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The purpose of this study is to examine how informational faultlines on a board affect the management of knowledge owned by directors and the consequences on organizational performance. In this study, informational faultlines are defined as hypothetical lines that divide a group into relatively homogeneous subgroups based on the alignment of several informational attributes among board members.

The study uses unique hand-collected panel data covering 7,247 board members at 106 publicly traded firms to provide strong support for the hypothesized U-shaped relationship. The authors use a fixed effects approach and a system generalized method of moments approach to test the hypothesis.

The study finds that the relationship between informational faultlines on a board and organizational performance is U shaped, with the least optimal organizational performance experienced when boards have moderate informational faultlines. More specifically, informational faultlines within boards are negatively related to organizational performance across the weak-to-moderate range of informational faultlines and positively related to organizational performance across the moderate-to-strong range.

By explaining the mechanisms through which informational faultlines are related to organizational performance, the authors contribute to the literature in a number of ways. By conceptualizing how the management of knowledge plays an important role in the particular setting of corporate boards, the authors add not only to literature on knowledge management but also to the faultline and corporate governance literature.

This study offers a rationale for prior mixed findings by providing an alternative theoretical basis to explain the effect of informational faultlines within boards on organizational performance. To advance the field, the authors build on the concept of knowledge demonstrability to illuminate how informational faultlines affect the management of knowledge within boards, which will translate to organizational performance.

This study explores how and when intuitive forms of planning can be used in a family firm's succession process.

The study uses an extended focus group meeting, consisting of individual, group and subgroup discussions with seven highly experienced external family business advisors in the Netherlands to gain a holistic understanding of the succession process and its underlying logic. The study also employs pre- and post-group questionnaires.

This study reveals that advisors perceive intuitive forms of planning as an integral part of the succession process, with the latter containing both intuitive and formal logic and activities. Both logics are used situationally and flexibly to deal with the uniqueness and unpredictability of the succession process and to build strong relations and manage relational dynamics in business families to address tasks, dilemmas and contingencies.

The succession process is an important part of business families' achievement of transgenerational intent. Creating commitment among potential successors begins when they are children, and understanding the role of the more intuitive forms of planning during the succession process will provide us with a more holistic perspective on its dynamics.

This study aims to unravel a potential determinant of employee engagement in family firms. In particular, we focus on the role of the CEO by studying the influence of CEO transformational leadership on employee engagement. Moreover, we look into the potential mediating psychological safety might play in this relationship.

Based on an extensive literature review, we propose that there will be a significant positive relationship between family firm CEOs’ transformational leadership and the level of employee engagement. We argue that psychological safety will serve as an underlying mechanism explaining this positive relationship. We empirically tested our research model using quantitative data collected through a questionnaire, completed by 508 employees from Belgian family firms.

The results confirm the positive relationship between CEOs’ transformational leadership and employee engagement. Moreover, these results show that the degree of psychological safety mediates this relationship.

This study forms a significant contribution to family firm literature. Until now, even though existing studies on employee engagement in general are numerous, we had little to no knowledge of the factors influencing employee engagement taking into account the unique context of family firms. With this study, we take an important step in this matter. In addition, this study also contributes to the general literature on employee engagement, since previous studies on the impact of leadership on employee engagement tended to focus on the role of the immediate supervisors and not the CEO.

The purpose of this paper is to build a conceptual framework for understanding how in‐depth joint supply chain learning can be successfully developed. This kind of learning is becoming increasingly important in highly turbulent and uncertain economic environments of new and growing interdependencies and complexities.

Using a “synthesizing” or “bricolage” approach, key insights, now dispersed over a variety of literatures and disciplines, are integrated to develop the framework.

The leading facilitative actor's orientations, competencies and behavior play a significant role in enhancing the relationships between the supply chain actors shaping in‐depth joint learning. Starting with establishing interaction boundary conditions by the leading actor, this process is likely to lead to system‐level generative outcomes. These outcomes, in turn, serve the process cycle of in‐depth joint learning as inputs for the relationship building process among all the actors.

By centering on the actual shaping of in‐depth joint learning, and the concrete enactment of roles by protagonists enhancing this process, the paper has opened the black box. Future research should refine the framework.

Apart from giving insight into the repertoire of relational competencies and behaviors needed to enhance the relationship building process conducive to in‐depth joint learning, the paper addresses how these skills can be developed in practice and education.

The paper identifies several implications for research, practice, and education. Instead of focusing predominantly on the content, procedure, levers, or outcomes of learning, the relational construction of the learning process itself is clarified.

The purpose of this paper is to profile the way in which Volvo Cars Gent (VCG) Belgium and its suppliers succeed in managing their interdependencies on HRM issues through a shared HRM collaborative, called the Suppliers Team Volvo Cars HRM forum (STVC‐HRM).

A case study approach is used to develop understanding of the critical factors that contribute to the forum's success.

It was found that the critical success factors concern the way STVC‐HRM members enacted trust, common ground, leadership, shared responsibility, and representative‐constituency dynamics.

To understand the Toyota system of successful collaboration and learning with suppliers, it is necessary to look into the actual assembler‐supplier relationships and practices developed.

Building lasting manufacturer‐supplier relationships is considered to be one of the elements that contribute to Toyota's competitive advantage in supply chain management. However, other organisations struggle to improve manufacturer‐supplier relationships despite applying seemingly similar principles. The paper helps in recognising and managing the main collaboration issues at hand.

The work suggests how to build and maintain deep mutually beneficial manufacturer‐supplier relationships through the VCG‐suppliers case. Other organisations that want to develop those much‐needed relationships may learn from the successful VCG‐suppliers way of doing things.

Despite advances in Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) scholarship and practice, ESE has not yet contributed to mitigate the sustainability-related problems it is meant to remedy. As part of an explanation, some scholars have argued that current ESE scholarship and practice overemphasizes intellectual and neglects (intra-)personal competencies as envisaged learning outcomes of ESE learning programs and activities. To date, however, such personal competencies have not been systematically specified in terms of the challenges they are meant to respond to. This paper aims to derive personal competencies from an analysis of inner challenges individuals face when engaging with the cause of sustainable consumption.

The study is conceptual and proceeds in two steps: In the first step, it analyzes existing research on challenges individuals experience when intending to change their consumer behavior and engaging in consumption-related learning activities. In a second step, a set of personal competencies for sustainable consumption are derived from the analysis of challenges. Based on the set of competencies, suggestions for future research empirically corroborating the reflections of this paper are made.

The discussion of challenges indicates that both sustainable consumption and consumption-related learning activities can come along with a series of affective-motivational challenges. In contrast to established competency frameworks, personal competencies emphasize the importance of affective-motivational learning outcomes instead of intellectual ones. They are defined here as abilities, proficiencies or skills related to inner states and processes that can be considered necessary to engage with the cause of sustainability. Personal competencies responding to the inner challenges of engaging with sustainable consumption include ethics, self-awareness, emotional resilience, self-care, access to and cultivation of ethical qualities and mindsets for sustainability.

Given that this paper is conceptual, further research is needed to empirically inquire into the importance of personal competencies for sustainable consumption and corroborate the provided reflections. Furthermore, the study has not responded to some of the concerns a few ESE experts have expressed concerning the concept of (intra-)personal competencies more generally. To address these concerns, future research should be dedicated to empirically validating and operationalizing personal competencies, eventually leading to tools allowing for a systematic assessment of these competencies. Based on such assessment tools, pedagogical formats should be elaborated and evaluated with regard to their potential to stimulate personal sustainability competencies.

The concept of personal competencies explicitly acknowledges that current unsustainability is associated with the experience of inner, affective-motivational challenges. ESE learning programs and activities should prepare learners for these challenges. However, a specification of these inner challenges and corresponding personal competencies has not yet been undertaken. The set of personal competencies outlined in this paper can serve as a first starting point for specifying personal sustainability competencies and makes a case why their consideration is important when it comes to designing and evaluating ESE learning programs and activities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate payout smoothing in two emerging markets – China and Taiwan. The authors conduct a comparative study of two emerging market economies that have common cultural and historical characteristics but have experienced different government systems and different approach to the market-based system.

The authors collect firm-level data from Standard and Poor's Compustat Global database, which covers 5,298 public firms in China and Taiwan during the period 1996–2015, and use a variance decomposition methodology to estimate the smoothness of corporate payout in a common empirical framework that includes net income, and debt and investment policies.

Overall, the empirical findings support recently proposed theories of joint determination of corporate payout behavior with debt and investment policies. The authors find that debt and investment policies absorb the majority of shocks to net income, and that debt policy is the main shock absorber. Furthermore, the authors show that firms in China follow a similar strategy with their counterparts in United States and smooth their payout. In contrast to firms in China and US, the payout of the Taiwanese firms is relatively highly sensitive to net income shocks.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to use a joint model to empirically investigate the extent to which debt and investment policies are used to keep corporate payout smooth in emerging markets.

Family governance mechanisms serve to govern and strengthen relations between the family and the business, as well as the relationships between the members of the business family itself. However, despite agreement on the importance of adopting family governance structures, explicit research on the determinants of family governance mechanisms is currently missing. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to uncover the determinants of family meetings. In order to do so, the social systems theory is used to unravel several determining factors of this crucial form of family governance mechanisms in private family firms.

The authors perform a qualitative study by conducting semi-structured interviews in eight Belgian private family firms in order to discover the antecedents of the implementation of family meetings. The authors use a pattern-matching technique as an analytical strategy.

The findings of the study highlight the importance of “soft,” relational, qualitative issues as antecedents of family meetings as opposed to previous research on family governance, which predominantly focused on “hard,” quantitative measures (e.g. family ownership). The findings of the study also provide novel insights into the origins of the family component (i.e. family meetings) of family business governance.

While the current literature has only focused on describing the different types of family governance and their positive consequences for the family firm, the authors take a step back to explain why family meetings, as a form of family governance, are adopted in the first place. Second, the authors demonstrate the instrumentality of the social systems theory in understanding the family's needs that necessitate the implementation of family governance mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the major entrepreneurship barriers facing Qataris. Qatar has a very specific economic and cultural environment that is different from any other Arab or western country. Such differences may contribute to the existing literature regarding entrepreneurship barriers in the Middle East.

A qualitative methodology was adopted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with final year business students. Face-to-face in-depth interviews were used in order to uncover all aspects related to the research objective from the students’ perspective.

Seven factors were identified as the main barriers to start-up new business activities among Qataris, which are: the non-availability of funds, risk avoidance, fear of failure, market barriers, knowledge barriers, stress avoidance, and attitude towards change.

It will be very useful to conduct a comparative study that covers more Gulf Cooperation Council countries to see whether the findings can be generalised to them. Furthermore, since this study adopted a qualitative approach, it will be interesting to empirically test these findings using a quantitative method.

The government needs to ease and facilitate the loans, by establishing a government fund for financing new businesses. Learning institutions have an important role to reduce these barriers. Indeed, promoting a healthy culture that encourages and promotes entrepreneurship can be achieved by including specialised entrepreneurship courses into students’ curriculum as early as primary schools. Government can also allocate certain percentage of contracts to new or small companies. This will ease market access. Business associations must also play their part by providing assistance, and provide training programmes tailored to the need of local potential entrepreneurs.

The paper contributes to the entrepreneurship body of knowledge by providing insight from the Qatari-specific economic and social environment context.

This paper proposes to rethink the concepts of relevance and usefulness and their relation to the theory–practice gap in management research.

On the basis of the cognitive-linguistic relevance theory or inferential pragmatics, supplemented by insights from information science, we define relevance as a general conceptual category, while reserving usefulness for the instrumental application in a particular case.

There is no reason to hold onto the difference between theoretical and practical relevance, nor to distinguish between instrumental and conceptual relevance.

This novel approach will help to clarify the confusion in the field and contribute to a better understanding of the added value of management research.