How companies motivate entrepreneurial employees: the case of organizational spin-alongs

This paper investigates how high-profile employees with entrepreneurial abilities can be attracted, retained, and nurtured in order to foster companies’ corporate entrepreneurship through innovations. We find that the spin-along design provides entrepreneurial employees with a combination of flexibility and security (flexicurity), corporate management, and control. Based on five in-depth case studies within an innovative company, our results show that the organizational spin-along structure supports and enhances entrepreneurial employees’ motivation and leads to the attraction, nurturing, and retention of such employees. We also find that senior management has a critical leadership role in enabling such an organization design by balancing flexibility and security with control.     

Daily transformational leadership and employee job crafting: The role of promotion focus

Transformational leaders are expected to challenge their followers to take greater ownership of their work, allowing the leader to align followers with tasks that enhance their performance. In the present study, we hypothesize that transformational leadership is positively related to followers' job-crafting behaviour – proactive behaviour aimed at optimizing job demands and job resources. Moreover, we argue that followers' promotion focus (i.e. being driven by growth and development needs) positively moderates this relationship. Data were collected from 107 employees from Norwegian knowledge-based organizations (response?=?93.2%). Participants responded to a general questionnaire and five daily diary questionnaires (total N?=?535 occasions). The results of multilevel analyses revealed partial support for our hypotheses. Followers' day-level perception of their leader's transformational behaviour was positively related to followers' day-level job crafting in the form of increasing structural and social resources. Moreover, daily transformational leadership was particularly beneficial for job crafting when followers scored high (vs. low) on the trait promotion focus. We conclude that transformational leaders can encourage their followers' use of job crafting, and that employees' promotion focus facilitates this effect.     

UK Competition Policy and Shareholder Value: The Impact of Merger Inquiries

Some previous studies have suggested that competition régimes can destroy shareholder value. This study examines data on 50 mergers in the UK between 1989 and 2002. The study confirms the finding from earlier studies of greater gains to shareholders in target than bidding companies, but does not find evidence supporting overall loss of shareholder value to target company shareholders when a merger is prohibited. It finds evidence that when the regulatory régime is stable and well understood the capital market behaves efficiently in response to new information. However, for a subgroup of the mergers involving companies with a new regulatory régime, where the industry and the stock market had little or no experience with respect to mergers, the capital market operated less efficiently.     

Underwriting and Calls of Convertible Bonds*

We model convertible bond calls under asymmetric information where, unlike Harris and Raviv (1985), we consider a nonzero call price and a call notice period. In the model, the use of underwriters conveys negative information. Consequently, the stock price decline is greater for underwritten calls than for nonunderwritten calls. Furthermore, underwritten calls are made earlier and when the conversion option is less deep in the money. Underwriting commissions and the stock price decline associated with a call are negatively related to the extent that the conversion option is in the money before the call. Empirical evidence in this paper and Singh, Cowan, and Nayar (1991) are consistent with the model's predictions.     

JOINT PRODUCT COST ALLOCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF COST-PLUS PRICING DETERMINATIONS WITH NON-UNIFORM MARKUPS

Companies that use cost-based pricing sometimes manufacture products that involve joint cost allocation. A problem with this is that, while product prices are a function of the full cost, joint cost allocation methods using net realizable values depend on the product prices. This paper demonstrates that when all costs and production quantities are known or can be budgeted, it is possible to simultaneously determine unique product prices (having non-uniform markup rates) and cost allocations using the net realizable value method.