This thesis addresses two main questions. Firstly “Are there significant differences between the level of academic achievement (qualification) of German senior managers and their British counterparts?” Secondly if so, “why should this be so?” These two questions lead to a third, “what impact, if any, do these differences have”? This third question, whilst it is not the focal point of this research, is discussed in outline in so far as it impinges upon our topic, it would however probably be more properly addressed as the subject of a further separate thesis. This thesis, supports the proposition that German senior managers are usually academically better qualified than their British counterparts and in particular that many more, by a factor of between 10 and 50 to one, have Doctorates. It identifies long standing and deep-seated cultural differences as being one of the principal reasons why this should be so. As to the third question the differing levels of productivity in the two countries, particularly in the manufacturing industry, have been the subject of much debate. This thesis supports the argument that lack of qualification both academic and vocational of British managers may contribute to this difference. However, it also indicates that the British less focussed more generalist approach may prove advantageous where the ability to innovate or to be entrepreneurial is concerned, an area where German managers it seems do less well.

This research applied a phenomenological approach to investigate the experience of final year undergraduate students who had undertaken 48 week paid management internships within the luxury hotel sector outside of the United Kingdom. There is an emerging research base in respect to students' responses to work integrated learning and co-operative work experience and this study has added to the limited qualitative evidence that exists on students' experience of extended international internships within the hotel sector. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 25 final year undergraduate students in a single British university. The interviews elicited information about how students made sense of their overseas work experience at a point when they were preparing to leave university and enter fulltime employment. Four superordinate themes emerged after the cross-analysis of individual participant's experience. Findings support previous studies into co-operative management education in identifying personal growth and confidence as important phenomena experienced by participants. Furthermore, participants indicated a sense of heightened human capital in the form of cosmopolitan human capital and expressed strong self-belief in their own employability as a consequence of their experience. This increased sense of employability remained true despite intention to work overseas again or to remain within the hotel sector. Original to this research are the phenomena of adversity and resilience coupled with the emergence of sub-themes clustering around positive psychological development that emerged through analysis of participants' internship experience. This study puts forward a theoretical model of international internships and positive psychological capital and contributes to practice in internship and employability mentoring and policy decision making regarding the internationalisation and employability agendas in higher education.

How does the SME internationalisation network develop across institutional distance and why? In order to understand and explain the process of SME internationalisation network development between a developed economy (the UK) and an emerging one (China), a conceptual research framework was first developed from the integration of theories of small firm internationalisation (Child and Hsieh 2014; Coviello 2006; Jones and Coviello 2005), social networks (Burt 1995; 2011; Jack 2010; Slotte-Kock and Coviello 2010) and institutions (North 2009; Peng 2003; Scott 2008). Welch et al.'s (2011) 'contextualised causal explanation perspective’ was then applied in an empirical context, through the in-depth study of three cases of SME network development between Scotland and China, which resulted in findings that underline the interconnectedness between formal and informal institutions and their effects on the phenomenon. The thesis ultimately offers a causal explanation process model of SME internationalisation network development across institutional distance, answering calls from the internationalisation literature (Jones et al 2011) for a greater understanding of how and why institutions (Eden 2010) - and informal institutions (Sartor and Beamish 2014) in particular – matter.

Developing an understanding of the employment of game based mechanics within an organisational context, is becoming an increasingly relevant topic of interest and research. This nascent field of study and practice has been termed Enterprise Gamification, and is progressively being adopted by organisations wishing to improve the use of their information systems across the workforce. However, there is limited understanding of the effective use of these elements and their influence on the actions of employees using gamified information systems. Thus, this research seeks to theorise the effective use by actors in the workplace of enterprise gamification systems embedded with game based mechanics. These elements were explored through an in-depth case study approach extending over a two year period with a global media agency comprising a large workforce. This approach enabled me to collect empirical data through interviews, archival materials and observations of information system use in the field of study, and to theorise about the mechanics of effective enterprise gamification system use by employees. In conceptualising effective enterprise gamification system use, and by uncovering the dynamics between user actions, system use, and performance effectiveness by which these may gamefully engage employees, this study offers a substantial contribution to the related streams of research concerned with understanding the effective use of information systems and enterprise gamification. Thus its original contributions to knowledge are: (i) uncovering new insights into gamified user actions and representations of game based mechanics; (ii) developing salient understanding of gamified system use across dimensions of effective use nature; (iii) offering novel insights into the relationship between game based mechanics and performance effectiveness in a gamified system use context; and (iv) research implications for the study of information system use with enterprise gamification. Contribution to practice also provides novel insights into the effectiveness of gamified information systems with employees, as findings suggest that potential benefits may be context specific as characterised by user interpretations and variations in states of engagement as influenced by game based mechanics.

This thesis integrates the cognitive modelling perspective into the literature on organizational slack by developing and validating a questionnaire-based instrument which measures managers’ attitudes towards slack resources. The literature is deeply polarized regarding the role played by slack in organizations. Researchers debate whether organizational slack is a sure sign of inefficiency in the workplace or a necessary cost to enhance the competitiveness of firms. Empirical studies have not been able to resolve this conceptual debate as the results are highly diverse. In order to explain conflicting empirical findings, scholars have made untested assumptions about the interaction between organizational slack and managerial psychology. However, despite repeated calls, managerial cognition regarding organizational slack remains a black box in empirical studies. This thesis addresses this shortfall in the literature by developing a new measurement instrument which reveals managers’ attitudes towards slack resources. The instrument, i.e. the Attitudes Towards Slack Resources Questionnaire (ATSRQ), consists of three five-item subscales reflecting attitudes towards HR, financial, and physical slack and a combined higher-order scale measuring overall attitudes towards slack. It is developed and validated by means of a rigorous and systematic paradigm. The psychometric properties of the ATSRQ are assessed with five empirical studies which provide evidence for the internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity of the ATSRQ. Results of the empirical studies suggest that managers’ attitudes towards slack resources are related to some key organizational phenomena, such as managers’ trust in employees. The results also reveal that managerial attitudes towards slack resources predict various employee-related outcomes, including leader-member exchange, perceived organizational support, work autonomy, access to resources, and decision latitude. The thesis concludes with a discussion of results, as well as limitations and future research directions.

Firms are facing challenges in managing corporate social responsibility (henceforth CSR) in their offshore outsourcing relationships and often fail to meet the ever increasing expectations from stakeholders. The main cause of these challenges stems from the complexity of offshore outsourcing. This thesis attempts to advance understandings of the mechanisms through which key relevant factors operate and interact to influence CSR performance outcomes. Three pieces of research taking different approaches embedded in multiple theories and levels of analysis are presented. Paper 1 advances the theoretical understanding of firm performance outcomes in cross-border inter-organisational relationships, mainly informed by institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and relational view. By specifically looking at CSR in offshore outsourcing relationships, the study enables prediction of CSR performance outcomes under institutional and inter-organisational differences. Paper 2 empirically studies a specific type of CSR failure, corporate social irresponsibility (henceforth CSiR) exposed by the media. Using an extensive amount of longitudinal data, the study demonstrates that CSR performance is an outcome of the interactions between the way firms are perceived by key stakeholders and attention to the subject matter. The paper contributes to the attention-based view, the theoretical underpinning of the paper, by separating out depth and breadth of attention conceptually and empirically. Paper 3 narrows down the sectoral context of the study to the retail industry considering its representativeness in the subject matter. Drawing on resource dependence theory, the study provides conceptual insights into a shifting paradigm from dyadic to trilateral governance. The findings of the three studies examining an identical phenomenon, but adopting different approaches and research tools, suggest CSR performance outcomes are formulated by internal and external contextual conditions and firms’ strategic choices. Overall the thesis contributes to our understanding of CSR in offshore outsourcing by unravelling the mechanisms through which these crucial factors work.

The title, per aspera ad astra, the ‘struggle to the stars’, speaks to this thesis in two ways. Firstly, the theoretical focus of this research project rests upon understanding the joint pursuit of exploitation (efficiency) and exploration (innovation), a concept otherwise known as organizational ambidexterity. To date, studies have demonstrated that organizations with the ability to achieve ambidexterity are apt to become leading star performers in their industries. Yet the pursuit of ambidexterity is difficult and fraught with tension; for exploration and exploitation are considered incompatible and demand fundamentally different skill requirements and capabilities. The research herein contributes knowledge to the field of strategy and change management by addressing an important but underdeveloped area of inquiry in examining how, in practice, an organization transitions towards an ambidextrous strategy and manages the exploration-exploitation duality (Birkinshaw, Crilly, Bouquet and Lee, 2016). Herein, the study focuses on the exploration-exploitation duality and addresses the research questions ‘how does an established organization transition in strategic pursuit of organizational ambidexterity, and what underlying mechanisms support or impeded its transition?’ Secondarily, to address this question an empirical qualitative case study analysis was conducted of an organization undergoing strategic change towards achieving ambidexterity, namely the NASA Johnson Space Center who strive to advance science and technology through the difficult endeavor of human space exploration. Utilizing a multimethod approach, rich qualitative data was gathered and through inductive reasoning and a grounded theory approach, theoretical insights were generated to develop theory. Broadly speaking, the study finds that: (1) an organization’s approach to ambidexterity is not static but evolves progressively with antecedents arranged in a layered pattern over time due to a dynamic relationship between exploration-exploitation. Consequentially, structural and contextual antecedents to ambidexterity are employed in a hybrid manner, and this is enabled by various distinct skills, processes and structures resembling the micro foundations of dynamic capabilities; (2) the formal and informal organization are important organizational features whose interaction creates a practice-based mechanism which, under certain conditions, engenders the informal organization to promote long-term change supporting the effective pursuit of ambidexterity; and (3) an organization’s history, when punctuated with crisis events, can have a paradoxical influence that simultaneously supports and impedes its approach to exploration and exploitation. The study contributes to a richer understanding of organizational ambidexterity and how an organization pursues and implements this strategy in practice. It also contributes to expanding our understanding of the processes, structures and micro-features engaged in the development of ambidexterity at different levels of the organization.

In the recent years, the pervasive use of digital technologies has remarkably changed our society. Realizing its huge potential for transforming a society, many emerging markets worldwide have widely adopted digital technologies aiming at poverty reduction, rapid socio-economic development and sustainability through a better connected society. However, despite its large scale adoption, a major percentage of digital technology-based projects in these markets have failed completely or partially. Considering the unique characteristics of emerging markets, it is now well acknowledged that the canonical set of methods used for innovation in developed economies do not work in the emerging markets and need doing things differently. As these projects are often led by entrepreneurs who lack in local knowledge, the projects suffer in contextualization of innovation leading to failure. This doctoral thesis examines dynamics of digital innovation in emerging markets focusing on digital entrepreneurship, digital technology driven enterprise transformation and co-creation of IT value for the firms engaged in such digital ventures. This thesis adopts three paper format and is grounded in concepts and theories from wide range of related and intertwined academic literatures: those of digital innovation in emerging markets, digital innovation and entrepreneurship, liminality, enterprise transformation, path creation, co-creation of IT value and social-commercial alliance. As methodologies, I have adopted interpretive cases studies and conducted three case studies in an emerging market, Bangladesh to collect empirical data. One of the papers is based on single case while two others are drawn on two cases. The first paper investigates two digital innovation projects in emerging markets drawing on liminality to explore how contexts and entrepreneurial agency in emerging markets co-evolve through digital technologies. Drawing on a single case, the second paper examines the transformation of an organization that adopts ICT. And finally, the third paper explores the process of co-creation and emanation IT value in two social-commercial alliances that embeds IT as their key resources for innovation. Overall, the thesis has several contributions to the theories and for practice. Specifically, the key theoretical contributions of the thesis are: 1) illustrating that digital innovations in emerging markets offer liminal space for entrepreneurs, 2) conceptualizing digital entrepreneurship and innovation as a constitutive process, 3) developing a process framework for digital innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging markets, 4) offering three practices for digital innovation in emerging markets, 5) conceptualizing ICT-based enterprise transformation in emerging market as a process of path creation, 6) offering ‘mindful deviation’ as a key practice for enterprise transformation, 7) developing a theoretical model for co-creation of IT value in social-commercial alliances and 8) building theoretical propositions related to firms‘ motivations for co-creation through IT. Further to that, I discuss several practical implications of the findings and also offer few implications for future research.

The importance of innovation for organizational competitive advantage and effectiveness is widely accepted (Love et al., 2011). Because of its potential to increase innovation, knowledge sharing (KS) has been of growing interest to researchers and managers (Kamaşak & Bulutlar, 2010). It is suggested that knowledge sharing is more likely to occur in supportive conditions when individuals have high-quality relationships with their leaders and co-workers (Carmeli et al., 2013). The purpose of the present study is to examine the association between the workplace relationships in teams and knowledge sharing, and how the pattern of knowledge sharing in teams is associated with team innovation and team performance. Social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity served as the theoretical foundation of the present study. A cross-sectional survey was utilized for data collection. The sample consisted of 223 members and 51 leaders from 51 teams which were collected from ten primary and middle schools as well as an aircraft corporation in Southern China. The results of the study demonstrated that both Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and Team-Member Exchange (TMX) are positively associated with knowledge sharing at the individual and team levels. Furthermore, the results suggested a mediating effect of TMX between LMX and team-level knowledge sharing (team KS). In Addition, the result of the comparison of an individual’s own LMX with the average LMXs in the team (RLMX) was found to moderate the relationship between LMX and TMX. However, the expected negative relationship between the variation in LMX relationships in a team (LMX differentiation) and TMX was not statistically significant. Finally, the study also found that the pattern of knowledge sharing in teams is positively related to team innovation and team performance, such that teams with more people sharing knowledge have better innovation and performance than teams with only a few people sharing knowledge. The overall findings indicate that both LMX and TMX have a unique influence on knowledge sharing, and our understanding of how supportive social relationships influence wok outcomes should be expanded from looking at the vertical leader-follower relationship and the horizontal relationship with a team in isolation. Rather, the multi-level interactions of these two types of relationships should be considered together.

The global security concerns combined with the emergence of firms operating at international level have intensified the competition among companies in the aerospace and defense sector. In this challenging business environment, the adoption of organizational ambidexterity could provide a company with the key advantage in dealing with the increasing competitive forces. Organizational ambidexterity, which denotes the simultaneous use of exploration and exploitation in organizations, ensures both short-term profitable operation through the exploitation of successful current products and long-term survival through the exploration of innovative solutions for future customer needs. According to ambidexterity and leadership literatures, transformational and transactional leadership styles, which constitute ambidextrous leadership behaviors, promote ambidexterity across multiple levels of the organization’s structure and become key elements for the successful implementation of organizational ambidexterity. This enactment of ambidexterity across levels constitutes ambidexterity penetration, a term first introduced in this study. In this context, this study attempts to address research gaps in the ambidextrous leadership research by linking the micro-level leadership styles with the macro-level corporate structure and environment by investigating: (a) how ambidexterity penetrates across multiple levels vertically and horizontally, (b) which tensions emerge from ambidexterity penetration and how they are managed, and finally (c) whether the type and size of the particular organizational setting is related to this ambidexterity penetration. To address these research questions, a dual case study research framework was used by analyzing data collected from: (a) a governmental organization with multiple business units dispersed throughout Europe, and (b) three aerospace and defense companies of different sizes with multiple business units in Europe and the United States. Data from 44 confidential, face-to-face and e-mail interviews, along with published archival information, was collected, compiled, and analyzed in the course of two years. The diversity of the studied business units in terms of type and size, and the compilation of data across multiple corporate levels (CEO to employee) provided a unique setting to uncover key findings that highlight the challenges and accomplishments of ambidextrous leadership in corporate and governmental organizational structures. The systematic, multi-level analysis of the collected data revealed variations in ambidexterity penetration across multiple levels of management in different types of organizations as a result of corporate culture and environmental constraints. However, in most cases, the analysis also uncovered: (a) similar characteristics of low horizontal, but high vertical penetration of ambidexterity, mainly due to their inflexible organizational structure, (b) prevailing transactional (exploitative) leadership style, as their leaders appear to act mostly as ambidextrous managers, (c) ambidexterity penetration across multiple levels via similar processes irrespective of type and size of each organization, and finally (d) the key role of middle management as a cohesive link within the firm’s structure that enables the ambidexterity penetration across management levels. In conclusion, this study contributes at the intersections of ambidexterity and leadership research in the context of the aerospace and defense sector and offers a timely empirical investigation of the competing challenges that these firms are called upon to face in the light of the emerging global security challenges and the subsequent vast investment in resources and capital.