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- The ‘extra’ sparkle in higher education Institutions: Exploring staff perceptions towards corporate volunteeringPublication . Silva, Carina; Mendes, Telma; Ferreira, Marisa R.; Faria, TatianaThe analysis of barriers to volunteering and the intraorganizational conditions that can promote or hinder employee engagement in volunteer programs are important for researchers and practitioners. Despite the relevance of these topics, they remain unexplored in the context of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), especially from the staff perspective. This represents an important theoretical gap, as HEIs are institutions that act in the public interest and represent the ideal context for spreading the culture of corporate volunteering due to their potential to connect theory to practice. Therefore, this study aims to explore how intraorganizational support moderates the relationship between both motivations and barriers to volunteering with the personal/impersonal outcomes of participating in these activities. The research is based on a sample of 155 public HEI employees obtained from the Northern Euro-region of Portugal/Galicia. The results of the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) suggest that motivations to volunteer were positively associated with personal/impersonal outcomes stemming from these activities, while barriers to volunteering were negatively related. When testing the moderating effects, we found that HEI intraorganizational support weakened (strengthened) the positive (negative) relationship between motivations (barriers) to volunteer and the personal/impersonal outcomes stemming from volunteer activities. Overall, this empirical evidence allows us to understand both motivations and barriers to volunteering, as well as how intraorganizational conditions discourage participation in volunteering.
- Do firms internationalize because they are profitable or are firms profitable because they internationalize? Assessing the causality between internationalization and profitability in new venturesPublication . Mendes, Telma; González-Loureiro, Miguel; Braga, Vítor; Silva, CarinaInternational business (IB) theories, including the Uppsala model and the International Entrepreneurship (IE) perspective, have provided explanations linking the level of the firm’s international commitment to organizational performance and found a non-linear relationship. However, causality in that relationship is still a veiled story. The aim of this study is to explore how the organizational age at the time of the first international market entry can change the direction of causality in the binomial internationalization-profitability. We add arguments based upon on the earliness of internationalization (how soon after inception a venture becomes an international player) to suggest a more complex relationship in which financial performance provides feedback on the implementation of internationalization strategies in the form of resources, particularly in firms that start internationalizing at a later stage. This feedback generates both the knowledge and the slack resources needed to support an adaptative feedback during the post-internationalization process. Using the most up-to-date technique in structural equation modeling for testing causality, we performed a multigroup analysis investigating the long-term rather than shortterm causal associations between international commitment and profitability in a longitudinal data set of 1,258 new ventures over five years of post-internationalization. Our findings showed that past profits positively contribute to future internationalization attempts in late internationals, but neither that causality nor the reverse were proven for early internationalizing firms. This cross-lagged evidence, therefore, supports the need to extend IB theories by considering financial performance as an antecedent and not just an outcome of the degree of internationalization.