Everybody Else is Doing it,So Why Can’t We? Pluralistic Ignorance and Business Ethics Education

In light of the myriad accounting and corporate ethics scandals of the early 21st century, many corporate leaders and management scholars believe that ethics education is an essential component in business school education. Despite a voluminous body of ethics education literature, few studies have found support for the effectiveness of changing an individuals ethical standards through programmatic ethics training. To address this gap in the ethics education literature the present study examines the influence of an underlying social cognitive error, called pluralistic ignorance. We believe that if pluralistic ignorance is reduced, the result will be more effective business ethics education programs. Eighty undergraduate management students participated in this longitudinal study, and a mixed-model ANOVA revealed that the reduction of pluralistic ignorance (due to an ethics education program designed to reduce pluralistic ignorance) resulted in higher personal ethical standards over the course of a semester, when compared to a class that did not receive a formal ethics education program as part of their course. We discuss the implications of pluralistic ignorance in training business ethics and ethics education.     

Women in top management and agency costs

This study investigates gender diversity among the top managers of Fortune 500 firms and its effect on agency costs. The study finds that firms with a greater percentage of female officers present lower agency costs but that the negative relation is not robust when considering the endogeneity of diversity. The study also finds that external governance influences the relationship. Although increasing diversity does not reduce agency costs for all firms, the evidence shows that diversity is significantly negatively related to agency costs in firms in less competitive markets. The results suggest that increasing diversity in management can have beneficial effects for firms where strong external governance is absent.     

Impact of retail environment extraordinariness on customer self-concept

This research examines the effect of extraordinary retail environments on consumer self-concept. Two between-subjects experiments manipulate the extraordinariness of the retail environment and evaluate participants' self-concept in the environment. In both experiments, high-extraordinariness retail environments elicit a more atypical working self-concept than low-extraordinariness environments. Content analysis of participants' working self-concept in the two environments offers insight into the cognitive processes underlying the effect. The article discusses managerial and theoretical implications of the research.     

The impact of social support on salesperson burnout and burnout components

Previous research has shown that salesperson burnout affects sales productivity, employee retention, and job satisfaction. Although burnout has often been conceptualized as a multiple‐component construct, research typically has approached the efficacy of burnout reduction techniques by using overall measures of burnout rather than by examining the effects of such techniques on individual burnout components. The present research investigates how social support and choice of coping strategy relate to burnout components, illustrating the need to consider such components when conducting burnout‐related research. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Eating their cake and everyone else's cake, too: Resources as the main ingredient to workplace bullying

This article examines workplace bullying from a personal resources perspective. As workplace bullying emerges in unsupportive and stressful work environments, the threat of personal resource loss triggers the low cost, high reward resource-seeking behaviors that are typically reported as indicative of bullies in the workplace bullying research. Herein, we propose that these resource-seeking bullying behaviors allow bullies to create reinforcing resource gain cycles for them, but also create reinforcing resource loss cycles for targets and bystanders of bullying. As a potential remedy, we discuss recommendations for organizations to reduce the occurrence of workplace bullying.     

EXPLORING A GOVERNANCE THEORY OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: BARRIERS AND FACILITATORS TO INTEGRATION

Supply chain management is rapidly growing as both a strategic initiative and an academic discipline. As firms increasingly include their supply chain partners in the development of business strategy, researchers will have to constantly reevaluate the underlying themes and emergent theories of strategic logistics, management, and marketing by introducing new topics and revisiting seminal extant results. As such, this research was developed to explore the important concept of supply chain integration through strategic governance theory development. Since supply chain governance is a relatively new topic, a grounded study of both new and existing integration facilitators and barriers is presented. The study was initiated with a qualitative “managerial” development of scale items followed by a full empirical analysis. The result is an industry based returning to the source methodology for testing current governance related issues in industry. Contributions include the development of multiple dimensions of supply chain governance across facilitators and barriers, an explanation of the interplay between governance facilitators of, and barriers to, integration, a discussion of strategic level managerial implications, and a call for the future extension of governance research into the theory wanting domain of logistics and supply chain management.     

Price volatility and rational expectations in a sectoral framework commodity model: a multivariate GARCH approach

This article explores supply response models in a rational expectations framework with endogenous risk by using a multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model with Cholesky decomposition. This approach allows the incorporation of price volatility as a risk factor into the supply response of a primary commodity sector that is composed of several markets of homogenous products. The model is applied to the Greek meat sector, which is composed of four major meat categories, that is, beef, lamb, pork, and broiler, and thus the model for the entire market includes supply and demand equations for all the four meat markets, which are estimated simultaneously. The empirical results confirm that price volatility is a significant risk factor in Greek meat production and also provide useful implications about the cost factors of production. Furthermore, the empirical findings show that the last reform of the Common Agricultural Policy seems to have had a negative effect on beef and lamb production in Greece.     

Dominant retailers’ incentives for product quality in asymmetric distribution channels

This paper investigates the diverging incentives for product quality in a channel with two asymmetric retailers and a common supplier. When retailers differ in terms of service provision and channel power, changes in manufactured quality cause channel conflicts. In particular, our results show that if the low service retailer becomes dominant in the channel, it may induce a low level of quality that is detrimental for the other members of the channel. The low service retailer benefits from quality reduction first by improving its competitive standing against its rival retailer by lessening the importance of quality for consumer choice and second by strengthening its relative bargaining position vis-à-vis its supplier. Our results also show that consumer surplus may increase as a result of quality reduction.     

On Delays in Project Completion with Cost Reduction: An Experiment

We examine the voluntary provision of a public project via binary contributions when contributions may be made over multiple periods. In many situations, early contributors are likely to pay a higher cost than those who wait. We show that in such circumstances the provision of the project always involves delay. Because this game involves coordination on complex, dynamic strategies in the face of asymmetries in payoffs, we examine behavior in the laboratory.