The stigma of obesity and discrimination in performance appraisal: a theoretical model

We propose a theoretical model to study the effect of obesity stigma on performance appraisal. The model draws from the appraisal, obesity, stigmatization, and prejudice literatures to examine three sets of factors: individual factors in the appraiser(s) and the obese appraisee; factors in performance appraisal; and contextual factors. According to the model, these factors make it easier or harder for obesity stigma to affect the performance appraisal of obese employees, potentially biasing the process and resulting in discrimination. While examining the interplay of forces that facilitate or inhibit the expression of obesity stigma in the affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses of appraisers, we introduce the concept of ‘aversive weightism’. This concept enhances understanding of the tensions between the ethos of objectivity in performance appraisal and the deeply rooted, often unconscious influences of societal prejudice and stigma against obesity. We conclude with implications for research and practice.     

Going Off Script: How Managers Make Sense of the Ending of Their Careers

The extant retirement literature primarily focuses on factors that influence the decision to retire and the generic retirement decision‐making process. While these approaches have extended our understanding of retirement decision‐making, we propose a sensemaking perspective that orients our attention towards the subjective meanings people attach to the factors that trigger the retirement decision, rather than simply the factors themselves. Accordingly, we see the retirement decision‐making process as bounded by situational constraints and rooted in identity work. Based on interviews with 48 retired Canadian executives and managers, we use thematic narrative analysis to identify six types of end‐of‐career narratives. Drawing on these narratives, we present a model of identity work that distinguishes between retirement decision‐making factors that are perceived as identity opportunities and those that are perceived as identity threats. Our findings contribute to scholarly understanding of subjective meanings and identity considerations in the process of ending one's career.     

Exploring the factors associated with employees' perceived appraisal accuracy: a study of Chinese state-owned enterprises

Western employment practices have increasingly been used in emerging markets, but little is known about the factors influencing non-Western employees' views regarding Western employment practices. This paper presents a study that investigates the factors associated with Chinese employees' perceived appraisal accuracy. Based on the extant literature, the study tests six aspects of a performance appraisal (PA) system: employees' perceptions of distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, administrative purpose, developmental purpose and the use of multiple raters. A mixed methods approach was used to collect the data; quantitative data collected from a survey were used to test the hypothesized relationships and qualitative data collected from interviews were used to help explain the underlying logic behind the relationships. The results of the hypotheses testing show that employees' perceived accuracy of PA is positively associated with the three types of justice and the two purposes of PA. The findings from the interviews indicate that employees' perceptions of appraisal accuracy are influenced by certain Chinese cultural characteristics and management traditions. The implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed.     

Accuracy and effectiveness in appraisal outcomes: the influence of self‐efficacy,personal factors and organisational variables

Two studies tested relationships of personal factors and organisational context variables with rating accuracy and perceived effectiveness of appraisals, and the role of self‐efficacy as a mediator of the relationships between the two sets of variables. Study 1 was a controlled experiment in which nurse supervisors appraised a video stimulus of a nurse's performance. Study 2 was a field study in which nurses and their supervisors each independently completed an assessment of their annual appraisal review, following the meeting. A ten‐item scale for performance appraiser self‐efficacy (PASE) was developed and tested for measurement properties on a large sample of nurses that included those who participated in either Study 1 or Study 2. The PASE scale was found to have high reliability and reasonable predictive validity. PASE predicted rating accuracy, appraiser and appraisee perceptions of effectiveness, and appraiser‐appraisee agreement on the effectiveness of an actual appraisal, after controlling for the effects of personal factors and organisational context. The main contextual influences were accountability, importance and management concern but the effects varied for self‐efficacy and different appraisal outcomes. The main predictor of self‐efficacy was the amount of training received by appraisers across the multiple sub‐tasks of appraisal.     

Doing well by doing right: a fundraiser's guide to ethical decision‐making

• The level of trust a prospective donor has in a charity will, in part, determine whether the individual chooses to support the charity as well as the amount of that support. A key factor involved in trust is an organization's ethical standards. Donors prefer to make donations to organizations that maintain the highest principles. If an organization can consistently make the best possible, most ethical decisions, it will be recognized as being an ethical institution, which in turn will enhance the trust it engenders, and, therefore, the support it can attract. A number of ethical decision‐making models exist. Adopting a decision‐making model will ensure that a methodical approach is used and that the incidents of rash decision‐making will be reduced. Using an ethical decision‐making model will help individuals arrive consistently at the best solutions to ethical dilemmas, defend those decisions, enhance public trust, secure more donors, and raise more money. The value of sound decision‐making and effective ethical decision‐making models are reviewed in this paper.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Too Good to be True: Board Structural Independence as a Moderator of CEO Pay‐for‐Firm‐Performance

Whether voluntary or mandatory in nature, most recent corporate governance codes of best practice assume that board structural independence, and the application by boards of outcome‐based incentive plans, are important boundary conditions for the enforcement of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay‐for‐firm‐performance; that is, for optimal contracting between owners and executive agents. We test this logic on a large Australian sample using a system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach to dynamic panel data estimation. We find that Australian boards exhibiting best practice structural arrangements – those chaired by non‐executives and dominated by non‐executive directors at the full board and compensation committee levels – are no more adept at enforcing CEO pay‐for‐firm‐performance than are executive‐dominated boards. These findings suggest that policy makers' faith in incentive plans and the moderating influence of structural independence per se may be misplaced. Our findings also hold significant implications for corporate governance theory. Specifically, the findings lend further support to a contingency‐based understanding of board composition, reward choice and monitoring; an approach integrating the insights afforded by behavioural approaches to Agency Theory and by social‐cognitive and institutional understandings of director outlook, decision‐making and behaviour.     

Marriage Market,Parents’ Bargaining Powers,and Children's Nutrition and Education*

Test of resource pooling and test of effect of sex ratio in the marriage market on intrahousehold resource allocation are combined to test the unitary household model. The consistency condition between the two tests is derived to test the Nash household bargaining and Pareto‐efficient household models. I examine intrahousehold resource allocation to children's nutrition and education in Indonesia. For children's nutrition, the unitary household model is rejected in favour of the non‐unitary models. The results for investment in education are mixed. The decision‐making process may differ depending on the type of decision being made.     

The Effects of Personality Composition and Decision‐making Processes on Change Preferences of Self‐managing Teams

Team decision‐making on organizational and strategic changes is pervasive. Yet, little is known about determinants of teams' change preferences. We analyze how composition with respect to personality traits associated with (pro‐)active behavior (locus of control and type‐A/B behavior) influences self‐managing teams' preferences for the likelihood and magnitude of changes, and whether participative decision‐making and team monitoring as core features of group decision‐making counteract or reinforce change tendencies. Results from a business simulation with 42 teams largely support predictions. Stronger type‐A orientation increases the likelihood of (drastic) changes. Teams dominated by internal locus of control members are highly responsive to performance feedback in their change preferences. Participative decision‐making encourages, whereas team monitoring restricts tendencies towards extreme magnitudes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can usefulness of performance appraisal interviews change organizational justice perceptions? A 4-year longitudinal study among public sector employees

This large-scale longitudinal study examined the hypothesis that the experienced usefulness of performance appraisal interviews affects justice perceptions and that changes in work life contribute to this effect. Our findings from 6592 employees who were nested in 1291 work groups over a 4-year period and who at baseline had not applied for a performance appraisal interview support this prediction. Specifically, the results of multilevel regression analyses showed that interviews that were experienced as useful improved justice perceptions significantly. In contrast, when the interviews were experienced as unhelpful, the impact on justice perceptions was negative. Furthermore, during negative changes in work life, useful interviews were especially important in helping prevent the deterioration of justice perceptions. The implications for organizational justice and the usefulness of the performance appraisal are discussed.     

An exploratory study of stewardship for Chinese nonprofit organizations

This study examined how Chinese nonprofits practice stewardship and how stewardship principles influence nonprofit–donor relationships and donor retention. Fifteen qualitative in‐depth interviews were conducted with experienced fundraisers in China. Results showed that Kelly's stewardship principles were applicable in China; Chinese fundraisers practiced stewardship principles of reciprocity, responsibility, reporting, and relationship nurturing to maintain relationships with major gift and annual donors. Besides, practitioners also utilized a variety of communication channels, ranging from face‐to‐face, telephones, emails, to digital shared media such as WeChat and Weibo, in communicating with individual and general public donors. Finally, interviewees also provided evidence on the positive role of quality nonprofit–donor relationships in retaining donors. This study illustrated the current status of nonprofit fundraising practice in China and expanded the explanatory power of the stewardship theory. The findings are implicative for Chinese nonprofits professionals on how to develop their unique stewardship practice in managing relationships with donors.     

Cognitive Biases and Strategic Decision Processes: An Integrative Perspective

Previous studies have not adequately addressed the role of cognitive biases in strategic decision processes. In this article we suggest that cognitive biases are systematically associated with strategic decision processes. Different decision processes tend to accentuate particular types of cognitive bias. We develop an integrative framework to explore the presence of four basic types of cognitive bias under five different modes of decision making. The cognitive biases include prior hypotheses and focusing on limited targets, exposure to limited alternatives, insensitivity to outcome probabilities and illusion of manageability. The five modes of strategic decision making are rational, avoidance, logical incrementalist, political and garbage can. We suggest a number of key propositions to facilitate empirical testing of the various contingent relationships implicit in the framework. Lastly, we discuss the implications of this framework for research and managerial practice.     

Is Perceived Creativity‐Reward Contingency Good for Creativity? The Role of Challenge and Threat Appraisals

To address the complex effect of perceived reward for creativity on creative performance, we examined the role of cognitive appraisal as an individual difference variable. An individual's appraisal of reward for creativity, including challenge appraisal (perceived potential for recognition, growth, or mastery) and threat appraisal (perceived potential for revealing incompetence and damaging self‐respect), is hypothesized to shape the effects of perceived reward for creativity. We further expect creativity‐related intrinsic motivation to play a mediating role in the perceived reward‐creativity relationship. The results of a three‐wave field study showed that when challenge appraisal was high, perceived reward was positively related to creative performance through creativity‐related intrinsic motivation, whereas when threat appraisal was high, perceived reward was negatively related to creative performance through creativity‐related intrinsic motivation. A similar analysis showed that intrinsic task motivation was not able to channel the moderating effect of perceived reward and individual appraisal on creative performance. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Overconfidence and Disappointment in Decision‐making under Risk: The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Overconfidence in economic decision‐making is a well‐established phenomenon; however, assessment of its scale and impact are largely absent from the literature. This paper uses Bell's disappointment metric to quantify its impact on individual decision‐makers in a risky investment setting. We are able to quantify the sensitivity of disappointment to overconfidence. We examine disappointment in both deterministic and stochastic models, finding that in the most likely cases, individual investors experience lower disappointment when variance is higher. We are also able to quantify and compare calibration‐based overconfidence and better‐than‐average overconfidence. Contrary to prior research, we find that their magnitudes are the same. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Managers and Strategies Matter? A Study In Crisis*

Highly interactive, tightly coupled, high-risk technological systems have introduced the potential for catastrophic events. Although many people consider crises and disasters to be inevitable, our results suggest that firms that are better able to avoid crisis events have top-management teams with a higher level of functional team heterogeneity, higher education levels, shorter organizational tenures, and more tenure heterogeneity. These characteristics serve as proxies for deeper underlying cognitive processes such as more complex thinking, quality decision making, dialectical inquiry, and multiple perspectives in solving potential catastrophic problems. These cognitive and social processes appear to be successful in addressing interactive complexity in high-risk technologies, and may be associated with fewer faulty assumptions about firms' vulnerability to crises. In addition, firms whose top managers' time and energy is devoted to managing acquisition and divestment activities are more likely to experience crisis events. Highly diversified firms emphasizing financial and bureaucratic controls appear to develop threat-rigidities, a lack of firm specific knowledge, and decreased information processing capabilities making them increasingly vulnerable to systemic crisis events.     

Experimental Study of Firm Bounded Rationality and the Pattern of Trade

This paper describes an experiment and simulation with features of a spatially explicit trading environment. Decision makers repeatedly make decisions about firm headquarters, input demands, and export patterns. A goal of this research is to determine if subjects’ management decisions reflect profit maximization, learning, or heuristic decision making. It also considers what impact decision makers’ bounded rationality has on the aggregate pattern of trade. Results indicate that bounded rationality in the form of learning and heuristic decision making are ubiquitous features of subjects’ decisions. This manifests as under‐reaction to trade‐driver stimuli and produces Trefler's missing trade, suggesting a behavioral basis for this anomaly.     

Choosing a school: the impact of social class on the primary school decision‐making process

One of the objectives of recent government educational reform is greater emphasis on parental choice of school. In consequence, schools are increasingly exposed to competition and in order to maintain pupil numbers will have to become more responsive to their customers. This study, drawing from semi‐structured interviews, examines the process of parental choice of primary school. There is a consensus among parents as to the importance of the decision being taken and regarding the influential evaluative criteria. However, during the early stages of the decision‐making process there are variations between different groups of parents, in particular first time choosers and those with a child already at school, but most especially between different socio‐economic groups. Implications for the primary schools' marketing strategy are considered. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Individual job‐choice decisions and the impact of job attributes and recruitment practices: A longitudinal field study

The present research is intended to contribute to the understanding of how job‐choice decisions are made and the role of effective and ineffective recruiting practices in that process. The issues are examined by tracking job seekers through the job search and choice process. At multiple points in the process, structured interviews are used to elicit information from the job seekers pertaining to how they are making their decision and what factors play a role. Results provide theoretical and practical insights into the organizational and job attributes important to job choice, as well as how specific recruiting practices may exert a significant influence, positive or negative, on job‐choice decisions. For example, our findings reinforced the importance of providing job seekers the opportunity to meet with multiple (and high‐level) organizational constituents, impressive site‐visit arrangements, and frequent and prompt follow‐up. Also, imposing a deadline (i.e., “exploding offer”) showed little effect on job‐choice decisions. Recommendations for recruitment practice and continued research are provided. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Context Variables as Cognitive Effort Modulators in Decision Making Using an Alternative-Based Processing Strategy

This paper examines how a number of decision context variables affect the cognitive effort required for decision making on dichotomical choice tasks. Subjects are trained in the use of a strategy in which information processing is alternative-based. The correlation between the attributes of the alternatives and the mean and variance of the difference between the attributes is manipulated. The results show that the effort needed for decision making increases as the mean of the differences decreases. Yet, neither the variance of the differences nor the correlation context affect the decision making effort in this type of strategies.     

Performance appraisal and culture: practice and attitudes in Hong Kong and Great Britain

This article compares the practice of and attitudes towards performance appraisal for managerial and professional staff in Hong Kong and Britain, and considers the extent to which actual practice and employee preferences are in alignment. Findings suggest that appraisal may be more widespread in Hong Kong than in Britain. However, British appraisal tends to be more participative and to place greater emphasis on discussing objectives, development and career plans. Hong Kong appraisals appear to be more directive and Hong Kong respondents perceive a higher level of 'negative' appraiser behaviour. In spite of this, Hong Kong respondents show if anything slightly more confidence in the utility of appraisal than do British respondents. They show stronger support for appraisal's use for reward and punishment and less support for the objectives-setting and training and development uses than do the British sample. Hong Kong respondents are more likely than their British counterparts to favour involving a more senior manager in appraisal, and they are less likely to prefer more frequent appraisals. There was little evidence that Hong Kong respondents had a stronger preference for group-based appraisal criteria, although they did show more support than the British sample for the use of personality as a basis for appraisal. Overall, the suggestion is that appraisal has been adopted in Hong Kong organizations but that the practice of appraisal has been adapted to suit the cultural characteristics of the society.