Twenty years ago Gibb suggested that despite an ‘explosion of research’ into enterprise, there had been ‘a growth of ignorance’. To see if that still applies, this paper looks at the nature of ‘knowledge’ and in particular at how our knowledge about enterprise has evolved. It suggests that to build our enterprise understanding, assumptions were made but not subsequently reviewed and verified. For instance it seems to have been assumed that enterprise is a sub-set of business, with the apparent consequence that big business-based thinking is applied also to small businesses.The paper concludes that there is a prima face case that ignorance about enterprise still prevails and there are examples which support this conclusion. In consequence, until the questionable assumptions are highlighted and their foundations recognised and corrected, we should not claim a leading role for our thinking or promote it as an appropriate basis for enterprise policy.

This study examined 130 Australian companies from the ASX 500 All Ordinaries between 2011 and 2015. We performed regression analysis on the effects of age of the board (mean age and age diversity) upon financial performance (measured by ROA and Tobin's Q). Controlling for board size, firm size and industry sector, we found that the average age of board members is positively associated with firm performance as measured by ROA. Boards with an older average age of directors perform better than boards with a younger average age. There was no significant relationship between age diversity as measured by the within-board standard deviation on the two performance measures. The primary focus of our study was age. However, an interesting concomitant finding is that the focus on increasing female representation on boards will lower the average age of a board (as female directors tend to be significantly younger than their male counterparts) and this may have an adverse impact on financial performance.

Older workers make up a substantial portion of today’s labor force. Yet little is known about the beliefs held by this age group. Our study offers some much needed insights into intersectionality around this group, by investigating how older workers’ perceptions of supervisors performing a gendered leadership behavior are impacted by a supervisors’ sex, age, and gendered attributes. The results show that these supervisors are perceived most favorably when they possess communal qualities and/or when they are depicted as being older than their direct reports. Our results also reveal that, when these supervisors are not perceived as communal, male but not female supervisors, experience a backlash. Within this context, young female leaders appear to be at an advantage when compared with young male leaders. This study advances the literature on the ‘think manager–think male’ stereotype and has the practical benefit of offering insights into leader-follower interactions in today’s aging workplace.

This study seeks to explore the effects of interdepartmental conflict on bonding social capital within a department and bridging social capital between departments. Two-period data were collected from 213 respondents in 71 high-tech and manufacturing firms in Taiwan. These respondents work in research and development departments and cooperate with marketing departments. The results indicate that intergroup task and emotional conflicts promote bonding social capital within the research and development department. Up to a moderate level, task conflict subsequently promotes the development of structural and relational bridging social capital; however, an increase in task conflict above a moderate level becomes detrimental to structural and relational bridging social capital. Intergroup emotional conflict does not influence bridging social capital. Furthermore, intergroup conflict is unrelated to cognitive bridging social capital. The results provide insights into intergroup interactions, offering a novel means for managers to increase group social capital using the levels of conflict that naturally occur between departments.

Perceptions of employee entitlement are reported to be increasing in organizations and have been linked to negative outcomes at work. Employee entitlement is an employee’s belief in deserving preferential treatment or reward without regard to performance. Arguments, however, are emerging that entitlement may also be linked to positive behaviors. In this article, we outline a study that examines the moderating effect of self-monitoring on the relationship between employee entitlement and organizational citizenship behavior and affective organizational commitment. Based on survey data collected from 167 individuals, we found that self-monitoring moderated the relationship between the specific subscales of employee entitlement and organizational citizenship behavior but had no relationship to commitment. Although previous studies have addressed entitlement perceptions as a negative outcome for the organization, in this article we outline the potential for positive outcomes. Limitations and future research directions are outlined.

This paper addresses longstanding questions about how promise and obligation, two of the key conceptual building blocks for psychological contract research, are conceptualized and operationalized: How do employees understand these concepts? Would their understandings be congruent with the researchers’ and how would this knowledge inform future psychological contract research? Drawing on interviews with 61 Chinese workers from diverse backgrounds, our results suggest the concepts have distinct meanings for participants in terms of three criteria (defining characteristics, key features and manifestations in employment). We argue that promise and obligation are likely to serve different functions in employment relationship and have different meanings for researchers versus participants, and accordingly we highlight the challenges of using them to conceptualize and operationalize psychological contracts in China and beyond.

Scholars often assume that reference groups are industry-wide, homogeneous, and stable. We examine this assumption and suggest hypotheses based on managers’ motivations such as self-enhancement and self-improvement, social identity, and affiliation-based impression management. We test hypotheses on failure-induced changes in reference groups and their direction in terms of upward and downward comparisons. An empirical examination of changes in reference groups for firms listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index between 1993 and 2008 shows that performance below social aspirations induces changes in reference groups and toward upward comparisons. The results indicate that managers can choose to change the reference group – a cognition-centered response – as an alternative to such action-centered responses as organizational search and risk-taking in response to poor performance from social aspirations and that upward comparisons may be the result of social performance shortfalls to give a better impression and to improve firm performance.