Anerkennungsgespräche — ein Instrument gesundheitsförderlicher Führung

?Appreciative experience sharing‘ within the scope of appreciation talks is designed as an health-science based instrument for managers. It is a concept for participative monitoring of the social relations at work and the working conditions between employees and managers. At the same time, the appreciation talks show themselves to be a situational-social health resource in enterprises. The exhibited concept was developed and tested, and further developed to a workshop for managers, within the scope of a qualitative study and consulting project in three public urban-transportation companies in Germany. The conception, the results of the project, the workshop concept, and first experiences with ‘appreciative experience sharing’ by managers with direct responsibility for employees are described and discussed.     

The effect of accounting standards on Big Bath behavior

This paper investigates the influence of accounting standards on systematic earnings understatement. To isolate the effect of reporting regulations from those of other institutional drivers of earnings management, Holthausen (2003) proposes analyzing reporting practices in a country undergoing a transition in accounting standards. We respond to this call by analyzing earnings management practices of large German-listed companies before and after their transitions from German GAAP to IFRS. Specifically, we focus on Big Bath behavior following Chief Financial Officer turnovers between 1999 and 2006. Our findings provide evidence of the effect of accounting standards on the existence of this particular earnings understatement pattern. However, while we detect Big Bath behavior for our sample of German GAAP firms, we find no such indication for those firms reporting under IFRS. Controlling for alternative explanations such as self-selection bias does not change our findings. We conclude that accounting standards seem to have a considerable influence on earnings management behavior, independent of managers’ and auditors’ incentives.     

Spectral Estimation of Covolatility from Noisy Observations Using Local Weights

We propose localized spectral estimators for the quadratic covariation and the spot covolatility of diffusion processes, which are observed discretely with additive observation noise. The appropriate estimation for time‐varying volatilities is based on an asymptotic equivalence of the underlying statistical model to a white‐noise model with correlation and volatility processes being constant over small time intervals. The asymptotic equivalence of the continuous‐time and discrete‐time experiments is proved by a construction with linear interpolation in one direction and local means for the other. The new estimator outperforms earlier non‐parametric methods in the literature for the considered model. We investigate its finite sample size characteristics in simulations and draw a comparison between various proposed methods.     

Evaluation of objectivity, reliability and criterion validity of the key indicator method for manual handling operations (KIM-MHO), draft 2007

Upper extremity musculoskeletal symptoms and disorders are common in the working population. The economic and social impact of such disorders is considerable. Long-time, dynamic repetitive exposure of the hand-arm system during manual handling operations (MHO) alone or in combination with static and postural effort are recognised as causes of musculoskeletal symptoms and disorders. The assessment of these manual work tasks is crucial to estimate health risks of exposed employees. For these work tasks, a new method for the assessment of the working conditions was developed and a validation study was performed. The results suggest satisfying criterion validity and moderate objectivity of the KIM-MHO draft 2007. The method was modified and evaluated again. It is planned to release a new version of KIM-MHO in spring 2012.     

‘Show me the money and the party!’ – variation in Facebook and Twitter adoption by politicians

Our study explores the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by candidates in the 2013 German Federal elections. Utilizing data from the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey fused with data gathered on the Twitter and Facebook use of candidates, we draw a clear distinction between Facebook and Twitter. We show that adoption of both channels is primarily driven by two factors: party and money. But the impact of each plays out differently for Facebook and Twitter. While the influence of money is homogenous for Facebook and Twitter with the more resources candidates have, the more likely they are to adopt, the effect is stronger for Facebook. Conversely, a party’s impact on adoption is heterogeneous across channels, a pattern we suggest is driven by the different audiences Facebook and Twitter attract. We also find candidates’ personality traits only correlate with Twitter adoption, but their impact is minimal. Our findings demonstrate that social media adoption by politicians is far from homogenous, and that there is a need to differentiate social media channels from one another when exploring motivations for their use.     

Virtuelles Selbstcoaching — Konzept und erste Erfahrungen

Combining management consultation with psychotherapy in the early nineties, coaching is a real innovation. Its success story grounds on a huge market demand. Nevertheless, actual market observations revealed a declining success progress over the past years caused by two factors. The first one refers to economic reasons since coaching is a high-budget-product and focuses mainly on managers and important specialists. The second factor is a psychological one: many potential clients associate coaching with psychotherapy and therefore react with resistance. To continue the progress, it is necessary to overcome both restrictions. The solution is virtual self-coaching as an innovative combination of coaching and e-learning. It is an online-tool that guides the user through a well-defined path of problem solving questions. This is for many users attractive because of the low costs in combination with the fact that working with an online-tool is associated with further education and not therapy. Our tests have demonstrated that the program is useful for a big variety of different problems and that best results can be expected if virtual self-coaching is combined with telephone coaching.