Effect of perceived conflict among multiple performance goals and goal difficulty on task performance

Contemporary performance measurement systems, such as the balanced scorecard, often advocate the use of an array of financial and non‐financial measures. Despite many claimed advantages for these systems, recent research shows that the inclusion of multiple performance measures sometimes has undesirable effects. The present study examines one of the potential problems of implementing these systems; namely, the impact of perceived goal conflict on task performance. Using survey data from employees working in multiple call centres in a telecommunication company, we find that perceived goal difficulty increases perceived goal conflict. Additionally, perceived goal difficulty also has a negative, indirect effect of task performance, through the mediating role of perceived goal conflict. Our results have important implications for both the research literature and the designers of performance measurement systems.     

Stockholder returns and international acquisitions of financial firms: An emphasis on banking

The wealth effects for shareholders of American financial firms involved in foreign acquisitions and also the wealth effects for shareholders of U.S. target firms acquired by foreign concerns are the topics of this study. The findings indicate that stockholders of U.S. bidding financial firms (and its subset of banks) earn neither abnormal gains nor suffer abnormal losses upon the announcement of an acquisition or regulatory approval. On the other hand, stockholders of U.S. target financial firms (and its subset of banks) earn significant abnormal profits at both the announcement of the proposed acquisition and the announcement of regulatory approval of the acquisition. The wealth effects for these two samples are also compared to samples in which both parties to the acquisition are U.S. firms. The research suggests that there is no significant difference in the size of the announcement gains or losses for either stockholders of the target or bidding firms based on whether the acquisition is foreign or domestic. These findings conflict with prior research which indicates that, for firms in general, stockholders of U.S. targets earn significantly greater wealth benefits when they are acquired by foreign firms than by domestic firms. Overall, these results are consistent with a competitive market for acquisitions of financial firms in which buyers do not earn or lose at the announcement of an acquisition, and in which abnormal gains are received only by the sellers.     

Exploring household financial strain dynamics

Rising energy and food prices are causing living standards to fall across Europe and straining household budgets. The longer-term outlook for households is unclear as the dynamics of financial strain are not well understood. We address four important research questions on financial strain dynamics by applying a dynamic random coefficients probit model with duration and occurrence dependence to De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) Household Survey panel data. We find no evidence that households become habituated or sensitised to financial strain over time unlike in studies of responses to stress. Entry into household financial strain is less likely when the household can cope by increasing earnings from work or by borrowing from family and friends but not by the economically inactive entering employment. Our third result is that the persistence of financial strain can be explained by a mutually-enforcing negative cycle through worse health but not through marital conflict or more short-sighted and risk averse decision-making. Finally, we find that neither income or wealth shocks affect financial strain in contrast to other studies. Further research into understanding the experience of financial hardship is warranted in the light of the economic challenges caused by the current cost of living crisis.     

Managing hybrid marketing systems

As competition increases and costs become critical, companies that once went to market only one way are adding new channels and using new methods - creating hybrid marketing systems. These hybrid marketing systems hold the promise of greater coverage and reduced costs. But they are also hard to manage; they inevitably raise questions of conflict and control: conflict because marketing units compete for customers; control because new indirect channels are less subject to management authority. Hard as they are to manage, however, hybrid marketing systems promise to become the dominant design, replacing the "purebred" channel strategy in all kinds of businesses. The trick to managing the hybrid is to analyze tasks and channels within and across a marketing system. A map - the hybrid grid - can help managers make sense of their hybrid system. What the chart reveals is that channels are not the basic building blocks of a marketing system; marketing tasks are. The hybrid grid forces managers to consider various combinations of channels and tasks that will optimize both cost and coverage. Managing conflict is also an important element of a successful hybrid system. Managers should first acknowledge the inevitability of conflict. Then they should move to bound it by creating guidelines that spell out which customers to serve through which methods. Finally, a marketing and sales productivity (MSP) system, consisting of a central marketing database, can act as the central nervous system of a hybrid marketing system, helping managers create customized channels and service for specific customer segments.     

Want collaboration? Accept--and actively manage--conflict

Companies try all kinds of ways to improve collaboration among different parts of the organization: cross-unit incentive systems, organizational restructuring, teamwork training. While these initiatives produce occasional success stories, most have only limited impact in dismantling organizational silos and fostering collaboration. The problem? Most companies focus on the symptoms ("Sales and delivery do not work together as closely as they should") rather than on the root cause of failures in cooperation: conflict. The fact is, you can't improve collaboration until you've addressed the issue of conflict. The authors offer six strategies for effectively managing conflict: Devise and implement a common method for resolving conflict. Provide people with criteria for making trade-offs. Use the escalation of conflict as an opportunity for coaching. Establish and enforce a requirement of joint escalation. Ensure that managers resolve escalated conflicts directly with their counterparts. Make the process for escalated conflict-resolution transparent. The first three strategies focus on the point of conflict; the second three focus on escalation of conflict up the management chain. Together they constitute a framework for effectively managing discord, one that integrates conflict resolution into day-to-day decision-making processes, thereby removing a barrier to cross-organizational collaboration.     

Home country bias: Does domestic experience help investors enter foreign markets?

This paper investigates the dynamics of individuals’ investments leading up to their decision to make the first investment abroad. We show that investors first invest in domestic securities and only some time later they invest abroad in foreign securities. We also show that investors who trade more often in the domestic market start to invest abroad earlier. Our findings suggest that the experience investors acquire while they trade in the domestic market is a key reason why active investors enter the foreign market earlier. A reason is that highly educated investors as well as investors with more financial knowledge, arguably those for whom learning by trading is the least important, do not need to trade as much in the domestic market before they start investing in foreign securities. Another reason is that investors who start investing in foreign securities are able to improve on their performance afterwards. This improvement in performance constitutes further evidence that the home country bias is costly.     

Social network analysis in accounting information systems research

This paper introduces social network analysis as an alternative research method for conducting accounting information systems related research. With advances in information and communication technologies, transaction data are being recorded in electronic form, resulting in a variety of research opportunities to examine dyadic interactions. A network consists of a set of nodes connected by ties. Social network research focuses on how outcomes are influenced not just by the attributes of the nodes (e.g. individuals), but also by the ties connecting nodes to each other. The nodes are typically conceptualized as actors, such as individuals, teams, or organizations. A unique network structure is created to reflect each different type of tie, such as trust, advice, collocation, or organizational affiliation. Social network analysis can be used for research examining individual, dyadic or network levels of analyses, and is a powerful tool for conducting multi-method research. Given the vast amounts of trace electronic data collected via accounting information systems, this paper reviews how social network analysis not only opens new research avenues for accounting information systems researchers, but identifies opportunities for the field of accounting information systems to inform social network research by identifying new network structures and dynamics leveraging transactional data.     

Improving the Interpretation of Complex Audit Evidence: The Beneficial Role of Order Effects

A principal element of business risk (or strategic systems) auditing is the goal of evaluating the degree of concordance between management representations and expectations derived from an understanding of the business environment. Peecher et al. (2007) argue that an effective means by which auditors may achieve this goal is through a process of evidentiary triangulation. In this exploratory study, we investigate whether the order with which auditors evaluate business environment, information systems and financial statement representations evidence has the potential, as suggested by belief function theory, to improve the effectiveness with which they interpret the complex interrelationships between these three sources of evidence. Analyzing judgements made by practicing auditors in an experimental setting, our results reveal that, when faced with negative business environment evidence that is in conflict with positive information systems and financial statement representations evidence, auditors assess the risk of material misstatement to be higher when they are presented with the critically important business environment evidence last, rather than, as is traditionally the case, first. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that the positive order effects may be attenuated by the requirement to document reasons underlying the judgements made. The results raise a number of practical and theoretical issues that give direction to future research in this important area.     

How management teams can have a good fight

Top-level managers know that conflict over issues is natural and even necessary. Management teams that challenge one another's thinking develop a more complete understanding of their choices, create a richer range of options, and make better decisions. But the challenge--familiar to anyone who has ever been part of a management team--is to keep constructive conflict over issues from degenerating into interpersonal conflict. From their research on the interplay of conflict, politics, and speed in the decision--making process of management teams, the authors have distilled a set of six tactics characteristic of high-performing teams: They work with more, rather than less, information. They develop multiple alternatives to enrich debate. The establish common goals. They make an effort to inject humor into the workplace. They maintain a balanced corporate power structure. They resolve issues without forcing a consensus. These tactics work because they keep conflict focused on issues; foster collaborative, rather than competitive, relations among team members; and create a sense of fairness in the decision-making process. Without conflict, groups lose their effectiveness. Managers often become withdrawn and only superficially harmonious. The alternative to conflict is not usually agreement but rather apathy and disengagement, which open the doors to a primary cause of major corporate debacles: groupthink.     

The tragedy of the commons in a violent world

Earlier research has shown that the tragedy of the commons may be resolved by Folk theorems for dynamic games. In this article, we graft on a standard natural‐resource exploitation game the possibility to appropriate the resource through violent means. Because conflict emerges endogenously as resources get depleted, the threat supporting the cooperative outcome is no longer subgame perfect, and thus credible. The unique equilibrium is such that players exploit noncooperatively the resource when it is abundant, and they revert to conflict when it becomes scarce. The players' utility is shown to be lower even if conflict wastes no resources.     

Combining creativity and control: Understanding individual motivation in large-scale collaborative creativity

Recent research has shown that management control systems (MCS) can improve performance in contexts characterized by high levels of task uncertainty. This seems to conflict with a second stream of research, which argues that MCSs risk undermining the intrinsic motivation needed for effective performance in such settings. To solve this puzzle, we build on theories of perceived locus of causality and self-construal and develop an integrative model summarized in 15 propositions. To explicate our proposed solution and to show its robustness, we focus on the class of activities we call large-scale collaborative creativity (LSCC) - contexts where individuals face a dual challenge of demonstrating creativity and embracing the formal controls that coordinate their creative activities with others’. We argue that LSCC requires the simultaneous activation of intrinsic and identified forms of motivation, and simultaneously independent and interdependent self-construals. Against some scholarship that argues or assumes that such simultaneous combinations are infeasible, we argue that they can be fostered through appropriate attraction-selection-attrition policies and management control systems design. We also show how our propositions can enrich our understanding of motivation in other settings, where creativity and/or coordination demands are less pressing.     

Unobservable shocks as carriers of contagion

We propose an identified structural GARCH model to disentangle the dynamics of financial market crises. We distinguish between the hypersensitivity of a domestic market in crisis to news from foreign non-crisis markets, and the contagion imported to a tranquil domestic market from foreign crises. The model also enables us to connect unobserved structural shocks with their source markets using variance decompositions and to compare the size and dynamics of impulses during crises periods with tranquil period impulses. To illustrate, we apply the method to data from the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis which consists of a complicated set of interacting crises. We find significant hypersensitivity and contagion between these markets but also show that links may strengthen or weaken. Impulse response functions for an equally-weighted equity portfolio show the increasing dominance of Korean and Hong Kong shocks during the crises and covariance responses demonstrate multiple layers of contagion effects.     

"税收协定优于国内税法适用"不可绝对化

《中华人民共和国外商投资企业和外国企业所得税法》和《中华人民共和国税收征收管理法》规定,在国内税法与税收协定发生冲突的情况下,优先适用税收协定。①但是这一规定过于绝对化,在大多数情况下,我们应该善意履行国际义务,遵守税收协定的规定,但是,如果国内税法的规定能够维护本国税收利益,打击国际逃避税,或者国内税法给跨国纳税人带来的利益优于税收协定给跨国纳税人带来的利益,则国内税法可以优先于税收协定适用。     

Pricing of foreign exchange options under the MPT stochastic volatility model and the CIR interest rates

We consider an extension of the model proposed by Moretto, Pasquali, and Trivellato [2010. “Derivative Evaluation Using Recombining Trees under Stochastic Volatility.” Advances and Applications in Statistical Sciences 1 (2): 453–480] (referred to as the MPT model) for pricing foreign exchange (FX) options to the case of stochastic domestic and foreign interest rates driven by the Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross dynamics introduced in Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross [1985. “A Theory of Term Structure of Interest Rates.” Econometrica 53(2): 385–408]. The advantage of the MPT model is that it retains some crucial features of Heston's stochastic volatility model but, as demonstrated in Moretto, Pasquali, and Trivellato [2010. “Derivative Evaluation Using Recombining Trees under Stochastic Volatility.” Advances and Applications in Statistical Sciences 1 (2): 453–480], it is better suited for discretization through recombining lattices, and thus it can also be used to value and hedge exotic FX products. In the model examined in this paper, the instantaneous volatility is correlated with the exchange rate dynamics, but the domestic and foreign short-term rates are assumed to be mutually independent and independent of the dynamics of the exchange rate. The main result furnishes a semi-analytical formula for the price of the FX European call option, which hinges on explicit expressions for conditional characteristic functions.     

International debt and world business fluctuations

The international transmission of real productivity disturbances is examined in an optimizing model with two countries each inhabited by an infinitely-lived representative consumer/producer. We analyze the dynamics of output, consumption, investment, interest rates, and net external debt. Foreign productivity shocks can have positive or negative impacts on domestic output and international debt, depending on the intertemporal distribution of the shocks. Transient foreign shocks are shown to be positively transmitted and lead to increased domestic indebtedness, while permanent foreign shocks are negatively transmitted and lead to a decline in domestic indebtedness.     

企业社会责任信息披露指标体系的构建

社会责任越来越受到经济社会的重视,如何计量和报告企业所承担的社会责任情况,成为了会计学科里一个新的研究热点,在分析和比较国外社会责任信息披露现状的基础上,结合国内的实际情况,参考了全球报告倡议组织（GRI）评价体系,试图从经济、社会、环境三个角度出发,分为六大类二十七小类构建出适合我国国情的企业社会责任信息披露指标体系。     

Visualizing the Invisible Hand of Markets: Simulating Complex Dynamic Economic Interactions

In complex systems, many different parts interact in nonobvious ways. Traditional research focuses on a few or a single aspect of the problem so as to analyse it with the tools available. To get a better insight of phenomena that emerge from complex interactions, we need instruments that can analyse simultaneously complex interactions between many parts. Here, a simulator modelling different types of economies is used to visualize complex quantitative aspects that affect economic dynamics. The main conclusions are: (1) relatively simple economic settings produce complex nonlinear dynamics and, therefore, linear regressions are often unsuitable to capture complex economic dynamics; (2) flexible pricing of goods by individual agents according to their microenvironment increases the health and wealth of the society, but asymmetries in price sensitivity between buyers and sellers increase price inflation; (3) prices for goods conferring risky long-term benefits are not tracked efficiently by simple market forces; (4) division of labour creates synergies that improve enormously the health and wealth of the society by increasing the efficiency of economic activity; (5) stochastic modelling improves our understanding of real economies, and didactic games based on them might help policy-makers and nonspecialists in grasping the complex dynamics underlying even simple economic settings. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New development: Faith and foreign policy—a perspective from the Vatican

Religion matters in foreign policy as much as it does in domestic society and, to understand the world in which we live, we have to comprehend religion as a source of influence and motivation in people's lives. That is not always easy for foreign policy specialists and diplomats. Britain's relations with the Holy See go back to 1479 when England sent its first resident ambassador overseas. The Holy See is one of the world's most global bodies—touching directly 17.5% of the world's population through the Catholic Church. It is a unique hybrid of the global and the local, which helps to form global public opinion. Today, the UK's oldest embassy is working on a whole range of issues with the Holy See from tackling climate change, disarmament, international development, interfaith dialogue and preventing and ending conflict.