The influence of social entrepreneurship orientation and competitive advantage on the performance of rural social enterprises

The increasing turmoil in the external organizational setting or business environment has focused attention on capabilities and resources as the primary source of competitive advantage. Obviously, this statement points to the application of the resource-based view (RBV) of organizational management. Nevertheless, what constitutes RBV remains an illusion in many quarters of organizational management, as scholars have managed to put up their personal ideas, and managed to converge on phenomenon-driven theories, in addition to RBV. This paper reviews the concepts of RBV in light of knowledge management to highlight some critical pitfalls that might have eluded the research community on the subject matter of RBV. To this end, this paper’s educational value lies in the fact that it simplifies the concept of RBV to the new researcher in a fashion that is capable of appealing to his or her level. A cross-sectional qualitative research approach was employed in an effort aimed at understanding the role of RBV in creating a sustainable competitive advantage and key competencies. A total of 20 relevant articles were searched from different databases and search engines, including Scopus, EBSCO, ABI Inform, IEEE, PubMed, Science Direct, SABINET, IEEE, Bing, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The findings indicate that RBV plays an important role and assists organizations not only create, nurture, and maintain competitive advantage, but also understand the collective resources needed to compete favorably in a globalized and highly competitive market. With expert knowledge workers at its core to provide support for knowledge creation, sharing, and utilization, the RBV principles discussed in this paper promise to guarantee a methodological step geared towards the achievement of competitive advantage. It, therefore, makes an incremental contribution to the RBV to attain modest improvement in organizational settings.

In today’s competitive business environment, human resources are one of the most critical assets particularly for service-focused organizations. Consequently, employees’ morale has become invaluable for maintaining outstanding organizational performance and retaining employees. One of the most important factors which may affect employees’ satisfaction is workplace bullying from employers and colleagues at large. It is considered a negative and unethical issue which may degrade, humiliate and create a risk to a healthy working environment. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to investigate the extent to which workplace bullying may affect the organizational outcomes of a sample of five-star hotels in Egypt. Two questionnaires were distributed among the subjects of the sample; bell desk staff, kitchen stewards and head departments. The results of this research confirmed that there is a correlation between workplace bullying, employees’ morale and turnover intentions but, showed no correlation between workplace bullying and employees’ work performance.

Academic resilience and emotional intelligence are considered important personal resources for furthering students’ academic performance. However, many educational organizations seem to trivialize the performance implications of these constructs in teachings and curriculum. Consequently, it can decrease not just their academic performance but also their employability, as they lack the generic competencies to adapt and survive in a stressful context. Even so, empirical evidence on integrating academic resilience, emotional intelligence, and academic performance remains unexplored in the Nigerian university context. Therefore, the study aimed to investigate the linkages between academic resilience, emotional intelligence, and academic performance in Nigeria. The partial least square (PLS) modeling method was utilized for testing the stated hypotheses with data collected from 179 final year undergraduate students in the regular B.Sc. Business Administration and B.Sc. Marketing program at Delta State University, Nigeria. From the PLS results, the study reported that academic resilience was positively related to emotional intelligence (β = 0.125, p = 0.007), academic resilience (β = 0.231, p = 0.000) and emotional intelligence (β = 0.260, p = 0.000) were positively related to academic performance, and emotional resilience mediated the positive relationship between academic resilience and academic performance (β = 0.057, p = 0.005). While academic resilience predicted academic performance, it also predicted emotional intelligence, which affected academic performance significantly and positively.