The role of character in ethical leadership research

The study of character is a legitimate and essential topic for the analysis of leadership in organizations. We undertake three key objectives in this article to stimulate meaningful dialogue. First, a brief historical overview of the extant body of literature on character is provided. Second, working definitions of character and character-based leadership are introduced. Third, new directions for organizational scholars interested in examining the role of character-based leadership in both their research and teaching domains are suggested.     

Is Stakeholder Corporate Governance Appropriate in Russia?

Journal of Management and Governance - Alternative forms of disciplining the actionsof senior enterprise managers can becharacterized as shareholder or stakeholdergovernance. This paper analyzes...     

An Empirical Test of the Relative Validity of Expert and Lay Judgments of Risk

This article investigates how accurately experts (underwriters) and lay persons (university students) judge the risks posed by life-threatening events Only one prior study (Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 1985) has previously investigated the veracity of expert versus lay judgments of the magnitude of risk. In that study, a heterogeneous grouping of 15 experts was found to judge, using marginal estimations, a variety of risks as closer to the true annual frequencies of death than convenience samples of the lay population. In this study, we use a larger, homogenous sample of experts performing an ecologically valid task. We also ask our respondents to assess frequencies and relative frequencies directly, rather than ask for a "risk" estimate--a response mode subject to possible qualitative attributions-as was done in the Slovic et al. study. Although we find that the experts outperformed lay persons on a number of measures, the differences are small, and both groups showed similar global biases in terms of: (1) overestimating the likelihood of dying from a condition (marginal probability) and of dying from a condition given that it happens to you (conditional probability), and (2) underestimating the ratios of marginal and conditional likelihoods between pairs of potentially lethal events. In spite of these scaling problems, both groups showed quite good performance in ordering the lethal events in terms of marginal and conditional likelihoods. We discuss the nature of expertise using a framework developed by Bolger and Wright (1994), and consider whether the commonsense assumption of the superiority of expert risk assessors in making magnitude judgments of risk is, in fact, sensible.     

CONVERGENCE AND PREDICTION OF PRINCIPAL COMPONENT SCORES IN HIGH-DIMENSIONAL SETTINGS

A number of settings arise in which it is of interest to predict Principal Component (PC) scores for new observations using data from an initial sample. In this paper, we demonstrate that naive approaches to PC score prediction can be substantially biased towards 0 in the analysis of large matrices. This phenomenon is largely related to known inconsistency results for sample eigenvalues and eigenvectors as both dimensions of the matrix increase. For the spiked eigenvalue model for random matrices, we expand the generality of these results, and propose bias-adjusted PC score prediction. In addition, we compute the asymptotic correlation coefficient between PC scores from sample and population eigenvectors. Simulation and real data examples from the genetics literature show the improved bias and numerical properties of our estimators.     

The Next Generation of Collective Action Research

The articles presented in this volume describe part of a new generation of interest and vigor in the social psychological study of collective action. This new wave builds nicely on the foundation set by social identity, self-categorization, and relative deprivation theories but also introduces a number of important innovative perspectives and variables. In this commentary, I review some of these expansions and additions, raise a number of conceptual concerns that arise out of these new directions, and discuss more generally some novel and important directions that emerge from the work presented in the volume and in other recent work on collective action.     

Was there a “golden past” for the introductory sociology textbook? A citation analysis of leading journals

Much debate over the years has centered around whether there was ever a “golden past” for the introductory sociology textbook, when high quality books influenced the development of scholarship and thinking. Some empirical evidence is added to this debate through an analysis of the citations to introductory sociology textbooks in all the articles and research notes appearing in theAmerican Journal of Sociology, theAmerican Sociological Review, andSocial Forces from 1960 to 1969 and from 1984 to 1993. The data show that, although seldom cited in recent journals, introductory sociology textbooks were often cited in the earlier period. The article concludes with some thoughts about why introductory sociology textbooks have had a declining influence on scholarship.     

What shapes plant and animal diversity on urban golf courses?

Recent concern over increasing loss of biodiversity has prompted considerable interest in the role of urban green spaces as reservoirs of local biodiversity. This study assessed the diversity of three indicator taxa - plants, ants and birds - on golf courses spanning a wide range of environmental variation in terms of climate, elevation, course age, size and connectivity to native woodland. Species richness and community composition was further compared between contrasting on-course habitat types that reflect different management intensities. We identified a set of taxon-specific environmental correlates indicating an intricate interplay of landscape- and local-scale variables that affect local species diversity. Our results show that floristic diversity is positively associated with the amount of rainfall, whereas ant and bird diversity are related to local-scale factors, particularly the number of trees and the size of water features on a site. The amount of on-course native habitat was a strong predictor of plant and ant diversity and was also associated with the number of unique species at the site level; this reinforces the value of remnant habitat patches as local biodiversity reservoirs that represent mini hot-spots in an otherwise species-poor urban landscape. Community composition for all three taxa differed markedly between non-playing and playing areas, with boundary and remnant habitats generally having more diverse, species-rich communities. Our results suggest that local floral and faunal biodiversity on urban golf courses can be enhanced by creating woody non-playing areas and, especially, by preserving, restoring or expanding remnant habitats.