Life in society is a function of the tension between the tangible and the intangible, although human beings have a natural tendency to give more attention and meaning to what their senses directly perceive. If there is smoke, we believe there is fire. AI, understood in a broad sense, is becoming the new electricity or even the new oxygen. A technology deified in such a disruptive, omnipotent, and omnipresent way that it will revolutionize all dimensions of society, from work, mobility, teaching, health, business, and the very nature of life. However, the deep and structurally unsustainable material dimension of this technology has received less attention and without smoke no one looks for the origin of the fire, and it spreads at a speed never seen before. The objective of this article is to identify the main layers of AI’s materiality, questioning its apparent benevolent relationship with management.

Research on workplace bullying often considers those in managerial positions as perpetrators or resources in the process. There is a lack of studies focusing on them as targets, with most existing research centred on upward bullying. The aim of this study was to investigate all forms of bullying, comparing first-line managers with those higher up in the hierarchy and with workers, and examining how perceived social support and laissez-faire leadership affect exposure. Using a probability sample of the Swedish workforce, the results showed that managers are generally as exposed to bullying as workers. For first-line managers, exposure depended on the perception of laissez-faire leadership from their immediate superior. Social support was beneficial for all but did not have a differential effect. Organizational efforts to mitigate bullying must ensure that anti-bullying measures explicitly include all hierarchical levels, with extra focus on first-line managers.

Management practices are constantly changing amid intense competitive global pressure. This can put a strain on managers in terms of adapting to new challenges that arise from rapid transformations. While there is an emphasis on timely transformations in order to increase efficiency and productivity gains, there can also be a relaxation when managers have reached their pinnacle and achieved their goals. The goal of this editorial is to focus on hot management trends which is an important topic given the ever shifting business environment. Well-known academics were asked to write about what they see as the main management trends affecting society at the current time period. They each have diverse views based on their area of expertise and thought processes. For the Journal of Management & Organization, it is critical that we look into management trends in order to inform practice but also to enrichen theory. It is exciting times with many things happening regarding management that makes it exciting to read about what may occur in the future.

This study extends the upper echelons literature by shedding light on the role of top management team (TMT) dissimilarity, a specific conceptualization of team diversity. TMTs are typically composed of members from different functional areas who have unique information and values. The perception of the degree to which TMT members view themselves as dissimilar from other team members affects the TMT’s decision-making and, therefore, organizational outcomes. However, research does not address this perspective of TMT diversity. We examine how informational and value dissimilarity among TMT members is associated with incremental and radical innovation capability. We survey top managers from various industries and use partial least squares structural equation modeling analysis to explore the association between TMT dissimilarity and innovation capability empirically. The findings show that informational dissimilarity is positively associated with incremental innovation capability. Value dissimilarity is negatively associated with incremental innovation capability, whereas it is positively associated with radical innovation capability.

Globally, organizations have little insight into mechanisms that enable them to leverage their resources and capabilities successfully. In that endeavor, this study demonstrates that organizations can achieve competitive advantages through resource transformation and capability reinforcement. Using a conceptual framework grounded in the resource-based view and the dynamic capabilities theory in combination with Miles and Snow typology, we show how different types of organizations can succeed in the currently evolving competitive landscape by developing mechanisms that match the strategic performance measures of the organizations, such as return on assets or Tobin's Q. Notably, analyzing data obtained from 114 firms with seemingly unrelated regression, the findings reveal central roles of alternating mechanisms that drive differential organizational performance and enable the organizations to successfully deploy resources and capabilities.

The evaluation of services has become a common strategy in service management, and there is a wide variety of tools available. The objective was to evaluate user satisfaction at a sports center using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) techniques, comparing the information provided by each. To this end, this study involved 1,433 users of a sports center, analyzing the responses to the NPS® tool and subsequently to the IPA tool developed ad hoc with 11 attributes. The NPS® tool revealed 29.58% detractors, 30.36% passives, and 40.06% promoters, highlighting a negative impact on the overall score. The IPA tool offered detailed insights into attributes varying across the three NPS groups, identifying four critical attributes requiring strategic attention, enabling segmented marketing strategies. This research demonstrates the complementary value of combining NPS and IPA tools for strategic service management, providing actionable insights to enhance customer satisfaction and competitive positioning.

Organizational context has an important influence on voice behavior. This study investigates the curvilinear relationship between perceived organizational politics (POP) – an inevitable organizational context factor – and employee voice behavior through a conservation of resources theory lens, considering the curvilinear mediating role of territoriality. A three-wave survey of 227 full-time employees revealed that (1) POP is positively associated with territoriality, (2) territoriality has U-shaped relationships with both promotive and prohibitive voice, that is, when territoriality ranges from low to moderate, promotive/prohibitive voice behavior gradually decreases. When territoriality ranges from moderate to high, promotive/prohibitive voice behavior gradually increases and (3) territoriality acts as a curvilinear mediator between POP and promotive/prohibitive voice behavior. These findings make a significant contribution to POP literature and voice behavior literature by identifying territoriality as a mediator between these organizational factors. Implications for practice are also discussed.

This study examines the antecedent role of organizational culture and the mediating role of digital transformation when promoting big data analytics capabilities. Employing the Competing Values Framework, we scrutinize the influence of various cultural typologies, including digital culture on the successful deployment of digital transformation and the enhancement of big data analytics capabilities. Our analysis utilizes Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling on a dataset of 183 firms to evaluate our hypotheses. The findings reveal that adhocratic, digital and hierarchical cultures significantly foster big data analytics capabilities mediated by digital transformation, which is a dynamic process that needs supportive digital and innovative values. In contrast, market and clan cultures exhibit weaker linkages. By providing empirical evidence and practical implications, this study highlights how organizations with a strong adhocratic and digital cultures outperform those with traditional cultures in their digital transformation and big data analytics capabilities efforts.

This study provides a holistic approach to the potential drivers of corporate environmental policy. Institutional and/or stakeholder theories are used to explain any influence on this type of policy in situations with different characteristics. Specifically, the analysis considers country-, industry-, and firm-level determinants of an international sample of listed companies. Exploratory factor analysis was first applied to the variables at the country level because their underlying interrelationships were unknown. Using ordered probit models clustered at the firm level, we found that some environmental characteristics of a country and some macro-level variables considered together affect corporate environmental policy, along with pressure from industry peers. Moreover, we observed that companies with better policies for stakeholders, greater board independence, and greater gender diversity tended to develop better environmental policies. This study offers insight into fostering environmental responsibility through policy incentives and effective corporate governance structures.

This study aims to provide insights into the values entrenchment strategies that indigenous Black founders and next-generation (NextGen) leaders use in their efforts to entrench values into their family businesses. The study uses a qualitative methodology and an inductive approach, and draws on seven indigenous African family business cases operating in various industries within the services sector. Our findings show that founders and NextGen leaders use explicit and implicit carriers as they strive to entrench values in their family businesses. It was established that these leaders are influential institutional constituents who contribute to entrenching values into the family business and, by doing so, shape institutional knowledge. Our study contributes to family business literature by extending the founder centrality to include that of the NextGen leaders in values entrenchment, explaining how these leaders articulate their personal and family values and how they seek to translate them into family business values.

With a growing body of research exploring how employees perceive and respond to human resource management (HRM) practices, the strategic HRM field faces the challenge of assessing how insights have evolved and which theoretical perspectives have shaped them. This study presents a bibliometric review of 292 empirical research on employee perceptions of HRM practices, focusing on (1) the major research interests explored, (2) the theoretical perspectives applied, and (3) their evolution over the last 25 years. The analysis reveals a reoccurring emphasis on performance-oriented variables, such as engagement, suggesting a tendency to rely on quantifiable outcomes while sidelining alternative constructs like employee well-being. It also highlights the dominance of a limited set of theoretical perspectives commonly applied, with alternative perspectives remaining underutilised. By mapping how topical areas and theories intersect, this study refines the classification of theoretical perspectives and contributes to a more critical understanding of the strategic HRM field. Potential implications are discussed to outline actionable recommendations for future research.

Much research on the antecedents of proactive behavior has appeared in the literature, but this research introduces a new ritual perspective to rethink this question. Drawing on the process model of interaction rituals, we propose that work rituals urge employees to share emotional energy, and then, employees are likely to experience a higher level of work meaningfulness. In turn, employees tend to engage in more proactive behavior. Using data from a random assignment field experiment involving 204 employees from a communication corporation in China, we found support for our hypotheses. The implications of our research for theory and practice are discussed.

Learning orientation emphasizes the importance of learning from any experience. It is grounded on commitment to learn, shared vision, open‐mindedness, and knowledge sharing. Organizational knowledge management literature based on social complexity theory posits that learning orientation makes companies generate new knowledge through spontaneous multi-level iterations and self-organization. Challenges related to the current business environment requires companies to constantly adjust to remain competitive. Still, the mechanisms making learning-oriented companies more capable to develop innovative product have been scantly explored. Pertinent literature actually conjectures this relationship as spontaneous, directed, and unmediated. Moreover, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)rarely represent the context of analysis of research on this topic. Frequently lacking resources to systematically pursue product innovation, SMEs rely on solutions deriving from the combination of internal knowledge and external sources; thus, these companies depend on learning orientation principles to remain innovative. In this vein, the research aims to understand how learning orientation allows product innovation in SMEs through the achievement of strategic flexibility. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse data from 300 British SMEs. The results demonstrate the mediating role of strategic flexibility in the relationships between learning orientation and product innovation. The importance of innovation culture also emerged.

Inclusive workplaces rely on the joint optimization of disability management and human resource management. However, disability management has been predominantly investigated as an independent issue, overlooking its interplay with human resource management. The article delivers a bibliometric and interpretive review of the scholarly debate falling at the crossroad of disability management and human resource management, mapping the state of the art of this study domain. Departing from a knowledge core of 91 papers, 6 research streams were identified through bibliographic coupling. They account for the evolution of disability management from a fix-it initiative aimed at fostering return to work of people with disability towards a holistic management approach targeted at inclusiveness. Aligning the hard and the soft sides of disability management and embedding it in the organizational culture are crucial to enact inclusive workplaces and make organizations able to engage people with disability at work.

Historically, the higher education curriculum in business degrees has contained little or no Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (herein ‘Indigenous’) content. With the increase in awareness at the societal level, Australian university business schools need to change and design the curriculum, so that students graduate with the capability to engage with Indigenous businesses, individuals, and communities while understanding contemporary policy and business including sustainability, Human Resources, supply chain, and governance. First, secondary data from Australian Department of Education, Skills, and Employment were collected on Indigenous and non-Indigenous higher education students is presented to establish the current levels of student’s access and completion rates in management, commerce and business areas. Secondly, focus groups were held to gain the views of educators who have taught Indigenous curriculum in Foundation business and commerce curriculum and share their perceptions of the impact of this on students and themselves. The secondary data presented show the imperative of providing strategies to support and opportunities to Indigenous students and that by embedding Indigenous knowledge students can build awareness and connection leading to short and long term improvements. Information gathered from the research can be used to support the largely positive impact teaching Indigenous curriculum thereby addressing government policies in closing the gap of education and employment.