José Luis Galán

Export stimuli revisited: The influence of the characteristics of managerial decision makers on international behaviour

Utilizing the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), this article proposes and tests relationships among the nature of export stimuli, the personal characteristics of decision makers and the decisions they make with regard to internationalization. The conceptual model for the study includes psychological variables that might condition owner-managers’ decision-making responses to such export stimuli. Using structural equation modelling, the study analyses data obtained by a survey questionnaire from 110 Spanish small- and medium-sized enterprises. The analysis reveals the importance of two particular variables, the perception of risks and opportunities in exports and the decision maker’s proactiveness, in determining the export stimuli and how these in turn affect the international behaviour of firms.

Biofuels 2020: Biorefineries based on lignocellulosic materials

The production of liquid biofuels to blend with gasoline is of worldwide importance to secure the energy supply while reducing the use of fossil fuels, supporting the development of rural technology with knowledge‐based jobs and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Today, engineering for plant construction is accessible and new processes using agricultural residues and municipal solid wastes have reached a good degree of maturity and high conversion yields (almost 90% of polysaccharides are converted into monosaccharides ready for fermentation). For the complete success of the 2G technology, it is still necessary to overcome a number of limitations that prevent a first‐of‐a‐kind plant from operating at nominal capacity. We also claim that the triumph of 2G technology requires the development of favourable logistics to guarantee biomass supply and make all actors (farmers, investors, industrial entrepreneurs, government, others) aware that success relies on agreement advances. The growth of ethanol production for 2020 seems to be secured with a number of 2G plants, but public/private investments are still necessary to enable 2G technology to move on ahead from its very early stages to a more mature consolidated technology.

Antecedents of construction project coalitions: a study of the Spanish construction industry

Research into the formation of alliances, relevant in the field of strategic management and especially, in the construction industry, is often explained in terms of interdependency and complementarities (exogenous factors). In contrast, the influence of a firm’s social relations networks (endogenous factors) has hardly been studied at all. Thus, a model is needed that includes both exogenous and endogenous factors as antecedents to the formation of strategic alliances in the construction industry. Cooperation in the construction sector is especially frequent, above all in public works programmes, as their scale requires coalitions of different‐sized firms. Accordingly, to explore how both exogenous and endogenous factors influence the formation of alliances, a social network analytical method—Multiple Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure (MRQAP)—was applied to cooperative project coalitions in the Spanish public works construction sector from 2001–2007. Empirical findings confirm that construction companies form coalitions, principally on the basis of past alliances. Membership of business associations and groups is also a key factor, though the influence of geographic proximity is the most debatable result. In the construction industry, the formation of alliances is conditioned, among other factors, by previous social and economic relations that can generate the necessary information and trust for the selection of whichever partner is considered the most suitable for the development of the joint project.

Employment relationships as drivers of firm flexibility and learning

Purpose – This paper seeks to analyse whether the firm model of employment relationships is associated with functional flexibility and organisational learning (exploratory versus exploitative). It also aims to assess the mediating effect of functional flexibility in the relationship between a specific employment mode (mutual investment) and organisational learning.Design/methodology/approach – This research was conducted using a sample of Spanish companies in the food industry, from which data from HR managers and production managers in each firm were collected. Cluster analyses, MANOVA and regression analyses were applied to test the hypotheses.Findings – The results suggest that those firms developing a mutual investment employment relationship outperform other firms in terms of functional flexibility and organisational learning (both exploitative and exploratory learning). The paper also finds a mediating effect of one dimension of functional flexibility (range‐number of activities) between mutual inve...

Management of alliance portfolios and the role of the board of directors

The objective of the present work consists in testing whether the strategic involvement of boards of directors has a positive influence on the development of alliance portfolio management capability and on the value that the alliance portfolio generates. A variance-based structural equation modelling (Partial Least Squares) has been applied to a sample constituted by 139 top Spanish companies. Our analysis shows that the strategic involvement of the board of directors has a positive and influence on the management of alliance portfolios, thereby influencing the value of that portfolio in an indirect way. Unlike previous literature, this study links the functions of the board of directors to organizational capabilities, connecting the literature on corporate governance and on management of alliance portfolios.

Causes of Changes in Top Management

Empirical research into the causes of change in top management has been biased in favour of certain type of enterprises (big size companies which quote at stock exchange) and in favour of certain type of performance measures (financial profitability), mainly because the easiness of getting data. This study uses a sample of enterprises with very different sizes and utilises as enterprise performance indicator the variation in sales. This work pursues two objectives. On the one hand, it pursues to empirically investigate the essential determinants that provoke a change in top management. On the other hand, it pursues to specify those factors that condition the choice as enterprise top manager successor of an outside to the company individual. The results obtained question some established hypothesis in the literature. Previous researches have assumed that manager’s replacement due to no forced causes (retirement, decease, illness…) are random distributed in the population; nevertheless, the results seem to show that our hypothesis is not conform to ?he reality in certain circumstances.