Journal of General Management

Acceptance of ecotourism is still a topic of great concern for vulnerable regions. Often described as a credible response to the problems of natural resource reduction and the development of inappropriate practices that degrade natural landscapes, ecotourism has nevertheless often failed to live up to expectations due to a number of factors. These include the inefficiency of public policies, failure to encourage local initiatives and the difficulty of reconciling the interests of all stakeholders living or working within an ecotourism area. This article aims, through a qualitative study, to better understand the problems of accepting ecotourism by conceptualising it as a social innovation and then analysing the influence and role of various stakeholders in ensuring its acceptance. The results highlight obstacles to the acceptance of ecotourism, namely the shortcomings of public policies, the controversial situations that arise from interaction between the main players and the problems of participatory governance.

Although resource renewal allows high-tech SMEs to adapt to environmental changes through innovation to seize new business opportunities and sustain competitiveness in volatile business environments, little is known about how they renew resources in innovation projects. This study addresses the research gap using the dynamic capabilities perspective. An inductive analysis of multiple cases of Malaysian high-tech SMEs finds that high-tech SMEs renew resources in four ways: by acquiring new technological resources to match customer requirements, using a prototype approach, by solving problems in projects, and by learning from involvement in their customers’ R&D activities.

False advertising has many negative consequences for the protection of consumer rights and wellbeing. In emerging economies in particular, false advertising has been widespread across business sectors and products due to inadequate public policy and ineffective law enforcement. Since the COVID-19 global pandemic has spread around the world, people have become more dependent on e-commerce for purchasing goods and services, and the negative impact has become historically high with increasing number of advertising and sales cyber-fakes However, prior studies have not focused on consumers’ perceived deception and information asymmetry in false advertising in general, and the consequent implications for public policy in controlling and eliminating such problems, specifically in emerging economies. This study focuses on the example of China as a leading emerging economy to investigate the relevant issues and contribute to extant knowledge by linking separate paradigms with a new holistic conceptual framework that identifies the key elements of contextual factors, consumers’ perceived deception and information asymmetry, the causes and impacts, and the expected policy implications for further prevention.

Recent work in stakeholder theory argues that additional research into how multi-stakeholder value creation happens is an important focus for the field. However, despite calls for greater attention to this area, there are few examples of how that can happen or what it looks like. This study examines how Volkswagen did just that: created value for multiple stakeholders, nearly simultaneously, over a multi-generational time period, all while overcoming an epic scandal.

This study constructs a family director board governance index (FBGI) and examines its impact on the firm performance. This motivation is prompted by the literature and theoretical gaps. Despite the pervasiveness of family firms around the world and their significant contribution to the economy, past studies have not developed a board governance index to address the Type II agency conflict in family firms. A panel data of 1105 firm-year observations based on 221 family firms from 2016 to 2020 is used in this study. Two-way fixed-effects estimation with cluster-robust standard errors is employed to examine the association between the proposed FBGI and firm performance. System generalized method of moments is adopted to validate the results. The statistical results report a significant negative association between FBGI and firm performance. The findings suggest that Malaysian family firms have the tendency to tailor the board composition, and such composition is detrimental to the firm performance. The proposed index may be useful for the policy-makers and regulators to assess the board composition and governance role of family directors in Malaysian family firms. Furthermore, the index may be of interest to the potential investors of family firms when evaluating the board governance and making investment decisions.

Within management studies and practice, the construct of organizational climate has long been studied, its theoretical value, support to human resource management and organizational development. Despite the sustained interest in this construct, theoretical and terminological inconsistencies have hindered the development of a shared framework. For the vested interest of companies and their persistent use for change management, a summative framework is essential. This study is a systematic review of the major frameworks that are available in the field, and it attempts to surface and summarize the major components of organizational climate. Thirteen compelling dimensions consistently emerged at the foundation of the construct, and these dimensions are Communication, Supervision/Leadership, Team Cohesion, Autonomy/self-governance, Psycho-Physical Environment, Reward Systems/Structures, Innovation, Decision-making, Job Description, Role Meaning and Goals, Coherence between Strategy and Operational Implementation/Fairness, Integration and Dynamism and Freedom of Expression. For each dimension, an operational definition is provided. Therefore, a comprehensive map of the construct is provided for the benefit of academics and practitioners to have a common language and for the development of analytics to be validated across and beyond hierarchy, sector and regional boundaries and an instrument of benchmark.

This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on leadership styles within Australian public sector organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative methodology was employed for this research consisting of semi-structured interviews with 50 managers. The study results suggest the pandemic affected managers’ leadership style, managers’ and employees’ emotions, stress and anxiety, and organizational performance and productivity. Changes in leadership style to incorporate being supportive, informative, and motivational to match the change in situation were found to be effective. This addresses a gap in the literature by identifying these three leadership styles as being important for employee support during the pandemic.