Attitude adjustment

How can you motivate physicians so that their decisions and behavior reflect what is best for the group practice, instead of themselves or their department? By clearly stating expectations and goals, physicians can learn that the priority must be the success of the group practice. Presented here is an example of how the Orlando Health Care Group (OHCG), a primary care medical group with 85 physicians in four specialties, addressed this challenge and the physicians' positive response to the change. To survive as a group, the OHCG had to abandon old ways of managing conflict and agree upon a list of core values around which it could evaluate all future physician behavior. The list became known as the "10 Commandments." They were meant to give every individual a sense of place and purpose within the group, knowing that the best way for an individual to prosper was to be part of a successful group.     

Were UK Culture, Sport and Recreation Charities Prepared for the 2008 Economic Downturn? An Application of Tuckman and Chang’s Measures of Financial Vulnerability

UK charities experienced rapid growth during the middle years of the first decade of the new millennium. The issue investigated in this study is whether the charities took the opportunity to strengthen their financial positions before the economic recession of 2008–2009. Having evaluated, and established the empirical robustness of, Tuckman and Chang’s measures of financial vulnerability, they are used as the basis for constructing a Charities Financial Exposure Index (CFEI). Variants of the index are applied to a panel of more than 300 large UK charities in the Culture, Sport and Recreation sector for the period 2002–2007. The findings are that by 2008 these charities were in a stronger financial position than they had been in 2002 and were therefore better prepared to face the onset of the so-called credit crunch recession.     

Bayesian Analysis of an Unobserved-Component Time Series Model of GDP With Markov-Switching and Time-Varying Growths

We propose an unobserved-component time series model of gross domestic product that includes Markov switching as an unobserved component. In addition to a trend component, the model has two time-varying drift components. One drift represents the expected rate of growth during recession; the other drift represents the expected rate during expansion. Estimates indicate a substantial decline in the latter annual rate for the United States from 6.4% in 1950 to 3.6% by 1990. We have employed weak priors based on prewar data. The estimation makes use of the Gibbs sampler and the Metropolis algorithm.     

The Mirror Effect: Corporate Social Responsibility,Corporate Social Irresponsibility and Firm Performance in Coordinated Market Economies and Liberal Market Economies

We investigate the classic management debate of agency versus institutional pressures through the application of the varieties of capitalism literature. In particular, we examine corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and their relationships with firm performance in two types of capitalist systems: coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs). We note that while the CSR literature has tended to develop a balanced view on the influence of agency and institutional pressures, the CSiR literature has tended to emphasize the influence of agency. The latter appears to be a result of the fundamental attribution bias, where irresponsible corporate behaviours are attributed to individual managers or organizations, rather than the institutional environment. Our results, which include five years of data across 16 countries, show significantly greater CSR and significantly lower CSiR in CMEs compared with LMEs. Further, we find a positive relationship between CSR and firm performance in CMEs but not LMEs, and a negative relationship between CSiR and firm performance in LMEs but not CMEs. Overall, our results demonstrate the influence of the institutional environment, suggesting that corporate behaviours mirror the external environment.