How CEOs protect themselves against dismissal: A social status perspective

In this study, we address the question of why some CEOs stay in office during a performance downturn while others don't. Taking a social status perspective, we argue that an individual's board network embeddedness—as reflected in the number of outside directorships—plays an important role in dismissal decisions. We predict that a high status of the CEO relative to the chairman of the board protects an underperforming CEO against dismissal, while the relative salience of board network outsiders can counter this effect. Using longitudinal data of large German corporations, we find support for our predictions. Ltd. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Enabling Shared Leadership in Virtual Project Teams: A Practitioners' Guide

Many virtual project teams perform better when leadership is shared (rather than centralized with the formal team leader); however, team leaders are often neither prepared to identify shared leadership potential nor to actually share leadership responsibility. Based on a study of 96 globally dispersed software development teams we show that team leaders tend to underestimate the team members’ capacity to lead themselves. As a consequence, these leaders monopolize decision‐making authority and provide insufficient levels of autonomy for team members to tackle their tasks. Preventing the team members from unfolding their true potential, these leaders unconsciously jeopardize virtual team performance. Paradoxically, it is thus team leaders themselves hindering leadership effectiveness in virtual teams.     

Does Libertarian Paternalism Reconcile Merit Goods Theory with Mainstream Economics?

In the wake of Musgrave's move to question the absolute hegemony of individual preferences for normative economics in the 1950's by propounding the existence of merit goods, a recent book by Thaler and Sunstein is now making a similar claim under the label of ‘libertarian paternalism’. This paper tackles the question of why the framework of libertarian paternalism has received a so much more friendly reception among economists than the theory of merit goods. The main reason is a better foundation, not only for the conditions under which paternalism may be justified but also for the tools that should be applied, utilizing transaction cost theory.     

Research Productivity in Business Economics: An Investigation of Austrian,German and Swiss Universities

Abstract. We draw on a new and comprehensive dataset that collects the research output of business economists employed by Austrian, German and Swiss universities. We compute research rankings of departments and identify the leading departments in selected subdisciplines. Moreover, we investigate how institutional design and individual characteristics affect research productivity and draw some conclusions for the training of junior scientists.     

Intellektuelles Kapital — Konzeptualisierung und Messung von Wissen als Produktionsfaktor

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Confucian Entrepreneurship: Towards a Genealogy of a Conceptual Tool

The concept of the ‘Confucian Entrepreneur’ is now used by many scholars to understand entrepreneurship in China and other East Asian countries. This paper traces the development of this concept from its roots in the writings of nineteenth-century Western authors to its use in modern management journals. We show that while this conceptual tool has been adapted over time, the claims associated with it have remained largely similar. Use of the term Confucian entrepreneur implies belief that Confucian ideas induce Chinese entrepreneurs to behave differently than their Western counterparts, a claim for which the empirical foundations are weak. We do not go so far as to say that those who research Chinese entrepreneurship should discard the concept of the Confucian entrepreneur simply because of its historical origins in colonialism. However, we do call on researchers to reflect on the historical origins of their conceptual tools. By historicising our theories of entrepreneurship, this paper should encourage greater scholarly reflexivity and thus the development of entrepreneurship and management theory with greater predictive power.