This article analyses how the intrapreneur’s demographic characteristics and personal values influence innovation performance in small creative firms. We demonstrate that the intrapreneur’s previous experience in developing and commercializing creative products and services, together with an entrepreneurial value system (EVS), constitute characteristics that positively affect a firm’s innovation performance. This article makes two main contributions. First, research on factors that stimulate innovation in small creative firms is scarce. Second, the article applies a cognitive approach integrating demographic characteristics and personal values, aspects that are rarely jointly explored in entrepreneurship research.

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The multidisciplinary character of the theories supporting research in the discipline of human resources management (HRM), the increasing importance of a more rigorous approach to HRM studies by academics, and the impact of HRM on the competitive advantage of firms are just some of the indicators demonstrating the relevance of this discipline in the broader field of the social sciences. These developments explain why a quantitative analysis of HRM studies based on bibliometric techniques is particularly opportune. The general objective of this article is to analyze the intellectual structure of the HRM discipline; this can be divided into two specific objectives. The first is to identify the most frequently cited studies, with the purpose of identifying the key topics of research in the HRM discipline. The second objective is to represent the networks of relationships between the most-cited studies, grouping them under common themes, with the object of providing a diagrammatic description of the knowledge base constituted by accumulated works of research in the HRM field. The methodology utilized is based on the bibliometric techniques of citation analysis.

The goal of the article is to present the results of an exploratory study that analyses a sample of business students from two geographically separated regions (the North-East and the South-West) in Spain, to establish if different sub-cultures can be detected within one country, taking into account work and life values. Measures of culture (defined by a set of work and life values) were constructed, and data were obtained from 653 business students in these two distinct geographical locations. Results suggested in an indirect manner that the universal theory of culture as proposed by Hofstede and other colleagues was not entirely confirmed in the Spanish context. Variances along the set of eight value factors emerging as the underlying structure of culture (four work values and four life values) were widely spread, and significant differences in values were found for the two locations. Moreover, an individual difference, gender, was found to play a major role in attributing importance to various work and life values. Findings emphasize the importance of diverse sub-cultures within a single country (Spain), and the article explores the implications for management practices and research

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the educational level and diversity of a firm's top management team (TMT), moderated by strategic consensus, influence its innovation performance. Design/methodology/approach -Using Poisson regression analysis, the proposed models were tested on 97 innovative Spanish firms selected from the Dun and Bradstreet database of 2000. Findings -Results show that a higher educational level in the TMT has a positive and direct effect on innovation performance, while functional diversity and diversity in TMT tenure have a direct and negative effect. However, in a situation of strategic consensus in the TMT, the relationship between functional diversity and innovation is positive. Originality/value -The paper makes several contributions to previous research. First, few studies have considered the influence of the characteristics and composition of the TMT on the organization's innovation performance. Second, this paper responds to the calls of researchers to enrich the upper echelon theory by considering strategic consensus as a process of interaction between the members of the TMT that modifies the relationship between TMT diversity and the firm's innovation performance.

This research analyzes whether variable compensation is designed as an economically rational incentive to increase organizational performance, or whether it also responds to other factors such as the search for legitimacy. A case study demonstrates how the design of the variable compensation system, at both managerial and lower levels, takes into account the company's adoption of popular management practices that increase its legitimacy but not necessarily its performance.The results show that,in the design of their compensation policies, organizations do not always seek financial objectives, as agency theory maintains, but often have other social objectives such as the search for legitimacy, as institutional theory suggests. The management of incentives not only is used to align the interests of principal and agent, but also has a symbolic character, insofar as it signals that the company belongs to a particular social context.

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The importance of entrepreneurial ecosystems is accentuated in the academic entrepreneurship context since academic spinoffs (ASOs) must rely on actors from the ecosystem to access resources they lack in order to improve their performance. This study analyzes the impact that actors from social and institutional (university and nonuniversity) contexts in the entrepreneurial ecosystem have on ASO performance in the stage of creation and initial development and in the stage of consolidation. From a sample of 118 ASOs in the initial stage and 47 ASOs in the consolidation stage, the results indicate that social and institutional contexts improve the performance of ASOs in both phases of development, although the relevance of each context varies with the stage. In the creation and initial development stage, the institutional context affects the ASOs’ performance to a greater extent, while the influence of the social context is less strong. Science parks from the institutional context are the most relevant actors in this phase. In the consolidation phase, social context is the most relevant for improving the performance of ASOs, with the venture capitalist being the actor that exerts more influence. With respect to the institutional context, performance is only affected by the nonuniversity context in this stage.