Leadership behavior and employee well-being: An integrated review and a future research agenda

Leadership behavior has a significant impact on employee behavior, performance and well-being. Extant theory and research on leadership behavior, however, has predominantly focused on employee performance, treating employee well-being (typically measured as job satisfaction) as a secondary outcome variable related to performance, rather than as an important outcome in and of itself. This qualitative state of the science review examines the process by which leadership behavior (i.e., change, relational, task, passive) affects employee well-being. We identify five mediator groupings (social-cognitive, motivational, affective, relational, identification), extend the criterion space for conceptualizing employee well-being (i.e., psychological: hedonic, eudaimonic, negative; and physical), examine the limited evidence for differential processes that underlie the leader behavior-employee well-being relationship and discuss theoretical and methodological problems inherent to the literature. We conclude by proposing a theoretical framework to guide a future research agenda on how, why and when leadership behavior impacts employee well-being.     

Strategien des Konfliktmanagements

Strategies of conflict management. Coaching, supervision and organisational development in comparisonHow do different kinds of professional consultants engage in conflict management and what do they concentrate on most in their consulting work? This article explores and compares the approaches of professional coaches, supervisors and organisational consultants, focussing on the central differences and commonalities of the consulting approaches that emerge from three case studies of conflict resolution. Whereas coaching, relying on the idea that conflicts in a business are best addressed by leaders and a top-down strategy, trains executives in conflict resolution, supervision and organisational consulting emphasize a participatory model that involves all the affected parties in conflict resolution. The author considers the various consequences these approaches have for those seeking help, as well as the substantive and methodological differences become evident in the course of consulting sessions.     

A Choice‐Based Dynamic Programming Approach for Setting Opaque Prices

Opaque pricing is a form of pricing where certain characteristics of the product or service are hidden from the consumer until after purchase. In essence, opaque selling transforms a differentiated good into a commodity. Opaque pricing has become popular in service pricing as it allows firms to sell their differentiated product at higher prices to regular brand loyal customers while simultaneously selling to non‐brand loyal customers at discounted prices. We use a nested logit model in combination with logistic regression and dynamic programming to illustrate how a service firm can optimally set prices on an opaque sales channel. The choice model allows the characterization of consumer trade‐offs when purchasing opaque products while the dynamic programming approach allows the characterization of the optimal pricing policy as a function of inventory and time remaining. We compare optimal prices and expected revenues when dynamic pricing is restricted to daily price changes. We provide an illustrative example using data from an opaque selling mechanism ( Hotwire.com ) and a Washington DC‐based hotel.     

Analysis of Travel Times and CO2 Emissions in Time‐Dependent Vehicle Routing

Due to the growing concern over environmental issues, regardless of whether companies are going to voluntarily incorporate green policies in practice, or will be forced to do so in the context of new legislation, change is foreseen in the future of transportation management. Assigning and scheduling vehicles to service a pre‐determined set of clients is a common distribution problem. Accounting for time‐dependent travel times between customers, we present a model that considers travel time, fuel, and CO₂ emissions costs. Specifically, we propose a framework for modeling CO₂ emissions in a time‐dependent vehicle routing context. The model is solved via a tabu search procedure. As the amount of CO₂ emissions is correlated with vehicle speed, our model considers limiting vehicle speed as part of the optimization. The emissions per kilometer as a function of speed are minimized at a unique speed. However, we show that in a time‐dependent environment this speed is sub‐optimal in terms of total emissions. This occurs if vehicles are able to avoid running into congestion periods where they incur high emissions. Clearly, considering this trade‐off in the vehicle routing problem has great practical potential. In the same line, we construct bounds on the total amount of emissions to be saved by making use of the standard VRP solutions. As fuel consumption is correlated with CO₂ emissions, we show that reducing emissions leads to reducing costs. For a number of experimental settings, we show that limiting vehicle speeds is desired from a total cost perspective. This namely stems from the trade‐off between fuel and travel time costs.     

Editorial

In this paper we want to investigate the impact of company owners on the low percentage of women on management boards and whether they are attempting to increase this percentage. After analysing whether ownership concentration influences the number of women on management boards we distinguish between different types of owners. We find that ownership concentration has no effect on the presence of women on German management boards, we show however that institutional and individual owners have a significantly positive effect. Classifying institutional owners into national and foreign owners illustrates that foreign investors are the primary driver of the positive effect within the class of institutional owners; the presence of national investors that are strongly influenced by the national banking system does not show any effect. Our analyses are based on 15,976 management board member positions from 2000 to 2007 in approximately 600 German-listed companies.     

Group decision making on water resources based on analysis of individual rankings

In problems to do with managing water resources multiple decision makers are involved, each acting in their own right and using different value systems. In the literature on management science, several procedures are proposed in order to establish a collective preference based on the aggregation of different individual preferences. However, the well-known methods that focus on a single winner have some inconveniences that should be addressed. This paper is focused on a group decision making procedure based on the analysis of individual rankings with the aim of choosing an appropriate alternative for a water resources problem. This alternative is found to be the best compromise from the points of view of all actors involved in the decision problem. The structure of the method is set out as is its application to the water resources problem. A comparison with other methods is presented and discussed.     

EXACT P‐VALUES FOR DISCRETE MODELS OBTAINED BY ESTIMATION AND MAXIMIZATION

In constructing exact tests from discrete data, one must deal with the possible dependence of the P‐value on nuisance parameter(s) ψ as well as the discreteness of the sample space. A classical but heavy‐handed approach is to maximize over ψ. We prove what has previously been understood informally, namely that maximization produces the unique and smallest possible P‐value subject to the ordering induced by the underlying test statistic and test validity. On the other hand, allowing for the worst case will be more attractive when the P‐value is less dependent on ψ. We investigate the extent to which estimating ψ under the null reduces this dependence. An approach somewhere between full maximization and estimation is partial maximization, with appropriate penalty, as introduced by Berger & Boos (1994, P values maximized over a confidence set for the nuisance parameter. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 89 , 1012–1016). It is argued that estimation followed by maximization is an attractive, but computationally more demanding, alternative to partial maximization. We illustrate the ideas on a range of low‐dimensional but important examples for which the alternative methods can be investigated completely numerically.     

On the equivalence of three estimators for dispersion effects in unreplicated two-level factorial designs

Box and Meyer [1986. Dispersion effects from fractional designs. Technometrics 28(1), 19–27] were the first to consider identifying both location and dispersion effects from unreplicated two-level fractional factorial designs. Since the publication of their paper a number of different procedures (both iterative and non-iterative) have been proposed for estimating the location and dispersion effects. An overview and a critical analysis of most of these procedures is given by Brenneman and Nair [2001. Methods for identifying dispersion effects in unreplicated factorial experiments: a critical analysis and proposed strategies. Technometrics 43(4), 388–405]. Under a linear structure for the dispersion effects, non-iterative estimation methods for the dispersion effects were proposed by Brenneman and Nair [2001. Methods for identifying dispersion effects in unreplicated factorial experiments: a critical analysis and proposed strategies. Technometrics 43(4), 388–405], Liao and Iyer [2000. Optimal 2^n-p$2^{n-p}$ fractional factorial designs for dispersion effects under a location-dispersion model. Comm. Statist. Theory Methods 29(4), 823–835] and Wiklander [1998. A comparison of two estimators of dispersion effects. Comm. Statist. Theory Methods 27(4), 905–923] (see also Wiklander and Holm [2003. Dispersion effects in unreplicated factorial designs. Appl. Stochastic. Models Bus. Ind. 19(1), 13–30]). We prove that for two-level factorial designs the proposed estimators are different representations of a single estimator. The proof uses the framework of Seely [1970a. Linear spaces and unbiased estimation. Ann. Math. Statist. 41, 1725–1734], in which quadratic estimators are expressed as inner products of symmetric matrices.