Autonomous agile teams: Challenges and future directions for research

According to the principles articulated in the agile manifesto, motivated and empowered software developers relying on technical excellence and simple designs, create business value by delivering working software to users at regular short intervals. These principles have spawned many practices. At the core of these practices is the idea of autonomous, self-managing, or self-organizing teams whose members work at a pace that sustains their creativity and productivity. This article summarizes the main challenges faced when implementing autonomous teams and the topics and research questions that future research should address

Research into employee trust:epistemological foundations and paradigmatic boundaries

This article explores the epistemological roots and paradigmatic boundaries of research into employee trust, a growing field in human resource management. Drawing on Burrell and Morgan's well-known sociological paradigms and their epistemological foundations, we identify the dominant approaches to employee trust research to examine its strengths and limitations. Our review of the literature on employee trust revealed that the majority of the most cited papers were written from a psychological perspective, characterised by positivistic methodologies, variance theory explanations and quantitative data collection methods. We also found that most of the studies can be located in the functionalist paradigm, and while accepting that functionalism and psychological positivism have their merits, we argue that research in these traditions sometimes constrains our understanding of employee trust in their organisations. We conclude that trust researchers would benefit from a better understanding of the ontological, epistemological and axiological assumptions underlying of HRM research and should embrace greater epistemic reflexivity

Power-based behaviors in supply chains and their effects on relational satisfaction: A fresh perspective and directions for research

Although the sources of a firm’s power vis-à-vis upstream and downstream relationships in supply chains have been studied extensively, how a firm may act or react to power-based behaviors of its partners has not been sufficiently defined and discussed. To this end, we present three power-based behaviors: dominance, egalitarian, and submissive. From a cross-disciplinary reading of the relevant literature, we conceptualize and discuss the characteristics of these behaviors as manifested by dyads within supply chains. Three power-based behaviors are proposed to describe both initiating and responding behaviors used by partners, with these behaviors affecting relational satisfaction. This results in nine potential descriptors of the state of any supply chain relationship. We then discuss the opportunities to use our approach to better research the dynamics of power in supply chain relationships

Factors Leading to the Creation, Development, and Maintenance of Positive Social Relationship

In contrast to the manufacturing economy where the focus is primarily placed on the man-machine interface, social relationships are important building blocks in the service economy. Hence, identifyig the factors leading to creation, development, and maintenance of positive social relationships within the context of leadership is an important consideration. In this paper, a lecture covers the nature of social relationships and the related determinants (including trust, care, and respect) are outlined. Through this lecture, students can develop the ability to identify the characteristics and determinants of positive social relationships, appreciate the importance of positive relationships to service leaders, and evaluate one’s social relationships. Students are also encouraged to explore other ways to improve their social relationship qualities

Trust in Organizations

Trust is central to human life and is considered to be essential for stable relationships, fundamental for maintaining cooperation, vital to any exchange, and necessary for even the most routine of everyday interaction. In organizations the importance of trust has been recognized at both interpersonal and institutional levels. Two types of trust can be distinguished: interpersonal trust, which refers to trust between people, and system or institutional trust, which refers trust in the functioning of organizational, institutional and social systems

Centrality in networks of geographically proximate firms and competitive capabilities

We examine how a firm's centrality within a network of geographically proximate firms affects its competitive capabilities. Our study of the total population of one Spanish cluster of fishing firms shows that the effects of centrality on a firm's competitive capabilities are contingent on the effects of two relational characteristics of its direct ties: strength and degree of cognitive cohesion. Specifically, our results indicate that the centrality of a firm within the cluster network enhances its competitive capabilities as the strength of its direct ties increases. Further, firms can capture the value of centrality for enhancing competitive capabilities with a combination of strong (or weak) direct ties and low (or high) in degree of cognitive cohesion. We contribute to the network and strategy literatures by reconciling conflicting results with regard to the strategic benefits of a firm's centrality in a cluster and the relational characteristics of its direct ties