Foreign ownership and productivity in Chinese newly listed firms: the moderating roles of founder’s human capital and social ties

This paper studies the effects of foreign ownership on firm-level productivity and examines the different moderating roles of the firm-founder’s human capital and social ties on the foreign ownership - productivity link. Leveraging a unique sample of 428 small and medium-sized firms listed on the Growth Enterprise Market in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange between 2009 and 2016, we find that the foreign ownership’s contribution to productivity is not linear and varies across different quantiles of the productivity distribution. Our findings also show that the founder’s education and foreign experience strengthen the foreign ownership - productivity link, while the founder’s political and managerial ties weaken it. Our results reveal the strategic importance of the founder and contribute to an improved understanding of why firms vary in their ability to enhance productivity in emerging economies.

     

Creating relational rents: The effect of business groups on affiliated firms’ performance in Indonesia

This research attempts to extend the discussion of business groups in emerging economies by treating business groups as a form of interorganizational network that generates relational rents among affiliated firms by creating technological and managerial capabilities. Based on the relational view, this research investigates whether value created by business groups depends upon sharing, combining, and exchanging unique and specific resources or assets among affiliated firms. Results show that technological capabilities contribute to create relational rents in terms of affiliated firms’ investment in R&D and human capital. Managerial capabilities also contributed to generating relational rents through investment in managerial knowledge acquisition for affiliated firms without R&D units and in training for affiliated firms with R&D units. However, learning by exporting and learning from imported input do not yield relational rents within business groups. Overall, these findings reveal that business groups as interorganizational networks are contingent on their internal, unique, and specific capabilities, as social capital theory argues.

Display rule perceptions and job performance in a Chinese retail firm: The moderating role of employees’ affect at work

This study investigates the relationship between emotional display rule perceptions and job performance. Building on theories of emotional labor and ego-depletion, we cast employees’ positive and negative affective states at work as crucial moderators. Results obtained in a sample of 245 frontline service employees and their 63 immediate supervisors from a retail firm in China demonstrate that display rule perceptions were positively related with task and contextual performance among employees experiencing little positive affective states at work, but not among employees experiencing highly positive affect. Moreover, display rule perceptions were positively associated with one aspect of contextual performance (voluntary learning) among employees with little negative affect, whereas highly negative affect buffered this linkage. Taken together, this study highlights performance consequences of employees’ display rule perceptions and uncovers key boundary conditions for these relationships.