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Sustainable social responsibility (SSR) toward multiple stakeholders is proclaimed as an obligation of firms rather than a voluntary deed. Keeping in view the stipulation of sustainability, this paper examines the influence of SSR on sustainable competitive position (SCP) and firm performance (FP) in the context of 307 Chinese small-and medium-sized enterprises. The results indicate a significant influence of aggregated and segregated SSR on SCP and FP. With the exception of SSR toward owners, the dimensions of SSR toward employees, the environment, the community, suppliers, and customers exhibit a significant positive influence on SCP and FP. Simultaneously, the results show that SCP has a mediating role in the relationship between SSR and FP. The findings of the study inculcate the managers to stretch substantial consideration to the interests of multiple stakeholders rather than owners only. Based on the evaluation, theoretical and practical implications are presented for managers, owners, and local governments.

In global product development projects, coordinating complex technical communication among teams across time zones in the overlapping process is a fundamental challenge. To optimize a global product development organization to reduce the negative impact of time separation on coordination, this article presents an innovative approach to solve two key problems: how to quantify the coordination among distributed teams and how to identify efficient global product development organization. We build structural models to capture the coordination dependency strength among global product development teams from the time separation and overlapping process perspectives, employing the design structure matrix method. Then, we analyze the factors that influence synchronous and asynchronous communication due to time separation. We also apply the random walk method to identify a team similarity matrix, taking into account the direct and indirect dependency relationships among teams associated with their performed activities. Finally, we use the team similarity matrix as an input to a spectral clustering algorithm to identify the clustering strategy for the global product development organizational architecture, yielding and reinforcing several managerial insights, including how to analyze the coordination among global product development teams as well as how the offshoring costs impact the clustered organization.

Agile organization are raising much attentions to enhance efficient coordination by Scrum approach. The key takeaways for a study on Huawei product development (PD) project are: (i) Agile organization emphasize minimum valuable product (MVP) to rise efficient coordination; (ii) Preliminary information are paramount to the overlapping process between project teams supported by daily scrum; (iii) iteration risks are reduced under agile environment with windows of overlap. We discuss organizational improvement opportunities of our modeled DSM with possibilities for follow-on research.