Dioni Elche

Among the many approaches to leadership, servant leaders stand out for the emphasis they place on the importance of service to their followers, the organization, and the broader community. We develop and test a multilevel mediation model, in which the relationship between servant leadership and team performance is sequentially transmitted through individual‐level organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and team‐based internal social capital. Multilevel structural equation modeling was applied to a sample of 343 teams, reflecting 835 respondents from various departments at 171 hotels in Spain; both top‐down (between team leaders and individual employees) and bottom‐up relationships (individual employee behavior and team outcomes) were assessed. As anticipated, individual‐level OCB and group‐level internal social capital fully mediated the positive effect of servant leadership on team performance. Our findings illustrate that servant leadership in the team‐based business enterprise context can foster virtuous individual‐level OCB to help build task‐focused community, in which leaders, followers, and teams can flourish for the common good. Thus, managers should know that serving their team members first and foremost is a positive for the flourishing of all involved. As such, policymakers should pursue communication and training initiatives to encourage the practice of servant leadership.

This paper focuses on the moderating role of knowledge strategy between threat of imitation and pioneering orientation (PO) in tourism and hospitality firms (THFs) located in cultural destinations. First, it studies the moderation of knowledge exploitation strategy and knowledge exploration strategy separately. Second, it analyzes the moderating effect of combined knowledge strategy, which includes exploitation and exploration. The sample consists of 215 THFs located in World Heritage Cities (WHCs) in Spain. The results show divergent moderating roles. While knowledge exploitation strategy positively moderates the relationship between the threat of imitation and PO, the moderating effect of knowledge exploration strategy is negative. Moreover, combined knowledge strategy also moderates the relationship between threat of imitation and PO. This study contributes to the empirical literature by analyzing different knowledge strategies and highlighting the need for simultaneous consideration of exploitation and exploration of knowledge in THFs located in tourism destinations.

This paper addresses two questions: Which manufacturing industries are associated with the inception of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS)? Do cross-sectoral interdependencies between the two sectoral macro-domains exhibit geographical heterogeneity? We use a job multiplier approach using decadal employment data of 399 municipalities in Spain over the period 1981–2011. The main result is that only traditional supplier-dominated industries exhibit significant employment effects, both positive and negative, on KIBS. Coherent with the prior literature, this is most prominent in denser areas. Our findings draw attention to the specificities of user industries, and lend support to the notion that KIBS are a heterogeneous group of activities.

Purpose: This paper aims to analyze the effects of inter-organizational relationships with core and peripheral partners on innovation in heritage tourism clusters.Design/methodology/approach: The empirical analysis uses original data (collected by means of a postal questionnaire) based at UNESCO World Heritage Cities in Spain. The sample consists of 215 companies, and the methodology used is hierarchical linear regression.Findings: The authors identify divergent effects of relationships with core and peripheral partners on innovation. In particular, the effect of core partners has an inverted U-shaped form, while that of peripheral partners is U-shaped.Research limitations/implications: The results may be extrapolated to other heritage tourism clusters located in World Heritage Cities with some precaution. The paper does not jointly analyze the effects of relationships with core and peripheral partners on the innovation of firms in tourism clusters.Practical/implications: Clustered tourism firms should not rely only on relationships with core agents, because beyond a critical threshold, returns in terms of innovation diminish. Firms should strive to establish relationships with peripheral agents in spite of the initial difficulties and the costs associated with network building, because positive returns soon materialize.Originality/value: This paper contributes to the literature on inter-organizational relationships by analyzing the impact of relationships with core and peripheral partners on innovation in clustered firms. The authors highlight the existence of the divergent curvilinear effects of these relationships on heritage tourism clusters.

It is argued that the literature on scientific research and development outsourcing focuses mostly on client firms, that is, the demand side, while little is known of the characteristics of the supplying sector. The present paper tackles this gap by elaborating an exploratory analysis of this business service sector with a view to analyze the main patterns of specialization and their evolution over time. Using data on job content and skill requirements in the United States, we elaborate a knowledge taxonomy of the sector and explore how different forms of knowledge coexist and coevolve.

This paper investigates empirically the strategic alignment between innovation and production strategies in a sample of service firms in Spain. It employs the integrated archetypes approach to analyse a dataset of unique, manually collected, firm responses. The results highlight differences in behaviour patterns underpinning both kinds of strategic decisions and, coherent with alignment theory, differential firm performance.