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Purpose
This paper aims to provide a strategic analysis of firms at the lowest hierarchical levels of the defence industry.


Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents the main results of an exploratory, multiple-case study that analyses the current strategy drivers and their views about the future ones, and their impact at the lowest hierarchical levels of the defence industry in Spain.


Findings
This investigation develops and analyses a contingency model regarding the strategy impact and effects of firms' drivers and clients, both mediated by the strategy players because of their huge impact on the defence industry. The research model focuses on the internal relations between technical and commercial activities due to the cause and effect of their capabilities. Simultaneously, pull and push mechanisms boost firms' capabilities and requirements to provide strategic foresight.


Practical implications
Ministries of Defence (MoDs) and prime contractors will remain mediating players in the near future even with further implications for the competition of Defence Technological and Industrial Base (DTIB) firms. It implies that firms and MoDs must maintain a close relation and implement more flexible practices, such as open innovation, property rights or new commercialization schemes.


Originality/value
This study offers insights related to the specific applications and the necessity of commercial and technological areas alignment of these firms for the future.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study the effect of gender diversity (in executive boards and top management) on firm performance. To reconcile the inconsistent and non‐conclusive findings from previous studies, competing curvilinear relationships are theorized between gender diversity on boards and firm performance based on different theoretical backgrounds.Design/methodology/approachThe paper comprises a literature review and development of theoretical propositions.FindingsCurvilinear relationships were developed that may integrate different theoretical perspectives.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper provides theoretical support to reconcile the inconsistent and non‐conclusive findings from previous theoretical perspectives and empirical studies by proposing that competing recommendations from theoretical perspectives could be tested through curvilinear relationships.Practical implicationsThe propositions provide a strong argument for having more women in top management positions who will be promoted later through the "glass ceiling" to more gender‐balanced boards.Originality/valueThe paper reconciles inconsistent and non‐conclusive findings from studies about gender diversity on boards and firm performance.

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to explain the impact of workplace flexibility on managers' perceptions of firm performance. The research focuses primarily on outsourcing, an increasingly common way of creating workplace flexibility, by studying its antecedents based on several economic and organisational theories.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology is a postal survey to a sample of 156 Spanish firms and statistical analysis.FindingsThe findings suggest that it is important to take into account different theoretical perspectives to explain the intensity of outsourcing: all proposed antecedents of the intensity of outsourcing except differentiation strategy and cooperation are significantly associated to outsourcing. There is not any significant relationship between outsourcing and firm performance; workplace internal flexibility does impact on firm performance but external flexibility does not. However, the results change according to the category of core and peripheral outsourcing.Research limitations/implicationsThis study's single country setting could limit the generalizability of the findings. Longitudinal as opposed to cross‐sectional data are needed for studying the causal assumptions reported here. Future studies should also take a multiple‐source as opposed to a single‐source data collection approach. Finally, objective measures of outsourcing and firm performance, as well as moderated variables are needed to analyse differentiated impacts on firm performance.Practical implicationsThis research makes two contributions to both practice and theory. First, the results show that the perceived impact of outsourcing on sub‐factors of firm performance is positive for peripheral activities and negative for core activities. Second, the research provides a framework to analyse the antecedents of outsourcing and the concurrent impact of outsourcing and other workplace flexibility dimensions on firm performance.Originality/valueThe paper explains outsourcing decisions by antecedents based on several economic and organisational theories. It also analyses the concurrent impact of outsourcing and other workplace flexibility dimensions on firm performance.