Jenny Gibb

Virtual Team Learning: An Introductory Study Team Exercise

This article outlines the design, implementation, and evaluation of an innovative virtual team exercise. Cognitive, affective, and action-learning outcomes highlight the relevance of this grounded experiential exercise for management education and practice. Details are provided to enable the exercise to be adopted in a wide range of programs. Prior online experience, motivation, resistance to online environment, and trade-offs were found affect an overall positive experience reported by students.

Online social networks: an emergent recruiter tool for attracting and screening

Purpose – The increased popularity in using online social networks by recruiters has received much positive attention, particularly in the popular press. Using social network theory this paper aims to examine how the structure and governance mechanisms of these networks can assist this process. The authors ask: how do recruiters use online social networks to effectively attract and screen prospective job applicants?Design/methodology/approach – The semi‐structured interview approach is used to gather data from 25 recruitment specialists.Findings – The connector role is identified as a specific attraction mechanism recruiters use to create numerous weak ties, where some are so weak they barely constitute ties at all. The authors then identify branding, transparency and data specificity as three mechanisms recruiters use to strengthen these ties when performing the attracting and screening functions.Originality/value – This is the first paper to analyse online recruitment, using social network theory, and h...

Grounded learning from a strategy case competition

This article describes a case competition that reflects the four elements of a grounded learning exercise. These elements include creating a real-world experience, optimizing learning transfer, integrating theory and practice, and shifting learning responsibility to the students. The authors also provide details on implementing this exercise in an undergraduate capstone strategy course and using a real-time case that brings the competition to life.

RISK TAKING, INNOVATIVENESS AND COMPETITIVE RIVALRY: A THREE-WAY INTERACTION TOWARDS FIRM PERFORMANCE

It is unclear how entrepreneurial firms should engage in risk taking and innovativeness in highly competitive environments. Using a sample of 167 New Zealand firms, we provide new insight to identify a significant three-way interaction effect between risk taking, innovativeness and competitive rivalry towards firm performance. We found high risk taking and innovativeness to be linked to higher firm performance, irrespective of the extent of competitive rivalry. Low innovativeness was found to be associated with differing levels of firm performance depending on the level of rivalry. These results have important implications for future research and for practitioners where competitive rivalry can influence dimensions of performance in entrepreneurial firms in ways that have not been previously recognized.

Mergers and acquisitions: a review. Part 1

Purpose - – This paper aims to review the relevant literature on mergers and acquisitions in an attempt to provide a comprehensive account of what we know about mergers and which parts of the puzzle are still incomplete. Design/methodology/approach - – This literature review consists of three key sections. The first part of this paper summarises the literature on the cyclical nature of mergers referred to in the literature as merger waves. The second section reviews the causes and consequences of takeovers; it first reviews the causes, or drivers, of acquisitions, while focusing on the fact that acquisitions happen in waves and then reviews the consequences of takeovers, with a predominant focus on the impacts of mergers on the economic performance of acquirers. The third part of the review summarises the theories as well as previous empirical studies on determinants of announcement returns and post-acquisition performance of combined firms. Findings - – Merger activity demonstrates a wavy pattern, i.e. mergers are clustered in industries through time. The causes suggested for this fluctuating pattern include industry and economy-level shocks, mis-valuation and managerial herding. Market reaction to announcement of acquisitions is, on average, slightly negative for acquirer stocks and significantly positive for target stocks. The combined abnormal return is positive. These findings have been consistent over several decades of investigation. The prior research also identifies a number of factors that are related to performance of acquisitions. These factors are categorised and reviewed in five different groups: acquirer characteristics, target characteristics, bid characteristics, industry characteristics and macro-environment characteristics. Originality/value - – This review illustrates a number of issues. Prior research is heavily biased towards gains to acquirers and factors that affect these gains. It is also biased towards finding sources of value creation through mergers, despite the fact that several theories suggest that mergers can be value-destroying. In fact, value destruction is often attributed to managers’ self-interest (agency problem) and mistakes (hubris). However, the mechanisms through which mergers destroy value are rarely addressed. Aside from that, the possibility of simultaneous creation and destruction of value in acquisitions is not often considered. Finally, after several decades of investigation, a key question is not completely answered yet: “What are the sources of value in mergers and acquisitions?”

Dynamic capabilities as patterns of organizational change: An empirical study on transforming a firm’s resource base

Dynamic capabilities are increasingly being used to explain how firms leverage their resource base over varying levels of market dynamism. Yet little attention is given to how the internal dynamism of the firm might affect capability development. Firms are often faced with the challenge of establishing ways to engage in goal directed action that calls upon routinized, path dependent activity as well as the exploration of new opportunities, at times when there is inner turbulence. Using an in-depth case study (2007 to 2012) on the airline Spanair, we ask the following question: How can a firm leverage its dynamic capabilities to bring about deep purposeful change? In our findings we identify a circular rather than hierarchical capability pattern with four dynamic capabilities, adding, transferring, integrating and shedding, and two higher order capabilities, goal development and orchestration. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating, how a link between the goal development capability of senior directors and the change orchestration capability, create a goal directed path. We also explain how the link between the high order and dynamic capabilities develops an important bridge between path dependence and path creation. We then demonstrate how goal adjustment occurs in a circular manner to create a link between the four dynamic capabilities and the goal development capability. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the goal development and change orchestration capabilities jointly enable a firm’s transformation, particularly in times of heightened internal and external environmental turbulence.

Past Experience versus Situational Employment: Interview Questions in a New Zealand Social Service Agency

This study compared the validities of the past-experience and situational structured employment interview questions using a two-group, experimental design. Subjects were 130 social workers, purpose...

Paradoxes of psychic distance and market entry by software INVs

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the role of psychic distance during the process of international market entry by software international new ventures (INVs) from small, open economies. Specifically, we investigate how home market and global industry contexts influence market-entry strategies, and how psychic distance influences initial then subsequent market-entry choice decisions. Design/methodology/approach – Using Atlas.ti7 software, this paper adopts a qualitative, multi-case analysis of ten software INVs based in New Zealand. Thematic coding of interview and secondary data revealed three core processes: pre-entry considerations, market selection criteria and post-entry evaluation, across the stages of initial and subsequent market entry. Findings – In the context of the global software industry, the key driver of proactive market entry by INVs from small, open economies is market size rather than psychic distance. During the process of market expansion, firms encounter the psychic distance parado...

An Islamic perspective on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition

The rapid growth in entrepreneurial development in Malaysia, together with the strength of Islamic principles adopted by Muslims, provides us with a somewhat unique context to investigate: How do Islamic principles shape the sourcing of entrepreneurial opportunities? To explore this question, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 Muslim entrepreneurs located in Kuala Lumpur. Our study highlighted Shariah compliance and the realisation of Tawhid as important factors influencing Muslim entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. More specifically we identified five Islamic spiritual principles that drove the opportunity discovery and opportunity creation processes through missing products or services in the marketplace and dissatisfaction with the current situation, respectively.

Exploring entrepreneurial finance and gender in an emergent entrepreneurial ecosystem: the case of the Punjab, northern India: A Comparative Analysis

Our exploratory chapter offers contextualized empirical evidence and theory of how entrepreneurial finance supports women-led firms in an emergent entrepreneurial ecosystem within the state of Punjab, in northern India. By emphasizing the social, cultural, and informal aspects, we posit that the Punjab context is an emergent entrepreneurial ecosystem in which informal institutions (social structure, culture, entrepreneurs, households, and lenders) and more formal institutions (such as formalized bank lending and educational establishments) are interwoven and interdependent. Drawing on questionnaires of selected women entrepreneurs located in five districts of the Punjab, we found that women entrepreneurs in emergent entrepreneurial ecosystems possess few overall assets, suffer from weak enforcement of financial rights and the existence of unequal inheritance rights. Consequently, they have limited access to community and social resources. Gender-based obstacles, conventional thinking and socio-cultural values aggravate the difficulties faced by women. Due to their lack of access to formal finance, women must approach informal lenders. For example, a quarter of women interviewed reported incidents of sexual harassment by informal lenders, especially in the rural and semi urban areas. Indeed, one-fifth who were exploited by informal lenders belonged to the scheduled classes or lower castes (Dalits: literally ‘the oppressed’), or so-called ‘untouchables’, illustrating the relationship between their caste and types of treatment and behaviour by these informal lenders.