The influence of social entrepreneurship orientation and competitive advantage on the performance of rural social enterprises

The increasing turmoil in the external organizational setting or business environment has focused attention on capabilities and resources as the primary source of competitive advantage. Obviously, this statement points to the application of the resource-based view (RBV) of organizational management. Nevertheless, what constitutes RBV remains an illusion in many quarters of organizational management, as scholars have managed to put up their personal ideas, and managed to converge on phenomenon-driven theories, in addition to RBV. This paper reviews the concepts of RBV in light of knowledge management to highlight some critical pitfalls that might have eluded the research community on the subject matter of RBV. To this end, this paper’s educational value lies in the fact that it simplifies the concept of RBV to the new researcher in a fashion that is capable of appealing to his or her level. A cross-sectional qualitative research approach was employed in an effort aimed at understanding the role of RBV in creating a sustainable competitive advantage and key competencies. A total of 20 relevant articles were searched from different databases and search engines, including Scopus, EBSCO, ABI Inform, IEEE, PubMed, Science Direct, SABINET, IEEE, Bing, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The findings indicate that RBV plays an important role and assists organizations not only create, nurture, and maintain competitive advantage, but also understand the collective resources needed to compete favorably in a globalized and highly competitive market. With expert knowledge workers at its core to provide support for knowledge creation, sharing, and utilization, the RBV principles discussed in this paper promise to guarantee a methodological step geared towards the achievement of competitive advantage. It, therefore, makes an incremental contribution to the RBV to attain modest improvement in organizational settings.

In today’s competitive business environment, human resources are one of the most critical assets particularly for service-focused organizations. Consequently, employees’ morale has become invaluable for maintaining outstanding organizational performance and retaining employees. One of the most important factors which may affect employees’ satisfaction is workplace bullying from employers and colleagues at large. It is considered a negative and unethical issue which may degrade, humiliate and create a risk to a healthy working environment. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to investigate the extent to which workplace bullying may affect the organizational outcomes of a sample of five-star hotels in Egypt. Two questionnaires were distributed among the subjects of the sample; bell desk staff, kitchen stewards and head departments. The results of this research confirmed that there is a correlation between workplace bullying, employees’ morale and turnover intentions but, showed no correlation between workplace bullying and employees’ work performance.

This study focused on corporate governance and performance of selected Nigerian multinational firms from 2012 to 2016. Specifically, the study focused on the effect of board size, activism and committee activism on return on asset and firm growth rate. Secondary data collected from four multinational firms were analyzed via static panel estimation techniques. While board size and board activism exerted significant negative impact on return on asset, committee activism exerted insignificant impact. The results of the study further showed that board size and board activism exert insignificant negative impact on firm’s growth rate, while committee activism insignificantly spurs firm’s growth rate. Decisively, discoveries from this study reflect that corporate governance has significant negative impact on return on asset, but has insignificant influence on the growth rate of Nigerian multinational firms. Based on these findings, the authors recommended that corporate governance dynamics in firms world over should be reconsidered, such that it gives credence to more than just numbers of persons or meetings held, but the main reasons and deliberations in such meetings. It was also recommended that excessive increase in magnitude or frequency of meetings held by board of directors cum committee should be avoided.