Exploring the role of perceived external prestige in managers' turnover intentions

Employee turnover is an important topic in the human resource management literature. Several researchers have sought to analyse its multiple determinants and to model the turnover process. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of employees' perception of the external image of the company they work for on their intentions to leave. It is based on a questionnaire survey of 801 French managers that attempted to incorporate the notion of perceived external prestige (PEP) within the literature's classical model of turnover. The results show that the impact of PEP on intentions to leave is partially mediated by the two determinants of turnover in the model: organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Yet there still remains a direct effect of PEP on intentions to quit. Our research also attempted to confirm the existence of a possible moderator effect, but was unable to find such an effect.     

WOMEN AND MINORITIES IN AMERICA'S VOLUNTEER MILITARY

Since the inception of the all-volunteer force (AVF) in 1973, the U.S. military has been considered a pioneer of equal opportunity among the nation's institutions, despite its being a unique internal labor market characterized by a hierarchical structure with little lateral entry. The authors argue that this actually helped women and minorities because (1) the advancement process is both well defined and based on merit, and (2) the promotion process looks at everyone. The pay raises that accompanied the AVF made military service competitive with civilian labor market alternatives and provided women and minorities with a viable career choice. They took advantage of this freedom of choice resulting in their ever-increasing representation at all levels of the armed forces.     

Sudden crash or long torture: The timing of market reactions to operational loss events

An emerging literature investigating market responses to operational loss announcements concludes that financial markets tend usually to overreact to loss events. This overreaction is commonly interpreted as reputational damage. We revisit this issue by focusing on the timing of markets’ reactions and highlight two variables: the start and the speed of stock markets’ responses. It appears that when operational losses are caused by internal fraud the negative market reaction materializes earlier and faster. Industry sectors and prevailing market conditions influence the timing of market reactions as well. Our empirical findings reveal moreover that a higher initial grading of the company is associated with a later stock market reaction to the announcement. While the relative magnitude and the length of markets’ overreactions is positively correlated to the concomitant downgrading our study shows that overreaction magnitudes are also strongly correlated to our estimate of the total duration of the reaction.     

Technology development mode: a transaction cost conceptualization

Technology alliances have emerged in the past decade as a significant mode for the development of innovation. The present research assesses the factors explaining whether firms will engage in such technology alliances or utilize the more traditional mode of internal R&D. The hypotheses stem from a transaction cost conceptualization. Results suggest that firms which pursue technology alliances are likely to have less commitment to product category-specific assets, to face higher technological uncertainty, to be more capable at measuring innovation performance, to have more successful technology alliance experiences, and to compete in lower growth product categories. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Simpson paradox of school grading in Italy

Data from the 2003 OECD-PISA Survey for Italy reveal a striking difference in the relationship between students’ competence (as measured by PISA score in Mathematics) and school grades across regions: a competence level granting bare sufficiency in the North yields excellence grades in the South. This has spurred a lively debate on education policy in the country, based on the inference drawn from this evidence that grading practices are excessively different in the two areas. We show in this note that this inference overlooks a Simpson paradox hidden in the data. After a more careful analysis, the above inference is seen to be wrong. The crucial omitted variable is the school-level average competence: schools with low-performing students, all over the country, inflate grades. Students in the South get higher grades simply because they are in weaker schools; grading policy is actually homogeneous across regions.