Management and Marketing - Research Publications
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ItemBetween fit and flexibility? The benefits of high-performance work practices and leadership capability for innovation outcomes(Wiley, 2021-04-01)The idea that human resource management (HRM) plays a strategic role in generating sustainable competitive advantage for organisations or intermediate outcomes such as innovation is a central tenet in HRM theory and research. Yet, the explanation for this relationship remains unclear. We contribute to understanding how HRM plays a role by integrating insights drawn from HRM and strategic management. We explore how configurations of high‐performance work systems (HPWS) and leadership competence (LC) provide micro‐foundations for organisational capabilities associated with innovation. We also examine the moderating role of external environmental conditions. We find support for the proposition that HPWS and LC contribute to capabilities associated with innovation. Importantly, in stable environments, the formation of the capabilities required for innovation is more strongly associated with HPWS, whereas in more dynamic environments, LC plays a more pronounced role. These findings have implications for understanding the strategic role HRM plays and for management practice.
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ItemBringing the Leader Back in: Why, How, and When Leadership Empowerment Behavior Shapes Coworker Conflict(SAGE Publications, 2020)With the diffusion of team-based work organizations and flatter organizational hierarchies, many leaders empower employees to perform their work. Empowerment creates an interesting tension regarding coworker conflict, enhancing trust and giving employees more autonomy to prevent conflict, while also increasing workload and the potential for coworker conflict. Recent conflict research has focused on how characteristics of individuals, groups, and tasks contribute to conflict among coworkers. We extend this work by exploring the role of leader empowerment behavior (LEB) in influencing coworker conflict. Our model integrates research on LEB and coworker conflict to help organizations manage coworker conflict effectively. To test our model at the workplace level, we utilize data drawn from matched surveys of leaders and employees in 317 workplaces. We find that LEB relates negatively to relationship and task conflict through affective and cognitive trust in leaders. We further find that LEB relates negatively to relationship and task conflict through reduced workload, but only when employees have a clear role description. In contrast, if employees have unclear roles, LEB has a U-curve relationship with workload: a moderate level of LEB reduces workload, but a high level of LEB increases workload, in turn increasing coworker conflict. Finally, relationship conflict has a direct negative effect on task performance, whereas task conflict has an indirect negative effect through relationship conflict.
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ItemConfronting the Crisis of Confidence in Management Studies: Why Senior Scholars Need to Stop Setting a Bad Example(Academy of Management, 2019-06-01)There is an emerging crisis of confidence in management studies. This is expressed in growing disquiet about the lack of value in our research outputs and increasing frustration about the nature of teaching in business schools. This crisis of confidence can be understood as a response to a series of developments, including an apparent lack of practical or academic impact from most published research, a narrowing of focus in the field, increases in unethical behaviour, a downgrading of teaching and increased pressure in both publishing and teaching. Traditional academic values are coming into conflict with processes of rationalisation in business schools and universities. The changes driving these outcomes are long-run and reflect powerful institutional pressures, rendering them difficult to change. Nonetheless, established management studies scholars have a responsibility to address them. One way that they can show leadership in this regard is by setting a good example. Three suggestions can be made about how to do this: a rejection of the fiction that what we do is analogous to laboratory science; a rejection of the myth of what this essay calls ‘the heroic workaholic publishing machine’; and a refusal to promote flawed approaches to assessing academic success.