An experimental study of centralized information in a financial organization

An experiment involving a simulated financial lending organization was used to compare subjects' decisions regarding the degree to which the organization should be informationally centralized, with that of an optimal decision rule based on a normative model. Typically, subjects overdecentralized the information structure to process small loans, and overcentralized the information structure to process large loans. Both the theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Entwicklung einer Checkliste als Einstiegsinstrument beim Konfliktcoaching

Zusammenfassung  Diese Arbeit stellt die „Checkliste für das Konfliktcoaching“ (CKC) vor. Sie wurde als Einstiegsinstrument für das Konfliktcoaching entwickelt und soll den Klienten auf die bevorstehende Beratung einstimmen und den Coach bei seinen Vorfeldanalysen unterstützen. Die erstellte Checkliste basiert auf Theorien zum Konfliktmanagement (Regnet 1992; Glasl 1997) und der Beratungsform Coaching (Looss 1997; Rauen 2000) sowie der Etablierung eines Beratungssystems (Rappe-Giesecke 1999; Schein 1987). Dagmar Fuchs, Dipl.-Psych., Trainerin, Moderatorin, Coach, Freie Mitarbeit bei Mensch & Organisation im Wandel, Leiterin des Personalservicebüros der Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe.     

ASSESSMENT OF MULTIATTRIBUTED MEASURABLE VALUE AND UTILITY FUNCTIONS VIA MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING*

A major restriction on the use of decision analysis in practice is the frequent difficulty of determining a decision maker's multiattribute utility function. The assessment process can be complex and tedious and generally involves: (1) identifying relevant independence conditions, (2) assessing conditional utility functions, (3) assessing scaling constants, and (4) checking for consistency. Some of the assessment and modeling complexities encountered include an assessor's inability to respond in a quantitatively meaningful and consistent way to hypothetical gambles and an analyst's problem in selecting an appropriate functional form that accurately characterizes the conditional utility assessments. A simplified procedure that mitigates these difficulties is proposed. This procedure facilitates the determination of scaling constants by obtaining (via mathematical programming) a multiattributed measurable value function which is converted to a multiattributed utility function. The methodology can be developed advantageously to produce an interactive software package for use as an assessment aid.     

A BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF NURSES,SUPERVISORS, AND DIAGNOSTICIANS IN A HOSPITAL SETTING

A hospital is a highly complex organization that is based on the mutual cooperation of a large and heterogeneous mix of interdependent professionals, semiprofessionals, and nonprofessionals. The present study focuses upon role clarity, need for clarity, job satisfaction, and anxiety-stress perceptions among administrators, nurses, and diagnosticians in a large and complex 450-bed teaching-referral hospital.     

The Management of Information and Managers in Subsidiaries of Multinational Corporations

A key challenge facing multinational corporations (MNCs) is how to encourage the development of firm specific advantages throughout the network of subsidiaries while maintaining global coherence. As a result, a critical task for top managers in the MNC is to structure the relationship between headquarters and subsidiaries. Thus, headquarters' control of subsidiary behaviour and performance becomes a central integrating function in the MNC. We examine first the relationship between the nationality of the MNC headquarters and its information management, namely the key performance metrics utilized by the parent to evaluate subsidiary performance. Second, we investigate the relationship between the MNC nationality and its management of managers, specifically, the transfer of parent company nationals and corporate acculturation. These questions are investigated in a study of MNC subsidiaries located in Australia, Ireland and Singapore. Our data provide strong evidence that MNCs of all nationalities place the greatest emphasis on financial metrics compared to other performance metrics. Moreover, there are differences in the degree of emphasis on performance metrics across MNC nationality. We found that Japanese and German MNCs place significantly less emphasis on financial measures than US and UK MNCs. Our hypotheses relating to the management of managers were also supported by the data. In comparison with all other MNC nationalities, Japanese MNCs place greater emphasis on the transfer of Japanese managers to overseas subsidiaries and less emphasis on corporate acculturation. While some researchers have argued that management control has become more isomorphic as a result of globalization, our results show that companies from different nationalities diverge in their practices.     

Bain: a program for Bayesian testing of order constrained hypotheses in structural equation models

This paper presents a new statistical method and accompanying software for the evaluation of order constrained hypotheses in structural equation models (SEM). The method is based on a large sample approximation of the Bayes factor using a prior with a data-based correlational structure. An efficient algorithm is written into an R package to ensure fast computation. The package, referred to as Bain, is easy to use for applied researchers. Two classical examples from the SEM literature are used to illustrate the methodology and software.