Employee organizational commitment: the influence of cultural and organizational factors in the Australian manufacturing industry

The importance of enhancing employee organizational commitment (EOC) is highlighted by the extensive literature revealing its positive impact on employees' job performance, reducing absenteeism and turnover rates, and improving employees' adaptability to organizational change. This study provides an insight into how EOC levels can be enhanced by examining the contextual factors that can influence EOC. Specifically, the study examines the association between cultural, organizational, and demographic factors with the level of EOC in the Australian manufacturing industry. Data were collected by a survey questionnaire from a random sample of 500 managers with the results revealing that two cultural factors (outcome orientation and stability) and three organizational factors (organizational size, perceived organizational support and job satisfaction) were found to be significantly associated with the level of EOC. Further analysis provides a preliminary insight into how to enhance the EOC of specific managers with different cultural and organizational factors found to be associated with the EOC of managers at different levels in the organizational hierarchy. The findings have important implications for practitioners attempting to improve the level of EOC of their employees with the subsequent enhancements in the level of EOC likely to contribute to improvements in productivity and growth in the Australian manufacturing industry.     

Learning to organise risk management in organisations: what future for enterprise risk management?

This paper identifies recurring issues in the regulation of new technologies through an historical review of the risk management of automobiles in the 1800s. Parallels are drawn between the regulation of early automobiles and that of the regulation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) today. It is found that many of the regulatory challenges facing UASs are analogous to those which faced the automobile industry more than a century and half ago and that the need for informed and objective decision making in policy development is reinforced. A systems engineering approach, based on general systems theory and decision‐based design principles, is then proposed as a means for improving the objectivity, transparency and rationality in the risk management decision making process. An example risk management decision making scenario is given within the context of a small UAS operating over a populated area. The results obtained from this case study illustrate how even simple analysis can support the decision making process and highlights some of the potential challenges in the regulatory approach currently applied to UASs.     

Gender identity and brand incongruence: when in doubt,pursue masculinity

Gender identity is the extent to which an individual identifies with masculine or feminine personality traits. Sex roles in Western societies continue to evolve, so this research examines the developing relationship between gender identity and consumer responses to gendered branding. Grounded in self-congruency theory [Sirgy, M. J. (1982). Self-concept in consumer behavior: A critical review. Journal of Consumer Research, 9, 287–300], the present research reports an experiment that supports a congruence relationship between gender identity and brand response. Masculine consumers prefer masculine brands. The results also show incongruent brand rejection where masculine consumers react negatively to feminine brands although feminine consumers are more accepting of masculine brands. Further, the results suggest that gender identity is a more effective dimension for customer segmentation than biological sex. Overall, the results suggest that masculine brands are more effective than other gendered brand profiles for masculine, feminine, and androgynous consumers.     

Price Discrimination and Efficient Distribution

This paper focuses on third‐degree price discrimination by an upstream firm with some degree of monopoly power. Downstream firms fall into two categories: efficient and inefficient, according to their relative costs of transforming a unit of the upstream good into a unit of final product. Under ordinary static conditions, price discrimination favors the inefficient firms, which have more elastic demands. We consider, however, the possibility that discrimination in the opposite direction can alter the downstream market structure toward greater efficiency. Discriminatory pricing, then, involves charging a higher price to the less efficient firms. Such pricing is shown to be both potentially profitable for the upstream firm and welfare improving as average consumer prices fall.     

Modelling guanxi with a games network approach

Rapid economic growth in East Asia has often been attributed to cultural preconditions. In the case of China, high economic growth has been attributed to Confucian emphases on loyalty, reciprocal social obligations, and the pre-eminence of the group over the individual. These cultural attributes are said to be manifested especially in the practice of guanxi, a distinctive style of inter-firm networking based on trust and mutual obligations. We suggest that cultural explanations of guanxi networking behaviour appear to conflict with standard economic assumptions of rationality and utility maximisation. We argue that guanxi networks can be better understood if modelled on these standard economic assumptions. For this purpose we use a network games approach. We find that guanxi-type behaviour can be generated by the model, such that culture-based explanations appear unnecessary. Thus, we argue, guanxi behaviour can be explained in a way more consistent with rational agents and maximising behaviour.     

Group Purchasing Organizations,Monopsony, and Antitrust Policy

Group purchasing organizations (GPOs) consolidate the purchasing power of their members and negotiate contracts with input suppliers on their behalf. GPOs have received attention from the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission because of concerns over monopsony power and standardization of hospital production costs. GPOs have been criticized in the literature for their contracting practices, which may appear to be exclusionary, and their funding mechanism, which may lead to incentive incompatibility. We analyze these competitive concerns in turn. We find GPOs to be procompetitive and suggest an antitrust policy that preserves the benefits of GPO operations while protecting consumers from any competitive shortcomings. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Informal conflict intervention: Advice and dissent

A disparity appears to exist between how managers are advised to handle conflict and the intervention methods that they utilize in actual practice. Normative advice tends to agree that managers should adopt a facilitative, mediatorlike role (e.g., Walton, 1987; Tjosvold, 1990), while the empirical research suggests that managers are much more controlling, often deciding how to resolve the problem on their own (e.g., Kolb, 1986; Sheppard, 1983). The present study focuses on two potential reasons as to why managers utilize the methods they do: (1) They treat choices instrumentally to achieve key goals and (2) they interpret or frame conflicts in a form that suggests directive action. One hundred and eighty managers were interviewed about a recent effort to intervene in a dispute at work. The results confirm that managers are very controlling when intervening in disputes and relates this to both interpretive frame and, to a lesser extent, managerial goals. A canonical analysis appears to emphasize the pivotal role that frame plays in influencing whether or not managers choose the solution. Implications of these results for managerial action are discussed.     

Employment opportunities and labor force participation

Conclusions The research reported here provides a link between expected mix of job opportunities and labor force participation rates for various demographic groups in the working age population. The model produced statistically significant results, generally, for the expected employment opportunities indices, and appears to be a useful device for analyzing labor force participation changes in reaction to varying employment opportunities.The empirical results give further evidence of the existence of a dual labor market in which several worker groups, encompassing younger and older workers and non-family heads, are not as strongly attached to the labor force as prime age males. In particular, percentage increases in job seekers in secondary labor force groups induced by expanding employment opportunities may well exceed percentage increases in employment opportunities in an area. These groups' labor force participation elasticities with respect to employment opportunities are usually greater than one, thus adversely affecting attempts to reduce the official unemployment problems of these secondary groups.Given the greater difficulties these so-called marginal or secondary workers have in finding employment, manpower planners need to anticipate shifts in the labor force composition in assessing needs to be met through job creation and manpower programs. In particular, the results suggest that selective job creation and training programs may be necessary to solve unemployment problems.Finally, this research provides additional evidence demonstrating the inadequacy of unemployment counts to show the total number of persons desiring a job and, thus, the total size of the employment problem faced in a labor market. Moreover, the number of hidden unemployed who will became active job seekers as job openings develop is related to the mix of specific job openings as well as to the demographic mix of the population age 16 years and over.The authors wish to thank the Economic Development Administration and the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah for funding portions of this research. The authors also wish to thank Professor Dan Mitchell, Graduate School of Management, UCLA, for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.