School of Management (SoM)

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Open Access
Acting in the spirit of the whole: expatriate careers between the poles of personal intentions and of company and country policies
(University of Bamberg Press, 2022-10-17) Andresen, Maike; Dickmann, Michael; Suutari, Vesa
Expatriation has received a lot of research attention over the years due to the importance of expatriates to organizations as well as extensive impacts such international work experience has on expatriates themselves. To generate a better understanding about expatriation, it is essential to understand things in context, as "Every event and everything must come into being as a result of causes and conditions." (Dalai Lama, 1998). In this chapter we discuss four topics areas that we see as important issues in the international careers of expatriates and that have been studied within the GLOMO project. We also connect the themes of the following chapters with these four areas and briefly introduce the chapters. First, we discuss expatriates’ career paths, the career capital they develop abroad and thus may be able to utilize afterwards, and the impacts of expatriation on the longer-term career success of individuals. Second, expatriates’ identities, well-being and embeddedness are discussed. Third, we introduce some key global mobility management challenges that companies face when managing expatriation. Finally, the role of the host country in expatriation is discussed as an additional theme that has received less attention in earlier research.
Open Access
Big data applications in supply chain management
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022-07-27) Aktas, Emel
This chapter overviews emerging applications of big data analytics in supply chain management. The academic attention on big data applications and their practitioner uptake is growing. Many recent papers showcase descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics applications where multiple benefits emerge from applying big data analytics to managerial problems. Such benefits include cost reduction, increases in revenues and profits, and minimization of the environmental impact of operations. Current concerns include the transition from traditional to digital supply chains and what can realistically be achieved over the next two decades. While we evidence excellent applications of big data analytics for supply chain planning and management problems, the issue of working in silos persists. For an organization to fully exploit big data applications, data should be perceived as an asset. When deploying novel artificial intelligence algorithms, the explainability of these algorithms should be at the forefront of an implementation strategy. Future research directions should be aimed at devising a connected and coordinated analytics approach that will enable the benefits of big data applications to go beyond what is currently realized.
Open Access
Chapter 12: Putting people and robots together in manufacturing: are we ready?
(Springer, 2019-05-06) Fletcher, Sarah; Teegan, Johnson; Larreina, Jon
Traditionally, industrial robots have needed complete segregation from people in manufacturing environments to mitigate the significant risk of injury posed by their high operational speeds and heavy payloads. However, advances in technology now not only enable the application of smaller force-limited robotics for lighter industrial tasks but also wider collaborative deployment of large-scale robots. Such applications will be critical to future manufacturing but present a design and integration challenge as we do not yet know how closer proximity and interactions will impact on workers’ psychological safety and well-being. There is a need to define new ethical and safety standards for putting people and robots together in manufacturing, but to do this we need empirical data to identify requirements. This chapter provides a summary of the current state, explaining why the success of augmenting human–robot collaboration in manufacturing relies on better consideration of human requirements, and describing current research work in the European A4BLUE project to identify this knowledge. Initial findings confirm that ethical and psychological requirements that may be crucial to industrial human–robot applications are not yet being addressed in safety standards or by the manufacturing sector.
Open Access
Chapter 15: Careers in turbulent environments: the impact of ‘Brexit’ on career motivations and behaviour in the United Kingdom
(Edgar Elgar Publishing, 2023-04-21) Dickmann, Michael; Parry, Emma; Chudzikowski, Katharina
This chapter explores the effects that the ‘hostile environment’ policy of the British government and the eventual exit of the United Kingdom (UK) from the EU, has had on the careers of international workers. Using insights from the career and hostile environment literatures, it concentrates on institutional, psychological and interactional perceptions that impact individuals’ career motivations and behaviors. Specifically, we explore and illustrate this using two cases of EU citizen who have lived and worked in the UK. We trace the development of their thinking and acting in the evolving career space over time to understand the effects of ‘hostile environments’ on their well-being, their identification with the host environment, their identity, career plans and coping approaches.
Open Access
Chapter 15: Normalization of deviance in projects: its causes and implications for effective governance
(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023-09-15) Pinto, Jeffrey K.; Davis, Kate
Organizational mistakes and accidents have a long history in practice and have been studied extensively in the engineering and organizational literature. One of the primary causes of persistent organizational error is the existence of deviance, i.e., behavior violating organizational norms. This chapter examines the behaviors and motivations of project team members in situations where deviant behaviors have been accepted and normalized as part of project operations. It discusses how normalization of deviance (NoD) manifests in terms of (1) project proposals and strategic misrepresentation, (2) client/contractor relationships, (3) planning and scheduling dynamics, and (4) workplace safety, and provides examples of NoD in practice. The chapter concludes with implications of NoD for organizational performance improvement and offers advice for how to avoid NoD situations.
Embargo
Chapter 16: Teaching sustainability: More than just a game
(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024-05-21) Watson, Rosina; Adams, Gemma; Borrelli, Rosina
Achieving a sustainable future involves rethinking how we live, work, and do business, and understanding the steps people and organisations can take to drive these changes. This involves having a vision of what a just and sustainable future could look like, seeing business as part of an interconnected system, taking bold decisions and collaborating with others. The Exploring Sustainable Futures game is a role-playing learning experience that teaches these skills. Participants experience how the interrelated actions of businesses, government and citizens shape the future, in the context of four possible scenarios of a sustainable future by 2050. We outline how the design and delivery of the game teaches critical competencies for sustainability. We offer practical guidance on playing the game with management students and executive leadership teams. We present emerging evidence on the impact of game play on participants, and recommend more participatory methods for evaluating learning outcomes.
Open Access
Chapter 1: Careers: what they are and how to look at them
(Edgar Elgar Publishing, 2023-04-21) Mayrhofer, Wolfgang; Briscoe, Jon; Dickmann, Michael; Hall, Douglas T.; Parry, Emma
Careers are central to people’s lives, but difficult to describe and understand. Building on the notion that everyone participating in the workforce has a career, this chapter presents the major building blocks of careers along three dimensions, i.e. ontic, spatial, and temporal. The ontic perspective on careers centres on various conditions of the persons having a career. This includes issues such as their gender, age, job, career satisfaction, career stage - in short, everything that matters and helps to characterize the person’s condition. The spatial perspective acknowledges that careers unfold not in a vacuum, but in a defined social and geographical space. This space is structured by external and internal boundaries, populated by other individuals, groups, and organizations and governed by formal and informal rules that individuals may or may not be aware of. The temporal perspective points towards time as a crucial aspect underlying careers. In terms of career outcomes, the chapter presents seven facets of career success in three groups - growth, design for life, and material output - that individuals use across the globe: entrepreneurship, learning and development, work-life-balance, positive impact, positive work relationships, financial security, and financial success.
Open Access
Chapter 1: Introduction
(Routledge / Taylor and Francis, 2017-09-13) Thompson, Toby
This book is about educating mid-career corporate executives, as dull as that sounds. My argument is aimed at those who are willing to argue for and against the usefulness of every station in the short logical journey that the (pro-education) scholar Stefan Collini outlines, above. The book will do battle with the strange sounding compound term “executive education” and propose that this innocuous seeming practice, as I will introduce it, deserves to be the new means by which we, collectively, can transform some of contemporary society’s greatest ills and iniquities, but not by the hubris usually associated with the corporate executive. This transformation is within the grasp of the corporate executive and the executive educator to affect, but like all transformations, it comes at a cost, which is twofold. Firstly, this cost is our willingness to challenge the dominant scripts, the scripts which tells us how we should act, think and feel in the face of the established orders and the predominant traditions. And on top of that significant outlay lies a second and altogether greater cost, but one that helps offset the first: and this requires us to confront the fact of our death, our anxieties and our boredom in the face of the day-to-day orders we routinely execute. This is where I engage with the work of the twentieth-century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), using his reckoning on the theme of being and time to enlighten how executive education can be reconceived and practiced anew: cue philosophy.
Open Access
Chapter 20: Corporate innovation and agile project management
(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023-10-01) Davis, Kate; Pinto, Jeffrey K.
Open Access
Chapter 21: the chatbot revolution: companies and consumers in a new digital age
(Sage, 2022-06-25) Shaalan, Ahmed; Tourky, Marwa; Ibrahim, Khaled
Chatbots are seen as something of a magic wand for both companies and consumers. They may enable companies to improve customer service and gather vast amounts of accurate data, while giving consumers a better experience as they engage with brands in a customised way. Chatbots can understand everyday language and respond by imitating human-to-human conversations. These anthropomorphic attributes, along with other advances in AI sophistication, have accelerated the commercialisation and prevalence of chatbots. This chapter explores chatbots as a form of evolving technology, provides a comprehensive understanding of their role in digital marketing, and sets out the academic theories associated with their use. It then theorises that machine learning processes are similar to those of humans, before exploring the big data being generated. After discussing the remaining challenges and obstacles to their wider use, conclusions are drawn about the likely future course of e-agents, with the intention of guiding researchers and practitioners into the next generation of AI advances.
Open Access
Chapter 2: One, two, many ways – a hands-on guide to how to navigate this book
(Edgar Elgar Publishing, 2023-04-21) Mayrhofer, Wolfgang; Briscoe, Jon; Dickmann, Michael; Hall, Douglas T.; Parry, Emma
This book contains career stories in context from all the populated continents in the world. It demonstrates how to look at careers from various perspectives. The stories are grouped in to 6 key themes: personal characteristic, stability and change, boundaries and borders, gender, generations and organizations. the chapters commence with a point of departure that sets the scene, constitutes a dilemma or problem or the like before contextualizing the situation. This usually is done by a brief introduction to the country and its specifics with regard to the careers and the core of the emerging story. Reflections on the story point towards core issues and related theoretical discourses. ‘Stop and Think’ sections with a few questions intended to stimulate further thoughts about the story close the chapter and are geared to produce relevant take-aways for the reader.
Open Access
Chapter 31: Ethics in digital marketing and social media
(SAGE, 2020-10-05) Hanlon, Annmarie
Chapter 31 considers ethics in digital marketing and social media. Whilst digital marketing and social media have disrupted traditional communications, the notion of ethics has been less considered. This chapter presents the emerging ethical issues within this domain, at individual, organisational and societal levels. The chapter starts with an introduction to the data that consumers are willing to share in order to gain access to platforms and explores how ethics has been managed in this domain, highlighting societal approaches to managing the data. It then provides the background to customer data deception and behavioural microtargeting and presents the notion of blurred boundaries, with its potential consequences such as online shaming. Subsequently this chapter looks at harmful online behaviour from trolls to sockpuppets, cyber-bullying to dying for selfies. Moving from risky individual behaviour to that of organisations and the ethical issues of seeking user-generated content, along with the role of influencers. The chapter concludes with a review of the policies and codes of conduct and discusses the future directions of digital and social media marketing ethics as we move towards an open ethics standard.
Open Access
Chapter 5: Following procedures, processes, or policies
(Routledge, 2022-12-30) Kutsch, Elmar
This book provides a guide to navigating the paradoxical tensions of organisational resilience and presents a framework to aid individuals and businesses to become more open-minded, flexible, and mindful in managing the unexpected. The book offers the reader pragmatic and insightful means to achieve a ‘state’ of organisational resilience, making use of current research data that shows how managers anticipate and respond to actual and near-miss incidents. Grounded in the day-to-day reality of managers, the goal of this book is to offer a unique theoretical framework as a platform for practical application for the improvement of organisational outcomes. It provides insights into ten key capabilities that enable the reader to set up a successful program of organisational resilience, taking a cross-cutting approach and focusing on implementation while having solid foundations in theory. This is an ideal book for advanced students and executive education courses in risk management, crisis management, and business continuity, as well as thoughtful practitioners.
Embargo
Chapter 8: Fostering project social sustainability through stakeholder inclusion
(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024-07-09) Di Maddaloni, Francesco; Davis, Kate
In project-based organizations, it is essential to respect the needs and expectations of different stakeholders. Sustainability and social outcomes have gained increasing importance, reflecting the demand for positive results in economic, social, and environmental areas. These results determine the actual value an organization contributes to its stakeholders. Aligning with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, organizations should prioritize sustainable economic growth, infrastructure, reduced urban inequalities, and partnerships in society. Neglecting social sustainability can lead to inequalities and suffering within local communities, posing reputational risks, particularly in complex projects. This chapter emphasizes the significance of stakeholder inclusion in project decision-making for better social sustainability. Project organizations should adopt a strategic and systematic approach, actively involving and harmonizing the interests of all stakeholders to achieve organizational goals and contribute to a cohesive and sustainable world.
Open Access
Chapter: Dialectical perspective of truce-making processes: integrating women into close combat roles in the Armed Forces
(Emerald, 2024-07-22) Alvarenga, Alessandro; Safavi, Mehdi; Burke, Gary T.
This paper investigates the intricate process of integrating historically excluded social groups into long-established routines. Drawing on a dialectical perspective, the research explores how persistence and change emerge through the interplay of opposing forces, shedding light on the dynamics of integrating new participants while ensuring stability in established routines. The empirical focus is on an Armed Forces’ ground combat training (GCT) course, examining the integration of the first female officers after the formal ban on their participation in close-combat roles was lifted. The findings reveal a nuanced evolution of routine adaptation and truce reformation, characterized by three dialectical cycles: tentative truces, experimental truces, and enactment truces. These cycles involve negotiations between continuity and reformation, accommodation and resistance, and modification and preservation, uncovering a dialectical dance where organizational actors invest intense effort in maintaining the status quo while accommodating ambiguity and settling tensions. The findings extend our understanding of routine dynamics by illuminating the performative aspect of truce-making, highlighting the effortful processes involved in accommodating new participants. This paper establishes a connection between routines and dialectics, providing novel avenues for exploring complex organizational challenges and emphasizing micro-strategies employed by routine participants to address differences in practice. It also contributes to the field of organizational inclusion by offering a dialectical understanding of integration, showcasing the intricate dynamics involved in integrating historically excluded groups into established routines.
Open Access
The efficiency of nations in the struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic
(IGI Global, 2022-04-01) Aktas, Emel; Ülengin, Füsun; Topcu, Ilker; Gundes, Eda Helin
The COVID-19 crisis has caused unprecedented suffering across the world. Millions have become infected, and hundreds of thousands have lost their lives. Nations mobilised their health workers and infrastructure to curb the spread of the disease and cure the infected. This paper aims to investigate the efficiency of nations in their struggle against the COVID-19 and how their efficiency changed over time analysing data from June and December 2020 with a novel three-stage methodology. In the first stage, we clustered 107 nations into highly competitive, competitive, and non-competitive countries using their Global Competitiveness Index scores published by the World Economic Forum evaluate a country in a group of comparable countries. In the second stage, we used Data Envelopment Analysis to assess the efficiency of each nation. In the third stage, we investigated the relationship between countries' efficiency and performance in 66 variables published in the United Nations Human Development Report along with the long-debated aspect of a nation's political governance regime using Tobit regression. Based on the data in June and December, the USA and the UK were the worst performers in the highly competitive nations cluster, Chile and Peru were the worst performers in the competitive nations cluster, and Brazil and Mozambique were the worst performers in the non-competitive nations cluster, respectively. Air pollution, international inbound tourists, urban population significantly reduced while domestic credit and gross national income per capita significantly increased efficiency, but the political regime did not affect efficiency.
Open Access
An exploration of the influence of innovations on organizational performance: a dynamic capabilities perspective
(Springer, 2022-06-25) Matopoulos, Aristides; Aktas, Emel
This research explores the impact of dynamic innovation capabilities on firm performance, investigating how alliances and networks improve the focal firm’s capabilities. We examine four innovation capabilities and their effect on profitability, performance, and growth of companies in the food industry. Drawing on the extant literature on innovation and dynamic capabilities theory, we develop six hypotheses to explain the relationship between different innovation capabilities and firm performance. We test the proposed research model and hypotheses using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with primary data from the food industry in Greece. Results indicate that dynamic innovation capabilities play a crucial role in improving profitability, growth, and overall firm performance through ordinary innovation capabilities. This study provides critical insights into innovation capabilities in the food industry. These insights are significant because prior studies have not investigated the relative effects of different innovation capabilities on profitability, growth, and overall firm performance, particularly the interrelationships between dynamic and ordinary innovation capabilities. The generalization of the study results may be limited due to the sample size.
Open Access
The global mobility “international employer” audit: charting the territory
(University of Bamberg Press, 2022-10-17) Dickmann, Michael; Barzantny, Cordula; Enser, David
Many authors and global mobility (GM) leaders ask for good data to base their expatriation decisions on. After all, where business insights lack it is rare that organizational decisions are high quality, agile and responsive to changing circumstances. One of the key aims of GLOMO was to develop a tool that helps important GM stakeholders, and in particular senior GM leaders, to monitor, analyse and refine their global mobility approaches. This chapter outlines pertinent GM design considerations in relation to strategic and operational pre-expatriation, on-assignment, and post-assignment decisions. In addition, it gives sample items of important performance indicators so that the reader gains an insight into core GM objectives. It shows how the GLOMO European research project is useful for organizations to improve their approaches to planning and managing the global mobility of employees.
Embargo
Individual resilience in a volatile work environment
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2023-09-01) Ong, Isabel; Kou, Chia-Yu
This chapter is set out to understand the way in which individuals build and maintain their resilience when facing a volatile work environment. We studied this question qualitatively in an S&P 500 company where the company faced major business changes during a time when employees faced work-related restrictions. We described practices that individuals do to maintain or inhibit their psychological resilience. Interestingly, we found that individuals were able to adopt positive framing of the situation across tenure, seniority levels, and involvement in the business change. We also found that the inhibitor for individuals to reframe their situation was related to being unable to rest. Increased working hours and a lack of work-life boundaries inhibited individuals’ pathways to resilience. Building on the findings, the chapter will conclude with managerial implications. First, the findings highlight that both direct managers and senior managers play an important role in shaping individuals’ meaning-making processes, and their narratives could encourage subordinates to demonstrate optimism around the challenge. Second, organizations can consider interventions such as instituting long and short breaks, and mindfulness training to mitigate the negative impact from lack of rest.
Open Access
Intelligent supply chains through implementation of digital twins
(Springer, 2022-07-05) Kulaç, Oray; Ekren, Banu Y.; Toy, Özgür
Data-driven decision-making process can be defined to be the sequential activities of real-time data collection, data analytics, optimization and decision making. Developments in Industry 4.0 technologies have made it possible to realize that new quality decision-making process. When that decision-making process is performed under the simulation model of a system developed on real-time data-based and end-to-end connection manner, to prevent the disruption risks and to improve resilience in a system, then it constitutes a digital twin (DT). A DT is a virtual representation of an object or system that can help organizations monitor operations, perform predictive analytics, and improve processes. For instance, a DT could provide a digital replica of the operations of a factory, communications network, or the flow of goods through a supply chain system. In this work, we focus on DT implementations in supply chain networks. We present state of the art implementation of DTs in supply chains and their prospective utilizations towards creating intelligent supply chains.