The role of interactivity in e-tailing: Creating value and increasing satisfaction

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between three dimensions of interactivity (controllability, synchronicity, and bi-directionality) and consumers’ perceived value composed of utilitarian and hedonic values on e-shopping, finally determining the level of overall satisfaction on using interactivity features in e-tailing service. A total of 451 respondents participated and the usable sample size was 427 after the screening process. The results indicate that bi-directionality is a key interactivity feature for consumers’ hedonic value creation in e-tailing service settings while synchronicity is a key for utilitarian value.     

Merit pay preferences among public sector employees

Organisations have choices about methods of pay, and employee pay adjustment preferences are an important consideration in this decision‐making process. Of particular organisational interest currently are pay systems that seek to link increases with individual performance, usually referred to as merit pay. Researchers have shown that pay adjustment systems that are incompatible with employee preferences can be costly for organisations, and have identified a range of demographic factors that predict support for merit adjustments. This article extends this line of research by investigating the impact of a performance appraisal system and a range of situational factors on the level of support for merit pay in a large public sector research organisation in Australia. The study finds that higher levels of perceived job security are associated with support for merit pay, while good promotional opportunities are associated with lower levels of support. Those who saw the outcomes of the current performance appraisal system as fair were unlikely to support merit pay.     

Executive stock options and IPO underpricing

In about one-third of US IPOs between 1996 and 2000, executives received stock options with an exercise price equal to the IPO offer price rather than a market-determined price. Among firms with such “IPO options”, 58% of top executives realize a net benefit from underpricing: the gain from the options exceeds the loss from the dilution of their pre-IPO shareholdings. If executives can influence either the IPO offer price or the timing and terms of their stock option grants, there should be a positive relation between IPO option grants and underpricing. We find no evidence of such a relation. Our results contrast sharply with the emerging literature on managerial self-dealing at shareholder expense.     

Employee voice: does union membership matter?

Industrial relations research has traditionally viewed trade unions as the primary mechanism for employee voice. With the decline in unionism in many advanced industrial economies over the past two decades, new direct non-union voice mechanisms have been introduced by employers. This focus on the mechanisms for employee voice, however, fails to take account of employees' perceptions of voice. We suggested that employee perceptions of voice vary between the different levels of an organisation and proposed that trade union membership will be more likely to enhance individual employee perceptions of voice at the wider organisational level. Contrary to our expectations, our analysis of 2,949 employees of a public sector scientific research organisation found that union membership had a significant negative impact on employee voice at the organisational level. The article concluded by offering possible explanations for this unexpected finding and the implications for theory, management and future research.     

Diversity in organizations: Where are we now and where are we going?

A great deal of research has focused on workforce diversity. Despite an increasing number of studies, few consistent conclusions have yet to be reached about the antecedents and outcomes of diversity. Likewise, research on different dimensions of diversity (e.g., age, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and culture) has mostly evolved independently. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to examine each of these dimensions of diversity to describe common themes across dimensions and to develop an integrative model of diversity.     

Coping with Ambiguity: Reconciling External Legitimacy and Organizational Implementation in Performance Measurement

This article reports the results of a study of the implementation of performance measurement in 74 UK public sector organizations. Performance measurement is often imposed on organizations by external stakeholders and those charged with implementation have to reconcile the demands of competing interests. These interests reflect the complex relations that 'street-level' public organizations engage in. The authors use institutional theory to make sense of how these relations, and the competing demands of performance measurement, are managed.     

Amenities and Fringe Benefits: Omitted Variable Bias

ABSTRACT If labor is fairly mobile, as it is in the United States, one would expect that households would move from less desirable areas toward more desirable areas until all areas are equally desirable. The way that areas become equally desirable is through the impact of movers on wages and rents (and possibly "endogenous" disamenities, such as congestion or pollution). That is, as people move to desirable areas, they will increase the demand for land (raising rents) and increase the supply of labor (lowering wages); in equilibrium, the wage and rent "compensation" for the niceness of an area reveals, in dollar terms, just how nice the area is. Blomquist, Berger, and Hoehn 1988 demonstrated the empirical importance of such amenity compensation in estimates of the "quality-of-life" in urban areas. However, those authors were unable to include fringe benefits, which are about 40 percent of explicit wage payments, in their wage compensation. This matters greatly as amenities are seen here to be even more important than previously thought and the regional implications are pronounced, with the West and Southeast looking "better" when fringe benefits are included and the East North Central and Northeast looking substantially "worse."