Heterogeneity and centrality of “dark personality” within teams,shared leadership,and team performance: A conceptual moderated-mediation model

Shifting from the much-studied five-factor model of personality, this paper focuses on dark personality (i.e. the “Dark Triad”: Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) to advance understanding of team composition, processes, and performance. The research responds to a call to explore dark personality's manifestation within – and impact on – teams. Specifically, this paper will examine the impact of within-team heterogeneity in dark personality on team performance, with shared leadership as mediator of this relationship. Additionally, I propose two moderators of the relationship between within-team dark triad heterogeneity and shared leadership – team network centrality of the team member scoring highest on the Dark Triad, and team mean Dark Triad score. This research aims to make a uniquely valuable contribution to scholarship on leadership within teams through bridging literatures on social network analysis, teams, leadership, and the dark triad and should have implications for team selection and performance.     

The non-relevance of the elusive holy grail of asset pricing tests: The “true” market portfolio does not alter CAPM validity conclusions

Empirical evaluations of CAPM usually attach a caveat that rejection is conditional on the choice of market proxy. We explore the criticality of the proxy choice disclaimer. Using different proxies and comprehensive simulations of the unobserved “true” market in Fama–MacBeth tests of CAPM, we find that the significance (t-statistics) corresponding to betas remain consistently unaltered, even if the proxy is a small fraction of or has a low correlation with the true market. The constancy of t-statistics persists in a simulated true-CAPM world as well: if CAPM is indeed valid, the choice of proxy is unlikely to reject it erroneously. Identity of the elusive true market portfolio and the choice of representative proxy cannot overturn conclusions on validity of CAPM based on Fama–MacBeth tests. Roll’s Critique, incontrovertible in theory, may be quite forgiving in practice – CAPM cannot be resurrected by a “closer” approximation of the elusive true market portfolio when it has commonly been rejected.     

Conditional implicit mean and the law of iterated integrals

This paper presents a new framework which generalizes the concept of conditional expectation to mean values which are implicitly defined as unique solutions to some functional equation. We call such a mean value an implicit mean. The implicit mean and its very special example, the quasi-linear mean, have been extensively applied to economics and decision theory. This paper provides a procedure of defining the conditional implicit mean and then analyzes its properties. In particular, we show that the conditional implicit mean is in general “biased” in the sense that an analogue of the law of iterated expectations does not hold and we characterize the quasi-linear mean as the only implicit mean which is “unbiased”.     

Transforming Transformers into Militainment: Interrogating the DoD‐Hollywood Complex

This article examines how the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Hollywood collaborated to manufacture the blockbuster films Transformers (T) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (TRF) to sell in global markets and to sell a positive image of DoD personnel, policy, technology, and practice to the world. T and TRF are global militainment films made by the “DoD‐Hollywood complex” to make money in markets and put the U.S. military before the world in a positive light. To show how, the article's first section defines the “DoD‐Hollywood complex,” presents a brief 20^th‐century history of its formation, and describes the current DoD institutions, policies, and practices that fuse DoD publicity agencies to Hollywood filmmakers. The second section highlights how DoD assisted T and TRF's production and contemplates why Hollywood solicited DoD support. The third section shows how T and TRF put DoD in a positive light. The conclusion addresses some of the consequences of T and TRF with regard to democratic theory. By showing T and TRF to be global militainment commodities, this article interrogates the nexus of “reel” and “real” U.S. military power and sheds light on how DoD interacts with Hollywood studios to influence how it gets screened by entertainment media and seen by global spectators.     

Network architecture, cooperation and punishment in public good experiments

Following Fehr and G?echter (Am Econ Rev 90(4):980–994, 2000), a large and growing number of experiments show that public goods can be provided at high levels when mutual monitoring and costly punishment are allowed. Nearly all experiments, however, study monitoring and punishment in a complete network where all subjects can monitor and punish each other. The architecture of social networks becomes important when subjects can only monitor and punish the other subjects to whom they are connected by the network. We study several incomplete networks and find that they give rise to their own distinctive patterns of behavior. Nevertheless, a number of simple, yet fundamental, properties in graph theory allow us to interpret the variation in the patterns of behavior that arise in the laboratory and to explain the impact of network architecture on the efficiency and dynamics of the experimental outcomes.     

Estimation and recent behavior of urban population and employment density gradients

The monocentric model of urban structure predicts that urban population density declines with distance from the central business district. Using the negative exponential function to approximate the decline, Mills (E. S. Mills, “Studies in the Structure of the Urban Economy,” Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, Md. (1972)) estimated population and employment density gradients from 1948 to 1963 for a sample of 18 SMSAs. This paper updates Mills' estimates and examines recent patterns in population and employment suburbanization. The updated series estimated here is obtained using a “corrected” version of Mills' method. The original procedure incorporated a bias which Mills noted and later corrected (E. Mills and K. Ohta, in “Asia's New Giant” (Patrick and Rosovsky, Eds.), The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. (1976)). The comparability of the series begun by Mills and extended here is not interrupted, however, because, as Mills suspected, the bias is indeed small provided SMSA data are used. On the other hand, Urbanized Area definitions of metropolitan areas cause the original and corrected versions to yield significantly different results. This finding has implications for the appropriate choice of data for urban studies.     

On nonparametric latent trait models

Some nonparametric latent trait models for dichotomous data are considered. We deal with n subjects, each answering to the same set of of k items, each item being scored dichotomously. We are interested in ordering item difficulties α₁,...α_k . In Sec. 2 it is shown that in the considered nonparametric models the ordering is identifiable. Then an order estimator is defined and its quality is described by the probabilities of correct, wrong and deferred decision. Asymptotic behaviour of these probabilities are considered for n→∞ and any k≥2. The hypothesis that the probability of wrong decision diminishes when the model is “more distant” from so called random response model, is proved for n≤3 and verified numerically for n≥3. In Sec. 4 we discuss critically some parameters of nonparametric models known in the literature as “coefficients of scalability”. In particular, for k=2 their connections with the evaluation of positive dependence are considered.     

Strategic Buying to Prevent Seller Exit

We consider a dynamic oligopoly model in which a seller may drop out of the market when demand for its product is insufficient in the first period. Buyers suffer some disutility if a seller exits the market and so their first‐period purchase decision not only depends on current period preferences and prices, but also on the potential effect that their behavior has on the probability of seller survival. Specifically, some buyers may choose to purchase from the seller with the lower survival probability even though they like the other seller's product better, a behavior that we call “strategic buying.” We analyze how the incidence of strategic buying depends on parameters and also the implications of the strategic buying motive for sellers' first‐period pricing decisions.     

Henry George and Europe

Abstract . Michael Flürscheim, an industrialist, sought in 1885 to organize in Germany a society of land reformers. Only 20 responded to his call. Soon afterwards two journalists, did respond and organized a group called the Land League. It disbanded in 1887. A. T. Stamm, who had previously tried to start an organization he called “The Society for Humanism,” then sought to form a society, “The All-Weal Union.” These efforts came to naught until Flürscheim launched in Frankfort the “German Union for Land Ownership Reform.” It gained 600 members. It was called by a government official, Wilhelm Schrameier, himself a land reformer, “a small sect.” But these educational efforts convinced officials of the imperial government and navy of the usefulness of the land value tax for ending land speculation and provided for 16 years a practical demonstration of that in a large colonial territory, Kiaochow, China.     

Determinants of capital structure choice: A structural equation modeling approach

In their seminal research on the determinants of capital structure choice using structural equation modeling (SEM), Titman and Wessels [Titman, S., & Wessels, R. (1988). The determinants of capital structure choice. Journal of Finance, 43, 1–19] obtain weak results and hence call for further investigation. We apply a Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model, with refined indicators, to a pooled sample for the period 1988–2003 and find more convincing results than those obtained by Titman and Wessels. With the capital structure measured simultaneously by the ratios of long-term debt, short-term debt, and convertible debt to the market value of equity, our results show that growth is the most important determinant of capital structure choice, followed in order by profitability, collateral value, volatility, non-debt tax shields, and uniqueness. Moreover, we find that long-term debt is the most important proxy of capital structure, followed by short-term debt, and then convertible debt.     

Exploratory data analysis as a foundation of inductive research

Across academic disciplines, scientific progress is maximized when there is a balance between deductive and inductive approaches. To promote this balance in organizational science, rigorous inductive research aimed at phenomenon detection must be further encouraged. To this end, the present article discusses the logic and methods of exploratory data analysis (EDA), the mode of analysis concerned with discovery, exploration, and empirically detecting phenomena in data. We begin by first describing the historical and conceptual background of EDA. We then discuss two issues related to EDA and its relationship to scientific credibility. First, we argue that EDA fosters a replication-based science by requiring cross-validation and by emphasizing the natural uncertainty of data patterns. Second, we clarify that EDA is distinguishable from other exploratory practices that are considered scientifically questionable (e.g., “p-hacking”, “data fishing” and “data-dredging”). In the following section of the paper, we present a final argument for EDA: that it helps maximize the value of data. To illustrate this point, we present several graphical methods for detecting data patterns and provide references to further techniques for the interested reader.     

The Male-Female Comparable Worth Debate: Alternative Economics Perspectives on an Issue That Cuts Across the Social Sciences

Abstract . Writers and speakers on the “comparable worth” or “pay equity” issue refer to “the economic view” but there is no such consensus. Three major paradigms exist in labor economics, the neoclassical, the “radical” or Marxian or Neomarxian, and the institutional Each differs in philosophical orientation, employs different analytical methods, and leads to different policy implications. On the issue of pay equity for women their views are contrasted; differences center on how successfully the market extends full options of choice. The analysis indicates that incremental advances in the direction of pay equity are to be expected, given present incentives in the private sector and less economic constraints in the public sector, provided women continue economic, legal, and political pressure. Surveying The Literature on the comparable worth or pay equity debate, one often encounters reference to the economic view. In reality however, three major paradigms exist in labor economics today; the prevailing neoclassical paradigm, the radical or Marxian view, and the institutional approach. While the three can be viewed as sharing common objectives (to describe, to predict, and to prescribe) they approach issues from different philosophical frameworks, employ different analytical tools, and lead to very different policy implications. Examining the pay equity issue from the perspectives of the three paradigms suggests different insights into the issue than that usually labelled the economic view.     

The role of organizational citizenship behaviour and rewards in strategy effectiveness

Abstract

In this paper we contribute to the strategy and OCB literature by empirically exploring how middle managers as strategic actors in product-market strategy making are enabled or constrained in the strategy process. We explore the role of organizationally targeted organizational citizenship behaviour (OCBO) as a conduit for strategy effectiveness. This is a departure from most OCB studies which concentrate on organizational effectiveness. We assess the mediating role of social and extrinsic rewards as organizational structural processes underlying the OCBO-strategy effectiveness relationship. Our results reveal that while OCBO has no direct influence on strategy effectiveness, participation as a form of social reward partially mediates the OCBO strategy effectiveness relationship. However, the negative mediation effect reveals that excessive participation reduces strategy effectiveness. In terms of extrinsic reward practices, process rewards partially and positively mediate the relationship. Focusing on OCBO our results contribute to the call for more nuanced studies into OCB relationships and performance and to the recent debate surrounding whether certain OCB behaviours are perceived as rewarded. We highlight that whilst OCBO is not in itself an important precondition for fostering effective strategy performance, organizational structural processes in the form of reward practices can foster beneficial OCBO which supports strategy effectiveness.     

Special issue on “The role of networks in entrepreneurial performance: new answers to old questions?”

The nature and extent of relationships between entrepreneurial networks and entrepreneurial performance are old questions. Scholars have explored the nature of entrepreneurial networks and have focused on their relationship with, and effects on, performance, which is viewed in this special issue in terms of the strategic development of established businesses and new ventures. However, while much is now known about the origins and effects of social networks there continues to a paucity of research on how social networks are used in various organizations, and when one or more networks are drawn upon for what specific purpose. Each article in this special issue addresses one or more of these questions in a range of industries and environments, namely poor village entrepreneurs who have to work in a highly challenging financial and social environment in Bangladesh, “early internationalizing small firms” in South Africa, high technology “early-stage ventures” in Hong Kong, 3-D technology ventures that operate with an “open” business model, and the “multi-rational” nature of networks in family businesses in and beyond the UK. In all, this collection of papers comprises a body of scholarship with fine-grained studies on how and when specific social networks are drawn on in various forms of organization. The subsequent discussion of these issues extends knowledge of the various ways in which entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial businesses advance their interests by leveraging familiar business and social networks.     

Animal spirits and unemployment: a disequilibrium analysis

The past decade has seen a number of advances in modelling disequilibrium dynamics. This paper draws on separate approaches to disequilibrium dynamics to demonstrate a Keynesian result concerning the formal relevance of “animal spirits” in production economies. Specifically, it is shown that a parameter that can be associated with the “animal spirits” of firms is crucial to the stability of full employment equilibrium in a production economy. This approach to “animal spirits” is different to that taken by recent New Keynesian DSGE-type models, but similar in spirit to “Old Keynesian” approaches, including that of the General Theory. The corollary of the main conclusion is that price flexibility is not a sufficient condition for convergence on full employment equilibrium.     

Teaching an old dog a new trick: Reserve price and unverifiable quality in repeated procurement

This paper shows that, in a repeated competitive procurement, a buyer can use the reserve price in a low-price auction as a “public”—hence nondiscriminatory—incentive device to elicit unverifiable quality. We study a model with many firms and one buyer, who is imperfectly informed on the firms' costs. When firms are ex ante identical, the provision of quality is sustained by a sufficiently high reserve price to reward firms for the quality provision and by the threat of setting a low reserve price forever, if quality is not delivered. The buyer can elicit the desired level of unverifiable quality provided her baseline valuation of the project is not too high and the net benefit from unverifiable quality is not too low. These results are robust to firms' heterogeneity in their time preferences when the punishment for a deviation is finite but sufficiently long.     

An exploratory study of stalled relationships among art museum members

• Museums must maintain a steady membership base to achieve their organizational objectives. Although many studies look at why relationships succeed, we examine members who fail to transition from an introductory relationship to a mature relationship with an art museum. In two studies examining non‐renewing members of a large metropolitan art museum, we find evidence for a phenomenon we call “stalled” relationships, whereby members discontinue their formal museum membership yet maintain a positive psychological affiliation with the museum. Our first study finds that members in stalled relationships often do not view themselves as defectors and do not blame the museum for their non‐renewal; they frequently cite personal reasons rather than service failures for discontinuing their membership. Our second study examines this phenomenon in greater detail, exploring the antecedents for stalling and finds that motivations for initiating their membership may help predict when a relationship is likely to stall.

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inefficiency and complementarity in sharing games

A sharing game is a very simple device for partially reconciling an organization’s goal with the interests of its members. Each member chooses an action, bears its cost, and receives a share of the revenue which the members’ actions generate. A (pure-strategy) equilibrium of the game may be inefficient: surplus (revenue minus the sum of costs) may be less than maximal. In a previous paper, we found that for a wide class of reward functions, no one squanders at an inefficient equilibrium (spends more than at an efficient profile) if the revenue function has a complementarity property. In the present paper, we examine the “opposite” of the complementarity property (Substitutes) and we study a class of finite games where squandering equilibria indeed occur if Substitutes holds strongly enough. Squandering equilibria play a key role when one traces the effect of technological improvement on a sharing game’s surplus shortfall. We then turn to the question of choice among reward functions in a principal/agents setting. We find that if we again assume complementarity then strong conclusions can be reached about the reward functions preferred by “society”, by the players (agents), and by the principal.     

The Ratatouille paradox. An inductive study of creativity in haute cuisine

Organization literature has extensively explored the crucial role of creativity in enabling organizations to survive in fast-paced environments. However, there are still substantial misunderstandings about the way in which creative processes unfold. In most studies, creativity has been analyzed using a compositional sequential model. Building on interpretive inductive research, conducted in the empirical field of Italian haute cuisine, this study develops a framework for the following creative processes, emerging within the field: improvisation, experimentation, trial-and-error, and imagination. The main difference between these processes is the relationship between four aggregate dimensions: process triggers, planning, the unfolding of creative phases, and trialing. This new framework offers a more comprehensive understanding of creativity as it is enacted, shedding light on its real potential in contemporary organizations.C: In every dish, Chef Gusteau always has something unexpected. I will show you. I memorized all his recipes.L: Always do something unexpected.C: No. Follow the recipe.L: But you just said that…C: No, no, no. It was his job to be unexpected. It is our job to… Follow the recipe. (“Ratatouille,” min. 43, Pixar, 2007)C: What are you doing? You are supposed to be preparing the Gusteau recipe.L: This is the recipe.C: The recipe does not call for white truffle oil! What else have you…? You are improvising? This is no time to experiment. The customers are waiting! (“Ratatouille,” min. 48, Pixar, 2007)