Antecedents and outcomes relating to public and private nurses’ use of intuition in England

This paper examines public and private sector nurses’ use of intuition in England using structural equation modeling. Leader–member exchange (LMX) and perceived organizational support (POS) correlated positively with nurses’ perception of discretionary power and use of intuition. Nurses’ perception of discretionary power and use of intuition were positively correlated with their engagement. Further, differences were identified between private sector and public sector nurses in relation to the impact of workplace relationships (POS and LMX) and intuition onto perceived discretionary power and employee engagement. The results are important for all hospital managers seeking to foster employees’ use of intuition, perception of discretionary power, and engagement.     

Informal communications, nonformal communications and mentoring in public accounting firms

Control is important within public accounting firms for a variety of reasons. Yet professional pronouncements are limited in providing guidance to auditors in the form of formally stated rules and requirements. The purpose of this article is to examine the non-formalized, non-rule oriented approaches employed in large public accounting firms to effect control. More specifically, it is directed towards understanding the possible roles of informal and nonformal communications and mentoring in managing public accounting firms.Based upon evidence gathered using a naturalistic, qualitative research methodology, it is concluded that: (1) informal communications exist in public accounting firms, play a limited role in informing organizational members of the politics and power within the organization, and are of some benefit to lower level individuals; and (2) nonformal communications and mentoring are involved with the performance of audit tasks, socialization of the individual firm, and instruction as to politics and power within the organization, and benefit the protege, mentor and firm, though at some cost. Implications of the study are also explored.     

New Development: The Demystification of Knowledge Management for Public Services

The public sector should be cautious about the use of classical and technological approaches to knowledge management. There is a need to face the power struggles and organizational politics associated with knowledge growth and dissemination. Knowledge management should promote the high value of team-based professional work and the desire to retain such staff through a collaborative environment.     

Dividends, Values and Agency Costs in REITs

This study examines the market value of REIT dividends conditional on transparency of operating structure and effectiveness of boards. Results suggest that total, mandatory and discretionary dividends are valued by the market. Consistent with agency cost theory, results provide some evidence that discretionary dividends paid by REITs with greater principal-agent conflicts have greater market value. Specific results suggest an increased value of excess dividends paid by firms with more complex organizational structures (UPREITs) and, to some degree, less independent boards. This evidence implies the equity market recognizes REITs’ substitution of discretionary dividends for stronger governance.     

Informal networks: the company behind the chart

A glance at an organizational chart can show who's the boss and who reports to whom. But this formal chart won't reveal which people confer on technical matters or discuss office politics over lunch. Much of the real work in any company gets done through this informal organization with its complex networks of relationships that cross functions and divisions. According to consultants David Krackhardt and Jeffrey Hanson, managers can harness the true power in their companies by diagramming three types of networks: the advice network, which reveals the people to whom others turn to get work done; the trust network, which uncovers who shares delicate information; and the communication network, which shows who talks about work-related matters. Using employee questionnaires, managers can generate network maps that will get to the root of many organizational problems. When a task force in a computer company, for example, was not achieving its goals, the CEO turned to network maps to find out why. He discovered that the task force leader was central in the advice network but marginal in the trust network. Task force members did not believe he would look out for their interests, so the CEO used the trust map to find someone to share responsibility for the group. And when a bank manager saw in the network map that there was little communication between tellers and supervisors, he looked for ways to foster interaction among employees of all levels. As companies continue to flatten and rely on teams, managers must rely less on their authority and more on understanding these informal networks. Managers who can use maps to identify, leverage, and revamp informal networks will have the key to success.     

Asset write-offs discretion and accruals management in Taiwan: the role of corporate governance

Using a sample of Taiwan’s public firms, this paper examines whether managers use discretionary write-offs and abnormal accruals jointly to reach earnings targets and how corporate governance mechanisms react to such opportunistic behavior. We develop a set of simultaneous equations that capture executives’ incentives to manage earnings through write-offs and accrual management. These incentives include the existence and tightness of accounting-based covenants, “big bath,” income smoothing, and changes in senior management. The empirical results show that firms with larger discretionary write-offs also have lower discretionary accruals. In addition, we find that these earnings management tools are endogenous, suggesting that discretionary write-offs and discretionary accruals are partial complements for earnings manipulation and that their magnitudes are determined jointly. These findings contrast sharply with the tenor of discussion in the U.S. literature concerning the potential for using asset write-offs and discretionary accruals to manipulate earnings, which documents that managers use their discretion over accruals to signal economic realities rather than to obfuscate. Moreover, the results reveal that the empirical association between discretionary write-offs and abnormal accruals is more pronounced in weakly governed firms, suggesting that a strong governance setting is likely to constrain management’s discretionary behavior. The above implications are robust to a number of alternative specifications and variables definitions.     

The people who make organizations go--or stop

Managers invariably use their personal contacts when they need to, say, meet an impossible deadline or learn the truth about a new boss. Increasingly, it's through these informal networks--not just through traditional organizational hierarchies--that information is found and work gets done. But to many senior executives, informal networks are unobservable and ungovernable--and, therefore, not amenable to the tools of management. As a result, executives tend to work around informal networks or, worse, try to ignore them. When they do acknowledge the networks' existence, executives fall back on intuition--scarcely a dependable tool--to guide them in nurturing this social capital. It doesn't have to be that way. It is entirely possible to develop and manage informal networks systematically, say management experts Cross and Prusak. Specifically, senior executives need to focus their attention on four key role-players in informal networks: Central connectors link most employees in an informal network with one another; they provide the critical information or expertise that the entire network draws on to get work done. Boundary spanners connect an informal network with other parts of the company or with similar networks in other organizations. Information brokers link different subgroups in an informal network; if they didn't, the network would splinter into smaller, less effective segments. And finally, there are peripheral specialists, who anyone in an informal network can turn to for specialized expertise but who work apart from most people in the network. The authors describe the four roles in detail, discuss the use of a well-established tool called social network analysis for determining who these role-players are in the network, and suggest ways that executives can transform ineffective informal networks into productive ones.     

The association between fair value measurements and banks' discretionary accounting choices

This study examines the association between fair value measurements and banks' discretionary loan loss provisions using regulatory financial data from 2009 to 2016 for a sample of U.S. public bank holding companies. I find that banks recognizing larger proportions of fair value assets and liabilities based on level 2 and level 3 inputs are associated with lower discretionary loan loss provisions. However, there is no significant association between level 1 fair value assets and liabilities and discretionary loan loss provisions. When pre-managed earnings are lower, banks with larger proportions of level 2 and level 3 fair value assets and liabilities report smaller discretionary loan loss provisions to inflate earnings. Banks reporting larger proportions of level 2 and level 3 fair value assets and liabilities are more likely to use discretionary loan loss provisions to beat earnings benchmarks and manage tier one capital ratios. Overall, the results support the proposition that fair value assets and liabilities based on level 2 and level 3 inputs are less transparent and are subject to more discretion regarding loan loss provisions.     

The determinants of financial structure: How to explain the “paradox of insolvency and debt” among SMEs in Cameroon?

The paradox of insolvent enterprises regularly contracting new debts is the motivation behind this research. Statistical tests carried out on a sample of 62 manufacturing firms show that the financial behaviour of these enterprises is mainly explained by two factors: the rate of asset immobilization and the manager's social capital. The impact of the first factor is due to the asset capacity to serve guarantees, and the impact of the second is inherent to the possibility that enables relational networks to get around norms or to reach informal circuits and alternative sources of financing. The latter aspect is the beginning of the answer to the insolvency and indebtedness paradox. This result denotes the coexistence of two parallel dimensions in the Cameroon business environment. Besides the formal sphere, where the lack of confidence and readability between the actors pushes financial backers to excesses of prudence, subsists an informal universe where confidence, loyalty and solidarity seem to cement business relationships. However, the economic rationality of actors in these networks remains problematic.     

‘Professionals who understand’: Expertise,public interest and societal risk governance

This paper applies ideas from Beck, Power and Collins & Evans to investigate why crises triggered by societal risks heighten tension between self-regulated experts and the state, and why this increased tension threatens professional self-regulation. Using an Irish case of the regulation of professional auditors, we find that Beck helps us to understand the accounting bodies’ view of their own position as experts and their role in mitigating risk. Beck’s idea of a closed organizational roof, Collins and Evans (2002) work on waves of risk and expertise, and Power’s insights on the significance of public perception of risk are deployed as a framework to explore why these bodies lost power to a non-expert state which more clearly grasped the importance of lay power in a time of crisis. We propose the idea of professional regulation as a form of societal risk governance; this provides a frame to investigate why the state was able to harness a growing public disquiet to assert more control in their relationship with the professional bodies, and underscores the precedence of public interest over expertise in the self-regulatory debate. An analysis of the perspectives of government, profession and civil society illustrates inherent vulnerabilities in the authority of a self-regulated professional body excessively reliant on its own expertise.     

Accounting for great expectations: Lessons from the new media surge for critical management theory

The short organizational history of Silicon Alley (1995–2001) is used to examine some key lessons on management learning and innovation in new, interactive media start-ups from a critical perspective. The macro-social context of this history is seen as shaped by the contemporary round of political and economic globalization and its consequences such as the consolidation of the Internet, the succession of software generations, the increase of economic concentration and corporate size, the uneven availability of venture and investment capital, and other changes in the organizational and legal structures of the “new economy”. It is argued that the dynamics of global–local interaction affects the relative autonomy of firms and their subunits (managed vs. self-organized project teams), sharpens the managerial contradictions between routinization/reproduction and innovation/transformation, and widens the differences between organizations and networks in facilitating learning, teaching, and innovation. The analysis emphasizes the endemic tension between institutional dominance and efforts at self-organization from below, the importance of informal, flexible, and relatively autonomous project networks for innovation and transformation as compared to the institutional power relations of older and larger firms, and the significance of networks in furthering the exploration and social construction of new cognitive and social boundaries.     

Does the Prohibition of Long-lived Asset Impairment Reversals Affect Corporate Innovation? Evidence from a Quasi-experiment in China

China modified the asset impairment standard in 2007, prohibiting long-lived asset impairment reversal, which it had previously allowed. Using this setting as a quasi-experiment, we investigate how the prohibition of long-lived asset impairment reversal affects corporate technological innovation. Our empirical results demonstrate that the prohibition of impairment reversal has negative impacts on corporate innovation outputs. Further analyses reveal that the negative effect of this prohibition on corporate innovation is more prominent in companies with high discretionary accruals, high shareholding ratios for the largest shareholders, and companies in highly competitive markets.     

“Helping them to forget..”: the organizational embedding of gender relations in public audit firms

As Giddens has observed “Nothing is clearer than that gender is a matter of learning and continuous work, rather than a simple extension of biologically given sexual difference” (1991, p. 63). In this paper, we discuss the processes of professional socialization implicated in the reproduction of gender relationships in UK offices of two multi-national audit firms. The gendering of audit firms is viewed as connected not simply to important elements of the formal organizational structures, such as temporal organization and appraisal processes, but also to the tacit, informal components, such as the correct form of socializing involved in `getting in and getting on' [Sociology 28 (2) (1994) 479] within Big Five audit firms. Our focus is upon practices, including the discursive practices trainees pick up and mobilize during their everyday interactions. In our conclusion, we signal how informal and formal organizational processes are intertwined so as to reproduce gender domination, and comment upon the problems that policy initiatives and reforms face in attempting to redress organizational gender imbalances.     

Organizational culture in public accounting: Size, technology, rank, and functional area

This study examines the nature of organizational culture in public accounting and demonstrates that different aspects of culture exist across and within public accounting firms. Organizational culture is defined in terms of values shared by members of an organization (or organizational sub-unit) that manifest themselves in the practices of that organization. Practices particularly important to the development and maintenance of culture include selection and socialization. The hypotheses state that different aspects of organizational culture vary across public accounting firms of different size and technology, and public accountants of different rank and functional area. These hypotheses are tested and largely supported with responses to a paper and pencil instrument, the Values Survey Module (Hofstede, Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, 1982), which was completed by 338 public accountants across the United States. Implications for accountants and future research are also discussed.     

Do Governments Hide Resources from Unions? The Influence of Public Sector Unions on Reported Discretionary Fund Balance Ratios

We explore whether municipalities with public sector unions exploit aspects of governmental (or “fund”) accounting to obscure the availability of discretionary resources in fund balance accounts, relative to municipalities without public sector unions. We first investigate whether governments with unions report higher proportions of discretionary resources outside of the general fund, a primary measure of financial health, and instead within less prominent fund types. Second, we explore whether governments with unions report lower ratios within accessible general fund balance account categories – that is, report lower proportions of unreserved fund balance. Primary findings are consistent with both hypotheses. Although somewhat mixed, cross-sectional analyses reveal that effects are magnified when unions have more bargaining power, as proxied by the ability to strike or the absence of state right-to-work laws. Further analysis corroborates cross-sectional findings by examining difference-in-differences specifications surrounding the quasi-exogenous shock of Wisconsin's 2011 weakening of state public sector union laws and Ohio's time-varying union contract negotiations. Overall, the evidence suggests that governments with unions shelter resources to avoid the appearance of large discretionary amounts available.     

An examination of professional commitment in public accounting

This study analyzes the professional commitment of Canadian Chartered Accountants who are partners, managers (supervisors) and other staff CAs in public practice. This commitment is examined in relation to organizational commitment, professional-organizational conflict, satisfaction with income and organizational level. The commitment to organization is shown to be the most powerful predictor of CAs' professional commitment in all organizational levels. At the same time, professional-organizational conflict has a negative impact on professional commitment, and satisfaction with income has a positive influence on such a commitment.     

Editorial

This article analyses the ways that Spanish public water companies communicate sustainability information to their stakeholders and explores whether distinctive and more progressive accountability is possible in the public sector in comparison with private sector organizations. Two distinct activities are identified in sustainable accountability: public organizations are engaged in informal as well as formal reporting activity, and their reporting seems to be coupled with real organizational strategies and operational activities.     

Opportunities and challenges of the ecosystem approach

Humanity will continue to struggle with solving its existential problems in the future if command-and-control continues as the predominant approach to environmental and natural resources management. Recognizing the ecosystem perspective, complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory and transdisciplinary collaboration as conceptual opportunities to developing innovative and socially robust solutions is an important step in the right direction. However, because ecosystems are constantly evolving, human co-development has to account for inherent ecological uncertainty. Thus, sustainability depends on a continuous reevaluation of objectives, continuous knowledge generation, stakeholder involvement and a deeper understanding of evolving social and ecological dynamics. These requirements of continuity are hardly met by current approaches consisting of consecutive transdisciplinary projects focused on solving the most urgent problems of mismanagement at hand. Therefore, in this paper we argue for an organizational setup when pursuing an ecosystem approach and outline essential characteristics, inherent opportunities and fundamental challenges. Promising benefits of this approach include tested yet proactive interventions, public credibility, resource efficiency, long-term relationship building, community participation and ultimately sustainable development. Thereby, sustainability is aspired to and supported by a shared vision, organizational co-evolution, an organizational culture promoting innovation and an external autonomy to self-organize.     

Facilitating co-production in public services: management implications from a systematic literature review

Drawing on the results of a systematic literature review of empirical studies, this paper sheds light on six broad factors that facilitate the initiation and implementation of co-production in public services. The factors are classified into two overarching categories: organizational factors, including organizational arrangements, professional roles, and managerial tools; and procedural factors, including participant recruitment, participant preparation, and process design. For each set of factors, the paper provides a series of management implications. It concludes with additional observations for practice.     

Measuring public value: a conceptual and applied contribution to the debate

Countries facing austerity measures need to create public value. Academics and practitioners have been discussing the ways in which public value can be created, managed and measured. This paper contributes to this conversation by proposing a public value measurement model. An Italian case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the model and the organizational implications when public value measures are available to public sector managers, politicians and the public.