Article by Aurélien Feix and Georg Wernicke
Publised in Journal of Business Ethics

Activism undertaken by CEOs has been on the rise in recent years. Research on this practice has been primarily concerned with determining the conditions under which a CEO’s public statements on sociopolitical issues are beneficial or detrimental to her firm’s business performance.

We complement this instrumental perspective on CEO activism with an ethical investigation of the implications of CEO activism for the democratic process. Drawing on political philosophy, we show that the answer to the question of whether CEO activism is conducive to the democratic process depends on the view of democracy that is adopted.

From the perspective of liberalism, the sole requirement that an instance of CEO activism must fulfill is that it is lawful, provided that the applicable law sufficiently protects people’s essential rights. However, from the viewpoint of republicanism, this is not a sufficient condition. Besides being law-abiding, CEOs should be “civic-minded” when intervening in public debates, i.e., concerned with the quality and fairness with which those debates are conducted. Based on the literature on republicanism, we suggest four possible criteria that civic-minded CEOs can apply to gauge the democratic conduciveness of a possible public intervention: added insight, timeliness, constructiveness, and transparency.

Our article complements the predominantly instrumentally oriented literature on CEO activism and contributes, more broadly, to the literature that explores the normative dimensions of corporate political involvement, as well as to a growing strand of research that draws on philosophical theory to inform business leaders’ ethical decision-making.

Article by Mathieu Molines, Anthony Perrier
Publised in Public Administration Review

How do public employees respond to organizational identity threats?

The present study investigates how public employees make sense of and react to threatening events that may call into question organization’s core attributes and status. Using social identity theory and the appraisal theory of emotions, we develop a model in which organizational identity induced by negative media coverage threat provokes shame that results in exemplification.

We further explain the role of public service motivation as a moderator of the proposed mediated relationships. Predictions are tested in an experimental study and a field study involving French police officers.

Our results show that shame mediated the positive effect of organizational identity threat on police officers’ exemplification behaviors. When public service motivation is high, police officers are more likely to engage in exemplification to cope with organizational identity threat than when it is slow. Theoretical and practical implications and future research directions are discussed.

Article by Quentin Plantec, Benjamin Cabanes, Pascal le Masson, Benoit Weil.
Publised in Research Policy

Academic engagement with industry is a well-researched topic. However, research has focused on scholars in traditional university departments, overlooking more hybrid research contexts such as the growing trend of PhD students and their supervisors engaging in collaborative research projects with industry during their training.

To address this gap, this study explores the early-career academic engagement of PhD students in university-industry collaborative research projects. It particularly focuses on research orientation and its association with scientific and inventive yield. Drawing on Stokes’ (1997) framework, the study investigates the extent to which the research orientation (basic research, applied research, and user-inspired fundamental research) is associated with scientific and inventive yield.

The study is based on a review of 631 collaborative PhD projects with industry completed in France in 2018 through a national programme (CIFRE). It finds that the three research orientations are associated with different levels of scientific and inventive yields. While basic research is the most common orientation across the sample, the rarest, user-inspired fundamental research, is associated with the highest scientific and inventive yield. Moreover, the study highlights the critical role of PhD students’ taste for science or industry (and the potential change in this taste during the project) in the association between research orientation and projects’ yields.

Overall, this study sheds light on an understudied area of academic engagement and highlights the significance of considering research orientation and students’ taste for science or industry when developing university-industry collaborations. This has implications for PhD supervisors, PhD students, their industrial partners, and policymakers.

Article by Camilla Barbarossa, Michela Patrizi, Maria Vernuccio, Maria Carmen Di Poce, Alberto Pastore.
Publised in Health Policy

Western governments’ attempts to encourage young adults to adopt COVID-19 contact tracing apps (CTAs) have been unsuccessful. Drawing on psychological reactance theory, we propose that government-imposed containment measures (e.g., lockdowns, curfews) may cause young adults to resist CTAs. We investigate how and when threats to freedom posed by government-imposed containment measures to young adults reduce their CTA adoption intentions.

We conducted a survey of young adults during the second general lockdown (March‒April 2021) in Italy. The results show that when young Italian adults focus on the restrictive nature of government-imposed containment measures, their sense of freedom is threatened.

Threats to freedom produce psychological states of either helplessness or reactance, depending on if young Italian adults think they can recover their freedom. Helpless young adults are motivated to adopt CTAs because they seek guidance from containment measures.

Reactant young adults resist CTAs because they exhibit aversive psychological states toward containment measures. These results offer relevant insights for policymakers. They shed light on young Italian adults’ resistance toward CTAs. They also inform governments on how to interact more efficiently with young adults if a novel pandemic should occur.

Article by Maciel M. Queiroz, Charbel Jose Chiappetta Jabbour, Chinming (Victor) Shi, Samuel Fosso Wamba
Publised in International Journal of Production Economics

The remarkable growth of ChatGPT, a Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI), has triggered a significant debate in society. It has the potential to radically transform the business landscape, with consequences for operations and supply chain management (O&SCM). However, empirical evidence on Gen-AI’s effects in O&SCM remains limited.

This study investigates the benefits, challenges, and trends associated with Gen-AI/ChatGPT in O&SCM. We collected data from O&SCM practitioners in the UK (N = 154) and the USA (N = 161). As we used the organizational learning theory for the research, our findings reveal increased efficiency as a significant benefit for both adopters and non-adopters in both countries, while indicating security, risks, and ethical as prominent concerns. In particular, it appeared that the integration of Gen-AI/ChatGPT leads to the enhancement of the overall supply chain performance.

Moreover, organizational learning can speed up the results of Gen-AI/ChatGPT in O&SCM. No wonders that adopters express their satisfaction about the post-implementation benefits of the technology, which include reduced perceived challenges for pre-implementation, and greater optimism about future Gen-AI/ChatGPT utilization compared to non-adopters.

Adopters also display diverse behavioral patterns toward efficiency, agility, responsiveness, etc. This study provides valuable insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers interested in comprehending Gen-AI/ChatGPT’s implications in O&SCM for both adopters and non-adopters. Additionally, it underscores the importance of organizational learning processes in facilitating successful Gen-AI/ChatGPT adoption in O&SCM.

Article by Waleed Shleha, Ferran Vendrell-Herrero, Yancy Vaillant
Publised in International Business Reviewe

As the importance of servitization and service-augmented solution delivery grows into a mainstream phenomenon for manufacturers, offering theoretically founded avenues to solve their specific internationalization challenges is necessary.

The study addresses the internationalization paradox faced by servitized manufacturers generated by the specific hybrid nature of their product-service offering. As such, this research is meant to understand the entry mode diversity for the internationalization of advanced servitization providers.

Our primary research deal-level data follows 1885 potential sales negotiations for servitized products closed in 2018 by a Poland-based multinational high-tech optics firm offering product-service systems. The results of the study support the idea that manufacturers of advanced servitization could benefit from the implementation of entry mode diversity.

It is found that the sales deal success when entry mode diversity is implemented in a foreign market is positively moderated when knowledge-intensive advanced servitization is included in the negotiation.

Article by Md Afnan Hossain, Shahriar Akter, Venkata Yanamandram, Samuel Fosso Wamba
Publised in Technological Forecasting and Social Change

This study’s objective is to investigate how a business can achieve data-driven market effectiveness through the sustained application of a customer analytics capability to its operations.

Despite the abundance of literature on retail technology management, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of a customer analytics capability in promoting sustainable market performance within retail business operations remains scarce.

This study presents a model of a sustained customer analytics capability in the context of competitive, data-rich retail business processes, drawing on grounded market orientation capability theory. The study employs a taxonomy of explanation and prediction from an epistemological perspective, employing predominantly positivist methods, where data analysis validates the conceptual customer analytics capability and its sustained critical outcomes.

In addition, the study discusses the significant contributions of its findings regarding the acceleration of retail business operational performance in a big data environment and also provides future research directions to resolve any limitations of the current study.

Article by Oscar Rodríguez-Espíndola, Prasanta Dey, Pavel Albores, Soumyadeb Chowdhury
Publised in Annals of Operations Research

When managing crises and disasters, decision-makers face high uncertainty levels, disrupted supply chains, and damaged infrastructure. This complicates delivering resources that are essential for the survival of the victims. Flexible and adaptable supply networks are needed to ensure a consistent flow of relief to the areas affected by disasters.

Intermodality is a valuable approach when infrastructure is damaged, as it allows the use of different delivery modes to reach demand areas. Nevertheless, involving different transportation modes has an impact on the environment. Looking at the importance of helping victims and considering the environmental impact of humanitarian operations for long-term sustainability, intermodality and carbon emission reduction measures can be an interesting combination.

This area, however, is currently understudied. This article introduces a two-stage stochastic formulation to fill that gap. The model addresses facility location, resource allocation, and intermodal relief distribution considering carbon emission reduction in facilities, intermodal activities, and distribution. The formulation minimises costs and the level of shortage of relief. The model is tested using a case study in Sinaloa, Mexico, to investigate the impact of intermodality and carbon emission reduction measures on costs and shortage of relief for disaster victims.

The findings confirm that the model proposed allows for the diversification of transportation modes and reduces carbon emissions whilst achieving a good level of performance in both metrics. The comparison with a benchmark model without intermodality and carbon reduction measures suggests that the formulation can increase flexibility and reduce the level of CO2 emissions whilst maintaining high satisfaction rates.

Article by Pawan Budhwar, Soumyadeb Chowdhury, Geoffrey Wood, Herman Aguinis, Greg J. Bamber, Jose R. Beltran, Paul Boselie, Fang Lee Cooke, Stephanie Decker, Angelo DeNisi, Prasanta Kumar Dey, David Guest, Andrew J. Knoblich, Ashish Malik, Jaap Paauwe, Savvas Papagiannidis, Charmi Patel, Vijay Pereira, Shuang Ren, Steven Rogelberg, Mark N. K. Saunders, Rosalie L. Tung, Arup Varma
Publised in Human Resource Management Journal

ChatGPT and its variants that use generative artificial intelligence (AI) models have rapidly become a focal point in academic and media discussions about their potential benefits and drawbacks across various sectors of the economy, democracy, society, and environment. It remains unclear whether these technologies result in job displacement or creation, or if they merely shift human labour by generating new, potentially trivial or practically irrelevant, information and decisions.

According to the CEO of ChatGPT, the potential impact of this new family of AI technology could be as big as “the printing press”, with significant implications for employment, stakeholder relationships, business models, and academic research, and its full consequences are largely undiscovered and uncertain. The introduction of more advanced and potent generative AI tools in the AI market, following the launch of ChatGPT, has ramped up the “AI arms race”, creating continuing uncertainty for workers, expanding their business applications, while heightening risks related to well-being, bias, misinformation, context insensitivity, privacy issues, ethical dilemmas, and security.

Given these developments, this perspectives editorial offers a collection of perspectives and research pathways to extend HRM scholarship in the realm of generative AI. In doing so, the discussion synthesizes the literature on AI and generative AI, connecting it to various aspects of HRM processes, practices, relationships, and outcomes, thereby contributing to shaping the future of HRM research.

Article by Maciel M. Queiroz, Samuel Fosso Wamba, Rakesh D. Raut, Ilias O. Pappas
Publised in British Journal of Management

Business models for sustainability (BMfS) enable organizations to create social and environmental value for a wide variety of stakeholders. As BMfS are new for well-established industries, their implementation requires deep organizational change to overcome path dependencies of existing business models. In this article, we present a framework which outlines the organizational change process involved in BMfS development. The framework shows that organizations can experiment with novel configurations of value, resources, and transactions, and follow discursive and cognitive pathways to enable BMfS legitimization and implementation. Although the value, resources, and transactions levers can be used either separately or in concert, discursive and cognitive pathways are most powerful when pursued together. We use our framework to highlight the contributions of the articles in the special issue and to propose new directions for BMfS research. We argue that future research should investigate the impacts of BMfS on the sustainability challenges they seek to address.