This article examines the relationship between women entrepreneurs’ job autonomy and work–life balance, with a particular focus on how this relationship might be augmented by environments that ...discriminate against women, whether socio-economically, institutionally, or culturally. Multisource data pertaining to 5334 women entrepreneurs from 37 countries indicate that their sense of job autonomy increases the likelihood that they feel satisfied with their ability to balance the needs of their work with those of their personal life. This process is particularly prominent when they operate in countries characterized by discriminatory socio-economic and institutional conditions, though a mitigating instead of invigorating effect arises in culturally discriminatory settings. For business ethics scholars and practitioners, these findings indicate how the extent to which women entrepreneurs, seeking to combine professional and private responsibilities, derive benefits from initiatives aimed at enhancing their job-related freedom critically depends on whether they operate in adverse external environments.
This study adds to business ethics research by investigating how employees’ exposure to despotic leadership might influence their peer-rated workplace status, along with a mediating role of ...ingratiatory behavior targeted at supervisors and a moderating role of their power distance orientation and self-enhancement motive. Multisource, three-wave data from employees and their peers in Pakistani organizations reveal that exposure to despotic leaders spurs employees’ upward ingratiatory behavior, and this behavior in turn can help them attain higher status in the organization. The mediating role of upward ingratiatory behavior also is more prominent among employees with higher levels of power distance orientation and self-enhancement motive. For business ethics scholars, this study thus pinpoints a potentially dangerous pathway—featuring employees’ deliberate efforts to impress self-centered, destructive supervisors—by which despotic leadership can generate beneficial outcomes for employees but not for the organization, as well as how this process varies due to key personal characteristics.
This study considers the mediating role of internal knowledge sharing in the relationship between two critical aspects of organizational social capital (trust and goal congruence) and entrepreneurial ...orientation (EO), as well as how this role might be moderated by the firm's level of formalization. It shows that higher levels of internal knowledge sharing relate to stronger EO, and such knowledge sharing in turn results from higher levels of trust and goal congruence. This study further provides a nuanced picture of the role of formalization in this process. The authors discuss both the study's implications and future research directions.
This article investigates how employees’ experience of role ambiguity might inhibit their creative behavior but also how this harmful effect might be buffered by employees’ access to relevant ...individual (resilience), job task (task interdependence), and relational (emotion sharing) resources. The uncertainty resulting from information deficiencies about job responsibilities diminishes in the presence of these resources, such that employees might be less likely to react to this resource-draining work condition by exhibiting a reluctance to develop change-invoking ideas for organizational improvement. Using survey data from employees in a large organization that operates in the renewable energy sector, this study shows that role ambiguity diminishes creative behavior, but this detrimental effect is subdued with higher levels of resilience, task interdependence, and emotion sharing. As this study shows, organizations that cannot avoid ambiguity in their employees’ work roles should adopt efforts to offset the associated challenge of thwarted creative behaviors with pertinent resources.
With a basis in conservation of resources theory, this study investigates the relationship between employees' exposure to perceived contract breaches and their job performance, while also considering ...the mediating role of knowledge hiding and the moderating role of positive affectivity. Multisource, three-wave data from employees and their peers in Pakistani organizations reveal that breaches in the psychological contract hinder job performance, because employees respond with an unwillingness to contribute valuable knowledge to execute their job tasks. This mediating role of knowledge hiding is mitigated if employees can draw from their own positive affectivity trait. This study accordingly identifies a key factor, intentional attempts to conceal knowledge requested by other members, that can backfire and make employees suffer doubly: from unfulfilled organizational promises and from lower performance. It also reveals how this risk might be contained, that is, by encouraging employees' positive affect.
This article addresses the important question of why those in paid employment might be hesitant to start their own businesses. In particular, we predict how diminished work-related creativity of ...employees might mediate the relationship between their perceptions that societal norms do not support initiative taking and their own entrepreneurial intentions. In addition, we consider how risk tolerance and passion for work might buffer this process. Survey data, collected among public-sector employees in the United Arabic Emirates, confirm these predictions with the exception of indications for a buffering role of passion for work. For entrepreneurship stakeholders, this research reveals a critical factor – a diminished propensity to generate new ideas at work – by which employee beliefs about limited normative support for enterprising efforts may escalate into a reluctance to consider an entrepreneurial career. It also identifies how this process can be muted when employees are willing to take risks.
Entrepreneurs with social goals face various challenges; insights into how these entrepreneurs experience and appreciate their work remain a black box though. Drawing on identity, conservation of ...resources, and person–organization fit theories, this study examines how entrepreneurs’ social value creation beliefs relate to their work-related well-being (job satisfaction, work engagement, and lack of work burnout), as well as how this process might be influenced by social concerns with respect to the common good. Using data from the German Public Value Atlas 2015 and 2019 and the Swiss Public Value Atlas 2017, a three-study design analyzes three samples of entrepreneurs in Germany and Switzerland. Study 1 reveals that entrepreneurs report higher job satisfaction when they believe their organization creates social value. Study 2 indicates that these beliefs relate negatively to work burnout; entrepreneurs’ perceptions of having meaningful work mediate this relationship. Study 3 affirms and extends these results by showing that a sense of work meaningfulness mediates the relationship between social value creation beliefs and work engagement and that this mediating role is more prominent among entrepreneurs with strong social concerns. This investigation thus identifies a critical pathway—the extent to which entrepreneurs experience their work activities as important and personally meaningful—that connects social value creation beliefs with enhanced work-related well-being, as well as how this process might vary with a personal orientation that embraces the common good.
This article seeks to extend research on small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and ambidexterity by investigating contingency factors that influence the relationship between contextual ...ambidexterity and SME performance. Acknowledging the importance of internal knowledge flows in leveraging ambidexterity, it offers unique insights into how internal and external rivalry conditions influence performance outcomes related to an ambidextrous posture. Using a sample of Canadian-based SMEs, the study shows that the contextual ambidexterity-performance relationship is suppressed at higher levels of internal rivalry and amplified at higher levels of external rivalry. The findings suggest that developing an ambidextrous posture should not be an end by itself, and they point to the need for SMEs to understand how the features of their internal and external environments affect the performance consequences of such posture.
In order to extend understanding of the drivers that underlie entrepreneurial intention formation, this article investigates the hitherto underexplored roles of people’s learning orientation and ...passion for work. It considers how these personal characteristics may moderate the instrumentality of their perceived ability to become a successful entrepreneur, and perceptions of the attractiveness of becoming an entrepreneur. Using a survey of 946 university students, it finds that learning orientation and passion for work invigorate the role of these feasibility and desirability considerations in enhancing entrepreneurial intention. A follow-up analysis reveals that the moderating effects of learning orientation and passion for work on the perceived attractiveness–entrepreneurial intention relationship are stronger to the extent that people value the intrinsic goal of autonomy in their future career more, but these moderating effects are immune to the importance of the extrinsic goal of earning financial rewards. Several implications for research and practice emerge.
Radio frequency (RF)-based indoor positioning systems (IPSs) use wireless technologies (including Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Bluetooth, and ultra-wide band (UWB)) to estimate the location of persons in areas ...where no Global Positioning System (GPS) reception is available, for example in indoor stadiums or sports halls. Of the above-mentioned forms of radio frequency (RF) technology, UWB is considered one of the most accurate approaches because it can provide positioning estimates with centimeter-level accuracy. However, it is not yet known whether UWB can also offer such accurate position estimates during strenuous dynamic activities in which moves are characterized by fast changes in direction and velocity. To answer this question, this paper investigates the capabilities of UWB indoor localization systems for tracking athletes during their complex (and most of the time unpredictable) movements. To this end, we analyze the impact of on-body tag placement locations and human movement patterns on localization accuracy and communication reliability. Moreover, two localization algorithms (particle filter and Kalman filter) with different optimizations (bias removal, non-line-of-sight (NLoS) detection, and path determination) are implemented. It is shown that although the optimal choice of optimization depends on the type of movement patterns, some of the improvements can reduce the localization error by up to 31%. Overall, depending on the selected optimization and on-body tag placement, our algorithms show good results in terms of positioning accuracy, with average errors in position estimates of 20 cm. This makes UWB a suitable approach for tracking dynamic athletic activities.
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