Entrepreneurial Leadership and Performance in Chinese New Ventures: A Moderated Mediation Model of Exploratory Innovation,Exploitative Innovation and Environmental Dynamism

This study advances prior theoretical research by examining the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and new venture performance with the introduction of exploratory and exploitative innovations as mediating variables. To fully understand the influence process of entrepreneurial leadership, we argue that environmental dynamism should be considered. Data on 168 new ventures in China indicate that entrepreneurial leadership is positively related to both exploratory and exploitative innovations, which in turn are both positively related to new venture performance. Our results also confirm that environmental dynamism moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and both types of innovation (i.e., exploratory and exploitative). Thus, we contribute to the debate on the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on the pursuit of excellent new venture performance, not only by examining how entrepreneurial leadership affects new venture performance by pursuing two types of innovative activities (i.e., exploratory and exploitative innovations), but also by revealing how these relationships are contingent upon environmental dynamism.     

The mediating effect of organizational culture and knowledge sharing on transformational leadership and Enterprise Resource Planning systems success: An empirical study in China

Senior leadership has been identified as a critical factor in fostering Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems success, however, the specific impact mechanism of transformational leadership on ERP success is still largely unknown. Based on organizational culture theory and knowledge based view, this study developed a theoretical model to explore the mediating effect of organizational culture and knowledge sharing on transformational leadership and ERP success. Data was collected from 115 IS executives and 413 ERP end users in 115 organizations in China. Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis results suggest that transformational leadership is directly related with all the four types of organizational culture – development culture, group culture, hierarchical culture and rational culture, and is indirectly related with knowledge sharing and ERP success. Specifically, development culture has direct impact on ERP success, while hierarchical culture, group and rational culture are indirectly related with ERP success, mediated by explicit and tacit knowledge sharing. The research findings can provide guidelines for the top executives to facilitate appropriate organizational culture, so as to foster ERP knowledge sharing and achieve business benefits with the assimilation of ERP systems.     

The mediating role of artifacts in position practice at work: Examples from a project-based context

Drawing on examples from a case study of a global product technology company, we discuss the mediating role of artifacts in position practice in project-based contexts. Findings revealed three types of mediation – professionalization, integration, and collaboration – and pointed out the key role of organizational remembering and forgetting in these mediation processes. These findings extend our understandings of how artifacts contribute to organizational practices. We discuss implications for theory and practice, and offer directions for future research.     

B2B E-Commerce Adoption in Iranian Manufacturing Companies: Analyzing the Moderating Role of Organizational Culture

The objective of this research is to examine the factors affecting Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce (B2B EC) adoption within technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework, and to test how such effects are moderated by organizational culture. Using a survey questionnaire, 320 responses were received from managers and owners of manufacturing companies in Iran. PLS-SEM technique was used for analysis. B2B EC adoption in manufacturing companies was found to be affected by cost of adoption, top management support, competitive pressure, and government support; and organizational culture was found to negatively moderate the relationship between top management support and B2B EC adoption. Managers, owners, and policy makers can use these findings to facilitate the adoption of B2B EC. Previous research have not analyzed the moderating role of organizational culture; these findings contribute to the e-commerce literature by filling this gap. The results indicate that the TOE framework provides a strong base for the study of B2B EC in developing countries. The results also show that this framework is able to integrate moderating variable into the theoretical model.     

Connecting the dots: Understanding the interrelated impacts of type,quality and children's awareness of design features and the mathematics content learning goals in digital math games and related learning outcomes

This study focused on an examination of how type, quality and children's awareness of design features in digital math games, along with an awareness of the mathematics goals of the game, were related to learning outcomes. We conducted a parallel conversion mixed methods study with 45 students in Grades 3 and 4 (ages 9–10). Students participated in clinical interviews using three digital math games. The results suggest a moderated mediation relationship in which the quality of the design features moderated the mediating impact of children's awareness of the game's design features, specifically when the child was aware of the mathematics content learning goal (MCLG) of the game. These findings show how important it is that design features are of high quality in a digital math game, and how this is intertwined with children's awareness of the features and the MCLG. When these variables intertwined in just the right way, the interactions between the children and the digital math game afforded mathematical learning growth.     

Mediating Effect between Supportive Culture and Job Satisfaction in Administrative Services at Higher Education Institutions

The purpose of this article is to examine halo effect and organizational commitment in relation to employees' job satisfaction and organizational supportive culture at universities in Taiwan. The study used a questionnaire to collect data from 210 female faculty members of Taiwanese universities. The conceptual model was tested mediating the effect of structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation. This study not only found the mediating role of halo effect and organizational commitment between supportive culture and job satisfaction, but also proved that a supportive culture in universities is directly and positively related to job satisfaction and that emotional and identification‐oriented organizational commitment may affect job satisfaction in a positive way among female faculty members. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The effect of SDLR and self‐efficacy in preschool teachers by using WS learning

This study examined whether self‐directed learning readiness (SDLR) moderates the association between Internet self‐efficacy and approaches to learning by web searching (ALWS). A total of 329 valid questionnaires were used for the correlation and path analysis. The results revealed that preschool teachers' SDLR significantly moderated the influence of Internet self‐efficacy and ALWS. Thus, this result suggests that spending more time on SDLR may increase preschool teachers' ALWS, which may enhance their teaching practice via web‐based professional development. Findings from this study may have implications for preschool teachers who aim to improve their teaching practice by targeting web‐searching environment and approaches to learning. The findings suggest that the positive mediation role of SDLR between Internet self‐efficacy and ALWS, especially effective learning, active learning and independent learning of SDLR. Because SDLR has the great influence on the online learning domain, preparing teacher's self‐directed learning ability is important for educational authorities to facilitate teachers' better performance when learning online.     

Effects of entrepreneurship and IT fashion on SMEs’ transformation toward cloud service through mediation of trust

This study draws from strategic choice theory, management fashion theory, and trust research to investigate organizational transformation toward cloud service. Considering organizations’ substantive rationality, this study proposes that SMEs’ entrepreneurial orientation and the institutional pressures received from the marketplace provide motives for their cloud transformation intention. These influences are mediated by a complex trust-building process. A survey involving 107 Chinese SMEs was conducted to validate our research model. The results illustrate that SMEs’ trust building toward the cloud-related situation and artifact plays a critical role in mediating the effects of strategic orientation and institutional pressures on their cloud transformation.     

What Factors Drive Organizational Learning From Crisis? Insights From the Dutch Food Safety Services’ Response to Four Veterinary Crises

Although organizational learning has been studied extensively, empirical studies in relation to crises and theory building have remained scarce. This study explored what factors affect the learning process from crises of a public sector organization. We studied the responses of the Dutch food safety services (NVWA) to the veterinary crises classical swine fever (1997–1998), foot‐and‐mouth disease (2001), avian influenza (2003) and Q fever (2007–2010). Data from in‐depth interviews with key experts in the organization and from crisis management documents pointed to political–economic context, social–emotional understanding, organizational structure, organizational culture, crisis management stage and organizational forgetting as key factors. Remarkably, postcrisis evaluation reports, leadership and a shared sense‐making of what lessons to learn were not found to play a central role.     

ERP system usage and benefit: A model of antecedents and outcomes

ERP system usage has been identified as a critical factor in attaining the benefit from an ERP installation. However, the specific antecedents of ERP usage and its impact on ERP benefit remains largely unknown. Drawing on absorption capacity theory, this study develops a theoretical model that examines the mediating effect of ERP system usage on ERP benefits. Similarly, the study also identifies the antecedents of ERP system usage. A model is tested using the responses of 157 ERP system end-users across the United States and the results suggest that ERP system usage is directly related ERP benefit. However, the relationship is moderated by the degree of knowledge integration mechanisms within the firm. Consistent with the proposed model, the results also reveal that technical resources, organizational fit and the extent of ERP implementation are key drivers of ERP system usage. The research findings advance our knowledge on how managers can enhance ERP usage and realize optimal ERP benefits.     

Entrepreneurship, knowledge integration capability, and firm performance: An empirical study

From the knowledge-based view, an organization is considered an entity that integrates and distributes knowledge to produce products and services. Knowledge is acknowledged as a sustainable basis of competitive advantage that many organizations possess. Entrepreneurial activity also has been viewed as an essential feature for organizations to survive and prosper in today??s turbulent environment. In this study, we explore the effect of entrepreneurship on organizational performance through knowledge integration capability. Our research model depicts the firm as a knowledge integration institution that produces its offerings through specialized knowledge integration capability that consists of learning culture, knowledge management process, and information technology capability. The results show a strong support for the relationship between entrepreneurship and knowledge integration capability. We also found that the effect of entrepreneurial activities on firm performance was mediated by knowledge integration capability.     

Different leaders: Emergent organizational and intellectual leadership in children’s collaborative learning groups

This paper presents two studies that examine emergent leadership in children’s collaborative learning groups. Building on research that finds that leadership moves are distributed among group members during learning activities, we examined whether there were patterns in the distribution of moves, resulting in different types of emergent leaders in groups. Study one examines individual groups working with a teacher, on the same task either with paper or multi-touch tables. Study two examines groups of students in a multi-touch classroom. Results from study one indicated that the leadership was distributed among the students; the distributions aligned with classifications of intellectual leadership moves and organizational leadership moves for about half of the groups. There were no differences in emergent leadership between the multi-touch and paper conditions. These results were explored in more detail in a multi-touch classroom study, exploring emergent leadership in 22 groups of students across six classes. Again, leadership was distributed among group members, and specific roles of intellectual and organizational leader, taken on by two different students, could be identified in half of the groups. These results suggest that attention should be paid to how students are engaging in collaborative learning tasks to ensure all students participate in the intellectual as well as organizational demands of the task. Additionally, the pattern of the distribution of roles suggests that care should be taken to specify behaviors if the role of leader is assigned to collaborative groups.     

Investigating the effects of IS strategic leadership on organizational benefits from the perspective of CIO strategic roles

In this study, the effects of IS strategic leadership on organizational outcomes are examined from the perspective of CIO strategic roles. A field survey is conducted that collects data from 110 matched pairs of CIOs and business executives within organizations. Our findings suggest that strategic leadership significantly affects both organizational benefits and information system quality. Further, we found that IS quality significantly mediates the relationship between IS strategic leadership and organizational benefits. We also note that IS vision significantly moderates the relationship between IS strategic leadership and IS quality, although it does not moderate the relationship between IS strategic leadership and organizational benefits or the relationship between IS quality and organizational benefits.     

Information behavior and value creation potential of information capital: Mediating role of organizational learning

This work draws on recent literature concerning information capital and organizational learning to explore how this may affect information behavior and value (IBV) of the healthcare industry in an emerging economy. Whether organizational learning mediates the relationships between information capital and both information behavior and information value (IBV) is also examined. Additionally, a parsimonious and plausible empirical model is proposed to examine the links among contextual variables. Data are collected from full-time medical staff of medical centers in Taiwan, including physicians and nurses. To clarify the relationships among these variables, structural equation modeling (SEM) is conducted to examine the model fit and three hypotheses. The SEM results clearly demonstrate the mediating role of organizational learning in the impact of information capital on both information behavior and information value. Consequently, organizational learning leads to appropriate information behavior and information value (that is, information sharing and information integrity, respectively) only when integrated with organizational learning and information capital for healthcare organizations.     

The role of information governance in big data analytics driven innovation

The age of big data analytics is now here, with companies increasingly investing in big data initiatives to foster innovation and outperform competition. Nevertheless, while researchers and practitioners started to examine the shifts that these technologies entail and their overall business value, it is still unclear whether and under what conditions they drive innovation. To address this gap, this study draws on the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm and information governance theory to explore the interplay between a firm’s big data analytics capabilities (BDACs) and their information governance practices in shaping innovation capabilities. We argue that a firm’s BDAC helps enhance two distinct types of innovative capabilities, incremental and radical capabilities, and that information governance positively moderates this relationship. To examine our research model, we analyzed survey data collected from 175 IT and business managers. Results from partial least squares structural equation modelling analysis reveal that BDACs have a positive and significant effect on both incremental and radical innovative capabilities. Our analysis also highlights the important role of information governance, as it positively moderates the relationship between BDAC’s and a firm’s radical innovative capability, while there is a nonsignificant moderating effect for incremental innovation capabilities. Finally, we examine the effect of environmental uncertainty conditions in our model and find that information governance and BDACs have amplified effects under conditions of high environmental dynamism.     

Examining the impacts of organizational culture and top management support of knowledge sharing on the success of software process improvement

Although numerous studies have discussed the importance of the relationship between knowledge management and software process improvement (SPI), a research gap still exists in relation to how the specific role of knowledge sharing influences successful SPI implementation. This study advances our knowledge by developing an innovative model for exploring the impact of knowledge sharing on SPI success, the impact of knowledge sharing in specific organizational cultures, and how the support of top management specifically influences the path to SPI success. To empirically test the model, this study adopts the statistical technique of partial least squares (PLS) to analyze 118 samples collected from SPI-certified Taiwanese organizations. The results suggest that clan-type organizational culture has a stronger association with knowledge sharing than hierarchy-type in the context of SPI success. SPI knowledge sharing is found to be a mediator of both clan culture and top management support in the context of SPI success. The findings also include the implication to improve our knowledge about how organizational culture and top management support drive effective knowledge sharing on the way to SPI success.     

Artificial worlds modeling of human resource management systems

Effective human resource management facilitates the success of an organization and the progress of a society. We describe an evolutionary computer model that simulates different modes of interaction between people and their environment. A two-level genotype-phenotype structure is used to represent the characteristics of an individual. The environment is modeled as a two-dimensional array of regions in which each region is characterized by a set of regional features and organizational culture. Evolution can occur at the regional and organizational levels. At the level of regional learning, the experimental results show that people tend to migrate from lesser-fitting regions to better-fitting regions to increase their fitness, which in turn results in the problem that some regions become extremely crowded and other areas have few residents. This problem can be partially eased by putting pressure on the number of people allowed in each region. However, our results show that too great an increase in pressure worsens the problem. At the level of organizational learning, our experiments show that individuals with a local mutation operator are better at adapting to a constant leadership strategy (type), while those with a global mutation operator are better at coping with the changes in leadership strategy. The individuals who sustain a balance between a global and a local mutation operator achieve better performance in a changing leadership strategy than a constant leadership strategy. The results demonstrate that the model is imparted with sufficient dynamics to allow different types of outputs to occur. The artificial worlds approach makes it possible to conduct some experiments that are infeasible to perform in the real world. Combining more selected features into the model would show its potential use in investigating complex human resource management issues.     

The role of organizational culture for grounding,management, guidance and effectiveness of enterprise architecture principles

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has become a widely acknowledged approach for guiding the continuous change of increasingly complex organizations. While methods and models for describing and analyzing enterprise architectures (EA) have been extensively discussed, principles guiding an EA’s design and evolution are hardly covered in existing research. The paper at hand therefore analyzes the mechanisms of EA principles (EAP), that is EAP grounding, EAP management, and EAP guidance and their effects on EA consistency and EAM utility. Specifically we aim at understanding the role of organizational culture for the mechanisms and effects of EAP. Based on empirical data we find that all relations describing EAP mechanisms and their effects are significantly moderated by organizational culture. Based on our findings we give recommendations on how to deal with selected design decisions when introducing and developing EA principles in an organization.     

Modeling and Simulation of Entrepreneur Individual Based on Dynamic and Complex System Computing

There are disadvantages such as lack of resources and experience in college students’ entrepreneurship and the current research belong to the investigation and research, lacking the prediction simulation model research. Based on the theory of individual learning and the theory of complex systems, this study analyzes the mechanism of college students’ entrepreneurial process through dynamic learning theory, establishes the model of college students’ entrepreneurial subject, studies the different learning styles of college students, and discusses the influence of environmental dynamics on college students’ chance recognition. Through simulation and practice analysis, it is concluded that college students’ entrepreneurship is the process of learning and development of an individual and enterprise subject. Simultaneously, this study finds that the improvement of learning efficiency, learning channels and vision can effectively promote the development of enterprises, and can provide new ideas for the theoretical research of college students’ entrepreneurship.     

Multi-level analysis of peer support,Internet self-efficacy and e-learning outcomes – The contextual effects of collectivism and group potency

The present study intends to explore the role of collectivism and group potency at group level in predicting individual Internet self-efficacy (ISE) and individual e-learning outcomes for people aged over 45. Group learning has been widely discussed in the research into online formats. However, less study has been carried out about how collectivism and collective group potency affect individual learning decisions, especially using the technique of Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) for cross-level analysis, which provides the solution of case dependency between group members. This study examines the mediation effects of ISE between peer support and e-learning outcomes. It also explores the contextual effects of group potency, and the moderation effects of collectivism and group potency at an individual level. The results show that ISE fully mediates the relationship between peer support and learners’ persistence in e-learning, and partially mediates learners’ perceived learning and satisfaction. It is noteworthy that the findings do not support direct group-level contextual effects of group potency. Instead, the results suggest that group potency moderates ISE-perceived learning and ISE-satisfaction relationships. On the other hand, collectivism also moderates the relationship between peer support and ISE. This study highlights the group-level effects of group potency, and suggests that adult educators design and deliver e-learning courses with an emphasis on facilitating group processes.