Seeking Legitimacy Through CSR: Institutional Pressures and Corporate Responses of Multinationals in Sri Lanka

Ethical debate exists on the effect of gender diversity of the top management teams (TMTs) on organizations. This study aims to contribute to this debate by analyzing the effects of gender diversity of TMTs on the relationship between knowledge combination capability and organizations’ innovative performance. We use a sample of 205 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) belonging to the sector of Spanish technology-based firms (TBFs). Our results indicate that gender diversity positively moderates the relationship between knowledge combination capability and innovation performance. Implications for theory and practice are discussed—among them, ways to contribute to more equal gender distribution and to the benefits of gender diversity in top management positions.     

Gender-based Barriers to Senior Management Positions: Understanding the Scarcity of Female CEOs

Although the number of women in middle management has grown quite rapidly in the last two decades, the number of female CEOs in large corporations remains extremely low. This article examines many explanations for why women have not risen to the top, including lack of line experience, inadequate career opportunities, gender differences in linguistic styles and socialization, gender-based stereotypes, the old boy network at the top, and tokenism. Alternative explanations are also presented and analyzed, such as differences between female leadership styles and the type of leadership style expected at the top of organizations, feminist explanations for the underrepresentation of women in top management positions, and the possibility that the most talented women in business often avoid corporate life in favor of entrepreneurial careers.     

Situational Management Support Systems

Digital natives increasingly populate organizations?? management. These new-generation managers more naturally accept management support systems (MSS), but also have higher expectations about how they should accommodate their individual user preferences. As a result, managers question MSS that have been developed without configuration mechanisms to accommodate their working style, relevant MSS use cases, and different MSS access modes. The objective of this article is to reveal managers?? different MSS use situations and propose levers for tailoring (conceptual) MSS design to them. Use situations generalize classes of similar user-group preferences. We first apply findings from a literature review to cluster managers?? user-group preferences into 36 MSS use situations. Second, we propose that the selection of end-user devices can serve as a main lever for MSS configuration. Third, we complete the configuration with a MSS user-interface design. Finally, we demonstrate utility of our configuration model by presenting and evaluating a prototype.     

Using performance management to win the talent war

The talent war is a 21^st-century reality whereby organizations of all sizes, across all industries, compete to hire and retain scarce human capital. The talent war is fierce because there are few individuals within each industry who are considered top human capital such that there is not enough to go around, and these top performers generate a great deal of revenues, profit, and overall success for their organizations. In this installment of Human Performance, we describe the nature of the talent war and reasons why winning it is crucial for organizational competitiveness, sustainability, and survival. We discuss how implementing a performance management system can help organizations win the talent war by retaining these coveted top performers. Specifically, we offer the following research-based recommendations for using performance management to (1) create and maintain individualized developmental plans; (2) ensure that work is challenging, interesting, and meaningful; (3) provide clear advancement opportunities, and (4) implement contingent rewards. Implementing these recommendations can turn performance management into an effective tool to retain top talent and prevent competitors from stealing a firm's crucial source of competitive advantage.     

Upper echelons and portfolio strategies of venture capital firms

In this study we analyze how the composition of the top management team (TMT) influences the portfolio strategy choice in venture capital (VC) organizations. We develop a model of risk perception to investigate how education and experience of TMT members impact whether VC organizations invest with a focus on early stage ventures or not, specialize or diversify across industries, and invest with a broad or narrow geographic scope.Evaluation of data on TMTs and portfolio strategies of 136 European VC firms revealed that VC firms with higher proportions of TMT members with science/engineering education and entrepreneurial experience more likely invest with an early stage focus. Furthermore, TMTs with more management education diversify their portfolios more across industries. Finally, the more international experience TMT members of VC organizations have, the broader the geographic scope of investees. We discuss the implications of our findings for the VC literature.     

Top management teams and corporate success in an emerging industry

This longitudinal study investigates changes in top management teams of a cohort of firms established in an emerging, high growth industry-the minicomputer industry. Given the turbulent conditions that organizations in this industry must contend with, top management teams do not remain stagnant. Most firms in the industry require a new set of executives to bring forth the organizational changes necessary to cope with major shifts in the environment.Little consensus exists in the literature on the impact of new executives on organizational performance. Studies have found that executive succession may be either positively, negatively, or unrelated to subsequent organizational effectiveness. The authors argue that a weakness of the existing research stream is a failure by scholars to adequately consider either the characteristics and skills of newly appointed executives or the patterns of change in management characteristics over time. The authors propose that organizational performance implications of executive succession events can be clarified by examining who the newly recruited executives are.When executive replacements are made, new successors often have characteristics which widely deviate from those of their predecessors. Such deviations in top management characterisics are shown to be pronounced where top management changes are made in response to crisis. In crises, successors are apparently recruited in an attempt to compensate for the shortcomings of their predecessors. However, while both high and low performing organizations make executive replacements as they evolve, the types of top management revisions they make differ. This study provides evidence that the types of senior management team changes made and the characterisics of newly recruited top management are related to organizational performance. High performing firms recruit new top management with new skills that are appropriate to the evolving environment. Lower performing firms somehow replace executives in response to crises, but seem to make the wrong executive recruitment decisions, apparently because the successors in the lower performing organizations do not match the changing competitive conditions in the industry. Low performing firms appear to recruit executives that entirely lack the types of top executive expertise are necessary for new environmental conditions.Although the majority of minicomputer firms required sizable changes in their executive teams over time, a small but significant subgroup of exceptional firms were identified that defy conventional wisdom. These extraordinary organizations were led by visionary CEOs—capable of maintaining management team stability as they successfully repositioned their firms' strategies to cope with continual environmental change. Among the conventional theories that these exceptional managers defy are: 1. Firms in high growth industries can be highly successful even if they retain their CEO/ Founders well beyond the embryonic stage. 2. Firms in high growth industries can retain a significant proportion of management ownership and still grow exponentially without financial crises. 3. Firms in high growth industries can maintain a high level of insider recruitment and still not become inbred.There appear to be two entirely distinct patterns of CEO/executive team success:Pattern 1 involves firms with no CEO change. This visionary CEO tends to be a founder who appears to be able to systematically recruit a limited number of external recruits in the top management team, selecting recruits who fit a changing environment yet also making maximum use of the existing team's longstanding experience and relationships. To maintain the necessary external perspective and avoid an inbred mindset, these firms a) tend not to allow the CEO to also be chairman, b) encourage a modest level of external ownership.Pattern 2 involves firms in which there is extensive turnover in both CEO and senior management teams, once again bringing in the kind of skills needed to match the changing environment. The CEO tends also to be chairman, and the external perspective is provided by having many external recruits plus low level of management ownership.     

区域性超国家组织及其诸种形式辨析

区域性超国家组织大量形成是当代社会政治结构演化过程中出现的一种新形式,它主要是国家政府间的集团组织。规模较大的组织有欧洲联盟、非洲联盟、美洲国家组织、东南亚国家联盟、上海合作组织、独立国家联合体等。这种超国家机构多是在经济全球化过程中跨国家、跨地区的经济共同体或经济协作组织大规模迅速发展而导致政治合作的产物。这些组织类型不同,功能各异,有的政治功能强,有的经济功能强,有的属军事合作,有的是洲际性的,有的则是区域性的,但影响远非局限于某一区域。各种各样的超国家组织正处在发展演化过程中。     

View from Practice: Managing Effectively in Collectivist Societies: Lessons from Samba Schools and Dabbawalas

This article reviews the organizational values, recruitment, and reward policies of Brazilian samba schools and Indian dabbawalas to illustrate how their fit to local cultures results in greater productivity, engagement, and low turnover. American‐style management has spread worldwide, yet in emerging market countries such as India and Brazil, multinationals often struggle to motivate and engage their employees. The companies’ top ranks in these countries are usually dominated by English‐speaking, university‐educated elites who are comfortable with Western management techniques. But these managers can be, as the Comprador class was in seventeenth‐century China, strangers in their own land, implementing management techniques that feel foreign and inappropriate to their employees. The result is often low productivity, absenteeism, and unhappiness. However, there are organizations in both India and Brazil that achieve staggeringly high productivity and consistently strong engagement though unaware of mainstream management techniques. The samba schools of Brazil and the dabbawala lunch‐delivery system of Mumbai do this by working within local cultural norms rather than trying to impose foreign ideas about efficient management. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Internal Audits as a Source of Ethical Behavior,Efficiency, and Effectiveness in Work Units

This study of internal auditors and auditees, who engage in both financial and operational internal audits in Israel, extends theory and research on internal audits in organizational units. It develops and tests a model that examines the role of top management and internal auditors in facilitating learning from internal audits and driving perceived performance improvement. We argue that support from the top management for the internal audit as well as the auditor’s capacity (skills, resources, and behaviors) facilitate learning from audits and help audited units to improve ethicality, efficiency, and effectiveness in organizations. The results of time-lagged survey data provide general support for the hypothesized indirect relationships between auditor capacity, auditor–auditee relational exchanges, learning from audits, and three different perceived performance measures: ethical behavior, efficiency, and effectiveness. We discuss the implications for research on internal audits, proactive learning, ethics, and performance improvement of organizational units in the public sector.     

Costly Ties: Social Capital as a Retardant of Network‐Level Entrepreneurial Orientation

Challenging social capital research, we argue that network top management teams (TMTs) established to support entrepreneurship in strategic multipartner networks should be careful in developing ties to outside organizations and networks. We suggest that such ties limit the network TMT's ability to engage in the strategy‐making processes needed to facilitate entrepreneurial orientation on a network level. Based on five‐year panel data from 53 formalized networks of small and medium‐sized enterprises, we demonstrate that homogenous and highly educated network TMTs can compensate the negative effects of TMT ties to other organizations, but not the negative effects of interlocking directorates.     

Employee involvement in ideation and healthcare service innovation quality

ABSTRACT

This study hypothesizes and empirically tests the influence of involvement of (1) frontline employees and (2) top managers in ideation process on healthcare service innovation quality. Based on data from 168 service innovation projects in Dutch healthcare organizations, the empirical results indicate that frontline employee involvement and top management involvement in, respectively, idea generation and idea application both improve the quality of healthcare service innovation. We find that the positive effect of frontline employee involvement is stronger under the condition of higher service innovativeness. In the direct relationship of top management involvement and healthcare service innovation quality, our data do not show such a moderating effect. The key and general managerial implication of the findings is that healthcare organizations are inspired to involve frontline employees in the idea generation processes and involve top managers in the idea application processes of service innovation projects, in order to improve innovation quality.     

Corporate Social Performance, Stakeholder Orientation, and Organizational Moral Development

This article begins with an explanation of how moral development for organizations has parallels to Kohlberg's categorization of the levels of individual moral development. Then the levels of organizational moral development are integrated into the literature on corporate social performance by relating them to different stakeholder orientations. Finally, the authors propose a model of organizational moral development that emphasizes the role of top management in creating organizational processes that shape the organizational and institutional components of corporate social performance. This article represents one approach to linking the distinct streams of business ethics and business-and-society research into a more complete understanding of how managers and firms address complex ethical and social issues.     

Institutional and corporate drivers of global talent management: Evidence from the Arab Gulf region

This study analyses how talent management (TM) is molded by institutional and corporate drivers. We borrow from the vast institutional literature to understand how organizations adopt and implement TM practices within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) context. This context is valuable not only because it tackles an under-researched region, but also because the type of variables found further our understanding of TM processes in non-Western contexts. Companies abide by localization rules to sustain their “legal” legitimacy, while trying to improve efficiency through actions that enhance their economic sustainability. Companies try to strike a strategic balance between local adaptation and global assimilation of their TM processes. We conclude by presenting a framework that portrays how various forces impact the TM process.     

Social responsibility in youth service organizations: Hong Kong evidence

The paper attempts to investigate the key factors affecting the social responsibility development in social welfare organizations. The study also measures how social welfare organizations are performing towards the social responsibility objectives. This paper focuses on a study undertaken among a number of youth service organizations in Hong Kong. The results showed that youth service organizations perceive they have supportive organizational culture and the management has been showing strong willingness in promoting social responsibility. The people from a senior level see that the motivating factors are more important than the junior people, but they perceive the ‘social pressure’ is less important than the junior people. The big contrast implies that the management people do not take ‘social pressure’ into serious consideration. The study reveals a significant influence from the management on the adoption and implementation of social responsibility activities. This further confirms the importance on promoting social responsibility at the operational level, with the top management providing clear strategic direction, and supportive resources and environment.     

What causes turnover among women on top management teams?

Women have made major inroads in the upper echelons in recent years, and not surprisingly, this trend has caught the attention of researchers in the management discipline. Recent empirical evidence reveals that greater the representation of women on top management teams, higher is the performance of the organization. Representation on the team needs to be investigated in the context of managerial turnover since turnover can have an adverse impact on organizational performance. Most turnover studies have focused on the determinants and consequences of turnover among managers on the top management teams without specifically isolating the effects for men and women. This can partly be attributed to the minimal to negligible presence of women on the teams. However, as women have ascended the top ranks of organizations in large numbers in recent years, it is important to examine what causes them to turnover at twice the rate of male managers as anecdotal evidence reveals. In this study, I examine the factors that cause turnover among women of Fortune 1000 companies. Also, following turnover, I examine the paths of the women managers who left their organizations.     

Application of production standards in complex organizations under uncertainty

This article explores the optimal determination of production (quantitative) standards under alternative assumptions concerning the ability of complex organizations to adjust variable inputs as the price of output becomes known.The model allows for transaction costs associated with ex ante and ex post input acquisitions (e.g., contracting for labor services). When such input transaction costs are not observable by top management, pecuniary incentive schemes based on ex post performance are considered. We show that standard-based compensation schemes can be built into the ex post optimization model so that the profit-maximizing production standards and the incentive designs are simultaneously determined.     

广州2010年亚运会与亚运物流系统

亚运物流是成功举办亚运会的保证,目前广州的物流系统无论在规划上、技术上还是在管理上,尚不能满足2010亚运物流的需求,为了成功举办2010年亚运会,必须尽快借鉴国外成功经验,建立一个有组织、协调能力的物流机构,进行亚运物流系统的规划,解决广州亚运的物流问题。     

High‐performance work systems in Asian companies

High‐performance work systems (HPWSs) have recently attracted considerable interdisciplinary interest in the field of management, industrial relations and economics. There is rising interest in using high‐performance work practices, because evidence showed that organizations that implemented such systems recorded remarkable success, especially in organizations in Western countries. The purpose of the study is to explore the extent to which HPWSs are used in organizations in three selected Asian societies and determine the extent to which HR systems directly enhance performance. Research from organizations in three Asian societies showed mixed results. A strong relationship between HR practices and the outcome measure—i.e., subjective performance ( profitability)—was observed. Managerial implications and future research direction will be discussed. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Tail-event driven NETwork dependence in emerging markets

This paper employs the Tail Event NETwork (TENET) to identify financial markets with greater potential risk, and simultaneously investigate the interdependence between them. We find strong time-varying connectedness across 23 emerging markets during the main crisis episodes, including the most recent COVID-19 pandemic, using data from January 1995 to May 2021. The network analysis revealed that emerging European markets are top risk transmitters, whereas emerging Asian markets are top risk receivers. China showed disconnection from the network, reflecting its diversification potential for investors. Our findings offer several policy and regulatory implications.