Configurations of business model themes and strategies in small firms: a qualitative comparative analysis

Firms' strategies and business model themes (BMTs) entail choices that create a configuration of interdependent elements that ultimately affect a firm's performance. So far, extant studies on BMTs (i.e. novelty, efficiency, complementarity and lock-in) have neglected an explorative analysis of how configurations of BMTs and the choices of a firm's strategy (namely, the source of the competitive advantage and the market scope) are associated with a firm's performance in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We address this limitation by analysing a sample of 96 small firms using a configurational approach. We identified four equifinal configurations leading to high performance and five equifinal configurations associated with low performance. Overall, our results suggest that in small firms, it is essential to combine a differentiation strategy with either consistent pairs of BMTs or the search for new avenues of value creation and capture, while featuring too many BMTs might be detrimental to their growth. Our study contributes to the scholarly debate about the relationship between business models and strategy

Careers in context: An international study of career goals as mesostructure between societies' career-related human potential and proactive career behaviour

Careers exist in a societal context that offers both constraints and opportunities for career actors. Whereas most studies focus on proximal individual and/or organisational-level variables, we provide insights into how career goals and behaviours are understood and embedded in the more distal societal context. More specifically, we operationalise societal context using the career-related human potential composite and aim to understand if and why career goals and behaviours vary between countries. Drawing on a model of career structuration and using multilevel mediation modelling, we draw on a survey of 17,986 employees from 27 countries, covering nine of GLOBE's 10 cultural clusters, and national statistical data to examine the relationship between societal context (macrostructure building the career-opportunity structure) and actors' career goals (career mesostructure) and career behaviour (actions). We show that societal context in terms of societies' career-related human potential composite is negatively associated with the importance given to financial achievements as a specific career mesostructure in a society that is positively related to individuals' proactive career behaviour. Our career mesostructure fully mediates the relationship between societal context and individuals' proactive career behaviour. In this way, we expand career theory's scope beyond occupation- and organisation-related factors

Reaction or anticipation? Resilience in small- and medium-sized enterprises

Purpose: Building on the recent capability-based conceptualisation of resilience, this paper aims to explore whether the experience of a previous crisis and entrepreneur resilience are associated with Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs') adoption of different anticipation strategies for adversities. Design/methodology/approach: Using original survey data on 959 Italian and German SMEs, the research uses a multinomial logistic regression model in order to test the influence of the prior experience of a crisis and the entrepreneur resilience on the likelihood of adopting different anticipation strategies. Findings: The paper shows that the previous experience of a crisis increases the likelihood of regularly adopting proactive but non-formalised anticipation actions while decreasing the likelihood of adopting a pure reactive strategy to adversities; in addition, entrepreneur resilience is nonlinearly associated with anticipation strategies. Originality/value: The main originalities rely on eschewing a pure binary view in relation to the organisational choice of adopting a reactive or a proactive approach towards adversities and on considering the entrepreneur resilience as a factor with both “bright” and “dark” side effects in relation to the anticipation of adversities

Progettazione di un Teaching Learning Center universitario: progettazione e gestione

Un Teaching Learning Center \ue8 un'unit\ue0 di un'organizzazione formativa che offre un servizio di supporto ai docenti nelle loro attivit\ue0 didattiche. Obiettivo di questo articolo \ue8 presentare le principali scelte riguardanti la progettazione di un Teaching Learning Center universitario

ERP AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE INDIVIDUALS AND DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF INTEGRATED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

ERP systems are one of the most important subjects in the Information Systems sciences. The organizational implications of their use have widely been dealt with in literature. The purpose of this work is to analyze the events occurring from the moment when a system is designed to the moment when it is being implemented. Using data gathered from an empirical research, this work presents a useful model to better comprehend and, therefore, manage the phenomenon of the designed vs. implemented ERP deviation, considering such drift as neutral in terms of value and introducing, as a critical variable, the time factor

The leadership dance in a performing arts organization

The leadership structure of cultural organizations has been a central issue in cultural management studies for many years. However, extant research tends to characterize leadership structure either as unitary or dual, employing a static approach that fails to explain the process underlying its evolution when the cultural organization changes and develops. Drawing on these limitations, we aim to answer the following research question: how do leadership forms change over time in cultural organizations? We use a qualitative methodology based on an exploratory case study carried out between 2011 and 2018 on the Italian performing arts organization \u201cFondazione Nazionale della Danza Aterballetto\u201d. Our findings show that different plural leadership forms may emerge during an organizational change. In addition, we show how various factors and dynamics at multiple levels (individual, organizational and environmental) come into play. Our study suggests that companies aimed at establishing a stable leadership structure should consider not only their internal strategic demands and organizational conditions but also external factors. In addition, our study demonstrates that both informal and formal rules influence leader\u2019s expected behaviors

Shaping the Future of Work

The fast pace of the technological evolution forces workers to update their competencies in order to remain attractive in the labor market. Those changes suggest that in order to remain employable, workers need to add new skills (either soft or digital) to their “traditional” competencies, demonstrating the ability to work in an interdisciplinary agile fashion. We argue that this professional evolution resembles the characteristics of the T-shaped professionals, and that it is possible to interpret the changes of jobs that are caused by the technological revolution drawing on job design literature. Hence, analyzing the data of a survey administered to a sample of 238 workers employed in Veneto Region, we explore the skill shapes of jobs that are present in the labor market and we assess their relationship with the workers’ and organizational characteristics