Exploring job crafting: Diagnosing and responding to the ways employees adjust their jobs

Recent research has developed an in-depth understanding of how workers change their jobs on their own to improve their performance and well-being, a process called job crafting. This research suggests that managers, coworkers, and organizations need a better understanding of how to manage job crafting to capitalize on its benefits and reduce costs. This article will help organizations diagnose the occurrence of job crafting, recognize the differences between goal-oriented approaches to job crafting as opposed to withdrawal-oriented avoidance job crafting, and identify the seven specific types of job crafting: work role expansion, social expansion, work role reduction, work organization, adoption, metacognition, and withdrawal. We conclude with recommendations for managers, coworkers, and organizations on how to diagnose and manage job crafting.     

Does ethics improve stock market resilience in times of instability?

This paper compares the resilience of ethical (Islamic and socially responsible) indexes among five developed (US, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia) and three emerging markets (Brazil, India, South Africa) during the period following the 2008 subprime crisis. It relies on a multivariate CAPM-EGARCH model that accounts for sudden changes in volatility through the application of an iterated cumulative sums of squares (ICSS) algorithm on daily data over the sample period 2008–2014 to model time-varying volatility and ensure reliable estimates. The study confirms the lower systemic risk associated with Islamic indexes during the bearish period and reports that SRI, despite being more subject to systemic risk, offered higher alphas in highly integrated markets, while Islamic indexes performed better in less integrated ones. The evidence also reveals a very limited increase in the models’ predictability power from the integration of sudden changes in volatility into the EGARCH models during the full sample period. This limit is more marked during the bearish sub-period. Our findings have important implications for international investment and portfolio diversification perspectives in times of financial downturn.     

Resource Dependence and Network Relations: A Test of Venture Capital Investment Termination in China

This study examines how venture capital (VC) firms terminate investments in an emerging economy context. We contend that due to the weak institutional environment, it is appropriate to draw on insights from power and social relation perspectives for a better understanding of the phenomenon. Specifically, we argue that a termination decision hinges on not only the dependence relationship between a VC firm and its portfolio companies, but also the social relationships among VC firms. Event history analyses of approximately 12,000 VC deals made in China between 2001 and 2012 reveal that when a VC firm has a greater number of investments in an industry, it is more likely to terminate investments on a portfolio company in that industry. Moreover, such effect on termination is moderated by the focal VC's embeddedness with its syndicate partners and collaboration opportunities with other VC firms outside the immediate access of the syndicate partners. Our study sheds light on research on VC decision making in emerging markets by integrating insights from resource dependence relationships and interorganizational network characteristics.     

Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: An Empirical Revisit of West German Consumers' Attitudes Toward Products and Brands from Former East Germany

More than 25 years after the German reunification, data show that products/brands from the eastern regions of Germany (“Neue Länder”) still do not have significant shares in the country's western part (“Alte Länder”). To analyze potential reasons for this phenomenon, our current study replicates a previous study that investigated selected attitudes of Alte Länder consumers toward products/brands from the Neue Länder. It is shown that factors such as consumer ethnocentrism, product judgment, willingness to buy, and economic animosity continue to influence consumer behavior and as such our study offers potential explanation for the failure of Neue Länder products/brands in the western regions of Germany.     

Crisis leadership in economic recession: A three-barrier approach to offset external constraints

An economic recession is a type of crisis originated from external factors that may imperil an organization’s survival depending on the intensity and duration of the crisis. In peripheral European countries, such as Portugal, the recent financial crisis had devastating effects on various business activities. As a result, Portugal represents an important case study in examining how some corporate leaders have handled the economic recession successfully. I interviewed 20 corporate managers to capture their perceptions of the leadership traits and behaviors exhibited by their CEOs in guiding their companies through the recession. In economic recessions, negative constraints do not affect the most effective leaders, who instead erect barriers against the high-pressure conditions to create a supportive, positive work environment. In order to achieve maximum effectiveness, leaders must act as blocking agents against the negative social impacts of the economic crisis, including the fragility of trust in organizational life (i.e., a barrier against distrust), uncertainty of the future (i.e., a barrier against uncertainty), and toxic emotions (i.e., a barrier against toxic emotions).     

Consequences of Customer Dissatisfaction in Upscale and Budget Hotels: Focusing on Dissatisfied Customers’ Attitude Toward a Hotel

It is important to understand customer dissatisfaction in order to maintain a sustainable business, given that the negative effects of customer dissatisfaction in service businesses may be even greater than the positive effects of satisfaction. This study investigates customer dissatisfaction and its consequences by focusing on the mediating role of attitude toward a hotel according to different hotel classes related to customer expectation level. The results show a mediating role for attitude in the relationship between customer dissatisfaction and specific negative behavioral intentions. This study broadens our knowledge of customer dissatisfaction and the role of attitude toward a hotel in the relevant literature. The empirical findings demonstrate that regardless of hotel type, customer dissatisfaction significantly affects their attitude and their consequent negative behavioral intention.     

基于水权交易和面源污染控制的农户灌溉施肥行为模型

将水权交易和面源污染控制有机结合,以种植面积、农业用水定额、污染物浓度为约束条件,运用边际分析方法建立农户灌溉施肥行为模型,分析水权交易和排污控制对农户行为的影响。结果表明:灌溉用水量与农作物价格成正相关,与交易水价和边际灌溉成本成负相关;一定范围内肥料施用量与农作物价格成正相关,与边际施肥成本或边际环境成本成负相关。模型证明,当农业用水定额内水权可交易时,水市场的存在和水价政策将激励农户减少灌水量,节约用水。     

Institutional herding and its price impact: Evidence from the corporate bond market

We examine the extent to which institutional investors herd in the U.S. corporate bond market and the price impact of their herding behavior. We find that the level of institutional herding in corporate bonds is substantially higher than what is documented for equities, and that sell herding is much stronger and more persistent than buy herding. The price impact of herding is also highly asymmetric. While buy herding facilitates price discovery, sell herding causes transitory yet large price distortions. Such price destabilizing effect of sell herding is particularly pronounced for speculative-grade, small, and illiquid bonds, and during the financial crisis.     

货币政策、企业家信心与上市公司投资效率*

企业、企业家等微观主体对货币政策的反应，在较大程度上影响货币政策的效果。货币政策可通过对企业家信心的影响，进而对公司投资效率产生作用。基于中国2007—2016年40个季度A股上市公司样本的实证研究表明：企业家信心在货币政策传导过程中有不可忽视的作用。企业家信心增强或者货币政策宽松时会加剧过度投资，减轻投资不足；企业家信心减弱或者货币政策紧缩时可以有效抑制过度投资，但会加剧投资不足。其中，国有企业对企业家信心和货币政策松紧的敏感性更强。进一步，货币政策对企业投资效率的影响，也会通过货币政策和企业家信心的交互作用而发挥作用。这种作用在国有企业和非国有企业之间无显著差异。     

Varieties of paternalism and the heterogeneity of utility structures

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business.