Understanding innovation performance and its antecedents: A socio-cognitive model

Little attention in the previous literature has been paid to understanding employees’ factors that drive customer development knowledge and performance from the perspective of social psychology. Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study validates a research model that examines the above issue. In the setting of new product development across high-tech firms in Taiwan, this study postulates that innovation self-efficacy, role conflict, and role ambiguity influence innovation performance directly and indirectly via the mediation of customer knowledge development and innovation outcome expectation. This study contributes to the social science literature by applying social cognitive theory to the rarely explored area of innovation performance and by presenting an operationalization of role stressors (i.e., role ambiguity and role conflict) in the area. Lastly, managerial implications and limitations from the empirical findings are provided.     

Mostly the mother: Concentration of adverse employment effects on mothers of children with autism

Creating comprehensive and effective social welfare and anti-poverty policy is an ever-elusive task. A key component of such policies and their related programs is the encouragement and protection of parents’ employment. However, such efforts become more complicated when families are faced with additional challenges such as difficulties, which may arise when parenting a child with a disability. Although both paid employment and parenting are widely understood as far from gender-neutral activities, how adverse employment effects become concentrated on mothers is less well understood. This article examines circumstances under which negative employment effects become concentrated on mothers of children with autism. The results of the analysis suggest focusing policy on addressing short term threats to the continued success of established careers and on workplace reentry could help counter factors which tend to result in having mothers’ careers disproportionately affected as a result of having a child with a disability.