The Morality of “new” CEO Activism

Journal of Business Ethics - CEOs’ social and environmental activism attracts significant public and research interest. Positioned as an expression of personal morality, such activism is...     

‘Carrots for Corporate Sustainability’: Impacts of Incentive Inclusiveness and Variety on Environmental Performance

In this paper we explore the role that managerial incentives play in improving corporate environmental performance, finding that greater inclusiveness of incentive beneficiaries and greater variety of incentive types are important factors in firms' incentive schemes. Drawing on a large dataset of multinational enterprises, our results suggest that including more beneficiaries from different levels within the corporate hierarchy and offering both monetary and non‐monetary rewards are generally more likely to lead to reductions in corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Developing two principles of incentive design, inclusiveness and variety, and the conceptualization of patterns of these in organizations as configurations of incentives, our research contributes substantially to normative advice regarding the relative effectiveness of alternative systems of environmental incentives. Such an understanding of the potential of incentives is critical to informing how firms address complex problems such as sustainability in the context of increasingly extended organizational hierarchies and designs. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Why resilience managers aren’t resilient,and what human resource management can do about it

Abstract

Prior resilience research typically focuses on either the individual or the organisational level of analysis, emphasises resilience in relation to day-to-day stressors rather than extreme events and is empirically under-developed. In response, our study inductively theorises about the relationships between individual and organisational resilience, drawing upon a large-scale study of resilience work in UK and French organisations. Our first-hand accounts of resilience work reveal the micro-processes involved in producing resilient organisations, and highlight the challenges experienced in doing resilience work in large organisations. We show that these micro-processes have significant implications for resilience at both individual and organisational levels, and draw implications for how HRM interventions can help to promote individual, and thus organisational, resilience.     

On the propensity to issue contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds

In this paper, we analyze the determinants of CoCo bond issuance. We find evidence that banks that issue CoCos are typically large. Moreover, in the case of BRICS and other emerging economies, we find evidence that banks are also highly leveraged, aiming to meet the Basel III rules and replace debt with equity funding. Also, we study the strength of the regulatory component in the CoCo issuance through analysis of tax deductibility in the UK, countercyclical capital buffer, subsamples of global systemically important banks and Basel III implementation.     

Usability Problem Areas on Key International and Key Arab E-commerce Websites

This research aims to identify, compare, and contrast the usability of key international e-commerce websites with those in the Arab world, and to offer advice on how to remedy the usability problems on the latter to make them more competitive. Heuristic evaluations were undertaken on three international e-commerce websites and four comparable Arab e-commerce websites. Major and minor problems were identified and rated on each of the sites before being categorized into problem areas. As expected, more major and minor usability problems were identified on the Arab e-commerce websites (average of 22 and 85 per site, respectively) compared to the key international e-commerce websites (average of 12 and 55 per site, respectively). Most problems with both the international and Arab e-commerce websites were related to content and design usability areas, respectively. A variety of unique usability problems were found on the Arab e-commerce websites.     

Analysing corporate insolvency in the Gulf Cooperation Council using logistic regression and multidimensional scaling

In this paper, we examine corporate insolvency in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region between 2004 and 2011. Data comprises 28 financial ratio variables from 112 firms. We use Logit regression with best-subset selection criteria to investigate the predictive value of the ratios in the GCC context, particularly cash flow-based ratios. We also examine the main dimensions of the ratios, and the weights firms attach to them, using 3-way Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). We find that a parsimonious Logit model with the profitability ratio EBITTL, the leverage ratio TLTA and the cash flow ratios CFFOTA and CFFOCL can predict insolvency, ex-ante, with 84.8, 95.6 and 73.9 % overall, type I and II accuracy, respectively. From MDS, we uncover four financial-ratio dimensions: (i) ‘Non-strategic sales activities’, (ii) ‘Profitability and financial stability balance’, (iii) ‘Sales activities against capital conversion’; and (iv) ‘Market value against cash generation’. Insolvent firms appear very specific and attach most salience to the ‘Non-strategic sales activities’ dimension, unlike solvent firms which attach more salience to the other three dimensions. Therefore, the results imply that, to reduce susceptibility to insolvency in the GCC, managers should focus less on non-strategic sales activities.