Improving Flood Risk Communication by Focusing on Prevention‐Focused Motivation

This article proposes an approach to flood risk communication that gives particular emphasis to the distinction between prevention and promotion motivation. According to E. Tory Higgins, the promotion system and the prevention system are assumed to coexist in every person, but one or the other may be temporarily or chronically more accessible. These insights have far‐reaching implications for our understanding of people's reasoning about risks. Flood risk communication framed in terms of prevention involves the notions of chance and harm, woven into a story about particular events that necessitate decisions to be more careful about safety issues and protect one's family and oneself from danger. The article describes how the insights worked out in practice, using a flood risk communication experiment among a sample from the general population in a highly populated river delta of the Netherlands. It had a posttest‐only control group design (n = 2,302). The results showed that risk communication had a large effect on the participants’ responses and that this effect was higher among chronic prevention‐focused people than among others. Any information that increased the fit between a prevention‐framed message and a person's chronic prevention motivation produced stronger situationally induced, prevention‐focused responses. This may significantly improve communication about risks. In contrast, the notion of water city projects, featuring waterside living, had more appeal to promotion‐focused people.     

More Than Fear Induction: Toward an Understanding of People's Motivation to Be Well‐Prepared for Emergencies in Flood‐Prone Areas

This article examines the extent and manner to which evaluations of flood‐related precautions are affected by an individual's motivation and perception of context. It argues that the relationship between risk perception and flood risk preparedness can be fruitfully specified in terms of vulnerability and efficacy if these concepts are put into the perspective of prevention‐focused motivation. This relationship was empirically examined in a risk communication experiment in a delta area of the Netherlands (n = 1,887). Prevention‐focused motivation was induced by contextualized risk information. The results showed that prevention‐focused individuals were more sensitive to the relevance of potential precautions for satisfying their needs in the context they found themselves in. The needs included, but were not limited to, fear reduction. Due to the heterogeneity of the residents, the evaluations reflected individual differences in the intensity and the selectivity of precautionary processes. Four types of persons could be distinguished according to their evaluation of precautionary measures: a high‐scoring minority, two more selective types, and a low‐scoring minority. For policymakers and risk communicators it is vital to consider the nature of prevention motivation and the context in which it is likely to be high.     

Empirical Analysis of Farmers' Drought Risk Perception: Objective Factors,Personal Circumstances,and Social Influence

Drought‐induced water shortage and salinization are a global threat to agricultural production. With climate change, drought risk is expected to increase as drought events are assumed to occur more frequently and to become more severe. The agricultural sector's adaptive capacity largely depends on farmers’ drought risk perceptions. Understanding the formation of farmers’ drought risk perceptions is a prerequisite to designing effective and efficient public drought risk management strategies. Various strands of literature point at different factors shaping individual risk perceptions. Economic theory points at objective risk variables, whereas psychology and sociology identify subjective risk variables. This study investigates and compares the contribution of objective and subjective factors in explaining farmers’ drought risk perception by means of survey data analysis. Data on risk perceptions, farm characteristics, and various other personality traits were collected from farmers located in the southwest Netherlands. From comparing the explanatory power of objective and subjective risk factors in separate models and a full model of risk perception, it can be concluded that farmers’ risk perceptions are shaped by both rational and emotional factors. In a full risk perception model, being located in an area with external water supply, owning fields with salinization issues, cultivating drought‐/salt‐sensitive crops, farm revenue, drought risk experience, and perceived control are significant explanatory variables of farmers’ drought risk perceptions.     

Improving Expatriation Success: The Roles of Regulatory Focus and Burnout

The study empirically and theoretically contributes to the human resource management discipline by developing and testing a cohesive model drawing on the pertinent literature from expatriate management, burnout and regulatory focus theory. Drawing on data from 233 expatriate managers, the study aims to examine the relationships between expatriate adjustment and the outcomes of job satisfaction and withdrawal cognitions via expatriate burnout. Specifically, the findings reveal that (a) higher levels of both work adjustment and interaction adjustment lead to reduced expatriate burnout, with the former having a greater effect on burnout than the latter; (b) burnout serves as a full mediator between work adjustment and withdrawal cognitions, and a partial mediator between work adjustment and job satisfaction; and (c) regulatory focus serves to moderate expatriate adjustment–outcome consequences, i.e. promotion‐focused (as opposed to prevention‐focused) expatriates demonstrate a stronger burnout–job satisfaction relationship. Several implications are extracted from the study for regulatory theory, burnout and expatriation management practices as well as suggested avenues for future research.     

Assessing Major Accident Risks to Support Land‐Use Planning Using a Severity‐Vulnerability Combination Method: A Case Study in Dagushan Peninsula,China

Major accident risks posed by chemical hazards have raised major social concerns in today's China. Land‐use planning has been adopted by many countries as one of the essential elements for accident prevention. This article aims at proposing a method to assess major accident risks to support land‐use planning in the vicinity of chemical installations. This method is based on the definition of risk by the Accidental Risk Assessment Methodology for IndustrieS (ARAMIS) project and it is an expansion application of severity and vulnerability assessment tools. The severity and vulnerability indexes from the ARAMIS methodology are employed to assess both the severity and vulnerability levels, respectively. A risk matrix is devised to support risk ranking and compatibility checking. The method consists of four main steps and is presented in geographical information‐system‐based maps. As an illustration, the proposed method is applied in Dagushan Peninsula, China. The case study indicated that the method could not only aid risk regulations on existing land‐use planning, but also support future land‐use planning by offering alternatives or influencing the plans at the development stage, and thus further enhance the roles and influence of land‐use planning in the accident prevention activities in China.     

The Economic Value of Market Information for Farmers in Developing Economies

In developing countries, farmers lack information for making informed production, manufacturing/selling decisions to improve their earnings. To alleviate poverty, various non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) and for‐profit companies have developed different ways to distribute information about market price, crop advisory and farming technique to farmers. We investigate a fundamental question: will information create economic value for farmers? We construct a stylized model in which farmers face an uncertain market price (demand) and must make production decisions before the market price is realized. Each farmer has an imprecise private signal and an imprecise public signal to estimate the actual market price. By examining the equilibrium outcomes associated with a Cournot competition game, we show that private signals do create value by improving farmers' welfare. However, this value deteriorates as the public signal becomes available (or more precise). In contrast, in the presence of private signals, the public signal does not always create value for the farmers. Nevertheless, both private and public signals will reduce price variation. We also consider two separate extensions that involve non‐identical private signal precisions and farmers' risk‐aversion, and we find that the same results continue to hold. More importantly, we find that the public signal can reduce welfare inequality when farmers have non‐identical private signal precisions. Also, risk‐aversion can dampen the value created by private or public information.     

The Implications of Utilizing Market Information and Adopting Agricultural Advice for Farmers in Developing Economies

To alleviate poverty in developing countries, governments and non‐governmental organizations disseminate two types of information: (i) agricultural advice to enable farmers to improve their operations (cost reduction, quality improvement, and process yield increase); and (ii) market information about future price/demand to enable farmers to make better production planning decisions. This information is usually disseminated free of charge. While farmers can use the market information to improve their production plans without incurring any (significant) cost, adopting agricultural advice to improve operations requires upfront investment, for example, equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, and higher quality seeds. In this study, we examine whether farmers should use market information to improve their production plans (or adopt agricultural advice to improve their operations) when they engage in Cournot competition under both uncertain market demand and uncertain process yield. Our analysis indicates that both farmers will use the market information to improve their profits in equilibrium. Hence, relative to the base case in which market information is not available, the provision of market information can improve the farmers' total welfare (i.e., total profit for both farmers). Moreover, when the underlying process yield is highly uncertain or when the products are highly heterogeneous, the provision of market information is welfare‐maximizing in the sense that the maximum total welfare of farmers is attained when both farmers utilize market information in equilibrium. Furthermore, in equilibrium, whether a farmer adopts the agricultural advice depends on the size of the requisite upfront investment. More importantly, we show that agricultural advice is not always welfare improving unless the upfront investment is sufficiently low. This result implies that to improve farmers' welfare, governments should consider offering farmer subsidies.     

Farmers’ Risk‐Based Decision Making Under Pervasive Uncertainty: Cognitive Thresholds and Hazy Hedging

Researchers in judgment and decision making have long debunked the idea that we are economically rational optimizers. However, problematic assumptions of rationality remain common in studies of agricultural economics and climate change adaptation, especially those that involve quantitative models. Recent movement toward more complex agent‐based modeling provides an opportunity to reconsider the empirical basis for farmer decision making. Here, we reconceptualize farmer decision making from the ground up, using an in situ mental models approach to analyze weather and climate risk management. We assess how large‐scale commercial grain farmers in South Africa (n = 90) coordinate decisions about weather, climate variability, and climate change with those around other environmental, agronomic, economic, political, and personal risks that they manage every day. Contrary to common simplifying assumptions, we show that these farmers tend to satisfice rather than optimize as they face intractable and multifaceted uncertainty; they make imperfect use of limited information; they are differently averse to different risks; they make decisions on multiple time horizons; they are cautious in responding to changing conditions; and their diverse risk perceptions contribute to important differences in individual behaviors. We find that they use two important nonoptimizing strategies, which we call cognitive thresholds and hazy hedging, to make practical decisions under pervasive uncertainty. These strategies, evident in farmers' simultaneous use of conservation agriculture and livestock to manage weather risks, are the messy in situ performance of naturalistic decision‐making techniques. These results may inform continued research on such behavioral tendencies in narrower lab‐ and modeling‐based studies.     

An Examination of IT Planning in a Large,Diversified Public Organization*

The conduct of information technology (IT) planning processes has been of dominant managerial concern in public and private organizations. Yet, current IT planning research offers little guidance on the types of planning actions and behaviors that are appropriate to organizational contexts. We focus on the conduct of the IT planning process by describing an exploratory research project. The project empirically examined a number of issues associated with managing IT planning within a single large public enterprise, particularly identifying actions and behaviors related to producing quality IT plans. The results of the study yield some useful set of guidelines; most interesting is the importance of building IT infrastructure based on IT sophistication and innovativeness for large agencies to improve plan quality. Other recommendations include having a focused, balanced technology and business planning orientation that incorporates a strategic outlook, support of top management, attention to business planning, and early consensus among planning members.     

Coupling the Biophysical and Social Dimensions of Wildfire Risk to Improve Wildfire Mitigation Planning

We describe recent advances in biophysical and social aspects of risk and their potential combined contribution to improve mitigation planning on fire‐prone landscapes. The methods and tools provide an improved method for defining the spatial extent of wildfire risk to communities compared to current planning processes. They also propose an expanded role for social science to improve understanding of community‐wide risk perceptions and to predict property owners’ capacities and willingness to mitigate risk by treating hazardous fuels and reducing the susceptibility of dwellings. In particular, we identify spatial scale mismatches in wildfire mitigation planning and their potential adverse impact on risk mitigation goals. Studies in other fire‐prone regions suggest that these scale mismatches are widespread and contribute to continued wildfire dwelling losses. We discuss how risk perceptions and behavior contribute to scale mismatches and how they can be minimized through integrated analyses of landscape wildfire transmission and social factors that describe the potential for collaboration among landowners and land management agencies. These concepts are then used to outline an integrated socioecological planning framework to identify optimal strategies for local community risk mitigation and improve landscape‐scale prioritization of fuel management investments by government entities.     

Does Iconicity in Pictographs Matter? The Influence of Iconicity and Numeracy on Information Processing,Decision Making,and Liking in an Eye‐Tracking Study

Researchers recommend the use of pictographs in medical risk communication to improve people's risk comprehension and decision making. However, it is not yet clear whether the iconicity used in pictographs to convey risk information influences individuals’ information processing and comprehension. In an eye‐tracking experiment with participants from the general population (N = 188), we examined whether specific types of pictograph icons influence the processing strategy viewers use to extract numerical information. In addition, we examined the effect of iconicity and numeracy on probability estimation, recall, and icon liking. This experiment used a 2 (iconicity: blocks vs. restroom icons) × 2 (scenario: medical vs. nonmedical) between‐subject design. Numeracy had a significant effect on information processing strategy, but we found no effect of iconicity or scenario. Results indicated that both icon types enabled high and low numerates to use their default way of processing and extracting the gist of the message from the pictorial risk communication format: high numerates counted icons, whereas low numerates used large‐area processing. There was no effect of iconicity in the probability estimation. However, people who saw restroom icons had a higher probability of correctly recalling the exact risk level. Iconicity had no effect on icon liking. Although the effects are small, our findings suggest that person‐like restroom icons in pictographs seem to have some advantages for risk communication. Specifically, in nonpersonalized prevention brochures, person‐like restroom icons may maintain reader motivation for processing the risk information.     

When I'm 64: Psychological contract breach,work motivation and the moderating roles of future time perspective and regulatory focus

Abstract

There is an increasing need for managers to understand what motivates younger versus older workers to continue work within their company. We believe that this two-wave study among 90 Dutch employees is the first to examine: (1) the cross-lagged relationships between breach of psychological contract (which includes transactional and relational obligations) and intrinsic work motivation, and (2) the moderating role of the age-related variables future time perspective and regulatory focus. Regulatory focus concerns the orientation (either promotion-focused or prevention-focused) by which an individual pursues their goals. Based on psychological contract theory, we expected and found that relational contract breach predicts lower work motivation. Furthermore, based on lifespan developmental and regulatory focus theory, we assumed that this relationship would be stronger when workers experienced an open future time perspective and a promotion focus rather than a prevention focus. The results showed that future time perspective indeed had a strengthening, and prevention focus a reducing moderating effect in the relationship between psychological contract breach and work motivation. However, no significant effects for promotion focus were found. These findings indicate that age-related processes such as future time perspective and regulatory focus are important variables to include in future psychological contract research.     

Strategic Manufacturing Planning Systems and Their Linkage to Planning System Success

Academics and practitioners alike are focusing more attention on manufacturing strategy after having recognized the important role it plays in shaping the success of industrial firms. Even though research in this area has increased in the last decade, the focus of much of that work has been on the content rather than the process of the manufacturing strategy. Consequently, this study attempts to understand the important elements of the strategic manufacturing planning process and its effectiveness. Borrowing from the extant literature in the fields of strategic management and information systems, we propose a research model that relates strategic manufacturing planning system design to planning system success. Using structured questionnaires, empirical data is collected from over 200 manufacturing executives to test the model hypotheses. Planning process in manufacturing was found to be a bottom‐up approach from a corporate or business perspective, which differs from the top‐down planning process prevalent in strategic information systems planning process. Findings also indicate that greater planning system success in manufacturing is associated with a planning system that combines some “rational” elements (formality, comprehensiveness, control focus, longer horizon) with others that lend adaptability (wider participation and more intense interaction). But the strategic manufacturing planning system is more than just a collection of independent planning characteristics. Instead, it can be viewed as a gestalt planning system whereby planning characteristics move together in affecting overall planning system success.     

Operations Risk Management: Overview of Paul Kleindorfer's Contributions

This paper reviews Paul Kleindorfer's contributions to Operations Management (OM), with a special focus on his research on risk management. An annotated bibliography of selected other contributions reviews the breadth of topics that have occupied Kleindorfer's research attention over his now 45 + years of research. These include optimal control theory, scheduling theory, decision sciences, investment planning and peak load pricing, plus a number of important applications in network industries and insurance. In the area of operations risk management, we review recent work that Kleindorfer and his colleagues in the Wharton Risk Center have undertaken on environmental management and operations, focusing on process safety and environmental risks in the chemical industry. This work is directly related to Kleindorfer's work in the broader area of “sustainable operations”, which he, Kal Singhal and Luk Van Wassenhove recently surveyed as part of the new initiative at POMS to encompass sustainable management practices within the POMS community. Continuing in the area of supply chain risks, the paper reviews Kleindorfer's contributions to the development of an integrated framework for contracting and risk hedging for supply management. The emphasis on alignment of pricing, performance and risk management in this framework is presaged in the work undertaken by Kleindorfer and his co‐authors in the 1980s on after‐sales support services for high‐technology products. This work on supply chain risk, and its successors, is reviewed here in light of its growing importance in managing the unbundled and global supply chains characteristic of the new economy.     

The Moderating Influence of Competitive Intensity on the Relationship between CEOs' Regulatory Foci and SME Internationalization

The international business literature has mainly focused on the impact of top managers' psychological attributes on firms' strategic decisions. However, the potential moderating influence of industry conditions such as competition, has not been well explored. Deriving insights from the regulatory focus and upper echelons theories, this paper extends the international business and regulatory focus literature by investigating how the impact influence of CEOs' regulatory foci on firms' degree of internationalization depends on the intensity of competitive market conditions. Using primary data gathered from 289 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana, the findings of the study revealed when competition is intense in the domestic market, the potency of a CEO's promotion focus as a driver of internationalization is amplified. In addition, the research shows that intense domestic market competition weakens the negative influence of a CEO's prevention focus on a firm's degree of internationalization. These findings have important research and managerial implications for international business.     

A Methodology for Integrating Tsunami Inundation Modelling into Land Use Planning in New Zealand

Guidance has been produced for land use planners and decision-makers on how tsunami inundation modelling can be included into land use planning. The process of developing the guideline included exploring the difficulties in integrating physical science models into land use planning with a focus on tsunami. These difficulties included addressing uncertainty and reconciling planners' needs with the capability of the modellers. The guidance was based on two key questions. (1) How can tsunami modelling be incorporated into land use planning? (2) What information do planners need from modellers to improve planning and policy for tsunami? The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the guideline, with the aim of assisting others in producing similar guidance for implementing tsunami modelling into land use planning. The guideline includes tsunami basics, a decision tree for including tsunami risk into land use planning, which forms the basis of the guideline.     

Boardroom Operational and Financial Control: an Insider View*

This study examines the control processes and their dynamics at the board level of two non‐profit organizations with a view to penetrating and exploring directors' control orientations, discourse and decisions in their holistic context. In comparison with the predominantly survey‐ and interview‐based prior research on board‐level control, this study offers a distinctly processual view through its employment of a longitudinal complete member researcher participant observer methodology. Three primary themes of boardroom control focus are identified and analysed. These are control reporting, director's control orientation and the board's budgetary control approach. Directors' strategic orientation is found to be the primary driver of their exercise of control, with reporting systems and routine monitoring emerging as adjuncts to their primary strategic control focus. Strategy‐triggered control activity exhibits itself largely via directors' cost–benefit and risk management analyses communally developed in the course of board meeting exchanges.     

Trust‐Level Risk Evaluation and Risk Control Guidance in the NHS East of England

In recent years, the healthcare sector has adopted the use of operational risk assessment tools to help understand the systems issues that lead to patient safety incidents. But although these problem‐focused tools have improved the ability of healthcare organizations to identify hazards, they have not translated into measurable improvements in patient safety. One possible reason for this is a lack of support for the solution‐focused process of risk control. This article describes a content analysis of the risk management strategies, policies, and procedures at all acute (i.e., hospital), mental health, and ambulance trusts (health service organizations) in the East of England area of the British National Health Service. The primary goal was to determine what organizational‐level guidance exists to support risk control practice. A secondary goal was to examine the risk evaluation guidance provided by these trusts. With regard to risk control, we found an almost complete lack of useful guidance to promote good practice. With regard to risk evaluation, the trusts relied exclusively on risk matrices. A number of weaknesses were found in the use of this tool, especially related to the guidance for scoring an event's likelihood. We make a number of recommendations to address these concerns. The guidance assessed provides insufficient support for risk control and risk evaluation. This may present a significant barrier to the success of risk management approaches in improving patient safety.     

Capacity Planning with Financial and Operational Hedging in Low‐Cost Countries

The authors of this article outline a capacity planning problem in which a risk‐averse firm reserves capacities with potential suppliers that are located in multiple low‐cost countries. While demand is uncertain, the firm also faces multi‐country foreign currency exposures. This study develops a mean‐variance model that maximizes the firm's optimal utility and derives optimal utility and optimal decisions in capacity and financial hedging size. The authors show that when demand and exchange rate risks are perfectly correlated, a risk‐averse firm, by using financial hedging, will achieve the same optimal utility as a risk‐neutral firm. In this study as well, a special case is examined regarding two suppliers in China and Vietnam. The results show that if a single supplier is contracted, financial hedging most benefits the highly risk‐averse firm when the demand and exchange rate are highly negatively related. When only one hedge is used, financial hedging dominates operational hedging only when the firm is very risk averse and the correlation between the two exchange rates have become positive. With both theoretical and numerical results, this study concludes that the two hedges are strategic tools and interact each other to maximize the optimal utility.