Impact of Entrepreneurial Leadership and Bricolage on Job Security and Sustainable Economic Performance: An Empirical Study of Croatian Companies during COVID-19 Pandemic

Empowering leadership: A conflict resolver and a performance booster for organizations

Organizational sustainability has become a critical challenge in the current era. This research purpose is to determine the impact of empowering leadership on conflict management and employees' performance for organizational sustainability. Furthermore, it also investigates the moderating impact of emotional stability on the relationship between empowering leadership, conflict management, and employee performance. Quantitative data for this research was collected from 512 middle-management-level employees from manufacturing firms in China. The partial least squares structural equation modelling results highlighted that empowering leadership positively impacts conflict management and employees' performance. Furthermore, the study showed that the organization's sustainability is possible with conflict management and employee performance when there is emotional stability. The theoretical grounding of this research closed a loop in the literature, and the findings are reliable for practice for organization sustainability.

An empirical study of entrepreneurial leadership and fear of COVID-19 impact on psychological wellbeing: A mediating effect of job insecurity

The empirical study proposes a model for investigating the effect of entrepreneurial leadership on job insecurity and employee psychological wellbeing during COVID-19 based on the combined theoretical grounds of The Conservation of Resources Theory and Social Learning. To explore the job insecurity relationship with psychological wellbeing, and measure the impact of Fear of COVID-19, an empirical study was conducted on a sample of 408 employees in Croatia. The data of the cross-sectional study was collected in November and December 2020. A strong influence of job insecurity on the psychological wellbeing of employees has been identified. Furthermore, fear of COVID-19 was found to have adverse psychological effects on wellbeing. The theorized positive impact of entrepreneurial leadership on job insecurity was not supported by the evidence. The strong point of our contribution lies in the finding that the entrepreneurial leadership style alone does not buffer against job insecurity, thus pointing that the more comprehensive inquiry into other organizational factors, such as coping, learning abilities, developmental opportunities, personal disposition, and pressure bearing. The research is the first step toward enhancing our understanding of the entrepreneurial dimension of transactional psychology. The observations we recorded have implications for research into the study of the mental processes and their impact on organizational proactive behavior.

Entrepreneurial Orientation and Open Innovation Promote the Performance of Services SMEs: The Mediating Role of Cost Leadership

In the 21st century, small and medium service firms face difficulty sustaining their performance. Additionally, the literature on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in SMEs is scarce. Moreover, the role of cost leadership strategy as a mediator lacks researchers’ attention. Therefore, this research aims to examine the relationship between EO and SMEs performance with the mediating role of cost leadership strategy. Based on the contingency theory, a theoretical model has been drawn. A survey approach with a questionnaire technique has been adapted to achieve the study objectives. The data were collected from 283 service SMEs in three states of Malaysia. The Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was employed to analyze the empirical data. The study findings highlight that risk-taking and open innovation have no direct relationship with SMEs’ performance. However, through the mediation role of cost leadership, risk-taking and open innovation have a significant association with performance. Furthermore, the findings indicate that proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy have a positive and direct relationship with performance, whereas in the presence of cost leadership, competitive aggressiveness has a partial mediating effect. The empirical findings are helpful to policymakers, researchers, and practitioners.

Work stress, technological changes, and job insecurity in the retail organization context

The study intends to investigate the relationship between work stress and job insecurity, as well as technological changes and job insecurity, with job satisfaction acting as a mediator. The study was conducted among Pakistani retail industry employees using survey questionnaires distributed online and in stores. The sample was composed of 262 retail workers from the FMCG and shopping mall industries. The responses were screened using the statistical software tool SPSS, and hypotheses were examined through SMART-PLS. The findings show that work stress has a strong relationship with job insecurity; additionally, the relationship appears to be statistically significant (β = 55.7%, p < 0.05), indicating that there is an increased level of job insecurity if work stress is increased. However, technological advancements showed less influence on job insecurity and had statistically insignificant results (β = 5.9%, p > 0.05). This demonstrates that many technological changes cause high levels of job insecurity because employees fear that they will be unable to cope with the changing environment. Furthermore, the mediating mechanism of job satisfaction was found to be significant, as employees with lower levels of satisfaction reported higher levels of insecurity, aiding in the narrowing of the gap in this section of the study. The study also has practical implications because the results show that the retail industry needs to act quickly to make sure workers do not worry about losing their jobs, especially now that COVID-19 is spreading like wildfire.

A conceptual model of mindful organizing for effective safety and crisis management. The role of organizational culture

The Covid-19 pandemic has involved nations world-wide in the necessity to manage and control the spread of infection, and challenged organizations to effectively counteract an unchartered medical crisis while preserving the safety of workers. While the pandemic and geopolitical turmoil caused by the war in Ukraine are recent examples of complex environments that require effective safety and crisis management, organizations may generally need to find ways to deal with the unexpected and reliably perform in the face of fluctuations. Mindful organizing (MO) is defined as the collective capability to detect discriminatory details about emerging issues and act swiftly in response to these details, thus allowing members to anticipate, and recover from, any errors or unexpected events that arise. Organizational culture refers to the mindset shared among members which orients their actions and thus qualifies as a relevant contextual factor that determines whether the specific forms of perceiving and acting entailed by MO may emerge in an organization. The present paper aimed to propose a conceptual model linking organizational culture, MO and organizational outcomes (i.e., safety, reliability, crisis management), and delineate arguments to address the match/mismatch between MO and culture types. Specifically, it is proposed that organizational culture determines the way an organization develops MO and the subsequent ability to handle unexpected events which might jeopardize organizational effectiveness and safety. Our contribution bridges the still disparate fields of MO and organizational culture, and provides scholars and practitioners with a complexity- and uncertainty-sensitive integrative framework in order to intervene on organizational outcomes.

The Driver of Workplace Alienation or the Cost of Effective Stewardship? The Consequences of Wage Gap for Corporate Performance

Relying on cross-country panel data, the paper investigates the possible repercussions of salary gap for employee productivity and corporate financial performance. Our empirical findings corroborate the presence of a negative tail effect of wage gap on productivity and employee morale. While worsening employee turnover and productivity, and increasing the chances of workplace controversies, high salary gap is found to be associated with a more efficient cost structure and higher profitability. Our evidence suggests that extreme salary gap may be curbed by targeted internal policies favoring internal promotion and career development, unionization, employee and managerial training. The composition of the board’s remuneration committee appears to play but a minor role in shaping the scale of salary gap. The results of the study are in line with equity aversion theory and suggest that extreme wage inequality may impede firms’ growth with spillover effects observable at the macro-level. Targeted policies may be necessary to counter the negative repercussions of high compensation disparities as within-firm mechanisms appear insufficient to mitigate them.

The Online Adapted Transformational Leadership and Workforce Innovation within the Software Development Industry

Leadership and workforce innovation are the two most glazed over universal phenomenon across time within the management literature. Despite the status of the buzz words, few researchers studied if there is a link between the online leadership behaviors and the de(in)creasing innovativeness of the followers at work. The current research aimed for offering a viable solution for the online-adapted leadership–workforce innovation equation, by answering to the following research question: is online transformative leadership able, and if so, are its instruments sufficient for increasing followers’ organizational and personal innovativeness within an exclusively online work environment? Research used a two-tailed questionnaire as a research instrument and applied it within the IT&C Industry in Iasi, Romania, namely the software development branch. Results were gathered during the first months of the social lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic; therefore, the ongoing communication and online work procedures implementation were captured via the subjects’ responses. Data was analyzed by using SemPLS (v3.2.5.) software; results show that transformational leadership instruments, once shifted within an exclusively online working environment, suffer from losing in importance and designated effects. Research provides information in regards to four general hypotheses that prove to be partially supported, sending the reader to the idea that an exclusively online-adapted work environment does not show expected results in terms on transformational leadership, nor workforce innovation. Therefore, online-based transformational leadership instruments need to be reshaped and adapted so that followers correctly perceive their leaders’ actions and behaviors on all the five dimensionalities.

Assessing the Effects of Innovative Management Accounting Tools on Performance and Sustainability

To cope with an increasingly competitive and turbulent environment caused by economic, health, and political crises, companies need to adopt innovative management accounting tools to meet challenges, increase economic performance and ensure organizational sustainability. This paper aims to study the impact of using innovative management accounting tools on companies’ performance and sustainable approaches. We investigate the influences among the variables involved in quantitative research based on a survey of 567 senior accountants of Romanian companies. The hypotheses formulated based on the literature were tested using structural equation modeling and artificial neural network analysis. The research results show that those companies that used more intensively innovative management accounting tools performed better and had more tools at their disposal to measure and manage a sustainable approach. Innovative management accounting tools provide more and better information and ways to improve organizational performance and the vector of sustainability to cope with the uncertainty produced by the economic crisis.

Entrepreneurial Leadership and Entrepreneurial Performance in Start-Ups: A Moderated Serial Mediation Model

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of entrepreneurial leadership on entrepreneurial performance in start-ups. Specifically, a moderated serial mediation model was developed to investigate the mediating role of tacit knowledge sharing and job embeddedness and the moderating effect of career growth opportunities. Data was collected from 376 start-up employees via an online survey platform. Using hierarchical multiple regression and Hayes' PROCESS Macro by SPSS 21.0, and structural equation modeling by AMOS 23.0, support was found for both mediation and moderation effects. Results showed that entrepreneurial leadership significantly positively affects entrepreneurial performance by mediating with tacit knowledge sharing and job embeddedness. Moreover, career growth opportunities moderate the serial mediating effect of tacit knowledge sharing and job embeddedness between entrepreneurial leadership and entrepreneurial performance. This study provides theoretical guidance for entrepreneurial leadership to improve entrepreneurial performance.

COVID-19 Pandemic Implications for Corporate Sustainability and Society: A Literature Review

The paper revises the ample empirical and theoretical literature on sustainable organizational growth and strategic leadership relating to the critical aspects of the ongoing pandemic, including poverty, social responsibility, public health, and organizational and managerial innovation. Drawing from available COVID-19, management, and sustainable leadership publications released from 2020 to 2021, this paper considers influential studies exploring core business concepts, principles, philosophies, and activities for accelerating, stimulating, and nurturing social and corporate sustainability. The study analyzed the characteristics and interrelation of 133 articles through bibliometric and literature systemization techniques. We shed light on the significant influence COVID-19 has had on financial, operational, and psychological solvency and organizational health to elucidate expectations and implications for businesses worldwide concerning the long-term financial and functional impact of COVID-19. An overview of the relevant studies on the individual, organizational, and external factors relating to novel disease’s relation to sustainability are provided. We emphasize the need for digital transformation following the COVID-19 upheaval and throughout the upcoming years. Some of the generally employed techniques in response to adversity entail portfolio diversification, service delivery innovation, product redesigning, new market development, partnering with competitors and/or complementary service providers, synergizing with other stakeholders, and open innovation.