Organization and Management

JAROSŁAW KARPACZ

PREFACE

Ladies and Gentlemen, on behalf of the Editorial Board, I would like to invite you to read the papers included in this issue of our quarterly. All topics discussed therein are relevant to current problems.

When reviewing the findings presented therein, it is worth considering that the times are long gone when value was created by production employees and driven by progress in basic technologies. The paradigm shift brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution has placed highly skilled employees at the center of today’s economies in a world characterized by high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The increasing frequency of new technological solutions and breakthrough innovations
is forcing and accelerating organizations’ implementation of digital transformation processes aimed at achieving and maintaining competitive advantage, each of which places greater demands on  employees. In such a situation, employee attitudes toward these changes emerge as a critical success factor: each employee may perceive the challenge of transformation as an opportunity for growth, learning, and achievement; or as a threat to routine, competence, and employment status. Therefore, the readiness of employees to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to use technology may
determine the ability to adapt to a changing environment and, consequently, determine the possibility of survival among more adaptive competitors. The environment imposes a set of constraints on an organization which it must consider in its functioning. If they are not taken into account, they may result in the organization’s failure as the environment controls resources, and the organization is more dependent on the environment when its demand for resources is greater.

Marzena Stor in her paper entitled The impact of organizational talent management on company performance results: The mediating role of HRM outcomes in MNCs headquartered in Central Europe bases on her own empirical research. This research shows that HRM (Human Resources Management) performance positively mediates the relationship between organizational talent management and an enterprise’s performance in terms of finance, quality, and innovation. Her findings indicate that this mediating effect is stronger during the pandemic period than in the pre-pandemic one. The authoress uses structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to verify the research hypotheses and assess the mediating effects. The study covers 200 international enterprises based in the Central Europe.

In his paper titled Differences in the approach to onboarding of leaderships talents in the HQ of MNCs before and during the COVID-19 pandemic Łukasz Haromszeki refers to talent management with specific focus on leaders. Leadership talent management is currently one of the key aspects of HRM (Human Resource Management). The paper presents findings from empirical research involving 200 enterprises (n = 200), demonstrating that the approach to the onboarding process of leadership talents has shifted before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under challenging conditions, onboarding is no longer seen merely as a step in filling a vacant position. Instead, it involves a comprehensive analysis of various aspects of leadership relationships and a deeper understanding of the needs, expectations, and behavior measurements. Descriptive statistics, correlations, and principal component analysis (PCA) are used therein to analyze the obtained data.

The paper authored by Elżbieta Kowalczyk, Gabriela Roszyk-Kowalska, and Anna Cedro titled Competency-based professional development in shaping affective organizational commitment also fits into the area of human resource management. It proves the existence of a relationship between professional competences and affective organizational commitment. The authors also indicate that career development and promotion opportunities are key mediators in this relationship. Their findings reveal that these mediators significantly explain the relationship between competencies and
the affective organizational commitment of fire fighters at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. The adopted research procedure includes Baron and Kenny’s mediation analysis, which helps to verify research hypotheses and formulate recommendations for practice. It is worth adding that the results presented in this paper may constitute, in the authors’ opinion, an important incentive for subsequent researchers to discover other, hidden and non-obvious mechanisms of dependencies in the area of organizational behavior, especially since this issue has not been extensively explored in prior studies.

The issue of human resource management is continued by Dominika Miliszkiewicz in her paper titled Virtual teams’ domain: In need of attention. However, in this case, her research attention is focused on virtual teams. By using a literature review, she determines the popularity of such teams’ work in the post-COVID reality. She points out that, according to her findings, this topic is less frequently explored by researchers than that relating to IT project management. Despite this, she believes that remote
work will remain in practice a widely used way of performing work duties. 

Michał Bańka, Mariusz Salwin, Magdalena Marczewska, Monika Sychowicz, Joanna Kłos, and Szymon Rychlik’s paper entitled Startup accelerators: Research directions and gaps is directed at systematizing the knowledge on start-up acceleration. It analyses the current state of knowledge on start-up accelerators, mapping and synthesizing current research efforts, as well as identifying gaps and opportunities for further research. As far as methodology is concerned, the authors use the results
of a systematic network analysis combining a systematic literature review with literature network research. A comprehensive review of research findings is developed through the use ofthe Scopus database. A bibliographic network analysis is performed using the VOSviewer and focuses on a manually selected group of research papers. A visualization of the co-citation network is analyzed and created with Citespace. In the authors’ opinion, none of the papers included in the Scopus database are intended to provide a comprehensive analysis of start-up acceleration and systematize the
achievements of researchers in this area.

Kamila Szproch-Dziopa presents the evolution of the concept of “corporate social responsibility” in the paper under the title of Corporate social responsibility: Changes in perception of the concept in theory and practice. The results of the literature review make it possible to demonstrate differences and similarities in the way this term is understood by both researchers and practitioners. Consequently, she answers the question of how changes in the perception of CSR by practitioners influence its
definition by scientists and vice versa – whether changes in the scientific approach to CSR generate the evolution of this construct in practice. The authoress reveals a common feature of all approaches, which is the need to establish a relationship between the enterprise and the environment in which it operates, as well as the fact that the group of stakeholders interested in CSR is constantly growing. She also states that increasingly easier access to information and growing social awareness will mean
that the dialogue conducted within the framework of socially responsible business will cover an increasingly broader spectrum of issues.

Urszula Kobylińska’s paper, titeled Antecedents of scientists’ engagement in cooperation with industry also focuses on the spirit of enterprise’s relationship with its environment. In its content, the authoress identifies the individual characteristics of scientists, as well as the organizational and institutional context and other conditions affecting the cooperation between scientists and enterprises. These
interactions include joint research with enterprises, contract research, consultancy, and more informal activities, such as consulting, training, as well as networking with business practitioners. The considerations presented therein reveal that most of the research attention is focused primarily on commercialization channels, ignoring other important forms of relationships which may be established at the interface of these two important sectors.

I encourage you to read these papers, hoping they will inspire you to research and discussions in our journal. We would like to promote new knowledge and methods among scientists and practitioners. Therefore, on behalf of the Editorial Team, I would like to encourage you to disseminate the research findings in the fields of management and quality sciences, economics, and finance in our journal. We are here to support you.