The constancy of ethics amidst the changing world of work

The dramatic changes of the past 25 years in the nature and conditions of work, including the globalization of organizations and the introduction of a strategic as opposed to employee-centered conception of HR have impacted the ways in which moral problems are manifested. But the paradigmatic forms taken by those problems, the character traits and motives needed to recognize them as such, the ethical reasoning used to address them, as well as the substance of the ethical principles on which such reasoning is based are all essentially unaffected and still pertain. Also discussed are distinctions among the variety of behaviors constituting the moral domain (incivility, intentional anti-organizational acts, and ethical failings); micro-versus macro-conceptualizations of “business ethics”; and formalistic versus principled mechanisms for promoting ethical organizational behavior. Viewed as critical is moral leadership from senior executives in creating salient ethical organizational cultures and climates.     

From Partners to Players: Extending the HR Playing Field

HR professionals must always be “becoming” or constantly changing and adapting. For the last decade, many have argued the business partner role as a complement to traditional HR administrative work. We argue in this paper that HR professionals should move beyond partners to become players. HR professionals as players are “in the game, on the field, making a difference” through their HR work. In this article, we suggest that to become players, HR professionals must learn to coach, architect, build, facilitate, lead, and provide a conscience to business leaders. Specific knowledge and tools for each of these roles are described. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

How HR measures support risk management: The Deutsche bank example

Are there concrete examples of how the “soft” HR factors can be made tangible and, what's more, meaningful to the business? In this article we give an answer to this frequently asked question. We show how Deutsche Bank's HR function consistently developed the range of employee surveying instruments to become pivotal to the Group's success. This is part of a wider effort in recent years to achieve a change of direction for the HR function, making it a strategic partner to the business. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An Examination of Proposals for a U.S. Industrial Policy

Abstract . An “industrial policy” for the U.S. appears from the writings and statements of its advocates to involve modification of federal tax laws and expenditures to allow a largely unchanged set of business institutions to better serve the public interest. It employs planning but it is planning of the sort the U.S. has always had. Those who oppose all government activity in the private sector oppose it, not realizing that the anti-trust laws, for example, do not interfere with the economy's operation but aid it to function beneficently. It is those whose activities are anti social who are loudest in their demands for business “freedom.” Does the U.S. need a more efficient economic system? Intercountry comparisons show that in many areas it lags. To achieve stability of income and employment as well as productive efficiency, the U.S. has many policy options it can consider—and it must.     

Small change,big impact? Organisational membership rules and the exit of employers' associations from multiemployer bargaining in Germany

German employers' associations first introduced a so‐called “bargaining‐free” membership (BFM) category in 1990, giving companies the option to join and access services while avoiding the obligations arising to regular members from industry‐level collective agreements with unions. To explain how this phenomenon contributes to change in the German political economy, we investigate why some associations offer their members BFM status whereas others have refused to introduce this option. Controlling for influences such as size and industry, our multivariate analysis of survey data shows that four sets of influences are positively associated with BFM: the role of courts' judicial decisions as “door openers,” structural characteristics of diverging business environments, the evaluation of multiemployer bargaining by the leadership of the association, and the strategic choices of associations.     

How Top Management HR Beliefs and Values Affect High‐Performance Work System Adoption and Implementation Effectiveness

What explains why high‐performance work systems (HPWSs) are not adopted more widely by firms that would appear to benefit economically by adopting them? We address this question by drawing on the upper‐echelons perspective to consider the role of the top managers’ beliefs concerning the financial payoffs from investments in HR (“HR cause‐effect belief”) as well as their employee‐centered value‐based beliefs (labeled “HPWS values”). We propose a conceptual model in which top management HPWS values moderate the relationship between HR cause‐effect beliefs and the intensity of HPWS programs reported by managers as well as the relationship between HPWS programs and employees’ perceptions of implemented HPWS practices. We test our model using a unique multisource data set collected from 120 hotel franchisees that includes survey responses from 648 managers and 1,293 employees. We find that firms’ ability to translate top managers’ cause‐effect beliefs about the economic value of HR investments into adoption of HPWS programs, as well as their ability to effectively implement these HPWS programs, is significantly affected by the value‐based HR beliefs held by top managers. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Ansätze und Ergebnisse anglo-amerikanischer M&A-Forschung

Based on a review of established U.S. management journals (1995–2003), six schools of thought are identified within the Anglo-American M&;A research: “Capital Market”, “Principal/Agent”, “Industrial Organization”, “Organizational Behavior”, “Human Resources” and “Strategic Management”. The literature review shows that the definition of M&;A success, the methods applied, and insights from empirical research differ according to the respective school of thought. Empirical studies focus on the resource combinations of merger partners, the specific circumstances of merger negotiations, and on integration management as antecedents of merger performance. Unfortunately, empirical findings have not yet provided reliable explanations for M&;A success. Based on the current state of Anglo-American M&;A research, the authors discuss implications for business practice, identify research gaps, and propose areas for future research.     

Japanese,German, and American Global Business Leadership

Abstract

Even though the issue of global business leadership has been intensively debated, few attempts have been made to investigate it from the perspective of international executives. This study is designed to address the issue of the national environments of Japan, Germany, and the U.S. and the prospect of global leadership for each nation. Seventy-four top Saudi Arabian firms participated. The results indicate that Japan is perceived to offer the most conducive business environment for effective global competition. In addition, participants believe that Japan and Germany will surpass the U.S. economically and technologically in the near future.     

Leading for Long‐Term Performance: Matching the Behavior to the Situation

Is there one right way to lead, or does it all “depend?” The right answer will inform the right leadership development strategy. A recent study by McKinsey & Co. using survey data collected from 165 organizations and over 365,000 respondents globally suggests that the answer is both. Two types of behavior sets emerged from organizations that enjoyed higher member perceptions of leadership effectiveness and attained higher levels of organizational health (the latter predicts long‐term financial and operational performance). We combined these into a model that prescribes a set of “baseline” behaviors that should always be evident, complemented by another set of behaviors (“situational behaviors”) that should be differentially emphasized depending on the level of organizational health. Both the content of the behavior and its relative emphasis are critical to either set. The current paper combines these into a model of organization‐wide leadership and concludes with action implications for organizations’ leadership development strategy.     

Corporate Power and Expansive U.S. Military Policy

Military defense is generally treated in economics texts as a “public good” because the benefits are presumed to be shared by all citizens. However, defense spending by the United States cannot legitimately be classified as a public good, since the primary purpose of those expenditures has been to project power in support of private business interests. Throughout the course of the 20^th century, U.S. military spending has been largely devoted to protecting the overseas assets of multinational corporations that are based in the United States or allied nations. Companies extracting oil, mineral ores, timber, and other raw materials are the primary beneficiaries. The U.S. military provides its services by supporting compliant political leaders in developing countries and by punishing or deposing regimes that threaten the interests of U.S.‐based corporations. The companies involved in this process generally have invested only a small amount of their own capital. Instead, the value of their overseas assets largely derives from the appreciation of oil and other raw materials in situ. Companies bought resource‐rich lands cheaply, as early as the 1930s or 1940s, and then waited for decades to develop them. In order to make a profit on this long‐range strategy, they formed cartels to limit global supply and relied on the U.S. military to help them maintain secure title over a period of decades. Those operations have required suppressing democratic impulses in dozens of nations. The global “sprawl” of extractive companies has been the catalyst of U.S. foreign policy for the past century. The U.S. Department of Defense provides a giant subsidy to companies operating overseas, and the cost is borne by the taxpayers of the United States, not by the corporate beneficiaries. Defining military spending as a “public good” has been a mistake with global ramifications, leading to patriotic support for imperialist behavior.     

Perceived supervisor support climate,perceived investment in employee development climate,and business‐unit performance

Perceived supervisor support (PSS) has been found to predict employee in‐role and extra‐role performance at the individual level of analysis. With respect to the unit level of analysis, the research on the predictive role of PSS remains limited. In particular, calls have been made for research on the role of leadership in facilitating perceived HR practices at the business‐unit level and on the role of line managers as implementers of such systems. In response to such calls, this study investigated the associations between PSS climate, perceived investment in employee development (PIED) climate, and business‐unit performance among 75 gas stations located in Norway. The results showed that the PSS climate was positively related to both the PIED climate and the business‐unit performance. This study contributes to research on PSS by extending the prior findings at the individual level to the unit level of analysis. Also, the study contributes to the research on perceived HR practices by demonstrating the facilitative role of the PSS climate. Finally, the study contributes to the research on shared perceptions of HR practices generally and the concept of the “strength” of the HRM system in particular. Implications for practice and future research are discussed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

“But we can't go back”

In 2004, a provincial cancer agency in Canada developed and implemented a provincewide Leadership Development Initiative (LDI) to enhance organizational leadership and relationships. Research using a quasi‐experimental survey design determined whether LDI implementation influenced the emotional health and leadership practices of LDI participants. An ethnographic approach (18 focus groups and 13 individual interviews) explored participants' perceptions of the LDI. This article presents qualitative findings that contribute to understanding the statistically significant findings of increasing levels of cynicism, emotional exhaustion, and burnout for most LDI participants. The LDI was regarded as a critical strategy for helping leaders grow and cope with change and help in changing organizational leadership culture to be more collaborative and inclusive. However, an organizational history of short‐lived, flavor‐of‐the‐month development initiatives and growing skepticism and disengagement by leaders represented in the themes of Catch‐22 and “there is no going back” contributes to understanding why these quantitative measures increased. Few studies have explored the hypothesis that real organizational development happens through a series of planned stages. In this study, leaders experienced escalating frustration because change was not seen to occur fast enough in “others” and reported that this was necessary before they would alter their own behavior. Leadership development programs in general need to reflect the reality that it takes considerable time, patience, and effort to effect fundamental change in leadership culture.     

Investor sentiment and country exchange traded funds: Does economic freedom matter?

Using unbalanced panel data of 27 iShares MSCI country-specific exchange traded funds (ETFs) over the period 1996–2014, this paper applies quantile regression to examine the impacts of global, foreign, and U.S. investor sentiments on the returns of the ETFs traded in the U.S. markets. We further investigate whether a country’s economic freedom affects the relationship between investor sentiments and ETF returns. We find that ETF returns are strongly determined by investor sentiments and the ETF expense ratio. The quantile regression approach reveals that high-return ETFs are positively sensitive to changes in global sentiment (measured by market turnover, VIX, U.S. federal funds rate), foreign sentiment (measured by current account balance, inflation, market turnover, public debt), U.S. sentiment, currency exchange ratio, and expense ratio, while negatively influenced by economic freedom and Asian proxy. The effects of VIX and foreign inflation are a reversal; that is, returns from lower (higher) quantiles have a negative (positive) relation with VIX and foreign inflation. Not all components of economic freedom affect returns equally.     

Verifying the state of financing constraints: Evidence from U.S. business credit contracts

Many policymakers are concerned that tight financing constraints for small businesses are stalling the recovery from the Great Recession. This paper empirically assesses two agency problems that induce such financing constraints—one resulting in a “firm balance sheet channel” and one resulting in a “bank balance sheet channel”. Evaluating specific models of these two agency problems against a comprehensive data set of U.S. small business credit contracts, I find strong support for the firm balance sheet channel but only weak support for the bank balance sheet channel. A complementary regression analysis confirms this result. Hence, policies seeking to improve firms’ balance sheets may be desirable to support small business lending in the recovery from the Great Recession.     

Strategic human resource management at Herman Miller

This article describes the Human Resource Management system in place at Herman Miller, Inc. (HMI). HMI's HR strategy is comprised of three primary goals: (1) building employee capabilities, (2) building employee commitment, and (3) improving the professional capabilities of the HR function itself. Key emphases of HMI's HR management infrastructure include (1) employee competency identification and development, (2) building employee participation, (3) building business literacy, (4) creating a “corporate community” through strong values and a sense of “belonging”, (5) community responsibility and environmental protection, (6) competently delivering the HR “fundamentals”, and (7) developing innovative partnerships with suppliers. Key challenges for the future include (1) change management, (2) clarifying HR's strategic role throughout the firm, and (3) attracting and retaining a diverse workforce. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The performance effects of human resource managers' and other middle managers' involvement in strategy making under different business-level strategies: the case in Hong Kong

We first developed theory arguing that HR managers' and other middle managers' involvement during strategy making would have different effects on performance for firms pursuing different business-level strategies. Then, our empirical study tested the hypotheses in the context of HR managers and middle managers in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People's Republic of China. We found that HR manager involvement during strategy making was positively related to perceptions of future business performance. The use of a differentiation strategy was also positively associated with future performance. Neither the use of a cost leadership strategy, however, nor involvement by other middle-level managers, was directly related to perceived future performance. Interestingly, pursuit of a cost leadership strategy, combined with either high HR manager involvement or high middle manager involvement, produced high business performance. Thus, we found a positive and significant interaction such that increasing levels of manager involvement in strategy and a cost leadership strategy was associated with much higher levels of performance. Lower levels of manager involvement combined with the cost leadership strategy, however, were related to much lower performance. No such interaction effect was apparent for differentiation strategies.     

Four Lessons Learned in How to Use Human Resource Analytics to Improve the Effectiveness of Leadership Development

The tools and methodologies being developed in the emerging field of human resource analytics can be used both to measure the impact of your organization's investment in leadership development and, perhaps more importantly, to improve the return on that investment. In particular, analytics can be used to move your organization beyond one‐size‐fits‐all competencies by identifying the unique leadership competencies that drive your organization's business results (sales, profits, and employee turnover). Your employee “engagement survey” is a powerful, but typically underutilized, tool for doing so. By linking it with other, disparate pieces of data (180/360 assessments, Learning Management System (LMS) records, turnover, and financial data), you create the foundation for understanding where leadership competencies explain variation (positive and negative) in your organization's business results. This, in turn, creates a strong evidence base for optimizing your leadership development strategy—and is done so using metrics and analysis, which is the language of CEOs and CFOs.     

Leadership learning: Crucial conversations,next steps,and thoughts for consideration

Forty years ago, the questions most discussed among those who cared about leadership were “is leadership possible among those who don't have titles and positions?”; “what are the characteristics possessed by effective leaders?”; and “how do we find the people who are the best leaders and help them prepare for positions that will allow them to have an impact?” After many conversations, conferences, research studies, and books, the terrain has shifted among scholars. Now the conversations focus on questions such as “If leadership is a shared responsibility among members of groups, how can the full leadership potential of all be cultivated?”; “What role do collaborators play in empowering positive leadership and defending against those who misuse it?”; and “How can organizations cultivate cultures that support and encourage visionary leadership dedicated to benefitting all?” The shift in the questions that leadership educators now explore, coupled with the breadth and variety of the initiatives dedicated to nurturing it, demonstrate that leadership can be taught. More importantly, the practice of leadership demonstrates that many can pursue leadership and that they must if the opportunities of the 21st century are to be fulfilled. The conversations and the needs for leadership have both shifted and it is now incumbent on those who value leadership most to agree to unifying perspectives that can draw us together in common purpose. From your vantage point, what are the crucial conversations, next steps, and/or thoughts for consideration as we enter the second decade of the 21st century?     

Leadership styles and gender: An extension

Leadership remains an elusive concept despite decades of research. In this paper, we attempt to deconstruct the concept by exploring the possibility of developing new measures of leadership, focusing on the attributes of “good” and “bad” leaders. Using a sample of 312 managers, we conducted factor analyses to reduce 13 “good” leadership attributes to two factors, the “visionary” and the “good,” and 13 “bad” attributes to two factors, the “inept” and the “evil.” Second, we assessed how male and female followers perceive the leadership styles of their best and worst bosses. We found that women viewed their best bosses differently from their male counterparts on several dimensions; however, there is little contrast in how bad bosses are perceived by men and women.     

The strength of human resource practices and transformational leadership: impact on organisational performance

The Human resource (HR) strength concept (Bowen, D., and Ostroff, C. 2004, ‘Understanding HRM-Firm Performance Linkages: The Role of the “Strength” of the HRM System,’ Academy of Management Review, 29, 2, 203–221) reflects the capacity of an HR system to transmit messages characterised by high distinctiveness, consistency and consensus. HR systems are therefore affecting perceptions and interpretations of organisational realities, such as climate and culture. Furthermore, Bowen and Ostroff (2004) suggest that organisational climate mediates the relationship between HR strength and performance. The leadership literature advocates that leaders are people who are able to create a social context in which employees are guided towards a shared interpretation, understanding and perception of the organisational climate (Yukl, G.A. 1989, Leadership in Organizations, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall). In summary, both HR strength and leadership are two environment dimensions shaping and moulding employees' perceptions and interpretations. The current study explores the relationships between HR strength, leadership, organisational climate and performance. 323 questionnaires were used to gather information from a company in the industrial sector. The results show a positive relationship between the variables; however, mediating effects of climate were only observed between leadership and performance.