What motivates employees? A comparison of US and Chinese responses

Differences in culture, history, economy, and political and management systems may lead to differences in employee job attribute preferences across countries. To the extent that this is true, managers and designers of motivation systems must understand the preferences of local employees. This study provides information on the job attribute preferences of Chinese employees at a major international hotel in Shanghai. Employee preference data were compared to published results from other nations. The pattern of preferences in China was unique compared to Russia, Taiwan and the United States. Chinese employees felt that good wages were most important, followed by good working conditions and personal loyalty from the boss and organization. Interesting work was relatively unimportant, especially to older employees, and 'being in on things' was not at all important. Supervisors at the hotel also provided information on the preferences which they believed characterized their subordinates. Unlike US managers who often badly misperceive the preferences of their US subordinates, Chinese supervisors accurately reported their subordinates' preferences. Expatriates in the hotel were much less accurate in ranking local subordinate preferences. Implications for motivating and managing Chinese employees are discussed.     

Substitution and complementarity between managers and subordinates: Evidence from British football

We use data on British football managers and teams over the 1994-2007 period to study substitution and complementarity between leaders and subordinates. We find for the Premier League (the highest level of competition) that, other things being equal, managers who themselves played at a higher level raise the productivity of less-skilled teams by more than that of highly skilled teams. This is consistent with the hypothesis that one function of a top manager is to communicate to subordinates the skills needed to succeed, since less skilled players have more to learn. However, we also find that managers with more accumulated professional managing experience raise the productivity of talented players by more than that of less-talented players. This is consistent with the hypothesis that a further function of successful managers in high-performance workplaces is to manage the egos of elite workers. Such a function is potentially more important the more accomplished the workers are-as indicated, in our data, by teams with greater payrolls.     

Evolutionary stability of prospect theory preferences

We demonstrate that in simple 2×2 games (cumulative) prospect theory preferences can be (semi-)evolutionarily stable, in particular, a population of players with prospect theory preferences is stable against more rational players, i.e. players with a smaller degree of probability weighting. We also show that in a typical game with infinitely many strategies, the “war of attrition”, probability weighting is (semi-)evolutionarily stable. Finally, we generalize to other notions of stability. Our results may help to explain why probability weighting is generally observed in humans, although it is not optimal in usual decision problems.     

The Interpretation And Resolution Of Resource Allocation Issues In Professional Organizations: A Critical Examination Of The Professional-Manager Dichotomy*

Professional organizations have long been depicted as rife with conflict between professionals, who are assumed to represent the interests of their profession, and managers, who are assumed to represent the potentially competing interests of the organization. This study examines the validity of this assumption. Based on past research on both professional organizations and knowledge structure development, we predict that to the extent that professionals and managers conflict, they may do so because they interpret 'identical' issues differently. The results of a study of resource allocation decision preferences with 350 chief financial officers, chief medical officers, and physicians revealed strong support for our issue interpretation predictions, and virtually no support for the simple professional–manager dichotomy. Specifically, using structural equation modeling, we found that: (1) single resource allocation issues could be interpreted in multiple ways; (2) issue interpretations were strong predictors of decision preferences; (3) professionals and managers tended to interpret issues differently, although many of the differences were not consistent with past theorizing about professionals; (4) the interpretations and decision preferences of professionals who occupied management positions were like those of other professionals but different from those of managers; and (5) decision maker status (i.e., professional and/or manager) was only modestly related to decision preference. Our findings suggest that the sources and manifestations of a professional–manager dichotomy are more complex than previously reported.     

You can pick your friends,and you can pick your nodes,but you can't pick your friends' nodes: misattributions of others'

One hundred and eleven managers from international organizations in Hungary selected success factors listed on cards by importance. The expressed preferences of non-Hungarians in this node selection task differed from the preferences attributed to them by the locals; the locals felt that the non-Hungarians did not care enough about the local environment, while the non-Hungarians - by their card selection - appeared to care more than the locals did about those issues. Several candidate explanations for the discrepancy are discussed, but all are eliminated with the exception of misattribution on the part of the locals. Implications of wide-spread misattribution, both for practice and for how management scholars go about their business, are discussed.     

Testing the Wisdom of Crowds in the field: Transfermarkt valuations and international soccer results

This paper investigates the value of collective judgments which stem from settings that have not been designed explicitly to elicit the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’. In particular, I investigate information obtained from transfermarkt.de, an online platform where a crowd of registered users assess the value of professional soccer players. I show that forecasts of international soccer results based on the crowd’s valuations are more accurate than those based on standard predictors, such as the FIFA ranking and the ELO rating. When this improvement in forecasting performance is applied to betting strategies, it leads to sizable monetary gains. I further exploit information on the preferences of individual crowd members in order to investigate whether wishful thinking hampers the accuracy of crowd valuations, but fail to find evidence that such is the case.     

Managerial Objectives and the Governance of Public and Non-Profit Organizations

By investigating managerial objectives, we test the simultaneous need for both control (agency theory) and collaboration (stewardship theory) in public and non-profit governance. We construct a discrete choice experiment to elicit preferences of managers in Belgian public and non-profit nursing homes. The results confirm that boards of nursing homes may experience pressure to simultaneously control and collaborate with their managers, thereby suggesting that agency and stewardship theory can be combined into a more general internal governance framework. We conclude by providing some policy implications to improve public and non-profit governance.     

Misperceptions By Managers and Their Bosses of Each Other's Preferences Regarding the Managers’ Careers: A Case of the Blind Leading the Blind?

Peter Herriot, Carole Pemberton and Robert Pinder report on and consider the policy implications of a study of the career attitudes of managers. Managers and their bosses believed that their attitudes about the managers’ careers were similar. In fact, there was little relationship between them, and furthermore, their perceptions of each other's preferences were largely unrelated to the preferences themselves. Three factors, ‘reputation’, ‘promotion’ and ‘competences’, explained approximately half the variance. Length of service with the organisation was the main predictor of the managers’ career attitudes. Managers believed themselves to be more likely to be promoted than did their bosses, and considered promotion more probable the more frequently they had moved jobs. Peter Herriot is Director of Research and Carole Pemberton is Research Consultant at Sundridge Park Management Centre. Robert Pinder is Director of Integra Associates.     

高管薪酬管制、审计意见与审计师选择

本文从高管薪酬管制政策对审计意见的影响入手,系统检验了薪酬管制政策的有效性。研究发现国有企业在实施高管薪酬管制政策的同时,经理人可能通过降低会计信息质量规避社会监督,从而遭受了更多的"非标"审计意见,增大了企业的代理成本。进一步研究发现,国企经理人会通过选择不同质量的审计师来应对增加的代理成本。结论表明,薪酬管制政策只能在短期内和表面上缓解国企过高薪酬的代理问题,需要在实施过程中出台相应的配套措施予以辅助。     

Cognitive style: Some human resource implications for managers

Cognitive style may be defined as an individual’s inherent and consistent way of organizing and processing information. It is independent of cognitive ability and may have an important bearing on individual performance within and across organizational settings, for example in the areas of selection, vocational and occupational preferences, management competence, team composition and performance, occupational-stress training and development and organizational learning. A model is suggested in which it is argued cognitive ability, cognitive style and cognitive strategies are intervening variables between individual/organizational processes and individual/organizational performance. It is suggested that managers and others within organizations who have a responsibility for human resource issues need to consider ways in which a knowledge of style may be integrated into these important areas of activity.     

Risk preference heterogeneity in group contests

We analyze the first model of a group contest with players that are heterogeneous in their risk preferences. In our model, individuals’ preferences are represented by a utility function exhibiting a generalized form of constant absolute risk aversion, allowing us to consider any combination of risk-averse, risk-neutral, and risk-loving players. We begin by proving equilibrium existence and uniqueness under both linear and convex investment costs. Then, we explore how the sorting of a compatible set of players by their risk attitudes into competing groups affects aggregate investment. With linear costs, a balanced sorting (i.e., minimizing the variance in risk attitudes across groups) always produces an aggregate investment level that is at least as high as an unbalanced sorting (i.e., maximizing the variance in risk attitudes across groups). Under convex costs, however, identifying which sorting is optimal is more nuanced and depends on preference and cost parameters.     

An Exploration of Two Competing Perspectives on Informational Contexts in Top Management Strategic Issue Interpretation

Two disparate theoretical views of how informational contexts affect managerial sensemaking and decision making appear in organizational research. An organizational information processing perspective posits that increasing the flow of information within and between organizations will enhance environmental awareness. In contrast, behavioural decision making and social cognition research suggest that information may increase the occurrence or magnitude of overconfidence and illusions of control. These competing predictions were examined by means of an investigation of the relationship between informational contexts and top managers' strategic issue interpretation. Findings indicate that managers whose organizations have environmental information readily available to them perceive higher control over issues than managers in organizations with lower informational availability. Moreover, managers in top management teams with higher information processing capacity seem to perceive higher degrees of control and manageability, and search for less data in issue interpretation, than managers in teams with lower information processing capacity. These results offer some support for the behavioural decision making and social cognition perspective, and question the organizational information processing prediction that organizations engaging in active information processing are more aware of the environment and more likely to assess environmental developments, trends or events in a more vigilant manner.     

Private conversation matters: Evidence from sell-side analyst reports after private meetings

Using a manually collected database of Shenzhen Stock Exchange listed firms from 2013 to 2015, we examine the key characteristics of firms’ private meetings and their effects on analysts’ reports. We show that the presence of managers, a smaller number of meeting participants, and discussing questions in more categories are associated with more accurate and less optimistic short-term forecasts during the hosting periods following the meeting. Our results suggest that private and small group conversations between managers and analysts can be significant information channels in these meetings. In particular, we show that the short-term earnings forecast is more accurate and less optimistic during hosting periods after these meetings in general, but recommendations are still biased upwardly. These results are robust regardless of whether the analyst attend meetings or whether the meeting is hold onsite, providing further evidence that private conversations with managers may be a more effective information channel than observing firms’ operations during site visits.     

Experimentelle Forschung in der Budgetierung – Lügen, nichts als Lügen?

Budgeting is one of the most important instruments for planning, control and coordination in decentralized firms. Participative budgeting allows a firm’s headquarters to make use of the divisional managers’ superior information when formulating budgets, but, simultaneously, gives the managers the opportunity to benefit from their superior information and to build slack into their budgets. This paper presents experiments analyzing the behavior in participative budgeting processes and explores the question how the actors’ behavior is influenced by pure self-interest on the one hand and non-standard preferences e.g. for the well-being of others or for honesty on the other hand.     

The effects of age,experience and managers upon baseball performance

As workers age, they acquire valuable experience even while their physical abilities eventually decline. Bosses/managers have the potential to alter the complex relationships between experience and declining physical abilities for better, or for worse. We examine the performances of 39,698 Major League baseball players in the 20th century and find that: (1) hitting performance peaks at age 30, base stealing at 27, and pitching at 34; (2) except for pitching, even experienced managers usually have little influence on player performance, or that influence is negative. In general, managers and coaches play limited roles in occupations where natural ability trumps other factors.     

An exploration of the HRM values of Chinese managers working in Western multinational enterprises in China: implications for HR practice

This paper qualitatively explores the nature of human resource management (HRM) values of local Chinese managers working in Western-based multinational enterprises in China and also considers how these values are associated with preferences for HR practices. The study involves the use of repertory grid interviews with 36 local Chinese managers. The study shows that interviewees reflected a high level of assimilation and internalization of many Western HRM values. Interviewees also retained many traditional Chinese values, thus highlighting the role of institutional and cultural forces on HRM. However, among these local managers, there was clear decline in some traditional Chinese values, such as ‘harmony’ and ‘virtue’. A further interesting finding was the co-existence of paradoxical values of collectivism and individualism among the managers. Analyses of repertory grid data and interview comments also highlight that preferences for HR practices is associated with these underlying HRM values.     

Social welfare,corruption and credibility

Abstract

Economic development requires that investments by entrepreneurs are not subject to expropriation by government. Unfortunately, public agencies often serve as the instruments by which political elites engage in corruption and extracting rents from the economy. The question is how to design institutions that credibly commit to a stable system of guarantees of property rights and contract enforcement.

Principal agent theory and the new public management favor greater accountability of public managers to elected officials or eliminating public agencies through privatization. We argue for institutional designs that provide a degree of public agency autonomy. We show that public agency autonomy is a by-product of the competition between elites in democracies with multiple veto players. We show that transparency, professionalism, and legality help ensure that public managers do not engage in rent-extraction. The institutional design problem is how to induce public managers to serve the public interest without being fully responsive to elected political officials.     

一个企业经营者的激励博弈模型分析

论文把博弈论引入到激励问题的研究中,将企业所有者和经营者作为博弈的双方,通过建立在完全信息和不完全信息条件下经营者激励的静态和动态博弈模型,来研究企业所有者和经营者行为.通过博弈模型的分析,得出完全信息和不完全信息条件下企业所有者和经营者对于激励约束问题的决策和对策.     

What restrictions do Bayesian games impose on the value of information?

In a Bayesian game players play an unknown game. Before the game starts some players may receive a signal regarding the specific game actually played. Typically, information structures that determine different signals, induce different equilibrium payoffs. In two-person zero-sum games the equilibrium payoff measures the value of the particular information structure which induces it. We pose a question as to what restrictions Bayesian games impose on the value of information. We provide answers for two kinds of information structures: symmetric, where both players are equally informed, and one-sided, where only one player is informed.     

Delay,multiplicity, and non-existence of equilibrium in unanimity bargaining games

We consider a class of perfect information bargaining games with unanimity acceptance rule. The proposer and the order of responding players are determined by the state that evolves stochastically over time. The probability distribution of the state in the next period is determined jointly by the current state and the identity of the player who rejected the current proposal. This protocol encompasses a vast number of special cases studied in the literature. We show that subgame perfect equilibria in pure stationary strategies need not exist. When such equilibria do exist, they may exhibit delay. Limit equilibria as the players become infinitely patient need not be unique.