Sacred time: Ensuring the provision of excellent supervision

In this study, the authors explore the beliefs and attitudes regarding what constitutes “excellent supervision” from the perspectives of frontline workers and supervisors employed by one voluntary services organization in Northern Ireland. Several themes emerged from focus group narratives, regardless of participants’ agency position, and a concept map provides an understanding of the relationships of the identified themes. This study reflects the important role of organizational context and culture in relation to staff’s ability to provide excellent supervision, as well as in sustaining organizational change efforts regardless of organizational setting. The potential of peer and/or group supervision to address improving staff support with limited resources is also suggested.     

How Opportunistic Culture Affects Financial Performance in Outsourcing Relationships: A Meta-Analysis

Although a substantial body of research has analyzed the overall impact of outsourcing on firm performance measured in shareholder value, a major portion of the between-study variance remains unexplained. Asset specificity related to the outsourcing category (e.g., a business process versus information technology) alone can explain only some of the observed differences in stock market reactions. By integrating insights from transaction cost economics and outsourcing research, we first explain how expected buyer opportunism negatively affects the overall performance of the outsourcing relationship and ultimately, the buyer's own shareholder value. We further argue that this opportunism can be predicted by national culture. We test this hypothesis by applying meta-analytic techniques to compare 4216 outsourcing announcements of firms from 19 cultural backgrounds. The results reveal that an opportunistic culture, represented by a high level of assertiveness combined with a low level of institutional collectivism, is a highly statistically significant predictor of stock market reactions to outsourcing announcements. When further integrating the outsourcing category, the meta-analytic weighted least squares regression becomes a strong predictor of stock market reactions to an outsourcing announcement.     

Product diversification strategy and financial performance: meta-analytic evidence on causality and construct multidimensionality

We meta-analytically integrate empirical data from 104 studies published between 1970 and 2005 and test whether the popular proposition that diversification strategy impacts financial performance holds after controlling for the difference between correlational estimates that indicate mere association and such that allow for inferring causation. Drawing on a total sample size of 82,742 observations, we find that temporal sequence of variable measurement and multidimensionality of both diversification and performance construct strongly influence the nature of the linkage observed in empirical research. Meta-analytic results suggest that strategies of related and unrelated diversification are significantly associated with concurrent but not with subsequent accounting- and market-based performance. Most importantly, we find that there is no such thing as a universally valid nature of the diversification strategy–performance linkage. Drawing on a quantitative integration of the relevant literature of unprecedented scope and detail, our findings challenge earlier meta-analytic results and contemporary theory on the performance effects of diversification strategy. Our study also has important implications for measurement designs of future diversification–performance research.     

Innovationsverhalten in Familienunternehmen

Family businesses are publicly believed to be highly innovative and to be the “Hidden Champions” of the German industry. In recent times scholars have begun to examine this thesis and have come to starkly opposing results. On the one hand family businesses are attested to have a special ?entrepreneurial “spirit” which makes them highly innovative. On the other hand the lack of separation of ownership and control and insufficient diversification of family-investors are said to lead to less innovation activity. In this study we investigate the innovation activity of 384 German manufacturing firms differing in legal structure, size, age, industry, and—most importantly—in the degree of family ownership, family management and family control. The results of our analysis reveals differentiated results. Fundamentally, family ownership and family management are detrimental to firm innovation, at the same time family control has a positive impact on innovation activities. Our Results point to the fact that owner-managed businesses tend to innovate less due to risk aversion while a focus on controlling instead of managing a corporation by the owning family lead to an increase in innovations.