Amy Huang

Integrating job demands-resources (JD-R) theory with institutional theory, this study investigates how labor market regulations affect the relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and organizational performance (OP). It posits that labor market regulations influence job demands and resources, and thereby the HPWS-OP relationship. Using hierarchical linear modeling in a meta-analysis of 59,265 business entities across 25 countries from 246 sample studies available as of April 2024, it finds that stringent hiring and firing regulations limit HPWS effectiveness, while strict work hour regulations enhance it. Centralized collective bargaining provisions do not significantly moderate this relationship. This study enriches strategic human resource management theory with a contextualized framework and offers meaningful insights for managers and policymakers on HPWS deployment and legislative development.

Higher education plays an important role in supporting sustainability through teaching, research, advocacy or key projects and initiatives. One of the innovative ways to achieve this is using an intercultural approach to work-integrated learning (WIL). This research shows how an award-winning WIL program, “Eco-economy project: improving livelihoods above and below the surface” empowers domestic Australian students with real-world experiences in an international context - Indonesia. Aided by a hybrid mode of delivery, students partner with a local NGO (non-government organization) to help a disadvantaged fishing island community develop sound alternative business plans and strategies aimed at decreasing its reliance on shark fishing. Through analysis of three years’ data based on multiple sources including the program’s teaching and learning materials, the partner NGO’s responses, student reflective learning journals and interviews, videos of the study tour, and survey data from local communities, the findings of this research clearly show how the impact of an intercultural approach to WIL extends beyond academic learning in terms of enabling students to grow environmentally and socially conscious, enhancing their intercultural competencies, and boosting their global employability. Through hands-on engagement, they become agents of positive change, making a meaningful difference in the lives of others.

Our study attempts to examine differences in the entrepreneurial development between Singapore and Australia. We focus on both external social-cultural environment for entrepreneurs and internal entrepreneurial characteristics of individuals in these two countries. The results of our study show that from the external perspective, there is a relatively less favorable social-cultural climate to encourage people to have their own businesses in Singapore, which is reflected by the lower social status of entrepreneurs, and the less desirability of creating ventures as a career choice in Singapore than in Australia. However, there is more media publicity for successful entrepreneur stories in Singapore. From the internal perspective, Singaporeans generally have lower self-evaluated skills related to starting new businesses than Australians, as well as a lower sense of entrepreneurial opportunities and lower tolerance for failure.

Open innovation seeks to assess knowledge exchange between organisations, but generally much of the research into open innovation ignores issues relating to proximity and geographical clustering. To remedy this relative paucity of research into open innovation and proximity issues, we look at various open innovation constructs within a sample of 3,468 European firms. We find that co-location within clusters facilitates open innovation effectiveness in terms of enhanced knowledge flows between firms and between firms and universities. We note that this concomitantly leads to a reduction on internal R&D investments within cluster-based firms. Our research has implications for both the economic geography and open innovation literature.

Despite a growing trend towards the axiomatic acceptance of ‘open innovation’s’ benefits, the generalizability of this new operational paradigm to developing economies has yet to be fully explored. This study provides empirical evidence and analysis regarding the relationship between open innovation) based strategies and innovation performance among Chinese firms. Our findings indicate that Chinese firms face certain barriers to the adoption of open innovation strategies relating to inadequate internal research expertise and limited absorptive capacity. These weaknesses make it difficult for them to benefit from the key external sources of openness (e.g. inter)firm networks, university linkages and research institute relations). While the positive role of absorptive capacity in facilitating open innovation outcomes has been supported in this study, we find this role is limited to large firms generally. These findings imply that developing economies like China will garner the benefits available from open innovation when they develop the capabilities required to identify, assimilate and commercialise knowledge and technologies from external sources.