Determinants of the Performance of Investment Promotion Agencies: Evidence from a Mix of Emerging Economies

This article argues whether and how investment promotion agencies (IPAs) efficiently influence investment promotion in the cases of the following selected variables: resources (experience, total staff, and overseas staff), service functions (combined promotion service of inward investment and trade, and inward and outward investment), and organizational structure (autonomous status of private/upper ministry-level IPAs). The results reveal a positive relationship between IPA’s performance and longer experience, larger staff, larger overseas IPA staff members, autonomous private agency types, and upper ministry-level IPAs. However, an IPA’s performance was negatively associated with the combined promotional service of inward investment and trade, and inward and outward investment. The results suggest that an IPA’s performance can be enhanced by adjusting the service functions and restructuring the governance and structure in addition to improving the IPA’s resources and the country’s investment climate.     

The effect of a tax training program on tax compliance and business outcomes of starting entrepreneurs: Evidence from a field experiment

This paper estimates the long-term impact of a short, partly personalized, mandatory tax training program on tax compliance and business outcomes of first-time entrepreneurs. To this end, we combine survey data, audit data and unique register data from the Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration with a three year long randomized experiment. The results show that the training affects specific domains of tax compliant behavior. Moreover, it has no impact on business survival, but treated entrepreneurs have significantly higher profits compared to the control group due to lower business costs. These outcomes are partially supportive of our hypotheses developed from theories on tax compliance and mental accounting.     

Higher Intensity,Higher Profit? Empirical Evidence from Dairy Farming in New Zealand

Over the last two decades there have been significant and well‐documented changes in the nature and structure of New Zealand dairy production. One particular feature has been a marked shift in the ‘input intensity’ of dairy farming systems through increased use of supplementary feed. These changes have generated debate about the impact of dairy farm intensity on the performance of farm businesses and the competitiveness of the New Zealand dairy sector. Using a novel econometric approach, we assess statistically the impact of three types of dairy farming systems on milk production and financial performance, using farm business data provided by DairyBase^®. Our empirical results show that higher input systems perform significantly better physically than lower input systems, but not financially. The disaggregated analysis suggests that the average treatment effects differ by region and performance quantiles.     

Innovation and performance in the hotel industry

The growing competition in the hotel industry is one of the main challenges of this segment, which increasingly depends on the ability to innovate. Thus, this article aims to analyze the impact of innovation on the performance of employees and hotel organizations. This is an exploratory study, with a quantitative approach using a structured computer-administered questionnaire to 73 managers of hotel chains, located in Brazil, which correspond to 792 hotels. Data analysis used multiple linear regression method with SPSS software to find out the relationship between the factors of innovation (communication, processes, leadership, and strategy) and the performance of employees and hotel organizations. Results show that the factors of communication, leadership, and strategy directly influence the performance of the employees. However, only the leadership factor directly affects the performance of hotel organizations.     

In the city: The John Lewis partnership and planned shopping centres

A defining feature of large-scale retailing during the period 1950–1980 was the emergence and evolution of planned shopping centres. During the 1950s, department stores in the United States were in the vanguard of this phenomenon. In contrast, British department stores continued operating from traditional high street sites, and had limited opportunities for expansion within planned shopping centres until the 1970s. This paper addresses the connection between department store retailing and the development of the planned shopping centre in Britain from the perspective of one enterprise: the John Lewis Partnership. The article demonstrates that the Partnership was willing to operate department stores within centrally located shopping centres, but was circumspect about operating stores in non-centrally located shopping centres.     

The effect of mandatory CSR disclosure on firm profitability and social externalities: Evidence from China

We examine how mandatory disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) impacts firm performance and social externalities. Our analysis exploits China's 2008 mandate requiring firms to disclose CSR activities, using a difference-in-differences design. Although the mandate does not require firms to spend on CSR, we find that mandatory CSR reporting firms experience a decrease in profitability subsequent to the mandate. In addition, the cities most impacted by the disclosure mandate experience a decrease in their industrial wastewater and SO₂ emission levels. These findings suggest that mandatory CSR disclosure alters firm behavior and generates positive externalities at the expense of shareholders.     

Service innovation in the hotel industry: culture,behavior, performance

The aim of this study is to focus on the service innovation culture (SIC) in the formation of frontline employees’ (FLE) innovation performance based on two fit theories. More specifically, the research evaluates and examines the mediating role of challenge-oriented citizenship behavior (COCB) and charged behavior in the aforementioned relationship. To test the hypotheses, two-step structural equation modeling with bootstrapping estimation was conducted in AMOS, using data from 215 full-time frontline hotel employees over a one-month time period. This study establishes that the development of a SIC is positively related to the innovation performance of FLE. Likewise, the results indicate that there is a partially mediating role for the COCB and expanded charged behavior (encompassing vitality and creative self-efficacy) of FLE in the relationship between SIC and innovation performance. The findings of this study highlight the need for managers to incorporate a secure and trusting work environment so FLE will eagerly participate in the service innovation process by voicing their novel ideas. Managers can also consider the significance of the employee selection procedures and take advantage of employing university graduate for frontline service jobs.     

The problem of employees' network centrality and supervisors' error in performance appraisal: A multilevel theory

This article reveals an unexplored paradox for HR managers: the centrality of an employee in the social network benefits performance but hampers performance appraisal because it affects supervisors' rating errors. Central employees can be erroneously rated high on performance even when they are not high performers because supervisors tend to overappraise their performance. A distinction is made between rating precision, which depends on supervisors' uncertainty regarding employees' performance, and rating accuracy, which depends on supervisors' bias in favor of employees. Employee centrality is posited to be beneficial to precision but deleterious to accuracy because it regulates the diffusion of positive information, status, and power, all of which distort supervisors' capacity and motivation to accurately appraise performance. It is then argued that rating errors caused by network centrality affect aggregate perceptions of justice in organizations. When employees are highly connected to each other in a dense network, organizations have a strong and positive justice climate. Yet when some employees are more central than others in a centralized network, organizations have a negative and weak justice climate. The article contributes to the literature because it identifies an unexplored dark side of network centrality and offers recommendations for HR managers to cope with its deleterious consequences and for scholars to study them.     

Performance management 40 years on: a review. Some key decisions and consequences

This paper reviews the past four decades of experience of performance management (PM). Beginning with a brief history of its international spread and development, a short section on conceptual issues is followed by a strategic analysis of the research thus far. From this analysis is extracted a set of key decisions which must be made for any PM system. Each decision has significant consequences, and none are purely technical (though they may occasionally be represented as such). In many cases difficult trade-offs are inevitable.     

Hotel performance: Rigor and relevant research topics

Academic research (rigor) in alignment with practitioners’ challenges (relevancy) has been advocated as a way of overcoming the ivory tower syndrome. Performance measurement is at the heart of strategic management processes, as it provides a mechanism of demonstrating outcomes. Given the importance of this topic for both theory and practice, this article explores the contribution of academic outputs in terms of academic research outputs (rigor) and current practitioners’ needs (relevancy).Using network analysis and cross-citation bibliometric approaches, a sample of 1155 articles is examined and fourteen clusters are identified. The emergent topics and subtopics from the academic literature are compared to ten insights proposed by Ernst Young to the hotel sector. The findings suggest a good fit between the two approaches together with some gaps. Based from empirical results, nine propositions are articulated.