In this article we show how specific family business logic shapes managerial practices. Based on empirical material from 20 case studies of family ownership governance, our study identifies seven core characteristics of family ownership logic. These include active, visible and persistent ownership with few owners, relatively stable strategic development encompassing multiple ownership goals, autonomy towards capital markets, and a strong identification and emotional bonding with the business. By considering the family business context, we find managerial practices that are prevalent in the majority of businesses around the world and that have implications for ownership research. It is concluded that by taking the logic of ownership into consideration when studying family businesses, researchers in this field can contribute to the growing literature on sociocultural and behavioural factors in corporate governance relations.

This paper investigate the degree to which environment uncertainty affects inter-organisational alliance partner selection in small to medium-sized enterprises and blends the resource-based view in a multiple-mediator model in which different dimensions of alliance motivation (cost and strategy) act as mediating mechanisms that transmit the positive effects of environment uncertainty to partner selection criteria. Four hypotheses are developed and then tested on a survey data sample of 108 firms in the Taiwanese steel industry. Our research findings show the mediating effects of alliance motivation cost and strategy and understanding how environment uncertainty impacts alliance motivation (cost and strategy) within small to medium-sized enterprises.

Organisational culture is considered an important influence on performance, particularly for service firms that rely on values-driven social controls to enhance human interactions. Using a qualitative approach, we show how the modified Organisational Culture Profile developed by Sarros, Gray, Densten, and Cooper to assess Australian organisations provides a framework for exploring the cultural drivers of high performing knowledge-intensive service firms in New Zealand. Our study provides rich insights into how six key cultural dimensions – competitiveness, innovation, performance orientation, emphasis on rewards, supportiveness and social responsibility – are translated into strategic human resource management practices.

Researchers have disagreed recurrently over the years concerning the nature of continuance commitment as developed within the Meyer and Allen paradigm, specifically whether continuance commitment consists of ‘high sacrifices’ and ‘low alternatives’ subdimensions. To address this, Edward's analytical strategy was used to examine continuance commitment as having superordinate, aggregate, or multivariate structural forms. Results suggest that (1) continuance commitment is not a multidimensional construct, (2) that the ‘high sacrifices’ subscale alone taps continuance commitment, and (3) the ‘low alternatives’ subscale measures neither continuance commitment nor perceived employment alternatives. Implications for further exploration of the continuance commitment construct are discussed.

This study investigated how cross-functional teams can influence their business model innovation and firm performance through team learning, consisting of multiple modes of within-team, cross-team, and market learning. Using a matched dyadic data set from a study of 330 cross-functional team members and their supervisors sampled from 165 electronics and information industries in China, the empirical results clearly indicate that within-team, cross-team, and market learning can improve business model innovation and firm performance. The results of the mediating model show how the business model innovation mediates the relationship between team learning and firm performance.

Over recent decades, nations worldwide have been struggling with public finance difficulties and other organizational and functional challenges that, inter alia, led to the EU Fiscal Stability Treaty in 2012. Under various reforms, poor-performing local authorities are subject to continuous pressure to employ turnaround management strategies – strategies borrowed from the private sector that are assumed to be effective in public-sector contexts. Based on insights from institutional theory, we argue not only that turnaround management strategies have been either poorly matched to the causes of failure in the government sector or poorly implemented, but that turnaround management strategies will almost always tend to fail in the public context. Based on survey data collected in local authorities, we empirically verify this argument. Theoretical and practical lessons for improving reforms in the government sector and other public organizations that face crisis are suggested.