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From ego to equity
(2024)
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the association between narcissistic tendencies, gender and funding success in high-growth start-ups. It aims to bridge a critical research gap by exploring the combined effect of gender and narcissism on start-up funding success.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors surveyed 540 founders of high-growth start-ups in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, using the NPI-16 questionnaire to assess narcissistic tendencies. By focusing on high-growth start-ups as opposed to small firms, the authors enhanced the validity of the sample. This study isolates and analyses the effects of gender and narcissism, providing insights into their individual and combined contributions to start-up funding success.
Findings
The findings reveal that gender is associated with lower start-up funding and lower narcissistic tendencies. This highlights the intricate relationship between gender, narcissism and funding success within the context of high-growth start-ups.
Practical implications
These findings have important implications for investors, policymakers and entrepreneurial educators, suggesting that a nuanced understanding of founders’ psychological traits could enhance funding strategies and start-up support mechanisms.
Originality/value
This research addresses the critical gap in the literature by examining the joint influence of gender and narcissism on funding success in high-growth start-ups. The study contributes to a nuanced understanding of the factors shaping founder psychology and performance dynamics, offering valuable insights for future research in gender, narcissism and start-up success.
Since the seminal work by Hackman and Oldham (1975) there has been a growing body of literature demonstrating how work characteristics can positively both organizations and their employees. While the very nature of the task or job at hand is well explored, insufficient attention has been given to the social and cultural context in which the work is done (Spreitzer & Cameron, 2012). Based on Meynhardt’s public value approach (2009, 2015), we investigate whether organizational public value acts as an additional work characteristic in the Job Characteristics Model (JCM), thus extending the model. Specifically, we theorize that organizational public value is an additional unique resource for employees and social context work characteristic in the JCM that is positively related to employees work engagement. Additionally, our study analyzes that the positive relationship between the work characteristics, including organizational public value, and work engagement is mediated by self-efficacy. Moreover, we analyze whether employees working in industries with a public focus integrated into their core business will experience higher levels of public value in their jobs than employees in other industries. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a representative online survey in different public and non-public organizations in Switzerland (N = 949). Overall, the results support our hypotheses and contribute to close the gap by taking social context factors into the JCM and to reveal processes between the macro-level (organizational public value, work characteristics) and micro-level (employees work experience). Further theoretical and practical implications as well as future research avenues are discussed in the paper.
The creation of a common European currency has been scrutinized in the context of optimum currency area theory since its origin in Mundell (1961). The debate gained particular prominence in light of the endogeneity hypothesis (Frankel and Rose 1998), which argues that once two countries establish a common currency, their economic structures and cycles increasingly align due to strengthening intra-industry trade. By contrast, the specialization hypothesis (Eichengreen 1992; Krugman and Venables 1996) argues that the creation of a currency union will predominantly increase inter-industry trade, ultimately lowering business cycle correlation. To test these views, we establish several indices of bilateral trade intensity across EU members using input–output data, measuring gross and so-called value-added trade, which also considers the contribution of intermediary goods in the production of final exports. The results of the fixed effect panel data framework indicate a strong and robust empirical relationship between growth correlations and intra-industry trade, much in line with both Mundell’s and Frankel and Rose’s theories. However, we cannot establish a similarly robust relationship between total trade intensity and growth correlations. We reconcile these results by identifying a statistically significant relationship between economic alignment and trade when only considering industrial production, highlighting the importance of pan-European industrial supply chains for European economic integration. Rerunning our regression framework on the subsample of the eurozone indicates that the common currency area displayed even stronger properties of an optimum currency area than the entire European Union.
Acting beyond concepts
(2022)
There is a lack of understanding about early-stage entrepreneurial actions, as existing research focuses on later stages and overlooks how experience impacts entrepreneurial actions. However, entrepreneurial experience has a pivotal role in shaping entrepreneurial actions, serving as a distinguishing factor within the scope of this study. Therefore, we employ a grounded theory research approach building on 112 in-depth interviews in which we differentiate between novice and experienced entrepreneurs. We analyzed the extensive data set following the methodology of Gioia et al. Our findings include the identification of three dimensions of entrepreneurial activities, namely Entrepreneurial Alignment, Resource Enhancement, and Value Generation, that are relevant for both novice and experienced entrepreneurs. In addition, we are able to identify 27 specific entrepreneurial actions distributed between the three dimensions but differing depending on whether the entrepreneur is a novice or experienced. Examining these results, we outlined differences and commonalities in the activities of the two groups: novice entrepreneurs follow a sequential, unconnected, and perfectionist-driven process, while experienced entrepreneurs adopt a parallel, interconnected, and iterative process across the three dimensions. Practitioners and researchers can benefit from the study’s results for entrepreneurship education and resource theories in the early-stage venture creation.
Purpose
In public management research, the focus in the public value debate has been on public administration organizations’ broader societal outcomes. Public value describes how public administrations form a vital part of the social context in which people develop and grow. However, there has not yet been an analysis of how public administration contributes to happiness in society.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, we empirically analyze the relationship between people’s happiness and the public value of public administration. Our approach is based on a unique Swiss survey dataset comprising 870 individuals.
Findings
We find a positive relationship between public administration’s public value and happiness. We also find preliminary evidence with a moderation analysis that the relationship between a value-creating public administration sector and self-reported happiness is stronger for public administration employees.
Research limitations/implications
While correlation studies cannot claim causal explanations and common method bias may additionally limit any research in social science, we took a number of measures to mitigate related problem. We tested our model in two samples and took both several procedural techniques and a survey design minimizing common method bias.
Practical implications
The paper discusses implications for public sector performance measurement for public management and practitioners.
Social implications
This study calls for a more positive view on the multiple functions public administration performs for society. After an era of critical voices, our study helps reclaim public administration as a positive force for society at large in times of grand challenges, such as climate crisis, demographics and digitization.
Originality/value
This study has highlighted the importance between public administration’s public value and happiness in Swiss public service organizations. The study also showed that an employment in the public administration contributes to the happiness of individuals and beyond to society.
Purpose
The purpose of the study is to understand the relationship between family-driven innovation and the incorporation of corporate sustainability in German family firms.
Design/methodology/approach
The study conducted 26 interviews with 22 German family firms. Thematic analysis was undertaken on the collected data resulting in five major themes.
Findings
The study identified five main themes of corporate sustainability-oriented innovation in family firms, which include measuring corporate sustainability performances, building corporate sustainability-oriented infrastructure, stabilizing/optimizing operations, enhancing operational flexibility/independence and knowledge management and development. The study also provides an activity-based guide for family firms to use innovation to achieve corporate sustainability goals and present the findings’ implications for policymakers.
Originality/value
The present study is the first study to empirically investigate the relationship between family-driven innovation and the incorporation of corporate sustainability at each of the corporate sustainability maturity levels.
Purpose
Since the beginning of the 2000s, investors have more frequently invested into professional football clubs, thereby radically changing the industry landscape. This review's purpose is to analyze and synthesize the state of research to understand motives, roles and implications of football club investors, and to provide recommendations for further research.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents an integrative literature review by identifying relevant English articles based on the search terms investor, owner, investment, ownership, shareholder and stakeholder in combination with soccer or football. Around 2,431 articles were reviewed. A total of 129 relevant articles was analyzed and synthesized within eight subject areas.
Findings
Investors in professional club football is a young research stream with a clear European focus. Investor motives and roles are diverse and implications are multidimensional. Investors mostly aim for indirect returns rather than pure profit- or win-maximization.
Research limitations/implications
Football clubs comprise an own investment class for which the identified, unique specifics must be considered to develop a financially successful investment model. Thorough academic research of investors' inherent characteristics, investor-club pairings and the pillars of long-term strategies for successful investor-club liaisons are avenues of future research. Furthermore, the results illustrate the need for research outside of Europe.
Originality/value
The paper is the first systematic, integrative review of existing literature in the domain of equity investments into professional club football. The findings genuinely show that, depending on the investor type and ownership structure, investors have a wide impact in professional club football.
Purpose
The organizational digital transformation (ODT) in companies presents small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – who remain at the beginning of this transformation – with the challenge of offering digital services based on sensor technologies. Against this backdrop, the present paper identifies ways SMEs can enable digital servitization through sensor technology and defines the possible scope of the organizational transformation process.
Design/methodology/approach
Around 21 semi-structured interviews were conducted with experts from different hierarchical levels across the German manufacturing SME ecosystem. Using the Gioia methodology, fields of action were identified by focusing on influencing factors and opportunities for developing these digital services to offer them successfully in the future.
Findings
The complexity of existing sensor offerings must be mastered, and employees' (data) understanding of the technology has increased. Knowledge gaps, which mainly relate to technical and organizational capabilities, must be overcome. The potential of sensor technology was considered on an individual, technical and organizational level. To enable the successful implementation of service offerings based on sensor technology, all relevant stakeholders in the ecosystem must network to facilitate shared value creation. This requires standardized technical and procedural adaptations and is an essential prerequisite for data mining.
Originality/value
Based on this study, current problem areas were analyzed, and potentials that create opportunities for offering digital sensor services to manufacturing SMEs were identified. The identified influencing factors form a conceptual framework that supports SMEs' future development of such services in a structured manner.
Prior research has indicated that hypercompetition exists in the venture capital (VC) market. However, it remains poorly understood what implications arise from hypercompetition on VCs' strategies and operational activities and how VC funds can capitalise their competitive advantages and signal investor quality to start-ups and limited partners. To fill this knowledge gap, we use inductive qualitative research and grounded theory as a research strategy. Our results offer evidence that hypercompetition requires strategic and operational adaptability to new market dynamics and a strong need to develop competitive strategies and improve fund capabilities. We harness the different VC fund strategies from our sample to derive dynamic fund strategies to support quality signalling and exploitation of competitive advantages. The six fund strategies differ based on fund size, capabilities and degree of adaptability. Our study contributes to the literature by addressing the topic of fund strategy formulation and competitive advantages in high-competitive market dynamics.
In recent years, research on corporate sustainability integration strategies has witnessed a significant growth in interest. However, contributions remain disjointed and fragmented, preventing the emergence of a cohesive understanding of the current research state. This study uses a systematic review of 126 articles from Web of Science (WoS) and Ebsco to extract a seven-dimensional integrated view of corporate sustainability integration strategies. Our review's contributions are threefold: (1) we enrich the corporate sustainability strategies literature by identifying the focuses and themes of recent publications; (2) we address the research's fragmentation issue by presenting the sustainability implementation strategies in an integrated view with the essential interdependencies shown at different hierarchical levels and across organizational dimensions simultaneously, (3) we present the theoretical and managerial implications and discuss in detail the crucial interdependencies of sustainability integration strategies. The study finishes with a conclusion highlighting potential avenues for future research.