El propósito de este estudio fue determinar si la intención de emprendimiento, con base en el modelo de comportamiento planeado de Ajzen (1991), puede predecirse con base en la propensión al riesgo, el locus de control interno y las habilidades de liderazgo. Asimismo, se identificaron variables sociodemográficas asociadas a tal intención. Se aplicó una batería de instrumentos estandarizados y confiables a 1493 estudiantes universitarios de áreas empresariales en cinco países latinoamericanos. De acuerdo con los resultados, la intención de emprendimiento puede predecirse significativamente con las variables estudiadas. De igual forma, se confirmó la incidencia de los antecedentes familiares en tal intención lo cual ha sido reportado en varios estudios. Contrario a lo hallado en otros estudios, no se encontraron diferencias por género en la intención de emprendimiento. Se discuten estos hallazgos.

Purpose: – Because women ' s status in Latin American countries appears comparable to their status in organizations of more economically advanced nations, this paper probes the mystery of how and why these women fare relatively well in their careers, given that socioeconomic and cultural factors could limit their possibilities of achieving higher management positions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach: – Exploratory study of 162 Latin American women who demonstrated exceptional success by attaining first and second level positions in private organizations. They responded to a semi-structured interview of 49 closed-ended questions about career challenges and barriers, leadership style, ambition, personal goals and work-life balance, plus two open-ended questions about men and women ' s leadership differences and how they understand their success.Findings: – Interviewees disagreed on issues of discrimination, recognized few serious professional career barriers and regarded work-life balance as their main challenge. They understood their success in terms of individual factors such as personality characteristics, performance and results, and their own leadership traits. Most admitted that machismo limits women ' s access to upper level positions. They recognized their ambition to attain power positions mainly for personal satisfaction, and their main goal was personal development and fulfilment.Research limitations/implications: – Given the sample size per country, future research could include a more representative and large sample or concentrate on one country per region to establish relationships between women ' s personal characteristics and organizations ' sector, or challenges faced and leadership style. Also family-owned companies as well as women entrepreneurs could contribute knowledge about women ' s leadership in these countries. Studying only national companies, a more neatly description of local culture and gender awareness in its organizational practices that hinder or promote women ' s leadership and participation in decision-making positions may be obtained. Transcultural studies that compare women ' s rise and upper management performance in countries where support from domestic help and extended family as well as cultural values are very different, could permit to understand more fully what it takes to reach top management positions and the weight that these particular cultural conditions have.Originality/value: – This study is unique in shedding light on a multinational sample of Latin American female executives and their perceptions of their success, leadership style and barriers and challenges faced.

The aim of this study is to examine how transformational and transactional leaders, boost the employees’ innovative work behaviour, directly or through work engagement, organizational climate for innovation and absorptive capacity in Latin American firms. A non-random sample of 1429 employees was used who had been working at least one year in the current company. The sample, composed of workers from different industries, was collected in postgraduate programs of business schools from seven Latin American countries. A multi-group structural equation model was built with the involved variables, which adopted two different conditions: i.e., unconstrained and constrained questionnaire measurement weights. According to the results, leadership by itself is insufficient to promote employees innovative work behaviour. Transformational and transactional leadership exert effect on this behaviour only through absorptive capacity and work engagement respectively. Likewise, absorptive capacity and employee work engagement show direct effects on innovative work behaviour. Additionally, organizational climate for innovation shows a significant moderating effect on the all relationships included in the model. Despite the cultural differences, the two-condition model yielded the same effect in each country, which indicates the validity of a general model of innovative work behaviour for the whole region supporting the common identity of this region. As a conclusion, leadership practices are needed to encourage innovative work behaviour within the Latin American organizational context, however some individual (engagement) and organizational (absorptive capacity) conditions are also needed to ensure this effect. Implications for human resources management are discussed.

With permanents global changes, organizations are increasingly required to promote employee creative behavior to deal with competitiveness keeping ethical leadership practices and responsible models of management. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of ethical leadership on creativity and estimates the mediating effect of organizational support for creativity in this relationship. A cross-sectional approach with a sample of 258 professionals, employees of different companies and economic sectors in the city of Lima, Peru, was employed. Valid and reliable instruments were used to assess the perception of the variables studied, and direct and indirect effects were tested using structural equation models. The results indicate that ethical leadership positively influences creativity both directly and through organizational support for creativity. This draws attention to the opportunity that leaders have to optimize organizational processes, procedures, and protocols oriented toward responsibility and respect for others to encourage creative behavior in employees. Furthermore, theoretical, and practical implications are discussed.

The percentage of women in Peru's workforce overall has been growing at a steady rate, but there are still few women are seen in executive positions. This qualitative study describes the challenges in women's professional career advancement in a country in which the cultural pattern of business is dominated by men and where specific roles have been assigned to women. In-depth interviews were conducted with 24 professionals, 11 women and 13 men. The interviews were analysed using qualitative data analysis software. The results show that family responsibilities were the main challenge for female executives' career advancement. Moreover, family responsibilities were linked to other challenges, such as physical mobility, educational attainment, professional experience and informal networks. Family responsibilities can be considered a transcultural challenge to the career advancement of female executives. Finally, the study shows that a country's culture is an important challenge to career advancement, as in the Peruvian context where women are still considered responsible for attending to the family and are assigned a fundamental role in raising the children.

Poverty remains one of this millennium’s main problems, which why the first objective of sustainable development is poverty reduction. Multiple actors are working on this issue: states, multilateral organisms, civil societies, and—perhaps less boldly—the private sector, through social responsibility programs. In this research, the aim was to understand how rural families perceive the contribution of CSR programs, in respect to the decrease in rural poverty. A total of 20 rural families, who were beneficiaries from CSR programs belonging to two extractive companies, were interviewed; furthermore, they were no longer poor and were currently dwelling within the highlands and jungles of Perú. The results show that the CSR strategies used by the companies directly and indirectly contribute toward a reduction in rural poverty, and particularly those more specifically related to capacity development, access to markets, and strategic philanthropy. In this study, it was also found that families mostly use the strategy of informal entrepreneurship, which is not directly linked to the companies’ actions; as such, this could serve as a basis for the future implementation of CSR actions.