with firm and year fixed effects. We construct a macro-efficiency index that embeds CSR obligations—employment, environmental effort, taxation, and public service—into performance evaluation, and compute productivity using OP, LP, and ACF-based TFP measures. MOR significantly increases productivity and macro-efficiency, with larger effects when the state retains effective control; reforms that substantially dilute state capital deliver no gains. Results are robust to alternative estimators and specifications.
Although self-leadership is often regarded as a positive resource for enhancing individual effectiveness, its potential adverse effects in ethical dilemmas remain underexplored. Drawing upon Self-Determination Theory, this study examines the double-edged sword effect of self-leadership in two typical organisational contexts: temptation of personal gain and risk of loss. Two quasi-experimental studies with a single-factor between-subjects design were conducted among Chinese service sector employees (Study 1: N = 191; Study 2: N = 229). By manipulating the intensity of temptation and risk cues, the study investigated the underlying mechanisms linking inducements to ethical decisions and moral identity. The results indicate that neither temptation nor risk directly diminishes individuals’ moral identity; instead, they exert indirect effects through ethical decision-making processes. Critically, self-leadership emerged as a significant moderator in this pathway: individuals with high self-leadership were more prone to unethical decisions under inducement, thereby weakening their moral identity, whereas in the absence of inducement, they exhibited stronger ethical decisions. These findings uncover the moral risks associated with self-leadership under high-conflict conditions, challenge its traditionally positive conceptualisation, and offer novel insights for identifying and intervening in ethical governance within organisations.
Digital servitization (DS) has emerged as a powerful approach for manufacturers aiming to enhance performance. However, the link between DS and performance remains controversial, with past empirical studies producing varied and conflicting results. This study presents a meta-analytical quantitative analysis based on a sample of 75 independent parameters derived from 51 peer-reviewed journal articles. Results confirm a positive relationship between DS and firm performance. They demonstrate that this relationship is influenced by the individual and integrated roles of digitalization and servitization. Specifically, digital infrastructure exhibits a U-shaped relationship with performance. In addition, contract-based services appear more effective than data-based services, and the interdependence of digitalization and servitization outperforms treating them as independent entities. This meta-analysis unpacks the “DS black box” by exploring the specific characteristics that account for the heterogeneities in the DS-performance relationship.
The global economy faces interconnected challenges involving economic recovery, climate change, and rising geopolitical tensions, as post-pandemic conditions have intensified financial instability and disrupted global value chains. Central to these dynamics is the transition toward a green economy, shaped by diverse national contexts; however, rising costs, technological barriers, and intensified competition—particularly in electric vehicles—have slowed progress and exposed tensions between sustainability and profitability. While firms struggle to balance green investments with financial viability, policymakers increasingly adopt strategic interventions to protect industrial competitiveness, though the uneven distribution of transition costs and benefits is further complicated by geopolitical fragmentation. Consequently, this special issue seeks to advance understanding of these dynamics, with particular attention to how developments in Asia and Europe are interconnected and mutually shaping pathways toward sustainable economic transformation.
To promote sustainability at the industry level, key actors need to work proactively and collectively by transforming existing practices and institutional structures. This paper explores the role of business actors in institutional change and examines the effectiveness of their actions for the green transition. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it draws upon the theoretical framework of “institutional work” in view of three dimensions of institutional capacity as an analytical lens. Using a qualitative, expert-interview method, the study investigates the green building movement in Hong Kong’s construction industry. It analyses how key actors’ institutional work interacts across the different dimensions of institutional capacity development and identifies constraints to the green transition in the industry.
Hidden champions are highly successful companies operating in niche markets, playing a key role in global supply chains. Recently, the Chinese government has launched a national strategy for selecting and supporting their own hidden champions, also called specialized, advanced, differentiated, and innovative (SADI) companies. Nonetheless, it is still unclear if these companies are different from non-Chinese hidden champions and whether their business strategies lead to different performance results. In this study, we investigate how SADI’s business networking strategy relates to their performance, using data from Orbis M A and the list of hidden champions published by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. By mapping the business network, our results show that SADI companies that establish joint ventures with companies from the same industry experience a positive increase in their performance metrics, however unique to the Chinese context Chinese SADI companies do not benefit fully from formal international collaborations.
Asia’s unique socio-economic and technological context demands distinct analysis of the impact of remote work on employees’ well-being. Moreover, previously accumulated knowledge on remote working might lack contextual relevance in the COVID-19 crisis. Interviewing forty participants from Bangladesh and Vietnam, we explore the impact of technology and social support on remote workers’ well-being during the pandemic. Despite socio-economic similarities between Vietnam and Bangladesh, Vietnamese organisations were more technologically aligned in their adoption of remote working. Due to a stronger national technological infrastructure, one-fifth of Vietnamese participants did not experience technological challenges, while it remained the most pressing challenge for Bangladeshis. However, Bangladeshis reported having proper social support, while Vietnamese’ well-being struggled in the absence of such support. This study contributes by offering valuable insights to help organisations and policymakers enhance support systems and nurture a resilient, technology-empowered workforce during and beyond the pandemic, while considering country-specific socio-economic and technological conditions.
This study explores the roles and challenges of Human Resource (HR) practitioners in implementing Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) within Taiwanese and Korean multinational enterprises (MNEs), focusing on the interplay between individual perceptions, organizational dynamics, and external pressures. While prior research has highlighted the strategic importance of GHRM for organizational sustainability, little is known about the everyday challenges faced by practitioners responsible for translating sustainability goals into HR practices. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with HR professionals across industries, this study investigates how practitioners navigate the interplay between external expectations, organizational priorities, and internal resource constraints. Findings reveal that HR practitioners occupy a sandwiched executor mediator role: they are committed to advancing environmental initiatives yet constrained by limited resources, ambiguous strategic direction, and weak cross-departmental collaboration. Moreover, national institutional contexts in Taiwan and Korea reinforce structural and cultural barriers that hinder the full integration of sustainability into HR functions. The study contributes to GHRM scholarship by uncovering the micro-level dynamics of practice implementation and theorizing HR’s evolving intermediary role between sustainability strategy and operational reality. It also offers practical implications for strengthening organizational support, cross-functional collaboration, and contextual adaptability in advancing GHRM.
Despite growing attention to consumer ethics and environmental consciousness, limited research has examined how nation‑level corporate social responsibility (NCSR) shapes international consumers’ purchasing behavior. Drawing on social psychology, CSR, and country‑of‑origin (COO) literature, this study explores how perceptions of a producing country’s NCSR, conceptualized as part of cognitive country image (CCI), influence purchase intention both directly and through affective country image (ACI). Focusing on four major fashion‑exporting countries (China, Bangladesh, Turkey, and Italy), the study investigates how Dutch consumers evaluate these countries’ NCSR. The findings show that perceived NCSR significantly predicts purchase intention and that this effect is mediated by ACI. However, perceived consumer effectiveness does not moderate the NCSR-purchase intention relationship. The study also highlights notable differences in how Dutch consumers perceive sourcing countries, particularly between Asian and European contexts, offering strategic implications for fashion firms seeking to strengthen competitiveness in the European market.
Leader unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) can cause unethical repercussions among employees that could eventually turn into work team unethical climates. While scholars have broadly examined the beneficial aspect of UPB, the unethical behavioral mechanism underlying it – which can be extracted by team members and affect the overall team climate – has been largely overlooked. Grounded in social cognitive theory, this study explores how employees extract the unethical behavioural mechanism underlying leader UPB and form cognitive interpretation that extend beyond their leader’s original behaviour, thereby contributing to the emergence of an overall work team unethical climate. This study also assesses whether employees’ ethical values help attenuate the transmission of the unethical effects of leader UPB. Using multi-wave, multisource data from 165 team leaders and their 495 employees in manufacturing organizations in a Pakistani industrial city, this study conducted structural equation modelling to test the hypotheses. The results support present proposed multilevel top-down and bottom-up associations. Specifically, results show that employees extract unethical behavioral principles from leader UPB and develop broader moral disengagement, which in turn fosters a team-level unethical climate, particularly when employees overlook their ethical values. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
This study explores the relationship between foreign subsidiaries’ status as green energy generating facilities and their Japanese parent utility firms’ levels of equity ownership, relative to foreign subsidiaries engaged in traditional power generation or other productive activities in this industry. We hypothesize that green energy subsidiaries are associated with lower levels of equity ownership following efforts to reduce costs from activities to build local community legitimacy and relationships in green energy production investments. We further posit that this relationship is negatively moderated by host-country economic development, cultural distance from Japan, and regulatory transparency. Using an unbalanced panel dataset comprising 1,394 foreign subsidiary-year observations, from 235 different foreign subsidiaries, across 20 countries from 2013 to 2023. The findings support the idea that Japanese parent utility firms tend to own lower levels of equity in green energy producing subsidiaries, particularly in host countries that are less economically developed and/or culturally distant.
This exploratory case study investigates how a Japanese heat-pump multinational enterprise navigates the EU Green Deal and enacts corporate responsibility amid policy volatility. Drawing on management geography, we re-conceptualize Corporate Spatial Responsibility (CSpR) as a transitional, action-based cycle rather than a linear maturity hierarchy. Using embedded unit interviews with headquarters in Japan, subsidiaries, and business environment organizations (BEOs) in Poland, complemented by archival analysis, we apply Gioia methodology, informed by inductive-abductive approach to identify recurrent managerial action modes (e.g. adapting, networking, lobbying, collaborating, envisioning) through which responsibility and local embeddedness are continuously produced, suspended, and recalibrated. We found that “sand in the gears” emerges from uneven institutional capacity and constantly changing market expectations, which makes embeddedness reversible rather than cumulative. The paper proposed a process-based mechanism linking CSpR activities with embeddedness of a green economy and extend CSpR framework by theorizing space in transition across social, economic, and cognitive dimensions.
The pandemic forced teachers around the world to re-think their instructional design, whereby traditional face-to-face instructions and assessments were replaced with unfamiliar online methods, almost overnight. In studies 1 and 2 (n = 602 teachers and 320 students, respectively), we examined the perceptions of teachers and students on students’ integrity when taking assessments on-campus versus online. In study 3 (n = 177 students), we examined the impact of honesty priming on students’ experience of their own behaviors during online assessments. We found that while teachers believed that students cheat more in online assessments as compared to on-campus assessments, students perceived the opposite. Further, when students were reminded of the importance of ethics, cheating behaviors went down significantly. We discuss our findings, highlight implications for academic leaders and teachers, and offer suggestions for future research.
An often-discussed topic in the literature on state capitalism is performance effects of state ownership, not least in China. However, in China analysis of performance is nearly impossible because the Chinese economy is bifurcated, with state-and privately owned enterprises operating in separate industries. Seeking a better basis for comparison, we therefore analyze the performance of state-owned Chinese football clubs. We furthermore test the mediating effect of resources on performance. This allows us to discriminate between some of the main theories of Chinese SOEs. We find a positive but insignificant direct performance effect of state ownership. However, mediation analyses suggest that Chinese state-owned clubs have fewer financial resources, which in turns negatively impacts their performance (relative to private firms). Our results challenge two commonly found assumptions in the literature, namely that, relative to private firms, Chinese SOEs have superior access to financial resources and that their corporate governance is weak.
Family motivation is prevalent among working adults. Although prior research emphasizes its positive outcomes, recent studies highlight the need to examine its potential downsides, particularly concerning unethical consequences. Drawing on goal shielding theory, we investigate when and how family motivation predicts unethical behaviors. Specifically, we argue that family motivation is positively related to unethical pro-leader behavior (UPLB) and social undermining toward coworkers through bottom-line mentality (BLM) when their leaders exhibit high performance-avoidance goal orientation (PAGO). In contrast, when leader PAGO is low, family motivation does not influence these unethical behaviors through BLM. We tested this theorized model in two studies: a time-lagged multisource field survey involving 219 employees and their 59 direct supervisors from four Chinese companies across diverse industries, and a scenario-based experiment with 281 full-time employees in the United States and the United Kingdom. The results provided convergent support for our model.
In several developing countries entrepreneurs work under radical uncertainty caused by market disruptions. In this study, we apply effectuation theory to theorize the process through which entrepreneurs innovate their business models to create new opportunities to serve low-income customers in the face of radical uncertainty. Based on an in-depth qualitative multi-case study in Iran, we illustrate how the effectual logic enables entrepreneurs to transform their business models constantly to cope with market disruptions caused by economic sanctions. Our findings contribute to business model innovation and frugal innovation research. We also contribute to effectuation theory by extending its boundary conditions.
This study examines the current status and challenges of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) mentorship education in Beijing through the lens of knowledge transfer. It incorporates the SECI model and draws upon the developmental experience of mentorship programs at Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The study proposes solutions and strategies to advance the externalization of tacit knowledge in TCM and foster innovation in TCM mentorship education.
