THE PLACE OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN THE TRAINING OF ACCOUNTANTS IN NEW ZEALAND

The purpose of this study was to identify those communication skills most needed by accountants, so providing information which could be useful for accounting educators when designing programmes. The survey showed that practising accountants perceived wide differences between the desired and demonstrated communication skills of their new graduates. Academics, too, perceived serious deficiencies in their students. The conclusion is that academics, for the sake of their students and the accounting profession, should endeavour to increase the amount of time and expert effort put into communication skills in their university programmes.     

“The Worse You Behave, The More You Seem, to be Rewarded”: Bullying in Nursing as Organizational Corruption

This paper reports findings from the first, qualitative stage of a national sequential, mixed method study of bullying in the Australian nursing workplace. Twenty-six nurses who had experience of workplace bullying were recruited from two Australian public sector health care organizations. Examining the narrative data from the viewpoint of bullying being a corrupt activity we present an alternative perspective on group acts of bullying. By exploring bullying as corrupt behaviour, this paper challenges the assumption that bullying can be principally considered a series of isolated events stemming from interpersonal conflict, organizational pressures, or poor work design. Corruption in organizations has not previously been linked with or compared to bullying. In revealing the manner in which actors can engage in corrupt conduct that includes bullying, the findings from our study offer important implications for the management of workplace bullying as a serious and corrupt activity.     

Backward linkages from construction. Exploring the economic development potential of Scottish building supplies

One argument for increasing construction investment is the number of jobs and related multipliers associated with property investment. However, economic activity does not begin and end with actual construction: there are important backward linkages into the input markets for construction. If these markets can be shown to be primarily indigenous or at least with the potential to be locally-based, then there are wider local and regional benefits that may accrue from construction programmes. This paper is based on recent Scottish research which traced back the linkages from construction to specific building supplies markets in materials, semi-finished and finished products. Strong economy-wide multiplier effects are identified for construction output, for those on low incomes and in terms of job creation. Scottish construction is found to be primarily self-contained with consequent opportunities to maximise the local economic impact of construction work. The research suggests that policies need to target specific supply industries, meet the skills shortage challenge and confront the problems associated with construction tendering.     

Professional Ethics in a Virtual World: The Impact of the Internet on Traditional Notions of Professionalism

Numerous articles in the popular press together with an examination of websites associated with the medical, legal, engineering, financial, and other professions leave no doubt that the role of professions has been impacted by the Internet. While offering the promise of the democratization of expertise – expertise made available to the public at convenient times and locations and at an affordable cost – the Internet is also driving a reexamination of the concept of professional identity and related claims of expertise and standards of integrity.This paper begins with a presentation of case studies illustrating the ease by which impostors infiltrate the ranks of professionals. Reports of individuals masquerading as professionals via the Internet often reveal that these imposters cause harm to the unwary victims who rely on assertions of professional expertise. Such reports motivated the authors to examine the origins and evolution of the traditional roles of professions and professionals in today’s society, as well as question how, or whether, the standards for professional practice have been adapted to the challenges posed by technology, i.e., do statements of professional ethics provide a ‘guiding light’ for practitioners and their clients in the cyber age? The authors challenge the professions to consider the notion that technology forces a confrontation between the guild-like aspects of a profession that have served, on the one hand, to protect a profession from encroachment and, on the other hand, have purportedly protected the public.The authors conclude by presenting an examination of websites that show recognition of the challenges that the Internet poses to professionalism, as we have known it. Detailed discussion of the websites of two professions illustrates different approaches to responding to these challenges.     

The effects of relationship quality on customer retaliation

This research examines the effects of relationship quality (RQ) on customers' desires to retaliate after service failures. We posit that the effects of RQ are contingent upon the attributions customers make about the firm’s controllability over a service failure. Two competing hypotheses are examined and reconciled. The “love is blind” hypothesis posits that when low controllability is inferred, high RQ customers experience a lesser desire for retaliation than low RQ customers. On the other hand, the “love becomes hate” hypothesis specifies that when high controllability is inferred, high RQ customers experience a greater desire for retaliation than low RQ customers. The hypotheses are tested with a survey-based design and a partial least squares (PLS) model that incorporates a multiplicative latent construct.     

Means or ends? Ethical decision frameworks in the Western Australian Public Service

The paper analyses results from a questionnaire-based survey of ethical behavior of members of the Western Australian Senior Executive Service. Relating to definitions of deontology (duty) and teleology (ends over means) the study examines the validity of three hypotheses on ethical behaviour/decision making frameworks. Longitudinal data is related to the 1983–90WA Inc period. The study establishes that SES managers apply ethical frameworks in order to understand the meaning of: ethical behaviour and that there are groups of managers with distinct understandings of what constitutes ethical behavior which is reflective of particular ethics theories. Three groups of managers are identified: (1) emphasises teleology (2) focuses on external influences (rules, standards and codes) and (3) encompasses both teleology and external influences and, to a lesser extent deontology. Only this latter group is regarded as having an appropriate repertoire of potential responses to any given ethical dilemma. There is no support for the view that those beginning employment in the public service post 1984 adversely affected the ethical decision making frameworks of other senior managers.Allan Peachment holds a doctorate from Lancaster University and is a National Fellow of the Royal Institute of Public Administration of Australia. For co-authors, Geoff Soutar, Margaret McNeil and Caron Molster, see other papers.     

Are we overconfident in executive overconfidence research? An examination of the convergent and content validity of extant unobtrusive measures

Building understanding of overconfident executives is central to a growing literature that spans a number of disciplines. Much of this research has utilized unobtrusive, or indirect, measures to assess executive overconfidence from secondary data sources. We analyze the convergent and content validity of seven extant unobtrusive measures of executive overconfidence. The results of our analyses indicate that these measures do not exhibit adequate convergence, suggesting that existing measures are not measuring the same construct. Further, we administer a sort task to academic colleagues to assess whether scholars believe that the seven measures are adequately assessing the intended construct. The results of our sort task indicate that scholars did not categorize any of the seven measures as sufficient for measuring overconfidence. We conclude with suggestions for future research to address the inadequate convergent and content validity found in our assessment of extant measures of executive overconfidence.     

The effect of rankings on honesty in budget reporting

We conduct an experiment to investigate the effect of rankings, which are pervasive in practice, on the honesty of managers’ budget reports, which is important for sound decision making in organizations. Participants in our experiment are ranked in one of four ways: (1) firm profit, (2) own compensation, (3) both firm profit and own compensation, and (4) randomly, which serves as our baseline condition. None of the rankings affect participants’ remuneration. Compared to our baseline (random rankings) setting, where participants indeed exhibit honesty concerns, we find that rankings based on firm profit significantly increase honesty and that rankings based on own compensation significantly decrease honesty. Participants who received both rankings were significantly more honest than participants in the own compensation rankings condition. We did not, however, find significant differences in honesty between the both rankings and firm profit rankings conditions. As such, participants in the both rankings condition seemed to focus more on the firm profit metric than on the financially congruent own compensation metric. We also find that our results are stable across periods, suggesting that the effects of rankings neither increased nor dissipated over time. We discuss the contributions of our study and concomitant findings to accounting research and practice.     

An Asymmetric Information Model of Lockouts

This note proposes an asymmetric information model of collective bargaining where the firm has the bargaining power and the union the private information. Results show that the firm may use lockouts to induce the union to reveal its private information.