Nuria Hurtado-Torres

Influence of transformational leadership on organizational innovation and performance depending on the level of organizational learning in the pharmaceutical sector

Purpose – This empirical study aims to examine the influence of transformational leadership (TL) on organizational innovation (OI) and performance (OP) depending on the level of organizational learning in technological firms.Design/methodology/approach – The research examined a sample of 164 pharmaceutical firms. A global model is formulated and the hypotheses are tested using structural equations.Findings – First, the study shows a positive relation between TL and OI, between TL and OP and between OI and OP. Second, the study verifies that these relationships are more strongly reinforced in organizations with high‐organizational learning than in organizations with low levels of organizational learning. Third, the study supports the theoretical arguments made but not demonstrated empirically in the prior literature.Practical implications – Organizational learning takes places in a technological community of interaction in which knowledge is created and expands in a constant dynamic between the tacit and t...

Proactive Environmental Strategies and Employee Inclusion: The Positive Effects of Information Sharing and Promoting Collaboration and the Influence of Uncertainty

The organizational literature has often acknowledged that under certain conditions, corporations should limit the information that employees receive and how they interact to improve corporate financial performance. The present article criticizes the logic of such corporate restrictions. Data obtained from 164 pharmaceutical firms operating in 27 different countries support the positive implications of inclusive and collaborative human resources practices. Our results reveal positive and significant relationships between the practices of information sharing with employees and promoting employee collaboration and the development of a proactive natural environmental strategy for a firm. In addition, this research tests the moderating role of general environment uncertainty in these relationships. Contrary to expectations based on contingency theory, uncertainty does not appear to moderate these results for the sampled firms.

Analyzing a firm's international portfolio of technological knowledge: A declarative ontology-based OWL approach for patent documents

Patent databases contain large amounts of information about the inventions and metadata of corporate patents (such as the technological domain they belong to, their applicants, and inventors). These databases are available online but since they do not provide explicit information about the relationships between different patent metadata, it is not possible for computers to automatically process such relationships. Several patent ontologies have been proposed so far in order to provide patent knowledge bases with semantics by merging information from different databases and establishing a common vocabulary. However, previous ontology literature has paid limited attention to the representation of specific relationships among metadata and the design of reasoning procedures that would allow some information not explicitly specified in the databases or ontologies to be inferred. This article proposes a methodological approach for the definition of relationships and reasoning tasks for patent analysis by using patent ontologies, and provides a real illustration of its potential in the context of international flows of research knowledge. This declarative method is based on the formal definition of key patent analysis indicators (KPAIs). The case study analysis is relevant because global competition and the importance of multinational firms in the patent process have resulted in firms not only patenting on their domestic markets but also transferring their patents to other markets and developing patents in different countries. In this context, it is important to analyze the connections between the patenting processes and the international knowledge flows of research and development. More specifically, the paper illustrates the applicability of the proposed methodology by classifying patents into the five patterns of internationalization identified by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Internationalization of Higher Education: Theoretical and Empirical Investigation of Its Influence on University Institution Rankings

Internationalization constitutes a broadly widespread concept in the literature about management. However, it has recently started being applied to higher education institutions. In this paper, we investigate internationalization in university institutions from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. To achieve our aim, we place particular emphasis on the methodology applied to evaluate the internationalization of higher education institutions from both quantitative and qualitative approaches. We focus on the study of the three most widely accepted higher education institution rankings: Times Higher Education Supplement, Academic Ranking of World Universities and Webometrics Ranking. We find that, while the variable internationalization is included in such rankings through several items, its weight in the overall score is still limited. Additionally, our results demonstrate that the final position achieved by university institutions is hardly determined by their degree of internationalization, but rather relies on other institutional aspects, such as teaching quality and research quality, among others. Furthermore, we argue that internationalization indicators used in current university institution rankings, e.g., international faculty ratio and international students ratio, are far from reflecting the main variables involved in their internationalization processes.ResumenEl concepto de internacionalización está ampliamente difundido en la bibliografía sobre gestión. Pero recientemente también se ha empezado a utilizar en el ámbito de las instituciones de enseñanza superior. En este artículo investigaremos la internacionalización en las instituciones universitarias desde dos perspectivas, teórica y práctica. Para lograr nuestro objetivo, hemos dado especial importancia a la metodología utilizada para evaluar la internacionalización en las instituciones de enseñanza superior desde un punto de vista tanto cualitativo como cuantitativo. Nos hemos centrado en el estudio de las tres clasificaciones de instituciones de enseñanza superior más ampliamente aceptadas: Times Higher Education Supplement, Academic Ranking of World Universities y Webometrics Ranking. Hemos visto que, aunque la variable de la internacionalización se tiene en cuenta en dichas clasificaciones a través de varios factores, su peso en la puntuación global es aun limitado. Además, los resultados que hemos obtenido demuestran que el grado de internacionalización de las instituciones universitarias apenas determina su posición final en las clasificaciones, ya que esta depende de otros aspectos institucionales como la calidad de la enseñanza y la calidad de la investigación, entre otros factores. Asimismo hemos visto que los indicadores de internacionalización utilizados en las clasificaciones más corrientes de instituciones universitarias, como la proporción de personal docente internacional y la proporción de estudiantes internationales, distan mucho de reflejar las principales variables que intervienen en los procesos de internacionalización.

The importance of trusting beliefs linked to the corporate website for diffusion of recruiting-related online innovations

Recruiting-related online innovations represent growing and high-potential opportunities for employers to broaden the reach of their recruiting efforts as well as reduce costs. The diffusion of innovative approaches for online recruiting, however, may experience bias due to potential employees’ lack of trust in firms offering positions online, particularly when the firms are small, operate in a risky industry, or are relatively unknown. We use the theory of reasoned action to propose that users of a corporate website develop trust beliefs with regard to three characteristics of the firm: ability, integrity, and benevolence. We have proposed three hypotheses highlighting the importance of trust generated by the corporate website in potential employees. Our experimental results involved a sample of 218 potential employees. These subjects were offered a consulting position in a fictional firm, which could only be known through its corporate website. Although previous literature has paid marginal attention to the influence of users’ beliefs regarding corporate integrity and benevolence, our findings showed that users’ perceptions of the corporate website regarding firm integrity and benevolence increased the users’ willingness to accept a job at the firm. We propose implications of our results for practitioners and for the literature of trust in online contexts.

The Influence of International Scope on the Relationship Between Patented Environmental Innovations and Firm Performance

The literature on the natural-resource-based view of firms has mostly focused on the positive relationship between financial performance and environmental innovation. The present study extends this research by addressing recent calls to identify the specific managerial approaches that affect a firm’s ability to financially benefit from an innovative environmental strategy. In particular, the focus is on how the selected international scope of patented environmental innovations affects a firms’ financial performance. The sample used included a 5-year data panel of 3,087 environmental patent applications by the 79 Information and Communication Technology firms in the Financial Times Global 500 firms list. The findings indicate that the geographical scope of the exploitation of environmental patents increases the positive relationship between patented environmental innovation and financial performance whereas the geographical scope of knowledge sourcing of environmental patents does reduce this performance.

Managing technological knowledge of patents: HCOntology, a semantic approach

Abstract Patent data provide technological information essential to define strategies and decisions in the context of firm innovative processes. At present, information regarding patents is usually represented and stored in large databases. Information from these databases is commonly retrieved in the form of files with a CSV- or XML-based codification but with little semantics that enable the inference of further relationships among patents. In these databases, each patent is associated with a technological field by a code. Although the codes assume a hierarchical classification approach, inclusion/subsumption relationships are not explicitly specified such that computers can process them automatically. In recent years, ontologies have been proven to facilitate the exchange of information between people and systems. In this context, the Web Ontology Language (OWL), whose formal semantics are based on description logics, has become the most widely used language for the representation of ontologies. Certain patent ontologies have already been developed in OWL to benefit from the semantics of patent information. However, none have fully exploited the information that can be derived from the formal representation of patent code classification hierarchies through description-logics-based reasoning. This paper presents an approach to automatically translate the hierarchies found in the patent classification codes into concept hierarchies. This proposal also enables the automatic inference of implicit knowledge based on reclassification techniques and relationships between different application domains without changing the applications that make use of patent information. Several examples are presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposal and how it can assist firms in patent information management.

Does knowledge explain trust behaviors and outcomes? The different influences of initial knowledge and experiential knowledge on personal trust interactions.

This paper examines the influences of initial knowledge and experiential knowledge on trust behaviors and trust outcomes, respectively, at an interpersonal level. We use an experimental dynamic trust game, and our results show that (1) the initial knowledge that exists a priori between a trustor and a trustee helps to explain the trustors trust behaviors toward the trustee, and (2) the experiential knowledge gained directly by a trustor during a specific trust interaction with a trustee influences the trust outcome, i.e. the difference between the original expectations of the trustor and the subsequent trust behaviors. Our results contribute to human resource literature by clarifying the specific influences of different types of knowledge on interpersonal trust relationships (e.g. between managers and employees) and by supplementing the traditional notion that trust within a firm develops slowly by showing that personal expectations have an immediate and important influence on trust output.

The influence of environmental international diversification on the proactive environmental strategy of small and medium enterprises

Purpose – We analyze the influence of the internationalization process of small and medium-sized enterprises on the adoption of a proactive environmental strategy. Design/methodology – Using direct interviews with the CEOs of 106 Spanish export firms from the food industry, we tested our research question through ordinary least squares regression analysis. Findings – We find that a high degree of environmental international diversification leads these firms to take advantage of different environmental competitive advantages from the different locations where they operate, and consequently integrate environmental proactive practices and programs within their organizational strategy. Research implications/limitations – The result obtained in this work contributes to better understanding of the importance of firms’ internationalization process in the generation of valuable environmental knowledge abroad. The chapter also discusses implications for managers, scholars, and policy makers. Future analysis should include longitudinal data of export firms based in other countries. Originality/value of chapter – We pay special attention to the environmental management undertaken by small- and medium-sized export enterprises. Specifically, we study the environmental institutional profile of the different regions where these firms operate.

A network view of innovation performance for multinational corporation subsidiaries

ABSTRACT A network view of innovation performance for multinational corporation subsidiaries: functionality and geography. Regional Studies. The literature has recognized the need to understand better the role of network partner characteristics on innovative performance in cases of multiple network embeddedness. This study argues that innovation performance is partly a function of the value created through intra- and inter-organizational flows of knowledge within and across regions. The analyses are based on two random-effects logistic models with sample selection. Results show that the functional breadth of a subsidiary’s inter-organizational network has an inverted ‘U’-shaped relationship with its radical and incremental innovation performance. Additionally, radical innovation performance is influenced by internal and external partners from different geographical locations.