Opportunistic hiring and employee fit

Most research on selection processes and organizational fit deals with existing, unfilled positions where expectations and tasks are known and measurable. This article instead evaluates the reasons, processes, and implications of opportunistic hiring—hiring employees before their jobs exist. Examples from an exploratory study show how “fit” factors into selection decisions. A typology is offered along the dimensions of whether opportunistic hiring is used to meet immediate or anticipated needs and the extent to which these needs are articulated prior to selection. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

How to achieve true integration: the impact of integrated marketing communication on the client/agency relationship

ABSTRACT

Reports from the advertising industry suggest that the pressure to create effective integrated campaigns across the ever-increasing mix of paid, owned and earned media is putting an enormous strain on client/agency relationships. This research identifies the main challenges that an Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) approach places on this relationship and thereby advances the IMC literature by examining the practical challenges of implementation. Six key issues, developed from academic and industry sources, are presented to advertising experts, through a Delphi study, to stimulate debate and identify areas of agreement. The findings are brought together in a model which presents three main areas that need to be addressed, along with specific recommendations. These topics include the need for clients to provide stronger leadership in defining agency roles and responsibilities, more transparent remuneration systems to encourage teamwork across agencies as well as individual input and an increased emphasis on the strategic contribution from agencies.     

Do Health Insurers Possess Market Power?

During the 2009–2010 health care reform debates, many policy makers presumed that a lack of competition in the U.S. health insurance industry had resulted in greater levels of uninsurance. However, such a presumption has no basis in current research. This study, with a panel data set of the 50 states and the District of Columbia over the years 2001–2007, examines how health‐insurer market concentration at the state level influences the percentage of the population with either individually purchased or employer‐sponsored private health insurance. Two‐stage least squares estimates are derived using a lagged measure of health‐insurer concentration as an instrument. Results suggest that health insurers exercise market power on the seller side of the health insurance marketplace, but the restriction of output is limited to the individually purchased insurance market segment.     

Ecotourism and Certification: Confronting the Principles and Pragmatics of Socially Responsible Tourism

Many ecotourism proponents advocate certification as a means to distinguish legitimate ecotourism from counterfeit ‘greenwashed’ products. This paper discusses efforts by certification advocates operating in global arenas to generate standards for measuring compliance with one dimension of widely accepted definitions of ecotourism, the stipulation that it should provide benefits to local communities. The paper then presents an ethnographic case study from Belize that reveals disagreements among ecotourism stakeholders in Belize and between them and international experts about the meaning of several key terms: who should count as ‘local’, what should count as ‘participation’ by locals, and what constitutes a ‘benefit’ to local communities. The author argues that divergent perspectives on these issues must be recognised and accommodated in the process of harmonising or standardising certification criteria for ecotourism; failure to do that could imperil both the principled and pragmatic rationales behind the requirement that ecotourism provide benefits to local communities.     

Do preferences for charitable giving help auctioneers?

Preferences for charitable giving in auctions can be modeled by assuming that bidders receive additional utility proportional to the revenue raised by an auctioneer. The theory of bidding in the presence of such preferences results in a very counterintuitive prediction which is that, in many cases, bidders having preferences for charitable giving does not lead to a substantial revenue advantage for an auctioneer. We test this theory and this prediction with a series of experiments. In one experiment we induce charitable preferences exactly as specified in the model to see if bidders respond to them as predicted. We find that they do. We then conduct a second experiment in which the revenue from the auctions is donated to actual charities to verify the robustness of the prediction when charitable preferences are generated by a more natural source and find again that the theoretical prediction holds: even strong charitable preferences do not result in substantial revenue increases to the auctioneer.     

Performance measures and short‐termism: An exploratory study

We examine the relationship between performance measurement systems and short‐termism. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of senior managers drawn from a major telecommunications company to determine the extent to which the diagnostic and interactive uses of financial and non‐financial measures give rise to short‐termism. We find no evidence to suggest that the use of financial measures, either diagnostically or interactively, leads to short‐term behaviour. In contrast, we find a significant association between the use of non‐financial measures and short‐termism. Results suggest that the diagnostic use of non‐financial measures leads managers to make inter‐temporal trade‐off choices that prioritise the short term to the detriment of the long term, while we find interactive use is negatively associated with short‐termism. We find an imbalance in favour of the diagnostic use over the interactive use of non‐financial performance measures is associated with short‐termism. Overall, findings highlight the importance of considering the specific use of performance measures in determining the causes of short‐termism.     

The ‘Flexible Firm’: Strategy and Segmentation

This paper draws together and provides further analysis of two research projects commissioned by the Department of Employment, with a focus on employers' labour use strategies in Britain. It seeks to place on a firmer statistical basis arguments about the presence and growth of the ‘flexible firm’, and it draws also on case-study data to explore some of the issues relating to flexibility and strategy. Our conclusions are that there has been a marked absence of strategy in this area, and reasons for this are explored, as are the implications for gender and segmentation in the labour market.