Contributions published at Foundations of Business Administration and Theories of the Firm (Andreas Scherer)

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This case study is set in mid-November 2020. The setting is Jesus College, one of Cambridge University's oldest and most prominent colleges. The protagonist is the [unnamed] College Bursar, effectively the CFO, who reports to the College Council, its governance body. Among the Bursar's responsibilities is advising the Council on the management of the college's endowment fund of GBP178 million, 20% of which is invested in the centrally managed University Endowment Fund. There is growing pressure both within the college and the university to divest from both direct and indirect investments in energy companies engaged in fossil fuel extraction and supply. The Bursar has been tasked with providing guidance on the choices available to the college and the likely consequences which such choices would entail.

This case deals primarily with the issues of managing an innovative collaboration at Cambridge's Addenbrooke's hospital, in response to the urgent demand for Personal Protection Equipment (short: PPE) created by the COVID-19 crisis in the UK in 2020. It relates to study domains within the fields of innovation, strategy, and leadership in organisations. The case highlights the challenges of open innovation (i.e., innovation which requires a third-party intervention) in general, and specific challenges which are amplified during an emergency. The two organisations featured are at opposite ends of the managerial spectrum: one is a very large hospital, run on traditional, established hierarchical lines, the other a small, informal entrepreneurial membership-based entity. The organisational cultures are also opposites: the hospital is focused on eliminating/minimising risk through well-defined protocols and processes; its potential supplier actively encourages experimentation and exploration. The central issues are whether, in the wider public interest, these two very dissimilar entities can find a meeting-point to work together, and what is the role of the protagonist, who has a foot in both camps, in brokering such a collaboration.

Public and investor expectations about corporate sustainability performance and disclosure are growing rapidly and extending into company supply chains. Companies are increasingly recognising that their supply chain holds both substantial risk and opportunity. As a result, many companies have started to engage creatively and proactively with their diverse supply chains to leverage their collective capacity to address sustainability challenges. Existing supplier engagement frameworks typically promote progressive steps towards collaboration as the ideal form of supplier engagement, but our research shows that this insufficiently captures the complexity of actual company-supplier relations. Instead, there are a variety of suitable engagement approaches that can be positioned along a spectrum between more coordinated and more collaborative. This spectrum of approaches applies to individual companies working with single suppliers, as well as to multiple companies partnering across industries and with other stakeholders to address wider supply chain challenges. Supply chain sustainability outcomes depend on your company’s ability to find the approach or combination of approaches that best align with current circumstances. Key considerations include your company’s desired objectives, supply chain characteristics, and the readiness of both your company and your suppliers.

Digitalization has far-reaching implications for individuals, organizations, and society. While extant management and organization studies mainly focus on the positive aspects of this development, the dark and potentially unexpected sides of digitalization for organizations and organizing have received less scholarly attention. This special issue extends this emerging debate. Drawing on empirical material of platform corporations, social movements, and traditional corporations, eight articles illuminate the various negative implications of the digitalization of work and organization processes, particularly for workers, employees, and activists. In this introduction,we contextualize these valuable contributions that underline the dangers of the ubiquity andsimultaneity of digitalization and begin to sketch out potential avenues toward a comprehensivecritical agenda of digitalization in organization studies.

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This article develops theory on responsible leadership based on a model involving three leadership roles: an expert who displays organizational expertise, a facilitator who cares for and motivates employees and a citizen who considers the consequences of her or his decisions for society. It draws on previous responsible leadership research, stakeholder theory and theories of behavioral complexity to conceptualize the roles model of responsible leadership. Responsible leadership is positioned as a concept that requires leaders to show behavioral complexity in addressing all three roles. In three studies, we provide a first empirical test of antecedents and outcomes of the roles model of responsible leadership. The results of the studies indicate that responsible leadership is positively related to the leader’s perceived effectiveness, favorable stakeholder evaluations and employee engagement with the organization and society. Responsible leadership behavior, in turn, seems to be facilitated by leader empathy, positive affect and universal value orientation.

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To address challenges such as Covid-19, a responsible innovation process is required. Here’s how corporate governance can help.

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