The purpose of this study is to examine how leader’s humor styles influence employee creativity, and the moderating effects of trust in leader on the relationships between leader’s humor styles and employees’ creativity. The results using 316 valid leader-subordinates pairs (71 leaders and 316 subordinates) from five telecommunication companies in South Korea showed that leader’s self-enhancing humor was positively associated with subordinates’ individual creativity, and leaders’ aggressive humor was negatively associated with subordinates’ individual creativity. In addition, trust in leader significantly moderated the relationship between selfenhancing humor and employee creativity. Specifically, the relationship between self-enhancing humor and employee creativity became stronger as trust in leader increased.

In 2008, a Korean online fashion distributor, Accommate, is founded in China and it tapped into the Chinese online market with the alliance of Taobao, online C2C(consumer-to-consumer) commerce platform of Alibaba. Taobao offered free listings to attract more sellers in order to compete e-bay and introduced keyword search features which Accommate made use of as an early adopter and partner. As Taobao became China’s market leader, Accommate secured the partner position to distribute Korean apparels and strengthened its partnership with Alibaba. Soon Alibaba introduced a new online brand mall called Taobao Mall or Tmall to complement the C2C platform. Accommate extended its business with Alibaba by taking charge of the Korean product sections in the online brand mall of Tmall. From the perspective of scales, China represented for Accommate a dynamic and fast-growing market, though it is so competitive. Moreover, it is a tough job to manage the adequate level of inventory for clothes which have as short lifecycle as 45 days. A number of Korean predecessors failed to manage cash flow issues resulted from the inventory. Accommate came to encounter the management issues of both meeting the changing requirement of Chinese customers and managing the inventory level at the same time. Considering these changes and challenges, we may well think what the strategic and operational issues regarding Accommate are and how the company should grow in this fast growing electronic marketplace. This case study will help readers think about the emerging electronic market in China and form an opinion on the associated management issues and analyses.

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This study investigates catch-up in the form of knowledge creation of firms in emerging markets by stressing two distinct types of search behaviors of an organization – horizontal search and vertical search. Based on an empirical analysis of 204 Chinese firms, this study provides new theoretical insights into and practical implications by emphasizing that in order to catch-up, firms in emerging markets should adopt idiosyncratic search strategies different from those of firms in more advanced countries. The regression results show that due to their under-developed absorptive capacity, firms in emerging markets should avoid searching in diverse knowledge fields, as established large firms in advanced countries are encouraged to do, in order to innovate successfully. Our findings also suggest that searching for recent and emerging knowledge helps firms in emerging markets overcome their learning curve disadvantage in the process of catch-up.

This study examines the relationship between human resource management practices and innovation in software engineering. We use social exchange theory to investigate how human resource management practices influence the innovative behaviors of software developers through the mediation of affective organizational commitment. The results show that developmental appraisal, externally or equitable reward, and comprehensive training increase developers’ affective organizational commitment, which in turn positively affects their innovative behaviors.

This study seeks to identify the elements of operational capability and obtain a detailed picture of the sequential relationships among operational capabilities and business performance in the hospitality industry. In addition, it attempts to prove that the capability to offer an enhanced customer experience constitutes a core competitive advantage in service firms. A phone survey was conducted among Korean hotels, and 102 data sets were collected. Structural equation modeling and multiple regressions were used to test hypotheses using the survey data. As a result, it was discovered an optimum path for the accumulation of operational capabilities in the hospitality industry and customer experience is revealed to be the only dimension of operational capabilities that is directly linked to market performance.

This study examines how consumers’ perceptions of a product’s design attributes influence their perceptions on other product attributes, and attitudes toward the focal product. This study explored image-related adjectives in order to analyze product attributes, which are categorized into design, symbolic, and functional factors. The empirical test results confirmed the mediating role of attitudes toward design, which indicate the overall preference about product design, between design attributes and attitudes toward product, while the hypothesis of the moderating role of design sensitivity was not supported. These findings revealed that design attributes have influences beyond the aesthetic value, as product design rouses symbolic value and delivers information about functions. Therefore, in the context of product development process, it would be effective to distinguish design elements that can strengthen advantages and supplement weaknesses and to measure attitudes toward design that can be an important index of product evaluation.

Using detailed data from Korea, free from the selection bias problem and providing industry codes for companies a venture capital (VC) fund invests in, this study conducts comprehensive analyses of performance and performance persistence of VC funds. We find significant differences between the results using a non-risk-adjusted and those using a risk-adjusted performance measure. Another notable finding is that government participation affects the risk-adjusted performance and cash inflows of venture capital funds. Furthermore, the persistence of performance is much weaker when we control risk of VC funds. In addition, we provide the evidence that the performance in a public market has a positive influence on the probability of raising subsequent venture capital funds.

This study seeks to elucidate conditions under which high performers emerge independent of their internal resources even when competition in the output market is intense. In particular, I present an extended model of localized competition in which ‘ill-informed’ producers compete with each other by ‘observing’ the actions of their rivals and ‘inferring’ the association between the cost and benefit of their action from observable market response to the action of their rivals. To this end, I combine three independent streams of research, including the ecological model of localized competition, organizational knowledge and Harrison White’s model of market (Carroll and Hannan 2000; Garicano 2000; Grant 1996; Nelson and Winter 1982; White 1981). An analytical strategy chosen is to parameterize the interplay of organizational knowledge and localized competition so that this study seeks to theorize a general competitive process that underlies the emergence of high performers without ignoring the role of firm heterogeneity in internal resources. In particular, this study characterizes market competition with respect to four parameters, including (1) the size of the neighborhood of a firm, (2) the upper and (3) lower bound of knowledge bases, and (4) a type of the market. The implications of this model are further explored in the context of multimarket competition as well as resource-partitioning.

This study examines how the use of external knowledge influences innovative performance of Korean service firms. Especially, this study underscores whether the relationship between external knowledge and innovation in Korean service industries differs from the relationship in Korean manufacturing industries found by Moon (2011). Using 2006 Korean Innovation Survey in service sector, this study tests whether the use of external knowledge improves innovative performance and how absorp￢tive capacity, new startup and appropriation methods moderate the effect of the use of external knowledge on Korean service firms’ innovation. The relationship between openness and innovative performance in service is different from that in manufacturing in Korea: First, openness in service is more effective for radical innovation than for incre￢mental innovation; in contrast, openness in manufacturing was more effective for incremental innovation than for radical innovation. Second, there is no complementarity between openness and R&D intensity in the service sector; in contrast, there existed the complementarity for incremental innovation in the manufacturing sector. Third, when a firm uses too many appropriation methods, openness of service firms is not effective. Lastly, the quality of human capital is important for service innovation while it was not for manufacturing innovation in Korea.