Which way to the frontier? Physician executives talk about the future

The author interviewed trustees, senior managers, and physicians at Moses Cone Health System in Greensboro, North Carolina, Legacy Health System in Portland, Oregon, and Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Michigan. These three successful health care systems bracket the national market in size, geography, and managed care penetration. The comments of physicians are presented here, drawn from the book, Designing 21st Century Health Care: Leadership in Hospitals and Healthcare Systems. What emerges most clearly from their comments is the enormity of the task ahead. There is wide-spread agreement that substantial improvements in the quality and cost of care are possible, an encouraging stream of anecdotes and ideas about how to proceed, but a lack of consensus on critical components of how to organize practices and promote effective care.     

Is Probability the Only Coherent Approach to Uncertainty?

In this article, I discuss an argument that purports to prove that probability theory is the only sensible means of dealing with uncertainty. I show that this argument can succeed only if some rather controversial assumptions about the nature of uncertainty are accepted. I discuss these assumptions and provide reasons for rejecting them. I also present examples of what I take to be non-probabilistic uncertainty.     

Why is the Return to Training So High?

Abstract. Cross‐sectional results show that training increases wages by 5 per cent. This return is on a par with the return to 1 year of education. Considering that the average duration of training is very short, this result is strange and needs further examination. After leaving out the importance of measurement error, we control for accumulated stock of firm‐specific skills, unobserved heterogeneity in wage levels, heterogeneity in training returns, and heterogeneity in wage growth. By this we manage to reduce the return considerably. Unobserved heterogeneity in wage levels is the most important contributor to the ‘too high’ returns to training.     

Does the market value corporate response to climate change?

Motivated by the controversial debate on mandatory reductions of greenhouse gases in the U.S., this study explores whether the market values corporate response to tackle carbon dioxide emissions. We measure corporate responses using the measure of media tone based on the positive and negative words in each news article. Our results show that the market reacts favorably to the negative media exposure of corporate response to climate change over the announcement period and the one-year period, which implies that the socially responsible action to tackle climate change is costly. We further find that the positive response is less pronounced for firms from polluting industries and firms with poor environmental performance.     

Managerial commitment to the status quo and corporate divestiture: Can power motivate openness to change?

CEOs' commitment to the status quo (CSQ) is a prominent psychological factor leading to their resistance to organizational change. In this study we focus on the moderating role of managerial power, a central element in strategic choice, in the relationship between CEOs' CSQ and corporate divestiture activity. Drawing from the resource dependence perspective of power, we identify multiple aspects of power (structural, ownership, prestige/social, and expert power) that reduce CEOs' resistance to corporate change arising from CSQ. This study contributes to the strategic leadership and organizational change literatures by underscoring the importance of considering how different power bases shape the decision making of top managers who may have tendencies to hold onto firm assets when the situation warrants change. With a better understanding of how various power bases may uniquely influence strategic outcomes in the presence of managerial psychological bias, we can more accurately assess the impact of power on firms' strategic actions.     

Get real: what will draw physicians to the Web?

What are physicians waiting for? What will it take to stimulate widespread adoption of Internet medical systems? How can health care leaders and physicians help the technology innovators and the executives of technology firms understand the components necessary to assure physician acceptance and utilization of new tools? (1) Don't underestimate the personal nature of a physician's practice. It really isn't a "business." (2) Most physicians are not Luddites; they are just extremely pragmatic and practical. (3) For the majority of physicians to adopt a new technology in their private office practice, it must address three major issues: money, hassle, and patient care. There are many obstacles to adopting the new technologies that are the result of physician training and expectations and the current models of payment and revenue generation. Some technological innovations are presented to physicians without sufficient respect for their knowledge of how medical practices really work. The benefits promised often don't match with the needs structure of the physicians. As a consequence, the cycle of diffusion of these new systems is extended and delayed.     

Does the Stock Market Gender Stereotype Corporate Boards? Evidence from the Market's Reaction to Directors' Trades

Attitudes towards male and female managers within organizations are well documented, but how the stock market perceives their relative capabilities is less studied. Recent evidence documents a negative short‐run market reaction to the appointment of female chief executive officers and suggests that female executives are less informed than their male counterparts about future corporate performance. These results appear to dispute the stock market value of having women on corporate boards. However, such short‐run market reactions may retain a ‘gender bias’, reflecting the prevalence of negative stereotypes, where the market reacts to ‘beliefs’ rather than ‘performance’. This study tests for such bias by examining the stock market reaction to directors' trades in their own companies' shares, by measuring both the short‐run and longer‐term returns after the directors' trades. Allowing for firm and trade effects, some evidence is found that, in the longer term, markets recognize that female executives' trades are informative about future corporate performance, although initially markets underestimate these effects. This has important implications for research that has attempted to assess the value of board diversity by examining only short‐run stock market responses.     

Can Multinational Corporations Afford to Ignore the Global Common Good?1

Contemporary advances in the fields of globalization and technologies raise the question of the relationship between international business and the global common good. Half of the hundred biggest economies in the world are now corporations. Nation‐states were traditionally viewed as the guarantors of the common good; however, the current historical stage is marked by the waning of the role of government, and reveals an emerging situation characterized by a co‐responsibility of multiple agents in this respect. Three major evolutions are likely to induce multinational corporations (MNCs) to take the global common good into account: the imperative of the preservation of our biosphere, the rise of an anti‐globalization sentiment with all its potential consequences, and the necessity to design a global social contract. Besides, these three phenomena are interconnected, which adds to the pressure on MNCs to change their policies.     

Integration of IPA and QFD to assess the service quality and to identify after sales service strategies to improve customer satisfaction – a case study

Customer satisfaction is considered very essential nowadays as it shows how firms are dedicated to afford quality products or services to their customers. Retaining the existing customer and acquiring the new customers are the basic objectives of any organisation and after sales service (ASS) has acquired a strategic role as a mean to achieve customer satisfaction. Importance–performance analysis (IPA) and quality function deployment (QFD) are the powerful tools successfully applied in many fields. However, studies on application of these tools in investigating the ASS quality and customer satisfaction seems to be scarce. This article investigates linking of IPA, which is a simple and effective customer satisfaction tool and QFD in the improvement of ASS attributes in an effort to determine the appropriate ASS strategic action plans to be adopted with the objective of enhancing customer satisfaction. In this study, a customer-driven model is proposed to examine the importance of the various ASS attributes and the performance of the organisation via questionnaire survey, and through the IP analysis, the areas to be focused are identified to help the decision makers in devising suitable policies, to improve the ASS performance. This is achieved through the employment of QFD that will help decision makers in the strategic planning to attain better customer satisfaction. A case study is carried out to exhibit the effectiveness of the developed model in a firm involved in manufacturing the home appliances.     

Are Individual Differences Germane to the Acceptance of New Information Technologies?

Persuading users to adopt new information technologies persists as an important problem confronting those responsible for implementing new information systems. In order to better understand and manage the process of new technology adoption, several theoretical models have been proposed, of which the technology acceptance model (TAM) has gained considerable support. Beliefs and attitudes represent significant constructs in TAM. A parallel research stream suggests that individual difference factors are important in information technology acceptance but does not explicate the process by which acceptance is influenced. The objective of this paper is to clarify this process by proposing a theoretical model wherein the relationship between individual differences and IT acceptance is hypothesized to be mediated by the constructs of the technology acceptance model. In essence then, these factors are viewed as influencing an individual's beliefs about an information technology innovation; this relationship is further supported by drawing upon extensive research in learning. The theoretical model was tested in an empirical study of 230 users of an information technology innovation. Results confirm the basic structure of the model, including the mediating role of beliefs. Results also identify several individual difference variables that have significant effects on TAM's beliefs. Theoretical contributions and practical implications that follow are discussed.     

Authentic Leadership: Getting Back to the Roots of the ‘Root Construct’?

In their 2011 review paper, Gardner et al. (Authentic Leadership: a review of the literature and research agenda. Leadership Quarterly, 22, pp. 1120–1145) concluded that the authentic leadership (AL) construct was still in the first stage of evolution, that of concept introduction and evaluation. At that time, the field was characterized by two types of contribution: conceptual expositions and largely quantitative research seeking to map out its antecedents and consequences, moderators and mediators. The current review aims to: (1) critically evaluate the development of the AL construct to the present time; and (2) taking this evaluation as a point of departure, propose the need for a radical re‐grounding of understanding of AL aimed at countering what the authors believe to be the substantive flaws in both its philosophical underpinnings and empirical grounding. The authors propose that these shortcomings have arisen owing to the failure of existential and other critiques of the dominant (normative and functionalist) discourse of AL to gain traction, and owing to an absence of practice‐based, qualitative research. As a strategic platform for the potential re‐grounding and relaunch of AL, the authors propose a radical return to the existential and practice roots of authenticity as the basis for a broader understanding of ‘authentic leadership’ as a ‘central organizing principle’ in leadership studies. Despite the flaws identified in the AL construct, the authors suggest that the notion of authenticity may still have a valuable role to play in the study of leadership: that role, however, can only be determined through a thorough understanding of AL as a practice‐based phenomenon.     

Supervisors’ power to deal with employees’ inner resignation: How perceived power of the organization and the supervisor relate to employees’ voluntary and enforced work behavior

Power is fundamental in organizations and is exerted on employees by the organization itself as well as by supervisors. In this study, I applied the slippery slope framework (SSF) and interpersonal power interaction (IPI) model to shed light on how power dynamics relate to employees’ inner resignation and contextual performance.Survey data was obtained from 1102 employees of Austrian and German organizations. In line with expectations, the results of path modeling revealed that perceived coercive power of the organization and supervisors positively relates to employees’ inner resignation. Perceived legitimate power of the organization and supervisors is positively associated with contextual performance and negatively associated with inner resignation. Finally, supervisor reward power further strengthens the beneficial relationship between legitimate organizational power and inner resignation. The results are discussed in light of self-determination theory and the effort-reward imbalance model.     

‘Talking the talk’ – a discursive approach to evaluating management development

Much evaluation practice is guided by a theoretical anachronism. Systematized and formulaic approaches of chain reaction models of evaluation are based on conceptions of management which are over 50 years old. This study presents an evaluation of a management development intervention which used evidence of discursive shift in learners as an indicator of attitudinal and behavioural change brought about by the learning programme. The approach taken characterizes the learning event and the evaluation process as interventions which have the capacity to help learners to shape their identity and in which language is a mediator of learning. The results of the study, which applies both quantitative and qualitative techniques, are used to argue in favour of the deployment of a model of evaluation which has a focus on social and relational aspects of a managers' role.