Talent — Innate or acquired? Theoretical considerations and their implications for talent management

In order to contribute to the theoretical understanding of talent management, this paper aims to shed light on the meaning of the term ‘talent’ by answering the following question: Is talent predominantly an innate construct, is it mostly acquired, or does it result from the interaction between (specific levels of) nature and nurture components? Literature stemming from different disciplines has been reviewed to summarize the main arguments in support of each of the three perspectives. Subsequently, these arguments are mapped on a continuum ranging from completely innate to completely acquired. We argue that an organization's position on this continuum entails important implications for its design of talent management practices, which we discuss extensively. By providing guidelines on how an organization's talent management system can be shaped in accordance with their respective talent definition, this paper is particularly useful to HR practitioners.     

Towards a cross-cultural framework of strategic international human resource control: the case of Taiwanese high-tech subsidiaries in the USA

Due to the growing expansion of newly emerging multinational companies (MNCs) in the USA market, it seems pertinent to explore how to manage their Western industrialized subsidiaries in terms of human resource management. This study combines the institutionalism, resource dependence perspective, and control theory to provide an integrative framework in an attempt to investigate the cross-cultural determinants of strategic international human resource control over MNCs' subsidiaries. By a qualitative analysis of 10 Taiwanese top high-tech manufacturing companies operating in the USA, our findings are as follow: In order to perform subsidiary's value-added activities, multinationals need to identify the value and capabilities need for these activities. At the same time, subsidiaries also need to compare the cultural advantage of the home country in terms of these activities. In addition, from the perspective of cross-cultural influence, input control is designed to respond to high integration and high adaptation; output control is executed in the case of low integration and high cultural adaptation; while behavioural control is used to respond to high integration and low adaptation, simultaneously in the case of low value of subsidiary's activities.     

Intolerable nuisances: some laboratory evidence on survivor curve shapes

The fraction of a user population willing to tolerate nuisances of size x is summarized in the survivor curve S(x); its shape is crucial in economic decisions such as pricing and advertising. We report a laboratory experiment that, for the first time, estimates the shape of survivor curves in several different settings. Laboratory subjects engage in a series of six desirable activities, e.g., playing a video game, viewing a chosen video clip, or earning money by answering questions. For each activity and each subject we introduce a chosen level \(x \in [x_{\min }, x_{\max }]\) of a particular nuisance, and the subject chooses whether to tolerate the nuisance or to switch to a bland activity for the remaining time. New non-parametric techniques provide bounds on the empirical survivor curves for each activity. Parametric fits of the classic Weibull distribution provide estimates of the survivor curves’ shapes. The fitted shape parameter depends on the activity and nuisance, but overall the estimated survivor curves tend to be log-convex. An implication, given the model of Aperjis and Huberman (SSRN, doi:  10.2139/ssrn.1672820, 2011), is that introducing nuisances all at once will generally be more profitable than introducing them gradually.     

The Role of Dialectical Interrogation in Review Studies: Theorizing from What We See Rather Than What We Have Already Seen

Review-centric works receive increasing attention for generating insightful contributions to management and organization studies. Despite this, the literature on theory building has taken little note of their place in the theorizing process. This deserves attention, however, given the challenges reviews face in theorizing in the absence of new empirical observations. Accordingly, these works run the risk of merely summarizing ‘what we have already seen’, instead of ‘maximizing what we see’. Drawing on the strategies of theorizing from similarities and theorizing from anomalies, we propose dialectical interrogation as a critical step in theorizing through which review scholars imaginatively engage in a back and forth inquiry between the phenomenal world of a given field and existing theory. By analysing selected review studies from top management journals, we reveal that theorizing outcomes occur through two ways of dialectical interrogation (consolidative and disruptive). We contribute by demonstrating that review scholars can enter into powerful theorizing through the consolidative or disruptive interrogation of the review data with extant theory to detect emergence and novelty alongside puzzles, conflicts and paradoxes. Dialectical interrogation can address the shortcomings of current theorizing in review-centric works and bears potential for advancing theories of management and organization studies.     

Don't ignore the floor: Exploring multisensory atmospheric congruence between music and flooring in a retail environment

In retail environments, consumers commonly evaluate products while standing on some type of flooring and concurrently being exposed to music; however, no study has examined the interaction of these two atmospheric cues. To bridge this gap, this research examines whether retailers can benefit from creating multisensory atmospheric congruent rather than incongruent retail environments of flooring and music. The results of an experiment in a real retail store reveal positive effects of multisensory congruent retail environments (e.g., soft music combined with soft flooring) on product evaluations. This study provides a new process explanation with consumers’ purchase‐related self‐confidence mediating these effects. Specifically, consumers in congruent rather than incongruent retail environments experience more purchase‐related self‐confidence, which in turn leads to more favorable product evaluations. Furthermore, this study shows that consumers with a low rather than a high preference for haptic information are influenced more by multisensory atmospheric congruence when evaluating a product haptically.     

Der Begriff Lügenpresse in deutschen Tageszeitungen

In Germany, we currently see on-going changes in politics and society. More and more people seem to lose faith not only in politics, but also in the mainstream media. Since autumn 2014, the distrust in and suspicion of the news media has reached a new level: the group “Pegida” (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) coined the term Lügenpresse (lying press) to illustrate their growing distrust in news media. The term lying press emerged for the first time in 1914 and was regularly used for war propaganda to defame foreign media. In general, the term is not only used by followers of a certain political direction, but in the context of different, especially antidemocratic, political movements (e.?g., during the National Socialist era or during the GDR era in Germany). Since the beginning of the 2000s, however, the concept has been increasingly referred to by right-wing groups (see Heine 2015; Klarmann 2013). Nevertheless, this is not only an issue in Germany, since Pegida has support in other European countries, such as Great Britain and the Netherlands.News media become part of their own coverage as soon as they refer to these developments. Self-discussion or self-coverage can be described as journalistic communication about journalism and means that the media themselves become the object of reporting. Hence, when media use the term lying press, they inevitably refer to themselves. The present study deals with how the media refer to the term lying press and how they reflect upon it. The main question we deal with in our study is how detailed the concept is reflected on and how the media deal with the associated reproach of deliberate misinformation.Drawing on the concept of framing, a content analysis is employed in order to analyze how newspapers report on the term, how they relate it to themselves and how they deal with its implications. The framing approach deals with the emergence, dissemination and alteration of interpretive frames, which are placed on an issue and determine the point of view on this topic. According to Matthes (2014), frames can be understood as a tool to highlight certain information or aspects of a topic while neglecting others. The framing approach deals with the genesis, alteration and effects of frames, which are located at various points in the communication process. In this study, we focus on media frames in the daily newspaper coverage. We rely upon the definition according to Entman (1993) which has been most frequently operationalized so far.We postulate several research questions that deal with the concept of self-coverage and framing. We are, for example, interested in verifying the sections of newspapers in which the term is referred to and if there are differences in how strongly the term is reflected upon. Furthermore, our research interest focuses on how the term is framed, which frames are dominant in the news media and if the frames change over time. We investigated the coverage of the five most widely circulated daily newspapers (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Bild, die Welt, and die tageszeitung) in Germany from October 2014 to October 2015. We discovered 304 articles with 338 statements referring to the term lying press. With a cluster analysis, we extracted four frames.Overall, the term lying press is more strongly reflected on in media sections than in political reporting. In political sections the term is often only mentioned without further contextualization. The four extracted clusters, which can be interpreted as media frames, are termed as follows: demanding author frame, reserved expert frame, external accusation frame, and unreflected author frame.In political sections of newspapers, the two rather undifferentiated frames (external accusation frame with 35% and unreflected author frame with 36%) are dominant. The reserved expert frame (35%) and the unreflected author frame (43%) are the two dominant frames in media sections. Nevertheless, the two most common frames (external accusation frame and unreflected author frame) do not use the term lying press in a critical and reflective way (combined percentage of 60%). The selection of the term as “non-word” of the year did not significantly change the frequency with which the four frames are used within the media.Our results show that the term lying press is used in different ways – but in most cases, there is only little or no elaboration. Frequently, the term is only mentioned without a deeper discussion and classification of the term and its meaning. It sometimes even seems that newspapers use the term ironically as a synonym for themselves instead of the terms media or press. However, the associated trivialization of a term carrying such negative connotations is problematic and could help to establish lying press as an unreflected designation for the media. The media might miss the opportunity to both react decisively to the accusations and to illustrate how important they are in a democratic society. The term must be placed in its historical context and should not be permitted as a flat-rate defamation. Whether the underlying criticism is justified or not, the media should discuss the term and, if possible, invalidate it. In this context, the media must perform their function of practicing criticism – also against themselves. Limitations and future research are discussed at the end of the paper.     

The Gender Pay Gap in EU Countries — New Evidence Based on EU-SES 2014 Data

Intereconomics - Gender differences in wages are a persistent pattern in most European countries. This study analyses the earnings divide between men and women and the driving forces behind it in...     

Comparing automated text classification methods

Online social media drive the growth of unstructured text data. Many marketing applications require structuring this data at scales non-accessible to human coding, e.g., to detect communication shifts in sentiment or other researcher-defined content categories. Several methods have been proposed to automatically classify unstructured text. This paper compares the performance of ten such approaches (five lexicon-based, five machine learning algorithms) across 41 social media datasets covering major social media platforms, various sample sizes, and languages. So far, marketing research relies predominantly on support vector machines (SVM) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Across all tasks we study, either random forest (RF) or naive Bayes (NB) performs best in terms of correctly uncovering human intuition. In particular, RF exhibits consistently high performance for three-class sentiment, NB for small samples sizes. SVM never outperform the remaining methods. All lexicon-based approaches, LIWC in particular, perform poorly compared with machine learning. In some applications, accuracies only slightly exceed chance. Since additional considerations of text classification choice are also in favor of NB and RF, our results suggest that marketing research can benefit from considering these alternatives.     

Managing service employees: literature review,expert opinions,and research directions

This article reviews the service management and marketing literature on managing people with a particular emphasis on managerial relevance. This review explores the market and financial results of managing people effectively, emphasizing that it is probably harder to duplicate high-performing human assets than any other corporate resource. The challenges inherent in boundary-spanning frontline jobs are discussed, including role conflict and emotional labor. Next, recommended human resources (HR) strategies and practices related to recruitment, training, empowerment, service delivery teams, and employee motivation are reviewed. The literature review concludes with a section on service culture, climate, and leadership. Each section is complemented with further research suggestions that emerged from interviews with eight academic and practitioner experts. The last section outlines six themes for new research opportunities with high potential managerial relevance; they relate to (1) the financial impact of HR practices and strategies, (2) motivating service employees, (3) training, (4) emotional labor, (5) dealing with rude customers, and (6) the impact of technology on managing service employees.