As part of the FELU research conference, we received another award for our AMJ paper: best award published by faculty members of The Faculty of Economics University of Ljubljana. We were in good company, as the other awarded papers included the one by Jože Sambt published in Science and the one published by Peter Trkman and Carlos da Silva in Long Range Planning. More news and gallery here.

 We (myself, Miha Škerlavaj and Marko Jaklič) have just received good news from Innovation: Management, Policy and Practice that our paper on the outcomes of Management Innovation was finally accepted for publication. While it took a while (this is the first paper, chronollogically, that I've written as part of my dissertation, we have to say that after the journal changed the submission system and the action editor, they've been quite fast. Here's the abstract:

The aim of this study is to investigate the innovation-performance relationship at the organizational level by empirically examining the role of management innovation in the link between technological innovation and financial performance. We adopt a view that is less present in the innovation literature and examine how technological innovations spur the need for new managerial solutions, which in turn result in improved firm performance. We apply a research methodology of testing our model via structural equation modeling on data gathered from 604 firms in three countries: Slovenia, Spain, and South Korea. The findings indicate that management innovation is the mechanism that enables firms to fully benefit from their technological discoveries in order to result in superior financial performance. The conclusions of the paper are related to shifting the view that presumes the crucial and almost exclusive importance of technological innovation for enhancing firm performance.

Within the week of Ljubljana University, I was very happy to receive the Best Young Professor Award for Extraordinary Teaching and Research Achievements, which was handed to me at the very nice event on December 1st at the main University building.

This year's special theme is HRM in start-ups, and the ABC accelerator was kind enough to allow us to work with their current batch (plus two more, MIPA HR agency and Creatrix). Gallery from the first meeting with students here.

As of today, I became a registered organizational designer, a member of the Orgdesignhub (Centar za organizacijski dizajn COD), based in Croatia and ran by our friend and colleague from Faculty of Economics and Business University of Zagreb:

Centar za organizacijski dizajn (COD) je virtualna zajednica studenata, znanstvenika i stručnjaka koji se žele informirati, učiti i razvijati u području organizacije i menadžmenta, s posebnim naglaskom na razvoj organizacije i ljudskih potencijala.

Jezgru COD tima čini nekolicina znanstvenika koja se aktivno bavi teorijom i praksom dizajniranja i organiziranja poslovnih sustava, s ciljem njihova daljnjeg razvoja i povećanja individualne, grupne i organizacijske djelotvornosti.

Some more good news, our three-study paper 'I want to be creative, but … preference for creativity, perceived clear outcome goals, work enjoyment, and creative performance' was (after three rounds of review, lasting for about a year and a half) accepted for publication in European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. Here's the abstract: 

​In today’s quickly changing work environment, many individuals want to be creative at their workplace, but only some of them succeed at manifesting these tendencies. In three studies, using both field and experimental data, we focused on transforming individuals’ preference for creativity, defined as an inclination for liking and wanting to be creative, into actual creativity. We first conducted a pilot Study 1 to establish discriminant validity to related constructs and provided initial evidence on predictive and incremental validity of the preference-for-creativity scale. Next, we performed a field Study 2, where we found that transforming preferences for creativity into supervisor-rated creativity is contingent upon employees’ perceptions of clear outcome goals. Clear outcome goals fostered individuals’ preference for creativity to result in higher levels of supervisor-rated creative behaviour—a finding that was replicated in an experimental Study 3. Furthermore, we explored whether work enjoyment mediated the moderated relationship between preference for creativity and creative outcomes. The results supported our mediated moderation model, whereby the manipulation of clear goals led to higher work enjoyment, influencing individuals’ preference for creativity to result in higher ratings of their creative outcomes.

The Norwegian Research Council recognized our past work and potential in our ideas, and approved our project entitled Fair Labor in the Digitized Economy, set up by our colleagues at BI Norwegian Business School Sut I Wong Humborstad and Christian Fieseler.

The primary objective of this project is to investigate what constitutes fair labor in an employment environment disrupted through new technology. To this end, we want
- to depict the substitution effects of technology and new digital business models on traditional forms of labor, and anticipate new forms of employment to deliver insights on the nature, desirability, advantages and disadvantages and the fairness of these emerging forms of work, taking into account both the employment and corporate perspective. 
- to deliberate on the effects more or less labor fairness has on human well-being and social cohesion.
- to derive solutions in terms of responsible technology design, corporate responsibilities, political and public deliberation, and employee skill building and consultation.

Specifically, the Slovene part of the project will focus on how creativity and innovation are shaped in light of the digital labor, and what potential job-design and organizational-design measures can be applied to overcome the barrier of not being present at work together, physically. The project consortium, besides the leading partner in Norway and Faculty of Economics University of Ljubljana, includes the following: institutions Harvard University, University of St. Gallen, Copenhagen Business School and Erasmus University (Rotterdam).

This time in Sarajevo in the first week of June. After a tremendously teaching-intensive semester with my wonderful HRM students, things were and still are starting to be a bit less hectic. We got a chance to enjoy the hospitality of the local SEBS (Sarajevo School of Economics and Business) team and spend some time in the city (not only at our meetings and conferences). I was also teaching at their master's Public Administration program, albeit only for a day. Next up - HRM exams, a month of research and mentorship activities, and then we're off to the States/Canada for the AoM meeting in Vancouver.

We just got the news that our paper 'I Get By With a Little Help From My Supervisor: Creative-Idea Generation, Idea Implementation, and Perceived Supervisor Support' (Miha Škerlavaj, Matej Černe, Anders Dysvik) was accepted to be published in Leadership Quarterly!

Here's the abstract:

In two studies using both field (165 employees and their 24 direct supervisors from a manufacturing firm in Study 1) and experimental (123 second-year undergraduate student participants in lab Study 2) data, we explore how perceived supervisor support acts as a crucial contingency that enables higher levels of idea implementation from creative-idea generation. First, we suggest that excessive creative-idea generation (in terms of both frequency and creativity of ideas) can lead to diminished returns with regards to idea implementation. Drawing on a resource allocation framework, we hypothesize and find a curvilinear inverse U-shaped relationship between employee creative-idea generation and implementation. Second, we examine perceived supervisor support as a moderator of the curvilinear inverse U-shaped relationship between idea generation and implementation. In line with our second hypothesis, we find that higher levels of perceived supervisor support dampen the curvilinear relationship between creative-idea generation and idea implementation. Accordingly, perceived supervisor support seems to provide employees with access to resources and support needed for idea implementation, making highly creative ideas more implementable.

On a personal note, LQ was the first academic journal I ever read (when I wrote my bachelor thesis on authentic leadership a couple of years ago), so this publication holds even more significance.

In April, we visited Oslo again at the Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference. With the proposed theme “Circuits of knowledge” we hope the conference contributions may be inspired to further develop the organizational learning, knowledge and innovation literature through conceptual and empirical contributions. The metaphor is meant to open up explorations of how knowledge and organizational learning may be said to move or revolve around, in, and through circuits. Familiar concepts may be learning cycles and –loops, and the recursiveness of practice.

Besides the conference, we got a chance to get together and work with colleagues from BI Norwegian Business School.

Our Academy of Management Journal paper was published in-print this month, and we've gotten some coverage in Business Daily, some hype in management-issues.com, and even an article in Yahoo!News

Earlier in February, we've kicked-off the IPA-financed PACINNO (Platform for trans-Academic Cooperation in Innovation) project that we successfully designed along with friends/colleagues from seven countries and applied for in CoBIK.

The goal of PACINNO is to establish a platform for cooperation in research and innovation covering the whole Adriatic region. Targeting both research institutions, policy makers and business entities, the project will help develop new bridges between the research and scientific activities, carried out at academic institutions, and the economic system, with specific reference to the technological needs of SMEs. More generally, PACINNO is aimed at overcoming the main obstacles and barriers to the economic development of the Adriatic countries, fostering the competitiveness of their minor firms (both in the high-tech fields and in the traditional industries), and promoting the creation of innovative start-ups.

Here's the project consortium:

Final Beneficiaries

1. University of Trieste 
2. Centre of Excellence for Biosensors, Instrumentation and Process Control, COBIK 
3. University of Rijeka, Faculty of Medicine 
4. School of Economics and Business in Sarajevo (SEBS) 
5. University of Tirane 
6. Institute Mihajlo Pupin 
7. Faculty of Economics Podgorica 
8. Ionian University 

Associates

1. Friuli Venezia-Giulia Autonomous Region, ITALY
2. Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
3. Ministry of Entrepreneurship and Crafts, CROATIA
4. Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Tirana, ALBANIA
5. Business technology incubator of technical faculties Belgrade, SERBIA
6. Investment and Development Fund of Montenegro, MONTENEGRO
7. Federal Ministry of Science and education, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

Po otvoritvi EF kotička na v knjigarni Konzorcij sem bil 'zraven' še pri eni premierni aktivnosti Ekonomske fakultete: prvem dogodku projekta še tesnejšega povezovanja fakultete z gospodarstvom - EF raziskave. Publiki, sestavljeni iz kadrovskih managerjev slovenskih podjetij smo predstavili izsledke naše raziskave o medsebojnem vplivu relacijskih klim in HR sistemov na proaktivno vedenje in medsebojno pomoč med zaposlenimi. Več v EF novički.

Related to the research award we got earlier this year, CEEMAN recently published an interview with Miha Škerlavaj and myself. You can find and download it here: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&shva=1#search/ceeman/1430a0cf9c7903d4.

And here's the FELU news, only in Slovene: http://efnet.si/2013/12/v-ceeman-news-70-objavljen-intervju-s-prof-dr-miho-skerlavajem-in-doc-dr-matejem-cernetom/