During last two decades the uncertainty in and complexity of the external environment has become a common challenge for most companies worldwide. To gain a more sustainable competitive advantage in their rapidly changing competitive milieux companies should be able successfully to integrate innovative elements and develop their dynamic capabilities. The value of dynamic capabilities lies in the resource configurations that they create or enhance in rapidly and radically changing environments, which in turn enable the firm to pursue opportunities in new, unpredictable markets (Ambrosini & Bowman, 2009). Firms which operate in high-velocity industries continuously develop their dynamic capabilities as the only means to survive. Companies in low-velocity industries are usually unprepared for radical and rapid changes and thus they are less competitive than companies which develop their dynamic capabilities in less stable environments. This study examines how dynamic capabilities have evolved in an industry which is moving from a relatively low velocity into moderately high velocity. A deductive, interpretive approach is chosen for the current study, mainly because it offers a better opportunity to explain, describe, illustrate, and explore specific aspects of the emergence of dynamic capabilities in relatively low velocity environments. The study has studied three ship building companies in Europe. The study has two main phases of data collection. The first data collection phase begins with three in-depth interviews with chief executives from the companies selected for the case study. The chief executives of these companies are chosen for their known, recent experience with dynamic capabilities and because they represent the shipbuilding industry in Europe. The second data collection phase consists of nineteen semistructured interviews. The collected research data is analyzed by case studies methods. This work has found that dynamic capabilities developed in stable environments lead to superior performance under conditions of environmental volatility; entrepreneurial behaviour on every managerial level is necessary in order to develop dynamic capacity; low-cost experimentations are one of the most effective methods to trigger dynamic capabilities; and learning through internationalization is an effective tool to develop dynamic capabilities. It has also found that new business development units and spin-offs might trigger development of dynamic capabilities but cooperation between small and medium-sized firms and large enterprises does not increase the development of dynamic capabilities and might be even counterproductive.

This thesis investigates the quintessence of leadership in terms of antecedents and consequences, focusing on the leadership traits and styles that relate to employee work-related attitudes. The thesis sheds light on the distinct traits of leaders/managers in the context of the Five-Factor Model of personality and the congruent leadership styles that reflect directly on employee behaviours, work-related attitudes, and organisational performance. Unlike most of the existing studies exploring the antecedents and consequences of leadership, which rely predominantly on small samples and contemporaneous correlations, this thesis uses large-scale survey data to provide a detailed investigation of the influence of gender and sector difference in influencing the triadic relationship personality-leadership-employee attitudes and behaviour. The thesis provides answers to the three main research questions. The first research question is whether there are specific personality traits that can explain the propensity of individuals to become managers and undertake leadership roles. The second question explores the relationship between leadership style at the organisational level and employee work-related attitudes i.e. job related to well-being. Finally, the third question examines whether leadership style at organisational level can build employee work-related attitudes, and more specifically organisational commitment. The findings confirm the importance of personality traits as strong predictors of managerial/leadership roles. Likewise, management/leadership style at the organisational level has a significant influence on employee job related well-being and employee organisational commitment. In particular, the role of trust in leaders, as both a moderator and a mediator, affecting this relationship within particular industrial sectors is confirmed. These findings contribute to the existing theoretical and empirical literature on the antecedents and consequences of leadership.

Family businesses make significant contributions to gross national product, employment and wealth creation in countries around the globe. In the UK, a third of businesses are regarded as family businesses. Yet despite their economic importance, much of the current legislation on boards (eg Companies Act 2006) fails to recognize the uniqueness of family businesses and their boards. This study explores the diverse approaches to governance within small and medium-sized family businesses (SMFBs) in the UK. It draws on original evidence gathered from 8 case companies by means of longitudinal study and semi-structured interviews. It employs rich narrative, thematic case and cross case analysis to identify similarities and differences between boards using a spectrum of boards and investigates the influence of board roles and show internal dynamics affect directors and their roles during the decision-making process. Building on prior literature, which suggests that boards significantly influence the behaviour of SMFBs, this thesis identifies the importance of family, business and family business aims and stage of the business. It also identifies the importance of, education and skills and relationship using dyads while highlighting the nuances and shifting dynamics of director’s relationships. The findings are used to develop a family business board model which adds to our understanding of how SMFBs function. Finally, it suggests how the new framework might be developed to support SMFBs identify and implement governance structures, and examines the policy and praxis implications of the findings. The thesis demonstrates that family businesses set up their governance around the aims of their business and that informal roles impact on the running of the board which is currently ignored in legislation and ’best practice’ suggestions which tries to suggest ’one size fits all’.

Building on behavioural theory with dynamic capabilities, I have studied how firms create competitive advantage through innovation over time after multiple mergers and acquisitions. This research is focused on the acquirer’s ability towards obtaining performance from product integration and set within the context of highly acquisitive software-houses, those organisations involved in the sales and manufacture of business software products. Within high technology industries, resources are at the heart of the firm and constitute the largest cost. Dynamic capabilities are a more recently extended RBV of the firm to incorporate dynamic markets, I,e, firms in situations of rapid change. In these markets, where the competitive landscape is shifting, the dynamic capabilities by which firm managers integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments. To this end, I test the dynamic capabilities theory in the high tech software industry in times of change. In 2012, software firms completed over $66 billion of mergers and acquisitions (Berkery Noyes, 2013). However research suggests that synergies are often left unrealised (Barkema and Schijven, 2008; Léger and Quach, 2009). In addition, the software industry is maturing and the mergers and acquisition activity in the industry has intensified (Léger and Quach, 2009). The highly acquisitive company - seeking rapid growth and using acquisitions as the means to achieve this, is using a recognised route to growth (Damodaran, 2004). In a report from PwC (2014) Rob Fisher, the PwC US technology industry leader notes that With software embedded in virtually everything, software and Internet sector [mergers and acquisitions] deal activity continues to flourish, offsetting declines in other subsectors.” (PWC, 2013): In this longitudinal research I describe, explain and account for the impacts of mergers and acquisitions on innovation, expressed through product integration; - the reconfiguring and combination of the product portfolios within software firms. Concerning the acquiring firm's endogenous growth (the creation of value through internal resource capability), I explain the relationship between organisation capabilities and the innovation outcome as well as the innovation effect on revenue. I find that the dynamic capabilities framework is a suitable for complex empirical study. In addition I find that while the measures including the measured capabilities directly effect product integration and revenues. By using mediation techniques, I also find that revenues are indirectly affected by product integration. Interestingly product integration, negatively impacts the financial performance of the firm. These findings are important for managerial decision making and imply a high level of orchestration requirement. According to the Business Software Alliance, BSA (2008), the software sector has enjoyed meteoric growth. In 2007, the software and related services sector experienced a real annual growth rate of 14%, while the business sector was considerably less. This is reflected by the business, SunGard (2009) who grew endogenously by only 1%. In light of the business problem, I concentrate on highly acquisitive software firms, i.e. those firms seeking growth through acquisition. I conceptualise product integration innovation as a second stage process of organisation integration. I have tested my theory using panel data of highly acquisitive firms, which have undertaken in excess of 900 events over a ten-year period.

Firms frequently experience service failures, wherein performance is below customer expectations. Seeking to address service failures, firms deliver service recovery. Extant research suggests that service recovery leads to customer satisfaction and repatronage when perceived to be fair (or just). Prior studies emphasise the role played by employees in delivering fair service recovery. By contrast, the literature overlooks situations where organisational policies such as service guarantees pose a constraint to employee recovery efforts. Service guarantees are widely used across several service sectors, and these policies are invoked when services fail. Hence, service guarantees can be employed as recovery strategies along with employee behaviour, both influencing customer perceptions of fairness, post-recovery attitudes and behaviour. Empirical research that explores customer perceptions of service guarantee and employee behaviour used as recovery strategies is, therefore, topical. This thesis examines the impact of two guarantee terms – payout and ease of invocation – and two types of employee behaviour – concern and communication – on customer post-recovery trust in the firm and in the employee, and in turn, commitment and loyalty. The thesis is theoretically underpinned by three well-established theories – Justice and Attribution Theories from social psychology, and Signaling Theory from information economics. Justice Theory explains how service guarantee and employee behaviour elicit perceptions of recovery fairness. Signaling Theory elucidates how fair service guarantee and employee behaviour influence post-recovery trust, by signaling the trustworthiness of the firm and of employees. The dual lens of Signaling and Attribution Theories explains how a firm’s characteristic of reputation for fairness, and customer attribution of inferred motive influence perceptions of service guarantee and employee behaviour employed as recovery strategies. A scenario-based experiment was conducted in two service contexts – banking and car repair. The data were collected via an online self-completion questionnaire embedding hypothetical scenarios of service failure and recovery. The sample was randomly selected from a consumer panel owned by a reputed UK-based market research agency. The conceptual framework of the thesis was tested by using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The moderating effects of firm reputation for fairness and inferred motive were tested by using the product indicator approach in PLS-SEM. Two pre-tests and a pilot study established the ecological validity of findings and the psychometric properties of the measures. In the main study, 658 valid responses were obtained. Results show that procedural fairness elicited by the ease of invoking the guarantee leads to post-recovery trust in the firm, but distributive fairness elicited by guarantee payout does not. Further, the effects of guarantee payout and ease of invocation are contingent upon the firm’s reputation for fairness. Interpersonal and informational fairness elicited by employee concern and communication at the recovery stage lead to post-recovery trust in the employee. The effects of employee treatment and communication on post-recovery trust are contingent upon inferred motive. Post-recovery trust in the firm and in the employee, in turn, impact customer commitment and loyalty. Consistency of results across banking and car repair enhances the generalizability of findings. This thesis extends knowledge in the domain of service recovery research and broadens understanding of the employed theoretical precepts. First, the thesis establishes that service guarantees employed as recovery strategies elicit perceptions of recovery fairness. Such knowledge offers conceptual development of the Justice Theory framework by enhancing understanding of what fair service recovery constitutes. Second, the thesis introduces a new perspective to signaling research that considers how service guarantee and employee behaviour, with related interplay with firm reputation for fairness, signal the trustworthiness of the firm and of employees, and thus influence customer trust. Third, the thesis contributes to the understanding of the impact of perceived recovery fairness on trust by distinguishing between two trust referents - firm and employee. Fourth, the thesis demonstrates how customer perceptions of service recovery are contingent upon the firm’s reputation and inferred motive.

Organisations use projects to manage customised, one-off events across a wide range of functions. Project management is an essential operational tool and process that is utilised to effectively and efficiently manage resources, tasks and activities, and associated timelines. Since each project is considered unique, it is essential to control the project's outcome parameters to minimise the chances of failure and the likely major financial and managerial ramifications for the organisation. As a consequence, project management literature has been dominated by discussions on the various critical success factors that are used to maximise the probability of a project's success. However, there is no single formula for success. In a recent report, it was found that 19% of completed projects fail and 52% were challenged in terms of meeting the time, cost, and quality constraints. The purpose of this study was to investigate the possibility that failure is a result of different interpretations of the criteria and factors used for success (termed 'success dimensions' within this study) by multiple stakeholder groups. Currently, there is no recorded theory to determine project success within the project management literature, which includes both the perspective of multiple stakeholder groups and shared use of success dimensions for a given project. This omission is the basis of the current work, which explores the impact of using all stakeholder views as opposed to a selected few to define project success. The research outcomes are important for informed managerial decision making that enables the minimisation of major financial losses. This study drew on previous research undertaken on project success and combined technological solutions (in the form of software packages, such as the Web of Science database, Bibexcel, NVivo, and Excel) to facilitate the identification, selection, and analysis of data sources relating to the success dimensions for project management. The results of the systematic literature review identified the 'diagnostic behavioural instrument' as the most frequently recognised measure of project success. This broadly argues that there are ten success factors that must be considered for successful project implementation. The literature also highlights the limitations of the 'diagnostic behavioural instrument', which forms part of the current gap in the literature regarding project success. These limitations were used to design a qualitative study to identify the additional attributes regarding project success as perceived across different stakeholder groups (i.e., senior management, project core team, and project recipients), as well as identifying which stakeholder perspectives are considered important in judging project success and which ones are being ignored. The findings of the qualitative study were extended to a quantitative study to confirm whether the initial findings were similar across a larger sample of stakeholders. The results from both studies were used to create an idealised, multiple stakeholder model, considering all the critical attributes to measure project success. This model was tested with a focus group to identify the extent of ease and the barriers that adopting this new perspective would present in practice. The results of the qualitative and quantitative studies showed clear differences between the project performance attributes that were considered important across the different stakeholder groups. The focus group results demonstrated a clear difference in opinion within and among the stakeholder groups, indicating their potential use for project managers to align stakeholders' views to increase project success. There is some indication that the model could be applied to projects from any field, but testing this assumption is beyond the scope of the current work. However, the preliminary results would support its use to increase the shared, multiple stakeholder perception of project success. Through use of the model, organisations can be more precise in their choice of success dimensions used to judge project success, leading to more informed decision making and subsequent motivation of employees and hence a more productive organisational culture.

This thesis is a paper-based thesis. Using a large-scale matched employee-employer dataset, three empirical studies were undertaken to empirically examine: 1) the relationship between employee attitudes, human resource management practices and firm performance in SMEs; 2) the effect of the firm size on firms’ and employees’ experience during the recent financial crisis, particularly firm’s employment related responses to the economic hardship; and 3) the impact of firm size on employee’s experience of work stress during economic recession. The findings of the first study suggest a direct relationship between HRM practices and SME firm performance, but this relationship is moderated by high employee job satisfaction. The results suggest that HR policies and practices may improve small firm performance, especially within firms with low levels of commitment and satisfaction. The estimation results presented in the second study show that SMEs are more vulnerable during times of economic hardship than larger firms, but those with HR practices have shown more resilience to the downturn. There is a significant firm-size effect on the choice of specific HRM measures in response to the recession, and having HR practices increases the likelihood of the firm to adopt organizational measures. Also, the results indicate that the differences in workers’ job experience are moderated by high management formality. For the final empirical research, employees in SMEs experience lower level of overall job stress than those in large enterprise, although the effect disappears once the employee-level and firm-level characteristics are taken into consideration. Finally, the findings suggest that the association and magnitude of estimated effects of the work stressor presented in the Cooper and Marshall’s work stress model differ significantly by firm size. Overall, the thesis has made significant contribution to the employee relations in SMEs literature and provide interesting academic and policy oriented findings.

The study of engagement concepts is intended to enhance our understanding of its nature and solve engagement enactment problem in organisations. Key proponents suggest that benefits from engaging accrue to both individuals and organisations (Kahn, 1990; Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez_Roma and Bakker, 2002). And yet, little research has looked at the individuals’ perspectives. As Shuck (2011) highlighted, the preference of individuals needs to be uncovered before it can be acted upon. However, a separation of the two prominent theoretical perspectives used to describe and explain its dynamics has always been an important preference in the literature. From an opposite direction, Sonnentag’s (2011) suggestion for the integration of the work engagement and the personal engagement concepts raises the question of a method for orientating this integration. Hence, gaps exist as to how an acceptable multiple perspectives driven model can be established. To bridge these gaps, this study followed suggestions by Whetten (2009) to develop a combined personal-work engagement concept, empirically tested this consolidated framework and examined the perspectives of 24 self-employed and employed Nigerians. The findings provide evidence on some aspects of the successful application of the combined personal-work engagement framework. The conclusions reached assert that at the individual level, engagement patterns occurring among the individuals’ reasoning reflects an underlying dimension: a distinction made between the regard and disregard for hindering factors that seems to affect the engagement level. At higher levels of engagement, individuals regard helping factors and disregard hindering factors and this pattern seemed to have a degree of support that is not found at lower levels. At lower levels individuals regard helpful factors and regard hindering factors. A limitation is that the findings only offers guarantees that more often than not, the relationship is an expression of engaging, more work needs to be done to follow-on from this study.

Access to finance is a necessity for the start-up, growth, innovation and survival of any organisation. As a result, access to finance has become an important theme in small business research. Although there is overwhelming research evidence on access to finance, there are still research gaps in the knowledge base of different forms of access to finance, especially in times of uncertainty and economic distress. Specifically, more research is needed on the identification of relevant theories of access to finance, the role of venture capital and crowdfunding, the effect of financial education and self-confidence on access to micro finance and the role of institutions in small firms financial liquidity. The thesis aims to fill these gaps and provide comprehensive reviews and new empirical evidence related to the above issues. Reviewing the academic literature, this research supports the view that venture capital and crowdfunding are both relevant in access to funding for firms as they represent worthy alternatives for different types of firms. Venture capital firms (VCF) have targeted their investment on later-stage, management buy-out and buy-in to limit their risks and increase returns. Although VCF traditionally have huge appetite for high risk and high returns, research show that they concentrate their funding on older innovative firms. In their risk aversion, VCF have become more stringent in their entrepreneurial project selection and monitoring with reduced funding of seed and early stage of projects. Turning to empirical parts of the thesis, a series of interesting and new findings have emerged. First, this thesis supports the view that financial self-confidence of the owner manager contributes to successful access to finance for UK firms whereas financial education is found to have weak explanatory power. However, financial education is found to increase financial self-confidence, and thus can be used as a means of improving access to micro-finance for SMEs. Self-confidence is also found to be affected by past poor performance of the owners’ credit outcomes stressing the importance of building a successful credit history and experience with the financial sector. Finally, at international level this thesis stresses the importance of regulation and institutions in Baltic States and South Caucasus countries in SME access to finance. The analysis points also towards some gender differences which add to the existing debate on differences between males and females.

This research relates to digital software products and the firms that produce them. The approach used to explore these topics is that of modelling and computer simulation within the context of complexity science. A complexity science approach advocates mapping equations from one research area to solve problems in another. In this case, the central features of the models are borrowed from the work of evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman. Logical deductions from Kauffman's work leads to the creation of a quantitative product fitness landscape that does not depend upon allocation of random fitness values. Product complexity is defined in terms of the aggregated quantity of embedded information, whilst product fitness relates to maximising synergies and eliminating redundancy. The assumption that fit products are more valuable than unfit products produces the construct of a market value landscape. This explains how market demand grows and offers an explanation of the economic phenomena of increasing returns. The effect of product lifetime is studied, which indicates that fitter products have to be generated at an ever increasing rate in order to produce continuous revenue streams. Empirical evidence is presented that shows a positive correlation between software product complexity and market size. The relationship between the size of a firm and its profitability highlights an interesting anomaly relating to Microsoft Corporation, the worlds current dominant software provider. The evidence suggests that Microsoft is experiencing increasing profitability as it grows, which is at odds with the trend for traditional firms. The research makes contributions to economics, strategic management and complexity science. It does so by creating a product centric model of software firms that provides an explanation of increasing returns and it backs this up with empirical evidence. Computer simulations based upon the models exhibit patterns that give insights into product strategy. A critical feature is that, for digital software programs, increasing returns arise from the integration of features into a single program, not by simply bundling multiple programs together into product package. The success of the Microsoft Windows Product Is that, from a user perspective, it appears to integrate multiple programs in a way that releases their synergies. The models and simulations range from simple conceptual building blocks, through to more complex representations of a marketplace in which software companies are operating. These models provide a basis for further work relating to: exploration versus exploitation and the increasing rate of technological change.