How leader role identity influences the process of leader emergence: A social network analysis

Contemporary theories on leadership development emphasize the importance of having a leader identity in building leadership skills and functioning effectively as leaders. We build on this approach by unpacking the role leader identity plays in the leader emergence process. Taking the perspective that leadership is a dynamic social process between group members, we propose a social network-based process model whereby leader role identity predicts network centrality (i.e., betweenness and indegree), which then contributes to leader emergence. We test our model using a sample of 88 cadets participating in a leadership development training course. In support of our model, cadets who possess a stronger leader role identity at the beginning of the course were more likely to emerge as leaders. However this relationship was only mediated by one form of network centrality, indegree centrality, reflecting one's ability to build relationships within one's group. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Stakeholder Green Pressure and New Product Performance in Emerging Countries: A Cross-country Study

Despite the burgeoning literature on stakeholder green pressure, research is scarce on how it influences eco-product innovation and new product performance. This article examines stakeholder green pressures as antecedents of eco-product innovation and new product performance in firms operating in resource-constrained countries. Using data gathered from surveys in Vietnam (N = 183) and Ghana (N = 217), we find that the positive effects of stakeholder green pressures on new product performance are serially mediated by environmental sustainability orientation and eco-product innovation. Our findings contribute to ongoing efforts to clarify the mechanisms channelling stakeholder pressures into new product performance in resource-constrained environments.     

Institutional voids,international learning effort and internationalization of emerging market new ventures

Much of the existing scholarly works portray institutional voids (IVs) in emerging economies as impeding forces against the development of new ventures. However, little attention has been paid to how such voids generate positive outcomes in emerging market new ventures. Drawing on the institutional theory, we propose IVs as crucial enablers of new venture internationalization. In addition, we investigate both how and when IVs enhance the degree to which new ventures internationalize by examining international learning effort (ILE) as a mediator and two domestic market environmental factors (i.e., environmental dynamism and competitive intensity) as important contingencies. We test our moderated mediation model using primary data gathered from 211 new ventures from Ghana. We found that ILE mediates the relationship between IVs and new venture internationalization and that both environmental dynamism and competitive intensity moderate the indirect relationship between home-country IVs and new venture internationalization. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this study.     

Understanding the emergence of redistributed manufacturing: an ambidexterity perspective

Abstract

This paper extends operations strategy theory on efficiency and flexibility trade-offs to the emergent phenomenon of redistributed manufacturing (RDM). The study adopts a multiple-case design including five small and five large pharmaceutical firms. We propose that organizations can gain the efficiency benefits of centralized manufacturing and the flexibility advantages of RDM by building an ambidexterity capability. To build such a capability, large firms can structurally partition their manufacturing and supply management functions, with one sub-unit managing centralized production and the other RDM. Smaller enterprises can build an ambidexterity capability by creating the right organizational context, where multi-skilled workers switch between efficient and flexible tasks. This paper contributes to theory by explaining the emergence of RDM using an organizational ambidexterity lens, laying the groundwork for new theory development in the field. We provide managers with a practical example of how to build an ambidexterity capability to realize flexibility and efficiency advantages.     

GROUP INEQUALITY

We explore the combined effect of segregation in social networks, peer effects, and the relative size of a historically disadvantaged group on the incentives to invest in market‐rewarded skills and the dynamics of inequality between social groups. We identify conditions under which group inequality will persist in the absence of differences in ability, credit constraints, or labor market discrimination. Under these conditions, group inequality may be amplified even if initial group differences are negligible. Increases in social integration may destabilize an unequal state and make group equality possible, but the distributional and human capital effects of this depend on the demographic composition of the population. When the size of the initially disadvantaged group is sufficiently small, integration can lower the long‐run costs of human capital investment in both groups and result in an increase the aggregate skill share. In contrast, when the initially disadvantaged group is large, integration can induce a fall in the aggregate skill share as the costs of human capital investment rise in both groups. We consider applications to concrete cases and policy implications.     

Age at first marriage in Malawi: a Bayesian multilevel analysis using a discrete time-to-event model

Summary.  The paper presents a hierarchical discrete time survival model for the analysis of the 2000 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey data to assess the determinants of transition to marriage among women in Malawi. The model explicitly accounts for the unobserved heterogeneity by using family and community random effects with cross-level correlation structure. A nonparametric technique is used to model the base-line discrete hazard dynamically. Parameters of the model are computed by using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. The results show that rising age at marriage is a combination of birth cohort and education effects, depends considerably on the family and to some extent on the community in which a woman resides and the correlation between family and community random effects is negative. These results confirm a downward trend in teenage marriage and that raising women's education levels in sub-Saharan Africa has the beneficial effect of increasing age at marriage, and by implication reducing total fertility rates. The negative correlation between family and community random effects has policy implications in that targeting communities with an intervention to increase age at first marriage may not necessarily yield reduced fertility levels in individual families. A campaign that is geared towards individual families would achieve the desired goals. Overall, the findings point to the need for the Government in Malawi to enact public policies which are geared at vastly improving women's education at higher levels. The variation in marriage rates over families poses problems in delivering the policy, since particular policies must be devised for specific groups of families to accomplish the required social and health objectives.     

On measures of productivity

The welfare of an individual enterprise, as well as that of the national economy, very much depends on productivity. But it appears that methods for determining measures of productivity are lamentably unsophisticated and lead to many ambiguities and inconsistencies. It is generally suggested that productivity represents some ratio of output to input, but existing measures of inputs and outputs are unsatisfactory, largely because they gloss over the difficulties of reducing multi-inputs and multi-outputs to single denominators. This paper examines certain approaches that may be developed to handle some of the measurement problems involved in this area.