F?rdern aktienkursbasierte Vergütungsinstrumente langfristig orientierte Unternehmensentscheidungen? Lehren aus der Kreditkrise

The question whether stock-based management incentives encourage long-term oriented management decisions is the topic of a controversial public debate. Also, the existing academic literature provides no clear picture, mainly due to endogeneity problems. In this paper, we reexamine the issue in the context of the recent credit crises, which allows us to solve the endogeneity problem. In the empirical analysis we find that firms, which have awarded stock-based incentives to their executives prior or during the financial crises, face substantially lower cuts in investment spending. These firms also show higher levels of R&D investments during the financial crises. Overall, our results suggest that stock based long-term incentives promote long-term oriented management decisions.     

Herding stats: the quality measurement dilemma

All over the country, millions of research dollars are being spent to devise an effective way of measuring quality that could be standardized in health care, and hospitals and managed care companies are experimenting with a variety of quality tools, trying to document what they now can only perceive as improvement. Experts are divided on what works best, but all applaud and embrace the efforts. In this special report, several of them discuss their views on what works, and what doesn't work, in the exploding field of health care quality measurement.     

Keeping the "care" in managed care: the importance of the therapeutic relationship and psychosocial factors in the managed care setting

There is much truth in the adage that "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Nowhere does this seem more apparent than in health care where, amidst monumental reconfiguration, basic foundations of physician-patient relationships and attention to the impact of psychosocial factors on health and health care delivery remain as critical influences. While the importance of the therapeutic relationship and the influence of psychosocial factors in medical care has been clear in traditional systems of delivery, these factors may be even more critical in managed care systems. These emphases must be incorporated by design, however, and not left to default.     

Zeroing in on leadership effectiveness: The methodological challenges of benchmarking leadership practices

Business success in the 21st century will be based on the widespread mastery of leadership roles, rather than on the directives of a professional or leadership elite. The first step for systematically enacting a leadership development agenda for our nation is to identify the factors, values or qualities most important to leadership effectiveness. Next, we must improve our understanding of how these guiding ideas and insights translate into what successful leaders do. As we perfect this understanding, we will need to operationally define the best practices of successful leaders. These best practices must then become benchmarks for intensive leadership development efforts.This article considers nine methodological challenges of the first agenda item-identification of the factors, values or qualities most important to leadership effectiveness. To illustrate these challenges, the authors use their own business leadership research as a case study. This research surveys 127 chairmen, chief executive officers, and presidents-a cross section of successful U.S.A. business leaders, including men and women from all parts of the nation who have diverse industry, racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds. The authors identify where methodological improvements are needed to cope with the challenges of leadership research. They suggest important directions for methodological development and propose three minimum standards for future leadership research.     

The Need to Reconcile Concepts that Characterize Systems Facing Threats

Desirable system performance in the face of threats has been characterized by various management concepts. Through semistructured interviews with editors of journals in the fields of emergency response and systems management, a literature review, and professional judgment, we identified nine related and often interchangeably used system performance concepts: adaptability, agility, reliability, resilience, resistance, robustness, safety, security, and sustainability. A better understanding of these concepts will allow system planners to pursue management strategies best suited to their unique system dynamics and specific objectives of good performance. We analyze expert responses and review the linguistic definitions and mathematical framing of these concepts to understand their applications. We find a lack of consensus on their usage between interview subjects, but by using the mathematical framing to enrich the linguistic definitions, we formulate comparative visualizations and propose distinct definitions for the nine concepts. We present a conceptual framing to relate the concepts for management purposes.     

Reframing Resilience: Equitable Access to Essential Services

We urgently need to put the concept of resilience into practice if we are to prepare our communities for climate change and exacerbated natural hazards. Yet, despite the extensive discussion surrounding community resilience, operationalizing the concept remains challenging. The dominant approaches for assessing resilience focus on either evaluating community characteristics or infrastructure functionality. While both remain useful, they have several limitations to their ability to provide actionable insight. More importantly, the current conceptualizations do not consider essential services or how access is impaired by hazards. We argue that people need access to services such as food, education, health care, and cultural amenities, in addition to water, power, sanitation, and communications, to get back some semblance of normal life. Providing equitable access to these types of services and quickly restoring that access following a disruption are paramount to community resilience. We propose a new conceptualization of community resilience that is based on access to essential services. This reframing of resilience facilitates a new measure of resilience that is spatially explicit and operational. Using two illustrative examples from the impacts of Hurricanes Florence and Michael, we demonstrate how decisionmakers and planners can use this framework to visualize the effect of a hazard and quantify resilience-enhancing interventions. This “equitable access to essentials” approach to community resilience integrates with spatial planning, and will enable communities not only to “bounce back” from a disruption, but to “bound forward” and improve the resilience and quality of life for all residents.     

Turnover turned over: an expanded and positive perspective

The negative impact of turnover is well documented in the literature. This paper examines turnover with a unique, positive focus. Turnover is reviewed, not only from the standpoint of the organizational theorist, but with economic, sociological, and psychological/social psychological perspectives. Often ignored benefits of turnover are noted.     

Corporate social responsibility: an assessment of the enlightened self-interest model

Much recent discussion of corporate social responsibility has concerned operationality. Many activities subsumed under corporate social responsibility can be shown to be public or partially public goods. The theory of public goods can clarify and explain some complex problems of operationalizing the social responsibility doctrine. An examination of philanthropy provides some behavioral applications.     

Forecasting: A hybrid approach

It has recently been shown that the Box-Jenkins approach to forecasting time series is superior to an econometric approach over a relatively short horizon. The results here support this contention. A combination of the two approaches, however, proves to be clearly superior to either one separately. By taking account of changes in economic and weather related variables in a time series model, improved forecasts are obtained.