The hidden face of mobbing behavior Survey application of the Cisneros inventory in a maquila facility in Mexico

The importance of this paper lies on the identification of the components of mobbing behavior at the maquila industry. Although the mobbing factor has been widely studied, studies made in the outsourcing industry in Mexico are scarce. The aim of this research was to diagnose the degree of mobbing that the surveyed employees showed as well as individual differences among the employees that suffered this problem. This paper applied the Cisneros inventory. The authors tested the original 43 item version with data collected from a sample of 150 direct employees working at a maquila production center for Radars and GPS Instruments in Ensenada, Baja California. Even though results show low levels of mobbing since only 8% of the surveyed employees experienced high degree of the harassment, 138 of the surveyed employees have suffered at least one of the mobbing behaviors from coworkers in the last six months. Correlations showed high significance between the variables of the model.     

Does emotional intelligence matter to academic work performance? Evidence from business faculties in Australia

Using data collected through survey questionnaire across 15 universities, we examine the effect of emotional intelligence on academic work performance (in research, teaching and service) in Australian business faculties. We find academics’ ability to use emotion enhances performance across research, teaching and service, while ability to regulate emotion enhances performance for teaching and service only. We also find support for a process‐based model of emotional intelligence in which appraisal of emotion is a necessary antecedent to emotion’s use and regulation. The results have implications for management in appointment decisions and professional development programmes in business/accounting faculties.     

Sovereign credit ratings: Discovering unorthodox factors and variables

The presence of different rating agencies and nuanced viewpoints on the determinants of sovereign credit ratings has led to convoluted and contested narratives; hence a need to arrive at common ground on both the significant and prioritised factors important in sovereign rating assessments. Furthermore, much research has focused on a regression analysis of variables which were determined as important to sovereign ratings on an a priori theoretical basis, while excluding a factor analysis which integrates variables within a multifaceted framework. This paper argues that the variables used in existing research are subject to a priori theoretical selection rather than being selected empirically. There has also been an insufficient utilisation of rating agencies' methodology papers in assisting with the selection of variables, and a lack of analysis of the rating agencies' application of factors. Hence, this paper unearths both new factors and variables relevant to assessing sovereign ratings. The findings suggest that there needs to be a broadened understanding of indicators used to analyse and assign sovereign ratings, and a prioritisation of analysed aspects following the inclusion of unorthodox factors and variables.     

Emotional Intelligence in Undergraduate Accounting Students: Preliminary Assessment

Abstract

There is a growing recognition among researchers and practitioners that the workplace is not the strictly cognitively-managed environment it was once assumed to be. Emotions play a large role in organizational life, and emotional intelligence (the ability to recognize, use and manage emotions) has become a skill that may allow accountants to perform better in a variety of areas such as leadership, client relations, and perhaps even decision-making. In addition, it is a skill that employers seem to value and that may be important to personal development as well. Thus, accounting education must attempt to inculcate emotional intelligence in its graduates in addition to technical knowledge. This paper investigates the level of emotional intelligence of accounting students using the MSCEIT, an instrument that measures ability rather than acquired competencies. The results show that the level of emotional intelligence of the students in the sample could be a concern. There is no evidence that one term of traditional accounting education can be expected to provide an opportunity for improvement. Thus, attempts to increase the emotional intelligence of the students may require targeted educational interventions.     

The Main Determinants of the Use of the Cost Accounting System in Portuguese Local Government

Abstract: This paper explores the main determinants of the use of the cost accounting system (CAS) in Portuguese local government (PLG). Regression analysis is used to study the fit of a model of accounting changes in PLG, focused on cost accounting systems oriented to activities and outputs. Based on survey data gathered from PLG, we have found that the use of information in decision‐making and external reporting is still a mirage. We obtain evidence about the influence of the internal organizational context (especially the lack of support and difficulties in the CAS implementation) in the use for internal purposes, while the institutional environment (like external pressures to implement the CAS) appears to be more deterministic of the external use. Results strengthen the function of external reporting to legitimate the organization's activities to external stakeholders. On the other hand, some control variables (like political competition, usefulness and experience) also evidence some explanatory power in the model. Some mixed results were found that appeal to further research in the future. Our empirical results contribute to understand the importance of interconnecting the contingency and institutional approaches to gain a clear picture of cost accounting changes in the public sector.     

The Business Model in Integrated Reporting: Evaluating Concept and Application

A key feature of the International Integrated Reporting Council's (IIRC) agenda to improve corporate reporting is to encourage companies to use Integrated Reports to disclose their underlying business models. However, extant research suggests that the IIRC's distinctive business model concept is not well understood. This paper aims to unpack and critically evaluate the core features of the IIRC's business model concept. To unpack the IIRC's business model, the paper conducts a structured comparative analysis of the IIRC's model against eight influential alternatives in prior business model research. The paper then evaluates the extent to which Integrated Reporting's distinctive business model is: (1) internally coherent and consistent; and, (2) consistent with the IIRC's broader reporting objectives. The paper identifies tensions in both these areas. Since the IIRC's business model is central to its agenda to improve corporate reporting, these tensions are relevant to both Integrated Reporting research and broader discussions about whether, or how, disclosing business models advances mainstream reporting frameworks.     

Building the emotional intelligence of groups

The management world knows by now that to be effective in the workplace, an individual needs high emotional intelligence. What isn't so well understood is that teams need it, too. Citing such companies as IDEO, Hewlett-Packard, and the Hay Group, the authors show that high emotional intelligence is at the heart of effective teams. These teams behave in ways that build relationships both inside and outside the team and that strengthen their ability to face challenges. High group emotional intelligence may seem like a simple matter of putting a group of emotionally intelligent individuals together. It's not. For a team to have high EI, it needs to create norms that establish mutual trust among members, a sense of group identity, and a sense of group efficacy. These three conditions are essential to a team's effectiveness because they are the foundation of true cooperation and collaboration. Group EI isn't a question of dealing with a necessary evil--catching emotions as they bubble up and promptly suppressing them. It's about bringing emotions deliberately to the surface and understanding how they affect the team's work. Group emotional intelligence is about exploring, embracing, and ultimately relying on the emotions that are at the core of teams.     

Factors that affect consumers' cross-buying intention: A model for financial services

Cross-buying behaviour in retail banking is receiving increasing research attention. Most studies on relationship development however revolve around relationship depth and length, while there has been hardly any work on the factors that affect relationship breadth. This research proposes and subsequently tests through structural equation modelling a model of factors that affect customers' intention of cross-buying retail financial services. The study yielded rich research results. Most notably, it demonstrated the centrality of image and trust in the formation of cross-buying intention and also showed that customers' cross-buying intention is formed by a combination of interrelationships among the four variables in the model, which should all act simultaneously.     

Regression-Based Tests of the Market Pricing of Accounting Numbers: The Mishkin Test and Ordinary Least Squares

The test developed in Mishkin [1983] (hereafter, MT) is widely used to test the rational pricing of accounting numbers. However, contrary to the perception in the accounting literature, the exclusion of variables from the MT's forecasting and pricing equations leads to an omitted variables problem that affects inferences about the rational pricing of accounting variables. Only if the omitted variables are rationally priced is their exclusion irrelevant. Failure to recognize this issue leads accounting researchers to employ the MT without appreciating how omitted variables affect the inferences they draw. We demonstrate that when additional explanatory variables are included in the MT, the rational pricing of accruals is not rejected. That is, the accrual anomaly documented in Sloan [1996] vanishes when additional explanatory variables are incorporated into the MT. We also show that in accounting research settings, where samples are large, ordinary least squares (OLS) is equivalent to the MT. As a result, accounting researchers should consider using OLS or be more explicit about the exact advantages of the MT over OLS in their research setting.     

Positioning of emotional intelligence skills within the overall skillset of practice-based accountants: employer and graduate requirements

This paper presents evidence of employer and graduate attitudes on the skill set requirements for professional accountants, and whether university accounting programs develop these skills, and in particular emotional intelligence (EI) skills. We use priority indices and strategic mapping to evaluate the positioning of 31 skills. This analysis suggests that university accounting programs could consider increasing the emphasis placed on particular EI and non-emotional intelligence (non-EI) skills while other skills could be de-emphasised. While non-EI skills were ranked higher than EI skills, some non-EI skills are considered well developed in graduates and others are viewed as important but not well developed. While employers expect correspondence between the skills seen as important in the workplace and their expected development in university, there was also reverse correspondence in that employers do not expect universities to develop skills considered less important in the workplace.     

Deriving the arbitrage pricing theory when the number of factors is unknown

This paper examines the use of proxies (or reference variables) for the true factors in the arbitrage pricing theory (APT). It generalizes other authors' existing work and shows that, when there are more reference variables than the true factors, the APT still holds. The possibility of fewer reference variables than the true factors is also considered, but the APT is not shown to hold, in the same sense, for this case. This work builds on an earlier paper by Ingersoll (Ingersoll J 1984 J. Finance 39 1021-39), and our propositions can be thought of as specializations of his theorems. Similar to Nawalkha (Nawalkha S 1997 J. Financial Economics 46 357-81), our work does not use the mathematics of Hilbert and Banach spaces and, thus, is open to a much wider audience. The practical implication of our results is that model builders should be generous with the number of factors they use, as excessively parsimonious models suffer from inaccuracy.     

Forging relationships with services: The antecedents that have an impact on behavioural outcomes in the life insurance industry

The extent to which service quality is linked to satisfaction, value and behavioural outcomes continues to be debated in the literature. This research investigated two models involving the linkages between service quality, satisfaction, perceived value, repurchase intention and willingness to recommend to others. The life insurance industry was chosen as the industry for investigation since it is virtually a pure service with little tangibility and high credence properties. Data were collected in Singapore in response to concerns about broadening understanding of these variables cross-culturally. Results of path analysis indicate that service quality has an indirect relationship with behavioural outcome measures via satisfaction and value. The study found that satisfaction was positively associated with customers' re-purchase intentions but its relationship with customers' willingness to recommend to others was relatively weak. This finding has important marketing implications as word-of-mouth has previously been found to have significant influence on customers' purchase decisions.     

Job offers of multi-national accounting firms: the effects of emotional intelligence,extra-curricular activities,and academic performance

This study investigates the effects of academic performance, extracurricular activities (ECA) and emotional intelligence (EI) of potential accounting-major graduates on the outcomes of their respective interviewing activities and the number of final job offers given by the multinational Big 5 public accounting firms. The following outcomes are identified: (a) the number of initial job interviews is affected by both a graduate's academic performance and level of participation in ECA; (b) the number of subsequent job interviews is affected by both the number of initial job interviews as well as the level of a graduate's EI; (c) the number of final job offers is affected by the graduate's level of EI and both the number of initial and subsequent job interviews. The results indicate the relevance of EI in the job search process and will also be useful for accounting educators to plan their curricula more effectively to enhance the job placement of their graduates with the Big 5 firms.     

Exploring the relationship between strategic performance measurement systems and managers' creativity: the mediating role of psychological empowerment and organisational learning

This study explores whether strategic performance measurement systems (SPMSs) are linked to managers' creativity through two mediating variables—organisational learning and psychological empowerment. Using data collected from 92 senior production managers in Australian manufacturing organisations, the study tests these links using a partial least squares structural model. The results from the structural model indicate that SPMSs are indirectly related to the managers' creativity through organisational learning and psychological empowerment. The study also finds that organisational learning is both directly related to creativity, and indirectly related to psychological empowerment. Further, the potential implications for empirical research are discussed.     

Impact of financial investment on confidence in a happy future retirement

The study examines the impact of financial investment on the individual's confidence in a happy future retirement using data from 735 respondents in the Bank Consortium Holding Limited (BCT) Public Opinion Survey on Retirement Happiness in 2017. The result shows that holding the investment portfolio with savings and risky assets positively and significantly correlates with the individual's confidence in a happy future retirement life. This relationship is more pronounced for those with a positive attitude toward life, better financial literacy, and voluntary contribution to the retirement account. The result is robust after using the propensity score matching (PSM) approach, placebo test, alternative regression model, and the independent variables and control for additional variables. Further analysis shows that the positive relationship between holding the investment portfolio and the individual's confidence in a happy future retirement life is not driven by individuals' income, assets, and location. This paper provides empirical evidence to guide citizens' investments and improve the pension system to cope with the aging population in Hong Kong.     

Mining the emotional information in the audio of earnings conference calls : A deep learning approach for sentiment analysis of securities analysts' follow-up behavior

In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to extract emotional information from the audio of earnings conference calls and empirically examine the influences of these emotional variables on securities analysts' follow-up behavior. Our findings suggest that, in the statement section, positive emotional information tended to positively influence the analysts' willingness to issue rating reports, while the inverse was true for negative emotional information; non-negative emotional information in the question section had a positive influence, while negative emotional information in the response section had a negative influence. Secondly, for the specific rating of the issued reports, negative emotional information in the response section tended to result in a lower rating, and neutral emotional information might also have caused a lower rating. Thirdly, in terms of rating adjustments, non-negative emotional information in the question section tended to cause an upgrade revision, while the inverse was true for the negative emotional information in this section. Positive emotional information in the response section also caused an upgrade revision. The approach we proposed provides new insight for understanding analysts' follow-up behavior and offers practical implications for analysts, management, investors, and regulators.     

The Winner's Curse Model of Underpricing: A Critical Assessment

The underpricing of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) on equity markets is a well documented phenomenon that has received both theoretical and empirical inquiry. The model which has received most attention in recent years is Rock's (1986) Winner's Curse model. The paper critically evaluates this model and shows that it rests on a number of conflicting assumptions and a form of analysis which is in contradiction with its core hypothesis, and, furthermore, produces propositions that are largely untestable. Thus, any existing empirical support for the model is open to doubt. The paper concludes that further exploration of the underpricing phenomenon is warranted.     

Stock market performance and manufacturing capability of the fifth long-cycle industries

Nearly 80 years ago Russian economist, Kondratieff, introduced the theory of economic long-cycles. Since from the start, this theory has faced controversial acceptance; for example, in the future studies researchers have used it to develop further specific applications, but in economics some leading scientists reject the entire idea still. Although, this theory is well developed, there does not exist research from the examination of relation between stock market performance, and leading innovation cycle industries manufacturing capacity addition and utilization. Based on the system dynamics model, called world dynamics, capacity addition and utilization have earlier been identified as the leading indicators of long-cycles.Our research results in this paper indicate that capacity utilization of computer manufacturing in US, and in some cases of US semiconductors, has influence on the stock market indexes of Nasdaq, S&P500 and Dow. However, it should be noted that capacity investment changes of these three examined industries (semiconductors, computers and telecommunications) are involved in the proposed regression models too. Further analysis reveals, that we are able to build regression models for all three stock indexes, containing only two variables. Notably, these two variables are capacity addition change in semiconductors and computers. This observation further increases discussion, whether we should be interested only about capacity addition changes of innovation wave industries, and possibly give secondary importance for the utilization.     

Social intelligence and the biology of leadership

A decade ago in these pages, Goleman published his highly influential article on emotional intelligence and leadership. Now he, a cochair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, and Boyatzis, a professor at Case Western, extend Goleman's original concept using emerging research about what happens in the brain when people interact. Social intelligence, they say, is a set of interpersonal competencies, built on specific neural circuits, that inspire people to be effective. The authors describe how the brain's mirror neurons enable a person to reproduce the emotions she detects in others and, thereby, have an instant sense of shared experience. Organizational studies document this phenomenon in contexts ranging from face-to-face performance reviews to the daily personal interactions that help a leader retain prized talent. Other social neurons include spindle cells, which allow leaders to quickly choose the best way to respond to someone, and oscillators, which synchronize people's physical movements. Great leaders, the authors believe, are those whose behaviors powerfully leverage this complex system of brain interconnectedness. In a handy chart, the authors share their approach to assessing seven competencies that distinguish socially intelligent from socially unintelligent leaders. Their specific advice to leaders who need to strengthen their social circuitry: Work hard at altering your behavior. They share an example of an executive who became socially smarter by embracing a change program that comprised a 360-degree evaluation, intensive coaching by an organizational psychologist, and long-term collaboration with a mentor. The results: stronger relationships with higher-ups and subordinates, better performance of her unit, and a big promotion.     

Examining the Impact of the 1986 Tax Reform Act on Corporate Dividend Policy: A New Methodology

This article introduces a new methodology to investigate the effects of the 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA) on corporate dividend policy. The methodology employs a modified version of Rozeff's (1982) model to control for the potential effect of underlying influential variables. The empirical results show there is no widespread reaction to the 1986 TRA passage on the aggregate level of dividends and only modest support for an industry-related dividend effect. We also find that firm size does not play a significant role in dividend policy reaction to the 1986 TRA.