This study examines the relationships among managerial communication, perceptions of the procedural justice of layoffs, and employee attitudes within the context of divestiture. As we expected, employee perceptions of procedural justice regarding the divestiture predicted, at one point in time, trust in new ownership and, two months later, post-divestiture commitment to the organization. Also as hypothesized, perceptions of the justice of the divestiture explained variance in trust and commitment above and beyond that explained by the perceived justice of the layoffs. Finally, as predicted, managerial communications that helped employees understand the events surrounding the divestiture increased perceptions of the procedural justice of the divestiture and layoffs, and had both indirect and direct effects on future commitment.

Servant leadership style has drawn much attention in the last decade to leadership studies on account of its focus on serving others first. Extant literature calls for a better understanding of the underlying mechanism for servant leadership to positively influence performance within an organization. We position servant leadership to contribute to firms’ sustainable performance, by empirically studying the mediating mechanism of bi-dimensional trust, namely affective and cognitive trust, between servant leadership and individual performance. Our data comprised of dyadic samples of 233 pairs of subordinates and their supervisors. The results from hierarchical linear model (HLM) for clustered data showed that servant leadership strongly predicted affective trust, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), and task performance of subordinates; affective trust fully mediated servant leadership’s effect on task performance while partially mediates servant leadership’s effect on subordinates’ OCB. In contrast, cognitive trust did not mediate servant leadership’s effect on either OCB or task performance. These findings reveal the relevance of affective trust as the underlying mechanism which mediates and deciphers servant leadership into positive individual performance.

This article investigates the relative merits of two methods of case discussion. The first is the Harvard Case Method (HCM), and the other is the McAleer Interactive Case Analysis (MICA) method. In the literature, MICA has been proposed as a remedy for the weaknesses of HCM. Here, we report the results from an experiment that assesses the relative effectiveness of these two methods. Our results support the claim that MICA is better than HCM. In particular, we find that MICA enhances student participation in case discussions. This is useful, inasmuch as one important component of active learning is participation.

This paper presents an empirically grounded study of the linkages between competitive strategy and manufacturing technology for 20 small manufacturers. It identifies the nature of strategy-technology linkages, the process by which the two align, the market and customer forces driving this alignment, and the consequences of failing to adopt appropriate new technologies. The paper proposes five propositions which are developed into a dynamic stratem-technology linkage model.

It is important for strategy research to have practical relevance given its professional orientation. The differing perspectives of academics and managers and the rapid development of the field of strategic management suggests a need to address the field's future direction. In this paper, a practitioners' agenda for the field is developed based on a survey of chief executive officers (CEOs) of major US corporations. A comparison of this agenda with one generated by academics highlights the differences between the two constituencies concerning issues of relevance for the future. Compared to academics, CEOs emphasize operating issues; disagree on the priority of strategic issues; and are generally unfamiliar with research-based journals. The two agendas should be viewed as complementary. Some implications for the field are discussed and suggestions made for dealing with the issue of relevance in future research and communicating the results to managers.