The Impact of Poor Performance on Risk-Taking Attitudes: A Longitudinal Study with a PLS Causal Modeling Approach

This article addresses some important issues in risk-return, or mean-variance, research. Much of the research in this tradition has used Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory to explain Bowman's proposition that “troubled firms” prefer and seek risk. Unfortunately, two key constructs in prospect theory, reference point and risk attitude, have not been applied in risk-return research in ways consistent with prospect theory. The author examines a series of inconsistencies in the use of prospect theory in risk-return research to date and suggests remedies. A proposed approach using a longitudinal research design at the individual-firm level is applied in an empirical test of the Bowman hypothesis with data from brewing firms in the United States. The findings strongly support the Bowman hypothesis.     

“鲍曼悖论”及其理论解释——来自我国上市公司的经验证据

本文基于2000-2009年我国十个行业225家上市公司的资产回报率数据,分别采用方差法和序数法度量战略风险,并通过风险/收益计算窗口的提前或滞后安排对鲍曼悖论的存在性及其可能解释进行实证检验。研究发现,由于数据严重左偏,用方差法度量战略风险会导致虚假的实证结果,而基于序数法的元分析结果揭示我国上市公司战略风险和滞后收益间存在显著的负相关关系,支持风险隐性成本说关于战略风险-收益关系的因果论证。     

我国股票市场收益率偏度对风险补偿的影响研究

收益率与波动率之间的关系(风险补偿)在金融资产定价和风险管理中至关重要,但二者之间的研究却一直没有定论。金融理论表明为正向关系,但实证却往往得到相反的结果。众所周知,尖峰厚尾以及负偏是收益率的典型特性。这些内在属性对风险补偿无疑有着重要的影响。本文研究表明,收益率的负偏和尖峰厚尾会导致风险补偿系数减小,进而导致风险补偿系数在实证当中的不确定性。虽然各个行业的夏普比率相差无几,我国股票市场的第“I”类、第“II”类风险补偿以及风险价格在不同行业之间存在较大的差异,且三者随着投资期限的增长,分别有下降、上升和轻微上升的趋势。     

Labor Market Intermediaries and the New Paradigm for Human Resources

Labor market intermediaries (LMIs) are entities that stand between the individual worker and the organization that needs work done. They include well-known operations such as executive search firms that act as brokers to fill jobs and temp agencies that lease labor to clients but also less familiar entities such as professional employer organizations (PEOs) that take on the legal obligations of employment for clients. LMI's mediate between individual workers and the organizations that need work done, shaping how workers are matched to organizations, how tasks are performed, and how conflicts are resolved [Autor, D.H. (2009). Studies of labor market intermediation: Introduction. In D. Autor (Ed.), Studies of labor market intermediation (pp. 1–26). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press]. They essentially disintermediate aspects of management that had been performed by employers. The growth and increasing prominence of LMI's is important for all research associated with the workplace because we can no longer do a study of “workers” in an organization and assume that they are all employees: Some may be temps under contract to an agency, some may be “employed” by a PEO, some may work for vendors. The reason that matters is because LMI's appear to alter attitudes and behaviors on all sides. For example, they change the bilateral, employee–employer relationship into a three-way “triangular” relationship. They may well create “dual allegiance” issues, where individuals feel ties to the search firm that placed them in their current job and their employer or the agency that employs them and the client on whose behalf they are currently working. Most fundamentally, they challenge the existing paradigms we have used to understand the workplace: Does “attraction–selection–attrition” have any relevance, for example, when employers hire temps placed by agencies into permanent jobs? What does career development mean when the person with the most influence over your next job is a search consultant? There is already an extensive literature on LMIs, but it is spread across disciplines and fields and mainly examines the labor market outcomes associated with the use of LMIs. The literature lacks a management voice. We know relatively little about the effects of LMIs on workplace attitudes and behaviors, the central focus of organizational behavior; about how LMIs and the associated rise of outside hiring change how we should think about topics such as recruiting and selection, a central concern of personnel psychology; we know even less about how LMIs change the way firms think about competencies and boundaries of the firm, central topics in strategy, when the firm's workforce is actually employed by another organization or when it can be reshuffled very quickly. We develop a taxonomy of LMIs and use it to classify the burgeoning but disjointed literature on LMIs across the social sciences. We classify LMIs in terms of three main attributes of human resource (HR) practices that they perform: Information Providers, Matchmakers, and Administrators. We describe first how LMI activities differ from HR management practices performed by employers in the traditional relationship. Second, we outline the existing research about how LMIs affect employment outcomes, such as access to employment, wages, work-related attitudes and behaviors, working conditions, and skill development. Finally, we highlight the implications of LMIs for management research, especially new, understudied research questions that need to be addressed.     

Desired Risk: Broadening the Social Amplification of Risk Framework1

Recently Kasperson et al.⁽⁶⁾ have proposed a conceptual framework, “The Social Amplification of Risk,” as a beginning step in developing a comprehensive theory of public experience of risk. A central goal of their effort is to systematically link technical assessments of risk with the growing findings from social scientific research. A key and growing domain of public risk experience is “desired” risk, but this is virtually neglected in the framework. This paper evaluates the scope of the “Social Amplification of Risk Framework,” asking whether it is applicable to desired risks, such as risk recreation (hang gliding, mountain climbing, and so forth). The analysis is supportive of the framework's applicability to the domain of desired risk.     

Intra-regional sales,product diversity,and the performance of merchandising multinationals

This study examines the relationship between intra-regional sales, product diversity, and performance of 45 merchandising firms using data from 1997 to 2003. The interaction effects between product diversity and intra-regional sales on performance are explored, using a curvilinear relationship. The analysis integrates three main theories, namely the resource-based view, transaction costs, and organization learning theory. The models measuring a firm's performance by return on assets (ROA) and return on sales (ROS) show that at high levels of intra-regional sales, small levels of product diversity can generate greater return to a firm but high levels of product diversity may hurt a firm's performance. Higher levels of intra-regional sales tend to improve a firm's performance and enhance the impact of product diversity on performance.     

The Visual Dimension in Organizing,Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas,Current Developments,and Promising Avenues

With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individual's everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized “visual mode” of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insights from the phenomenological tradition in organization theory and from social semiotics, this article sets out to consolidate previous scholarly efforts and to sketch a fertile future research agenda. After briefly exploring the workings of visuals, we introduce the methodological and theoretical “roots” of visual studies in a number of disciplines that have a long-standing tradition of incorporating the visual. We then continue by extensively reviewing work in the field of organization and management studies: More specifically, we present five distinct approaches to feature visuals in research designs and to include the visual dimension in scholarly inquiry. Subsequently, we outline, in some detail, promising avenues for future research, and close with a reflection on the impact of visualization on scientific practice itself.     

LMX and welfare trade-off ratios: An evolutionary perspective on leader-member relations

A growing stream of theory and research in evolutionary psychology proposes that people mentally represent dyadic relationships through an internal regulatory variable, the “Welfare Tradeoff Ratio.” I introduce welfare tradeoff theory and indicate how it speaks to the problematic distinction between social exchanges and relationship quality in Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theory and research. I then address issues related to leader-member agreement, LMX development, upward impression management, emotions in leader-member relationships and LMX differentiation from the perspective of welfare tradeoffs. Implications and consideration of measurement also are discussed.     

Paradoxes and Dual Processes: A Review and Synthesis

Paradox and dual‐process theories are used by management and organization researchers in studying a variety of phenomena across a wide range of management sub‐fields. Cognition is a focal point of both of these theories. However, despite their growing importance and shared areas of inquiry, these two theories have developed largely in isolation from each other. To address this lack of integration, the authors conducted a review and synthesis of relevant aspects of the paradox and dual‐process literatures. Focusing bidirectionally on how paradox theory informs dual‐process theory and how dual‐process theory informs paradox theory, they highlight the ‘nestedness’ of intuition and analysis in paradox (a paradox within paradoxical thinking). On the basis of the review and synthesis, they identify four themes (epistemological and ontological assumptions in the relationship between intuition and analysis; psychological and psychometric issues in the relationships between intuition and analysis; managers’ experiences of tensions between intuition and analysis; managers’ approaches to tensions between intuition and analysis) and introduce an integrative framework that assimilates these two perspectives and sets out an agenda for future research and implications for management.     

History in Organization and Management Theory: More Than Meets the Eye

Abstract

There has been a growing debate about the role of history in management research with several authors making suggestions on how to bring the two (back) together and others even highlighting the need for a “historic turn”. What we argue in this paper is that, while history was indeed sidelined by the scientization of management since the late 1950s, it started to make a comeback from the 1980s onwards and is increasingly employed in a number of research programs. We stress that the crucial question for management scholars engaging with history (or wanting to do so) is how it relates to theory. First of all, we present a systematic overview of the way history has been used—both at the micro (organizational) and macro-levels of analysis—distinguishing between what we refer to as “history to theory” and “history in theory”. In the former, we consider those research programs, such as (neo-)institutionalism, where history serves as evidence to develop, modify or test theories. In the case of “history in theory” we identify research programs where history or the past are part of the theoretical model itself as a driver or moderator, with “imprinting” as a prime example. Second, we also identify a growing number of studies that go further by displaying what we call “historical cognizance” in the sense of incorporating period effects or historical contingencies into their theorizing efforts. Finally, drawing on our broad overview, we make more specific suggestions for increasing the visibility and influence of history in organization and management theory.     

On the Use of Paradox for Generating Theoretical Contributions in Management and Organization Research

Although research relating to paradox has burgeoned throughout the past decades, how paradox has been used in generating theoretical contributions remains largely tacit. Hinging on the systematic analysis of 476 publications, this literature review uncovers how scholars have leveraged paradox in demarcating theoretical contributions in the area of management and organization research. First, scholars can make use of paradox as a means to theorize, adding to the core conceptual conversation on paradox. Second, scholars can make use of paradox as a means to understand or advance insight on particular phenomena, drawing from paradox's conceptual knowledge to push forth discussions or debates in other strands of the management and organization field. Finally, scholars can make use of paradox as a way to verbalize something puzzling or surprising, supporting how readers are to appreciate or make sense of theoretical contributions advanced. Denoting approaches identified as highly complementary, this paper offers explicit handholds for academics to develop theoretical contributions through paradox, supporting the consolidation and further elevation of scholarly impact for the paradox community as such.     

Cyber risk assessment in small and medium-sized enterprises: A multilevel decision-making approach for small e-tailors

The role played by information and communication technologies in today's businesses cannot be underestimated. While such technological advancements provide numerous advantages and opportunities, they are known to thread organizations with new challenges such as cyberattacks. This is particularly important for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are deemed to be the least mature and highly vulnerable to cybersecurity risks. Thus, this research is set to assess the cyber risks in online retailing SMEs (e-tailing SMEs). Therefore, this article employs a sample of 124 small e-tailers in the United Kingdom and takes advantage of a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method. Indeed, we identified a total number of 28 identified cyber-oriented risks in five exhaustive themes of “security,” “dependency,” “employee,” “strategic,” and “legal” risks. Subsequently, an integrated approach using step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and best–worst method (BWM) has been employed to develop a pathway of risk assessment. As such, the current study outlines a novel approach toward cybersecurity risk management for e-tailing SMEs and discusses its effectiveness and contributions to the cyber risk management literature.     

Colonel Urwick and “organization”

This paper examines Urwick's view that confusion of two meanings of the term “organization”, due to social scientists, has diverted attention from the study of organization structure and the task oriented nature of management. It is maintained that this view is not an adequate characterization of Organization Theory. The relationship between social science and management theory is examined, and the approaches are held to be symbiotic, not, as Urwick suggests, competitive.     

Top Management's Transformational Leader Behaviors and Innovation Orientation: A Cross-Cultural Perspective in Eight Countries

This study builds upon the established relationship between top management's transformational leadership and firm-level innovation. It extends current research by determining how specific transformational-leader behaviors influence the firm's innovation orientation and how national culture moderates this relationship. The study examines these behaviors empirically in 954 firms from eight countries. Findings reveal that six transformational-leader behaviors positively influence innovation orientation but with differing levels of intensity. Only two of these relationships, “providing an appropriate model” and “accepting group goals,” are culturally independent, while the other behaviors' effects tend to be culturally dependent. For example, “providing intellectual stimulation” has a stronger effect in collectivist cultures, cultures with high power distance, and low uncertainty-avoidance cultures than in other cultures. Similar culture-dependent findings emerge for other leader behaviors.     

Public Perceptions of the Risks and Benefits of Technology1

This study attempted to verify and extend previous research on people's perceptions of the risks and benefits of technology and their judgments concerning the acceptability of technology safety regulations. The study addressed several limitations of prior work, in that: (1) it was the first “expressed-preference” study to collect data from large, representative samples of Americans; (2) the research design made “person,” rather than “technology,” the unit of statistical analysis; and (3) the study employed an expanded set of independent variables, including three qualitative benefit characteristics. The results confirmed several major conclusions of prior expressed-preference research, the most important being that members of the public tend to define “risks,”“benefits,” and “acceptability” in a complex, multidimensional manner; and that their definitions differ significantly from those used by professional risk-managers and other technical experts in quantitative assessments of risk and acceptability. The results also indicated that people's stances toward technology regulation tend to cut across traditional sociodemographic lines.     

Toward a Theory of Whistleblowing Intentions: A Benefit‐to‐Cost Differential Perspective*

In order to rescue information technology (IT) projects when they go awry, it is critical to understand the factors that affect bad news reporting. Whistleblowing theory holds promise in this regard and a number of salient factors that may influence whistleblowing intentions have been identified. However, an integrative theory that explains how they influence whistleblowing intentions has been conspicuously absent. In this research, we introduce and test a middle‐range theory of whistleblowing that can explain how and why a variety of factors may influence an individual's whistleblowing intentions. Drawing on the social information processing perspective, we propose that individuals holistically weigh the perceived “benefit‐to‐cost differential” and that this mediates the relationship between whistleblowing factors and whistleblowing intentions. Tests using data collected from 159 experienced IT project managers largely support our theoretical perspective, in which the central explanatory variable (benefit‐to‐cost differential) significantly mediates a majority of the proposed relationships. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.     

Integrated Uncertainty Analysis for Ambient Pollutant Health Risk Assessment: A Case Study of Ozone Mortality Risk

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses health risk assessment to help inform its decisions in setting national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS). EPA's standard approach is to make epidemiologically‐based risk estimates based on a single statistical model selected from the scientific literature, called the “core” model. The uncertainty presented for “core” risk estimates reflects only the statistical uncertainty associated with that one model's concentration‐response function parameter estimate(s). However, epidemiologically‐based risk estimates are also subject to “model uncertainty,” which is a lack of knowledge about which of many plausible model specifications and data sets best reflects the true relationship between health and ambient pollutant concentrations. In 2002, a National Academies of Sciences (NAS) committee recommended that model uncertainty be integrated into EPA's standard risk analysis approach. This article discusses how model uncertainty can be taken into account with an integrated uncertainty analysis (IUA) of health risk estimates. It provides an illustrative numerical example based on risk of premature death from respiratory mortality due to long‐term exposures to ambient ozone, which is a health risk considered in the 2015 ozone NAAQS decision. This example demonstrates that use of IUA to quantitatively incorporate key model uncertainties into risk estimates produces a substantially altered understanding of the potential public health gain of a NAAQS policy decision, and that IUA can also produce more helpful insights to guide that decision, such as evidence of decreasing incremental health gains from progressive tightening of a NAAQS.     

Routines Revisited: Exploring the Capabilities and Practice Perspectives

Organizational routines, repetitive patterns of interdependent organizational actions, have been investigated through the lens of capabilities, rooted in organizational economics, and the lens of practice, grounded in organization theory. The former approach emphasizes the “what” or “why,” while the latter emphasizes the “how.” In this review, we summarize both of these literatures and explore recent empirical studies in each stream, identifying common themes. In particular, we compare and contrast how each perspective incorporates the effects of individual actors, tacit knowledge, ambidexterity, and context specificity. We find that the two streams of work have distinct trajectories and strengths, but elements of each can be complementary to developing a more holistic understanding of organizational routines.     

Elusive Critical Elements of Transformative Risk Assessment Practice and Interpretation: Is Alternatives Analysis the Next Step?

This article argues that “game‐changing” approaches to risk analysis must focus on “democratizing” risk analysis in the same way that information technologies have democratized access to, and production of, knowledge. This argument is motivated by the author's reading of Goble and Bier's analysis, “Risk Assessment Can Be a Game‐Changing Information Technology—But Too Often It Isn't” (Risk Analysis, 2013; 33: 1942–1951), in which living risk assessments are shown to be “game changing” in probabilistic risk analysis. In this author's opinion, Goble and Bier's article focuses on living risk assessment's potential for transforming risk analysis from the perspective of risk professionals—yet, the game‐changing nature of information technologies has typically achieved a much broader reach. Specifically, information technologies change who has access to, and who can produce, information. From this perspective, the author argues that risk assessment is not a game‐changing technology in the same way as the printing press or the Internet because transformative information technologies reduce the cost of production of, and access to, privileged knowledge bases. The author argues that risk analysis does not reduce these costs. The author applies Goble and Bier's metaphor to the chemical risk analysis context, and in doing so proposes key features that transformative risk analysis technology should possess. The author also discusses the challenges and opportunities facing risk analysis in this context. These key features include: clarity in information structure and problem representation, economical information dissemination, increased transparency to nonspecialists, democratized manufacture and transmission of knowledge, and democratic ownership, control, and interpretation of knowledge. The chemical safety decision‐making context illustrates the impact of changing the way information is produced and accessed in the risk context. Ultimately, the author concludes that although new chemical safety regulations do transform access to risk information, they do not transform the costs of producing this information—rather, they change the bearer of these costs. The need for further risk assessment transformation continues to motivate new practical and theoretical developments in risk analysis and management.     

Philosophical speculations on systems design

Belief in the value of the scientific method as a means of implementing improvement in social systems (here called “systems design”—SD) raises important philosophical questions concerning, inter alia, the meaning of “scientific method”, of “improvement”, and of social reality. One underlying problem is that of the “self reflecting paradox”; e.g. the content and validity of the scientific method can only be discovered by the application of the scientific method. Similarly, SD has its own “social reality” through which it perceives that of its client. “Improvement” is bound up with ethics but ethics does not admit the limitation of obligation to one sub-system, therefore improvement requires the recognition of sub-system linkages. Paradoxically, again, the “improver” is himself part of the total system and bears its impress. Implementation (of improvement) meets the paradox that SD on SD is needed to judge the worth of the SD proposal. The pragmatic escape from the paradox identifies SD with a heuristic role in social progress but presupposes the possibility of progress. “Implementation” secures the possibility of such progress. The second major problem is that SD requires a social reality in which individuals have visible goals; but the “inner world” of individual goals is unknown and cannot be tracked from observable responses. In any case, Kant's moral precept requires that individuals be valued as ends rather than means. Much of SD uses them as means. Though SD is and must be practised, such philosophical speculation raises SD's self knowledge and points the neat paradox of its technical precision won at the price of its fundamental woolliness.