Computer-supported cooperative negotiations

This article describes an environment for interactive negotiations based on current and emerging information technology. Over the past few years a suite of methods, tools, and techniques have emerged which promise to revolutionize the negotiations planning and decision-making processes. Some of these technologies include collaborative computing, electronic publishing, intelligent systems, and networked communications—all supported by a network of processors, applications, and data bases. This article explores these opportunities by examining how the methods, tools, and techniques might all combine to facilitate “computer-supported cooperative negotiations.”     

Applications of Business Theatre in New Service Development

Applying business theatre can not only make a contribution in the context of change management, learning and development processes in companies, but also in the new service development (NSD) process. The authors show how business theatre can be applied in each step of NSD and present insights that they gained from a students’ and a research project. As service theatre addresses the “emotional side”, it is an ideal complement to a systematic NSD approach that addresses the “rational side” of a service.     

The Effects of Framing on Inter-group Negotiation

The present paper explores the way in which groups cognitively represent information framed as danger and the way in which such collective cognitive representations influence group performance during inter-group negotiations. One hundred and two participants were distributed over 34 three-person groups and were involved in a negotiation game developed by Lewicki et al. (1999, Negotiation: readings, exercises and cases. McGraw-Hill, Boston). The groups were organized in 17 pairs and each pair played the negotiation game in two rounds. The game rules and the available resources were the same for both groups, but one of the groups in each pair received the game information framed as “danger”, while the other group in the pair received a neutral framing. The groups with a “danger” frame developed a more defensive strategy during negotiations, adopted more often a collaborative approach and had a significantly lower performance as compared to the groups in the non-framing condition.     

Examining the Effects of Moral Development Level,Self-Concept,and Self-Monitoring on Consumers’ Ethical Attitudes

This study investigates the possible effects of self-concept, self-monitoring, and moral development level on dimensions of consumers’ ethical attitudes. “Actively benefiting from illegal activities,” “actively benefiting from deceptive practices,” and “no harm/no foul 1–2” are defined by factor analysis as four dimensions of Turkish consumers’ ethical attitudes. Logistic regression analysis is applied to data collected from 516 Turkish households. Results indicate that self-monitoring and moral development level predicted consumer ethics in relation to “actively benefiting from questionable practices” and “no harm/no foul” dimensions. Actual self-concept is also a predictor variable in relation to “no harm/no foul” dimension. Age and gender make significant differences in consumers’ ethical attribute dimensions.     

Using a Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making Approach to Select Merged Strategies for Commercial Banks

This investigation develops an analytic hierarchy framework to help banks choose development strategies according to six main criteria comprising 41 attributes, namely management performance, staff rights and interests, customer orientation, financial analysis, government policy and risk management. Questionnaires are administered to compare the priorities of different criteria and the ratings of feasible developmental strategies amongst decision makers and respondents including bank superintendents (Department of Finance), economists, shareholders, customers, executives and staff of the Bank of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Additionally, the analytic hierarchy process and consistent fuzzy preference relation are used to improve consistency and effectiveness in decision making. The analytical results reveal that risk management and customer orientation are the most important considerations for the Bank of Kaohsiung in the development of a strategy selection. Furthermore, the staff select the best futuristic policy on “focusing on core business competitiveness to become a specialized and stable bank,” whereas the other five groups choose the strategy of “merging with other finance organizations to become an existing bank.”     

中国企业渠道联盟关系影响因素研究

Channel alliance is regarded as the most advanced form of channel relationships. The extant literature mainly focuses on commitment, trust, communication and cooperation as influencing factors of channel alliance relationship. This paper empirically explores influencing factors of channel alliance relationship in Chinese enterprises, and their respective degrees of influence, particularly those of personal relationship and government administrative factors. Research hypotheses were tasted based on a survey of automobile vendors and dealers. Three most important influencing factors were identified “commitment and trust”, “communication and cooperation”, and “returns”. __________ Translated from Nankai Guanli Pinglun 南开管理评论 (Nankai Business Review), 2006, 6(1): 42–48     

Discovering the “customer annoyance iceberg” through evidence controlling

There is no doubt about the relevance of complaint management for customer retention. But complaint management-objectives can only be achieved if complaints registered by the firm give a comprehensive view of the annoyances perceived by customers. In fact, a considerable share of annoyed customers do not complain and many complaint articulations are not registered. Because of these “unvoiced” and “hidden” complaints, registered complaints show only the tip of the “annoyance iceberg” leading to misinterpretations and wrong allocation decisions. As a countermeasure, the concept of evidence-controlling is developed in this paper. Relevant key figures are identified, effective information gathering is demonstrated and managerial implications and open research questions are discussed.     

Together and Apart: Exploring Structure of the Corporate–NPO Relationship

Financially significant relationships between corporations and non-profit organizations (NPOs) have increased in recent years. NPOs offer access to interests and ideologies that are lacking within most for-profit organizations. These partnerships form a unique bridge between for-profit and non-profit goals and offer significant potential to produce innovative ways of “doing business by doing good.” Exploration of the structural implications of these relationships, however, has been limited. The potential for ideological imbalance in these relationships, particularly for the NPO, has been poorly described. We explore the structure of Corporate–NPO relationships from the NPO's perspective under high pressure conditions such as large relational investments or negative pressure from stakeholders. Using data collected from 20 NPOs in Australia, we identified the use by NPOs of both formal and informal governance mechanisms within their partnerships. These mechanisms acted to align and defend important goals of the NPO. They allowed the NPO and their corporate partners to be simultaneously “together and apart.” Our study offers important insight toward the study of cross-sector relationships and the role of governance mechanisms.     

When Deontology and Utilitarianism Aren’t Enough: How Heidegger’s Notion of “Dwelling” Might Help Organisational Leaders Resolve Ethical Issues

This paper offers an alternative to deontological and utilitarian approaches to making ethical decisions and taking good actions by organisational leaders. It argues that the relational and context-dependent nature of leadership necessitates reference to an ethical approach which explicitly takes these aspects into account. Such an approach is offered in the re-conceptualisation of ethical action on the part of leaders as a process of “coming into right relation” vis-à-vis those affected by their decisions and actions. Heidegger’s notion of “dwelling” is explored as a means of “coming into right relation”. Three aspects of dwelling: “staying with”, “comportment” and “active engagement” are described and ways in which they might be practically enacted by leaders are suggested. The paper concludes by reflecting on the ways adopting a “dwelling” approach to resolving ethical issues implies a re-conceptualisation of leadership itself.     

Images of Women in Online Advertisements of Global Products: Does Sexism Exist?

Research on female stereotypes in online advertisements is particularly scant, and thus, we lack evidence on whether women are depicted in derogatory (stereotypical) terms on the Internet or not. This theme has significant ethical implications. Hence, the objectives of this study are: (1) to provide evidence on female role portrayals in online advertisements of global products, and (2) to explore female role portrayals across web pages for different audience types. The results indicate that women are generally portrayed in a stereotypical way, supporting the notion that sexism is prevalent in online advertisements worldwide. Portrayal of women across web pages varies considerably, with female-audience web pages embracing “decorative” female images; male-audience web pages promoting polarizing depictions of women in “dependent” or “non-traditional” roles; and general-audience web pages using portrayals of women as housewives or equal to men. Overall, the findings suggest that “traditional” or “decorative” stereotypes are largely evident in all three audience types, although some “non-traditional” roles may occur. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Organizational Leadership, Ethics and the Challenges of Marketing Fair and Ethical Trade

This article critically evaluates current developments in marketing fair trade labelled products and “no sweat” manufactured goods, and argues that both the fair trade and ethical trade movements increasingly rely on strategies for bottom-up change, converting consumers “one cup at a time”. This individualistic approach, which we call “shopping for a better world”, must, we argue, be augmented by more collectivist approaches to affect transformative change. Specifically, we look at the concept of mission-driven organizations pursuing leadership roles in developing affinity relationships to promote fair and ethical trade and developing ethical spaces. Increasingly, a range of organizations are restructuring their operations, so that their mission is reflected in ethical practices throughout their operations, including product sourcing and product sales. First, ethical purchasing policies operated by non-profits and public agencies represent markets through which fair/ethical products reach end consumers. The efforts discussed to create ethical spaces through direct democracy and electoral mandate build on a broad-based affinity with the principles of fair and ethical trade. Second, we explore the potential for “mission-driven” non-profit organizations, such as zoos and aquaria for merging their mission of conservation education with their marketing activities through the operation of their shops and cafés. Interesting initiatives to link the conservation message to food choices is being undertaken by a number of zoos and aquaria, while there is scope for increased linkages in the giftware sold in their shops.     

Ethics in Information Technology and Software Use

The emerging concern about software piracy and illegal or unauthorized use of information technology and software has been evident in the media and open literature for the last few years. In the course of conducting their academic assignments, the authors began to compare observations from classroom experiences related to ethics in the use of software and information technology and systems. Qualitatively and anecdotally, it appeared that many if not most, students had misconceptions about what represented ethical and unethical behaviors in these realms. Clearly, one can argue that if college students are uncertain about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior then this uncertainty will be carried forward into their workplaces upon graduation. Furthermore, if their workplaces don't provide ethics training as a component of a new employee orientation program, one can project a potential for unintentional violations and infringements of copyrights and law in the field. This study was conducted among graduate and undergraduate students to gain insight into their attitudes, perceptions and understanding of some of the relevant ethics issues. A questionnaire of 11 statements was employed that described ubiquitous but most likely unethical (or surely dubious) behaviors in the prevailing business and academic environments. Each respondent was asked to evaluate each statement twice (once for “self” and once for “colleague”) on a five-option highly ethical (5) to neutral (3) to highly unethical (1) scale. The statements were worded such that lower instrument score was associated with higher ethical responses. The questionnaire's two-part structure was designed to solicit honest answers. The encouraging learning from this study was that the overall sample and its various sub-samples did not consider any of the eleven behaviors to be “ethical” or “highly ethical.” It was also encouraging to note that the overall sample and all sub-samples considered “highly unethical” those behaviors associated with personal privacy or property or outright theft. This indicated that moral judgment and probity prevail. The discouraging learning was that behaviors associated with the use of enterprise property were viewed as “neutral” i.e., neither “ethical” nor “unethical.” These findings suggested confusion and lack of clarity and definition around workplace deportment as it regards ethics in software and information technology use. The current study suggests that additional research needs to be conducted to define and clarify the issues, which in turn can form the basis for programs to rectify or at least ameliorate the situation.     

Nurturing the Whole Person: The Ethics of Workplace Spirituality in a Society of Organizations

In a world which can be increasingly described as a “society of organizations,” it is incumbent upon organizational researchers to account for the role of organizations in determining the well-being of societies and the individuals that comprise them. Workplace spirituality is a young area of inquiry with potentially strong relevance to the well-being of individuals, organizations, and societies. Previous literature has not examined ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality that organizations might expect based upon the co-existence of multiple ethical work climates, nor has previous literature accounted for the relevance of the cosmopolitan (external, societal) source of moral reasoning in the ethical treatment of workplace spirituality. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps by articulating two such ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality: the “quiet desperation” dilemma and the instrumentality dilemma. Moreover, I propose two theoretical contexts that foster “both-and” rather than “either-or” thinking, thereby mitigating (moderating) the relationships between climate combinations and conflictual aspects of the ethical dilemmas. For the “quiet desperation” dilemma, I propose a person–organization fit perspective to emphasize diversity of individual preferences instead of a managerially prescribed uniformity of spirituality. For the instrumentality dilemma, I propose a multiparadigm approach to workplace spirituality research to avoid the privileging of one research interest over another (e.g., instrumentality, individual fulfillment, societal good). I conclude with suggestions for future research.     

Toward a relational perspective of franchising chains

In many professional and services industries, firms try to scale up their operations by reproducing practices in new locations through franchising arrangements, especially business format franchising. The classic but still prevailing explanations for franchising related phenomena, especially the initiative of franchising, the propensity to franchise, and the franchise performance, are mostly based on two orders of reasons (or a combination of them): franchising is either explained as a means to deal with resource scarcity or (and) as a mechanism for franchisor and franchisee to align incentives between themselves. However, empirical studies have shown limited support for both such claims, especially in face of the so called plural form, where proprietary and franchised units of the same franchisor co-exist. It may also be argued that the traditional literature on franchising has assumed a high level of homogeneity within and between franchising “networks,” possibly due to the perception that they tend to be “dominated” by a high level of standardization and replication of practices, both operative and relational. However, learning processes in such “networks” have recently been brought in as an attempt to capture other mechanisms that may underlie their operation and sustainability. This article seeks to explore a third perspective to look at franchising “networks,” by drawing from the literatures on capabilities and industrial networks. Seen from this perspective, business format franchising may involve more than the mere replication or exploitation of a recipe, especially if we take into consideration the partly idiosyncratic nature of both the relationships between actors and their capabilities and intentions. Within this perspective, variety preservation, and not only uniformity, may be recognized by participants as relevant for the performance of the franchise chain. In other words, variety may reflect the need for the refinement of the “package” throughout time, in more than one ways, together with the gradual development of the network and the learning experiences that take place in that context.     

Organizational Governance and Ethical Systems: A Covenantal Approach to Building Trust

American businesses and corporate executives are faced with a serious problem the loss of public confidence. Public criticism, increased government controls, and growing expectations for improved financial performance and accountability have accompanied this decline in trust. Traditional approaches to corporate governance, typified by agency theory and stakeholder theory, have been expensive to direct and have focused on short-term profits and organizational systems that fail to achieve desired results. We explain why the organizational governance theories are fundamentally, inadequate to build trust. We advance a conceptual framework based on stewardship theory characterized by “covenantal relationships” and argue that design of governance mechanisms using a covenantal approach is more effective in building trust in organizations. A covenantal relationship is a specialized form of a relational contract between an employee and his or her organization. We argue that regardless of incentives and control mechanisms carefully designed through contractual mechanisms, in the absence of covenantal relationships it is extremely difficult to build trust within organizations. We propose that organizations are more likely to build trust – both at the organizational level and at the interpersonal level – when they create reinforcing and integrated systems that honor implied duties of “covenantal relationships.”     

A Virtue-Ethics Analysis of Supply Chain Collaboration

Technological advancements in information systems over the past few decades have enabled firms to work with the major suppliers and customers in their supply chain in order to improve the performance of the entire channel. Tremendous benefits for all parties can be realized by sharing information and coordinating operations to reduce inventory requirements, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction; but the companies must collaborate effectively to bring these gains to fruition. We consider two alternative methods of managing these interfirm supply chain relationships in this article. The first, which we have named “dictatorial collaboration,” occurs when a dominant supply chain entity assumes control of the channel and forces the other firms to follow its edicts. We compare and contrast this method with “sustainable collaboration,” in which the parties share resources and engage in joint problem solving to improve the performance of the system as a whole. We use a virtue ethics lens to describe these methods of relationship management to suggest that sustainable collaboration is preferable to dictatorial collaboration both operationally and ethically in the long run.     

论中国招商引资过程中政府决策的合理性

Based on consumer and manufacturer behaviors, this research describes local governments’ unique role in the process of “attracting foreign direct investment (FDI)”. Drawing from a sample of 28 provinces plus four cities throughout China from 1998 to 2004, we construct an econometric model in this paper to analyze the common factors that influenced the result of “attracting FDI”. The main finding of this paper is that in the process of “attracting FDI”, local governments play a decisive role, which puts consumer surplus, producer surplus and the other social welfare into a basket to construct its plan for “attracting FDI”. The common factors which influence the result of “attracting FDI” are local costs, the number of foreign-invested company, the market share of local companies, and the market share of foreign-invested companies. Translate from Caimao Jingji 财贸经济 (Finance & Trade Economics), 2005, (12): 70–75     

Size matters: entrepreneurial entry and government

We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual’s decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from corruption and on “market freedom” defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property rights and regulation. We test these relationships by combining country-level institutional indicators for 47 countries with working-age population survey data taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Our results indicate that entrepreneurial entry is inversely related to the size of the government, and more weakly to the extent of corruption. A cluster of institutional indicators representing “market freedom” is only significant in some specifications. Freedom from corruption is significantly related to entrepreneurial entry, especially when the richest countries are removed from the sample, but unlike the size of government, the results on corruption are not confirmed by country-level fixed-effects models.     

A methodology for managing risk in electronic transactions over the Internet

The explosive growth of the Internet has made possible an economic transformation in which commerce will become largely electronic. In this vision, the medium of communication and negotiation becomes a distributed network of computers equipped with robust, secure and trusted “cash” mechanisms. It is thus of paramount importance to design mechanisms that will ensure timely and reliable transactions in cyberspace. In this paper we present a methodology for quantitatively managing the risk and cost of executing transactions in a distributed network environment by exploiting an analogy with modern financial portfolio theory. We illustrate the methodology with several concrete examples under different pricing schemes, as well as with empirical measurements of Internet traffic. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Global Economic Ethic Manifesto: Implementing a Moral Values Foundation in the Multinational Enterprise

The Global Economic Ethic Manifesto (“Manifesto”) is a moral framework/code of conduct which is both interactive and interdependent with the economic function of the main institutions of the economic system: markets, governments, civil society, and supranational organizations, which lays out a common fundamental vision of what is legitimate, just, and fair in economic activities. The Manifesto includes five universally accepted principles and values: the principle of humanity; the basic values of non-violence and respect for life; the basic values of justice and humanity; the basic values of honesty and tolerance; and the basic values of mutual esteem and partnership. We posit that the Manifesto provides an ethical foundation for explicitly assisting multinational enterprise's (“MNE”) executive management and boards of directors to meet the moral failures criticisms associated with the expansion of global capitalism, and similarly how the U.N. Global Compact (“Compact”) is focused on addressing complimentary market and institutional failures. In this article, we argue how the Compact and the Manifesto complement each other, explaining how the policies and guidelines of the Compact can now be implemented at the organizational/individual level through a comprehensive human resource management (HRM) plan supporting the ethical framework of the Manifesto. Finally, we have described how the Manifesto completes a comprehensive managerial framework (consisting of both the Compact and the Manifesto) for what we term an “MNE Moral Values-Based Corporate Governance Model.” Ultimately, further research is needed in understanding how much impact external and internal influences make on creating a sustainable ethical culture in MNEs.