THE TIMING OF LABOR TRANSFERS IN DUAL RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED SYSTEMS: “PUSH” VS. “PULL” RULES*

Altough the dual resource-constrained (DRC) system has been studied, the decision rule used to determine when workers are eligible for transfer largely has been ignored. Some earlier studies examined the impact of this rule [5] [12] [15] but did not include labor-transfer times in their models. Gunther [6] incorporated labour-transfer times into his model, but the model involved only one worker and two machines. No previous study has examined decision rules that initiate labor transfers based on labor needs (“pull” rules). Labor transfers always have been initiated based on lack of need (“push” rules). This study examines three “pull” variations of the “When” labor-assignment decision rule. It compares their performances to the performances of two “push” rules and a comparable machine-limited system. A nonparametric statistical test, Jonckheere's S statistic, is used to test for significance of the rankings of the rules: a robust parametric multiple-comparison statistical test, Tukey's B statistic, is used to test the differences. One “pull” and one “push” decision rule provide similar performances and top the rankings consistently. Decision rules for determining when labor should be transferred from one work area to another are valuable aids for managers. This especially is true for the ever-increasing number of managers operating in organizations that recognize the benefits of a cross-trained work force. Recently there has been much interest in cross-training workers, perhaps because one of the mechanisms used in just-in-time systems to handle unbalanced work loads is to have cross-trained workers who can be shifted as demand dictates [8]. If management is to take full advantage of a cross-trained work force, it need to know when to transfer workers.     

Reconsidering the Effect of Market Experience on the “Endowment Effect”

Simple exchange experiments have revealed that participants trade their endowment less frequently than standard demand theory would predict. List (2003a) found that the most experienced dealers acting in a well functioning market are not subject to this exchange asymmetry, suggesting that a significant amount of market experience is required to overcome it. To understand this market‐experience effect, we introduce a distinction between two types of uncertainty—choice uncertainty and trade uncertainty—both of which could lead to exchange asymmetry. We conjecture that trade uncertainty is most important for exchange asymmetry. To test this conjecture, we design an experiment where the two treatments impact differently on trade uncertainty, while controlling for choice uncertainty. Supporting our conjecture, we find that “forcing” subjects to give away their endowment in a series of exchanges eliminates exchange asymmetry in a subsequent test. We discuss why markets might not provide sufficient incentives for learning to overcome exchange asymmetry.     

Implications of person–situation interactions for Machiavellians' unethical tendencies: The buffering role of managerial ethical leadership

Machiavellianism is a dark personality trait that prompts self-interested manipulation in interpersonal relationships and is conducive to unethical behaviour. Yet Machiavellians (Machs) are also adaptive individuals who tailor their behaviour to the immediate context and feel constrained to manoeuvre selfishly in tightly (not loosely) structured work environments. Drawing on a person–situation interaction perspective, we analyse whether managerial ethical leadership buffers the negative influence of Mach on employees' ethical work intention. Using data from 436 employees of a diverse set of Spanish banking entities, we find that interactions with ethical leaders weaken employees' intention to behave unethically more among high Machs than among low Machs. This investigation sheds light on Machiavellianism in the workplace and explores some actions that can buffer its negative effects on employees' ethical intention.     

Further Beyond the Basic Background Check: Predicting Future Unethical Behavior

In this paper, we analyze the ethical issues of using honesty and integrity tests in employment screening. Our focus will be on the United States context: legal requirements related to applicant privacy differ in other countries, but we posit that our proposed balancing test is broadly applicable. We start by discussing why companies have ethical and legal obligations, based on a stakeholder analysis, to assess the integrity of potential employees. We then move to a consideration of how companies currently use background checks as a pre‐employment screening tool, noting their limitations. We then take up honesty and integrity testing, focusing particularly on the problems of false positives and due process. We offer a balancing test for the use of honesty and integrity testing that takes in three factors: (1) the potential harm posed by a dishonest employee in a particular job, (2) the linkage between the test and the assessment process, and (3) the accuracy and validity of the honesty and integrity test. We conclude with implications for practice and future research.     

Path to “Stardom” in Globally Distributed Hybrid Teams: An Examination of a Knowledge‐Centered Perspective using Social Network Analysis

Although distributed teams have been researched extensively in information systems and decision science disciplines, a review of the literature suggests that the dominant focus has been on understanding the factors affecting performance at the team level. There has however been an increasing recognition that specific individuals within such teams are often critical to the team's performance. Consequently, existing knowledge about such teams may be enhanced by examining the factors that affect the performance of individual team members. This study attempts to address this need by identifying individuals who emerge as “stars” in globally distributed teams involved in knowledge work such as information systems development (ISD). Specifically, the study takes a knowledge‐centered view in explaining which factors lead to “stardom” in such teams. Further, it adopts a social network approach consistent with the core principles of structural/relational analysis in developing and empirically validating the research model. Data from U.S.–Scandinavia self‐managed “hybrid” teams engaged in systems development were used to deductively test the proposed model. The overall study has several implications for group decision making: (i) the study focuses on stars within distributed teams, who play an important role in shaping group decision making, and emerge as a result of a negotiated/consensual decision making within egalitarian teams; (ii) an examination of emergent stars from the team members’ point of view reflects the collective acceptance and support dimension decision‐making contexts identified in prior literature; (iii) finally, the study suggests that the social network analysis technique using relational data can be a tool for a democratic decision‐making technique within groups.     

Zombies and Originals: How Cultural Theory Informs Stakeholder Management

The question of stakeholder salience has recently resurfaced in the suggestion that the ethical foundations of corporate cultures result in stakeholder cultures that largely explain how firms allocate resources among stakeholders. The present article seeks to complement this novel approach to understanding stakeholder management by adding insights from the multilevel influences that create the corporate culture in the first place, and ultimately affect managers in their stakeholder decisions. This article draws on cultural theory to examine how the individuals who compose firms present group and grid solidarity that results in cultural biases in the corporate culture. These cultural biases—individualism, hierarchy, fatalism, and egalitarianism—are then paired with the stakeholder cultures they enable, and inferences are extracted concerning the salience managers are likely to accord to various classes of stakeholders as a result. Future research and managerial implications stemming from this new view on stakeholder management conclude this article.     

Remitting Behaviour of “Temporary” and “Permanent” Migrants: The Case of Greeks in Germany and Australia

This paper makes the point that migrants have different motives for sending remittances and remittance receivers have different claims on migrants' income, depending on whether people move to accumulate capital to improve their living at home after they return — temporary migration — or to start a new life in a foreign country — permanent migration. This hypothesis is empirically tested with data from Greek–German and Greek–Australian migration. The findings attest to the fact that German remittances constitute obligatory income streams to close family at home, while Australian remittances are gifts. Some quantitative estimates of the relative impact of individual factors on remittances are also obtained. Some hints are also given for a changing remitting behaviour of Greek migrants in Germany, along with the changing character of migration in that country.     

TOWARD A “NEW ARCHITECTURE” FOR POM

The field of POM is steadily expanding its scope. This allows us to pursue interesting new fields of inquiry and makes us ever more relevant to the needs of practitioners. But it also increases the risk that over time our efforts will become fragmented and unfocused, causing us to slowly lose our sense of community and break up into separate camps. In this paper I ask, “What kind of new organizing framework, or ‘architecture,’ will allow us to maintain our sense of community as our interests diverge?” I describe the experience of one academic organization that faced a similar problem several years ago and how the situation was resolved. This experience leads us to propose a possible solution to Pom's emerging problem: engage with real operations managers and focus our efforts on helping them deal with the actual problems they are facing in today's complex and fast‐changing world.     

“Chemophobia” Today: Consumers’ Knowledge and Perceptions of Chemicals

This mixed‐methods study investigated consumers’ knowledge of chemicals in terms of basic principles of toxicology and then related this knowledge, in addition to other factors, to their fear of chemical substances (i.e., chemophobia). Both qualitative interviews and a large‐scale online survey were conducted in the German‐speaking part of Switzerland. A Mokken scale was developed to measure laypeople's toxicological knowledge. The results indicate that most laypeople are unaware of the similarities between natural and synthetic chemicals in terms of certain toxicological principles. Furthermore, their associations with the term “chemical substances” and the self‐reported affect prompted by these associations are mostly negative. The results also suggest that knowledge of basic principles of toxicology, self‐reported affect evoked by the term “chemical substances,” risk‐benefit perceptions concerning synthetic chemicals, and trust in regulation processes are all negatively associated with chemophobia, while general health concerns are positively related to chemophobia. Thus, to enhance informed consumer decisionmaking, it might be necessary to tackle the stigmatization of the term “chemical substances” as well as address and clarify prevalent misconceptions.     

Offenders’ Risk‐Taking Attitude Inside and Outside the Prison Walls

It has long been assumed that risk taking is closely associated with criminal behavior. One reason for placing criminals behind bars—aside from punishment and protecting the public—is to prevent them from engaging in further risky criminal activities. Limited attention has been paid to whether being inside or outside prison affects offenders’ risk‐taking behaviors and attitudes. We compared risk‐taking behaviors and attitudes in five risk domains (ethical, financial, health/safety, recreational, social) among 75 incarcerated offenders (i.e., offenders who are currently in prison) and 45 ex‐offenders (i.e., offenders who have just been released from prison). Ex‐offenders reported higher likelihood of engaging in risky behavior, driven largely by a willingness to take more risks in the recreational and ethical domains. Benefits attributed to risk taking as well as risk perception did not differ between incarcerated and ex‐offenders, indicating that the opportunity to take risks might underlie behavioral risk intentions. Our results also indicate that risk‐taking activities are better predicted by the expected benefits rather than by risk perception, aside from the health/safety domain. These results highlight the importance of studying the person and the environment and examining risk taking in a number of content domains.     

MANUFACTURING STRATEGY ON THE “S” CURVE

The concept and techniques of “manufacturing strategy” offer managers the opportunity to use their production function as a strategic weapon in competition, an apparently attractive objective. Yet after about 25 years, the use of manufacturing in corporate strategy (MCS) as a management practice is not widespread. In contrast, however, in academic literature it appears to be flourishing and rapidly growing in popularity. This paper seeks to answer this apparent paradox, beginning with the history of MCS as it was developed as a theory of design to enable a manufacturing system to be focused on a key competitive task. Common criticisms of MCS, such as “tradeoffs,” “focus” and “undynamic,” are examined and refuted as valid reasons for its only modest usage. Instead, three “new” problems in the MCS concept and its techniques are suggested as genuine needs for the completion of the theory and for its becoming more universally understood and used by industrial managers.     

Media Effects on Group Collaboration: An Empirical Examination in an Ethical Decision‐Making Context

Even though it is widely acknowledged that collaboration underlies much of the decision‐making efforts in contemporary organizations, and that organizational groups are increasingly making decisions that have ethical implications, few studies have examined group ethical decision‐making processes and outcomes. In addition, while there is increasing evidence that groups often collaborate/communicate using different mediating technologies, few studies have examined the effect of the characteristics of the media in group ethical decision‐making contexts. Finally, there is a clear paucity of studies that have investigated group decision making pertaining to information technology (IT)‐related ethical dilemmas, an area of rising importance for information systems (IS) and decision science researchers. This article seeks to address the gaps described above through an experimental study where groups collaborating either in a face‐to‐face context or in a computer‐mediated context (using NetMeeting or Wiki) were required to make a decision with respect to a scenario with an IT‐related ethical dilemma. Results indicate that media characteristics (e.g., anonymity, immediacy of feedback, parallelism) do not have an effect on whether groups make ethical (or unethical) decisions. However, several media characteristics were found to play a significant role on downstream variables, such as the quality of a follow‐up task (i.e., creation of a decision justification document), and overall process satisfaction of the group members.     

Formal Infrastructure and Ethical Decision Making: An Empirical Investigation and Implications for Supply Management

Building on Rest's (1986) conceptual model of ethical decision making, we derive and empirically test a model that links an organization's formal ethical infrastructure to individuals’ moral awareness of ethical situations, moral judgment, and moral intention. We contribute to the literature by shedding light on the importance of a multifaceted formal ethical infrastructure—consisting of formal communication, recurrent communication, formal surveillance, and formal sanctions—as a crucial antecedent of moral awareness. In so doing, we discern how these four elements of a formal ethical infrastructure combine to collectively influence moral awareness based on a second‐order factor structure using structural equation modeling. We test our model based on survey data from 805 respondents with significant work experience across three separate ethical scenarios. Our results across the three scenarios provide overall support for our model. We found that a second‐order factor structure for the formal ethical infrastructure explains the variance among the four infrastructure elements and that a multifaceted formal ethical infrastructure significantly increases moral awareness. Our results further suggest a strong positive effect of moral awareness on moral judgment, which in turn was found to have a positive impact on moral intention. These results were substantiated when taking several individual and contextual control variables into account, such as gender, age, religiosity, work satisfaction, and a de facto ethical climate. Implications for theory, practice, and supply management are discussed.     

A Note on “Discrete Sequential Search with Group Activities”

This note comments on a paper published by Wagner and Davis [Decision Sciences (2001), 32(4), 557–573]. These authors present an integer‐programming model for the single‐item discrete sequential search problem with group activities. Based on their experiments, they conjecture that the problem can be solved as a linear program. In this note, we provide a counterexample for which the optimal value of the linear program they propose is different from the optimal value of the integer‐programming model, hence contradicting their conjecture for the specific linear program that they specify. To the best of our knowledge, the conjecture settled in this note was still an open question.     

Ethical leadership and follower voice and performance: The role of follower identifications and entity morality beliefs

Previous studies have established the relationship between ethical leadership and a variety of positive follower outcomes. Follower organizational identification has been found to mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and follower job performance. In this research, we incorporate a second distinct and theoretically important type of social identification process, relational identification with the leader, along with organizational identification, and examine their mediating effects on follower performance and voice outcomes. Further, we bring the implicit theory of morality to the behavioral ethics literature and examine follower morality beliefs as a moderator. Using a Romanian sample of 302 followers under the supervision of 27 leaders, we found that ethical leadership has an indirect effect on follower job performance and voice (through the mediating mechanisms of both organizational and relational identifications) and that these relationships are stronger for followers who held the implicit theory that a person's moral character is fixed.     

International Evidence on the Determinants of Organizational Ethical Vulnerability

This paper proposes a model to explain what makes organizations ethically vulnerable. Drawing upon legitimacy, institutional, agency and individual moral reasoning theories we consider three sets of explanatory factors and examine their association with organizational ethical vulnerability. The three sets comprise external institutional context, internal corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure. We combine these three sets of factors and develop an analytical framework for classifying ethical issues and propose a new model of organizational ethical vulnerability. We test our model on a sample of 253 firms that were involved in ethical misconduct and compare them with a matched sample of the same number of firms from 28 different countries. The results suggest that weak regulatory environment and internal corporate governance, combined with profitability warnings or losses in the preceding year, increase organizational ethical vulnerability. We find counterintuitive evidence suggesting that firms’ involvement in bribery and corruption prevention training programmes is positively associated with the likelihood of ethical vulnerability. By synthesizing insights about individual and corporate behaviour from multiple theories, this study extends existing analytical literature on business ethics. Our findings have implications for firms’ external regulatory settings, corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure.     

Do All Activities “Weigh” Equally? How Different Physical Activities Differ as Predictors of Weight

In Britain, it is recommended that, to stay healthy, adults should do 150 minutes of moderate‐intensity physical activity every week. The recommendations provided by the U.K. government, however, remain silent in regard to the type of activity that should be done. Using the annual Health Survey for England we compare how different types of physical activities predict a person's weight. In particular, we consider clinically measured body mass index and waist circumference. We document mean slopes emanating from ordinary least squares regressions with these measures as the dependent variables. We show that individuals who walk at a brisk or fast pace are more likely to have a lower weight when compared to individuals doing other activities. Additionally, we highlight that the association between physical activity and weight is stronger for females and individuals over the age of 50. Our overall conclusions are robust to a number of specifications.     

Rachel Carson's Toxic Discourse: Conjectures on Counterpublics,Stakeholders and the “Occupy Movement”

This article draws attention to the origins, forms, and implications of “toxic discourse” as a genre central to the understanding of the public sphere in business in society. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is used as a pivotal cultural document establishing “toxic discourse” as an ongoing form of moral narrative rooted in the rationality of counterpublics. Toxic discourse is framed within a center/periphery model in which toxic discourse gains salience in periods of economic dislocation and uncertainty. In these periods, toxic discourse draws together those on the periphery or counterpublics who otherwise would not unite in their opposition to the center. The article critically examines how stakeholder theory, despite making sense of the public sphere for agents of organizations, glosses counterpublics and relegates toxic discourse, as evident in the “Occupy Movement,” to the ephemeral role of temporary, disruptive protest groups with very little of substance to communicate.     

The global “war for talent”

In this paper we examine the “global war for talent,” the factors that impact it, and organizations' responses to it. Using a comprehensive search of more than 400 contemporary academic and business press articles, the paper reviews relevant research and reassesses the “talent war.” We posit that the dominant approaches to the “talent war” based on a scarcity state of mind and action, often characterized by a tactical and exclusive top talent or “star” focus, are being challenged by the emergence of a more evolutionary paradigm. This new paradigm adopts more strategic, innovative, cooperative and generative approaches which we describe as creative ‘talent solutions.’ The paper also highlights implications for future research, teaching and development in the field.