Dr Nuttawuth (Wuth) Muenjohn

The theme of this special issue indicates an investigation of the bidirectional (two-way) relationship among management practices, innovation, and firm productivity across various types of organisations and countries. Drawing on data from developing, emerging, and least developed economies, this special issue assesses the interplay among firm-level management quality, innovation activities, and country-specific context to identify the factors contributing to differences in firm-level performance and competitiveness. A series of studies covers an array of topics, including management practices, R&D investment, digital transformation, blockchain use, AI adoption, sustainability, resilience, export performance, and innovation capability at both the small- and medium-sized enterprise and large-firm levels. While there was a strong association between effective management practices (i.e., performance monitoring, target-setting, and incentive-based systems) and increased innovation outputs (and thus productivity), the positive relationship between innovation and firm performance was found to depend on specific environmental, financial, institutional, or technological characteristics. An additional number of studies have identified the mediation effect of innovative activities (e.g., R&D, patents, intangibles), while other studies highlighted the inhibiting effect of financial constraints on innovation-driven firms without tangible assets. Also, a significant portion of the studies included in the special issue demonstrated that digital and technological innovations will play a key role in determining future business performance and sustainability. By integrating various theories and methodologies, the collection provides a comprehensive review of how firms can align their management practices and innovation activities to improve long-term productivity, competitiveness, and sustainable development in increasingly complex global markets.

Environmental, social and governance indicators are often used to assess an organization's ethical and long-term sustainability and performance. Organizations with high environmental, social and governance scores tend to perform consistently and exceed market expectations (Rajesh and Rajendran, 2020). In particular, organizations that incorporate environmental welfare into their mission statement or core values not only achieve their organizational goals, but also achieve positive individual outcomes, such as employee engagement, willingness to take on organizational responsibilities and low turnover. Given the numerous environmental issues (e.g. pollution, global warming and waste management) that every industry faces directly or indirectly, there is an increased need and growing pressure for organizations to adopt sustainable strategies. As a result, the topic of green human resource management (GHRM) continues to attract the attention and interest of HRM scholars. A simple Google Scholar search (as of May 31, 2022) reveals 3,550,000 studies on this topic. Hence, GHRM is becoming one of the most important tasks for organizations, in addition to managing human resources from an economic perspective...