Implicit Leadership and Followership Theories “in the wild”: Taking stock of information-processing approaches to leadership and followership in organizational settings

For over 30 years information-processing approaches to leadership and more specifically Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) research has contributed a significant body of knowledge on leadership processes in applied settings. A new line of research on Implicit Followership Theories (IFTs) has re-ignited interest in information-processing and socio-cognitive approaches to leadership and followership. In this review, we focus on organizational research on ILTs and IFTs and highlight their practical utility for the exercise of leadership and followership in applied settings. We clarify common misperceptions regarding the implicit nature of ILTs and IFTs, review both direct and indirect measures, synthesize current and ongoing research on ILTs and IFTs in organizational settings, address issues related to different levels of analysis in the context of leadership and follower schemas and, finally, propose future avenues for organizational research.     

Modeling the Audit Opinions Issued to Bankrupt Companies: A Two‐stage Empirical Analysis*

Many observers are dissatisfied with the accounting profession's ability to warn the public of upcoming bankruptcy filings. Since regulators and users tend to treat an unmodified audit opinion as a “clean bill of health,” they do not expect the business to fail in the near future. Research has shown that more often than not, auditors end up letting users down when it comes to predicting bankruptcy filings with audit opinions. Although auditors assert they are not responsible for predicting future events, it is very clear that their opinion decision is evaluated, at least in part, based on events that occur after the audit report date. The interesting and logical next step is to find out how companies exit bankruptcy. Do they liquidate or reorganize? Successful reorganization may, in the end, exonerate auditors and preserve their role as an early warning device. The opinion prediction model developed in the paper introduces a new bankruptcy resolution variable that proxies for the auditor's prognosis of the ultimate disposition of the soon‐to‐be‐bankrupt company. Using a sample of bankruptcy filings between 1982 and 1992, we find that auditors do not seem to be able to predict filings or resolution. Our tests of bankruptcy resolution support what auditors have been arguing for years: that they are not clairvoyant with respect to a client's future.     

Evaluating and Refining Expert Critiquing Systems: A Methodology*

Expert critiquing systems are a rapidly growing class of intelligent decision support systems that apply artificial intelligence techniques to criticize a user's proposed solution to a problem. Critic programs now exist in the medical, engineering, programming, knowledge acquisition, word processing, and other domains. Critic refinement is a nontrivial activity that, even when done well, consumes a sizable fraction of the complete effort to build and deploy a critiquing system. To ease that effort, it is important to adopt a rigorous approach that allows one to reproducibly measure the degree of success of the current critic version and to predict which refinements will improve the critic further. The current article presents one such approach with actual case studies that illustrate its usage and elaborate selected aspects of the refinement process.