Generation Y’s Ethical Ideology and Its Potential Workplace Implications

Generation Y is a cohort of the population larger than the baby boom generation. Consisting of approximately 80 million people born between 1981 and 2000, Generation Y is the most recent cohort to enter the workforce. Workplaces are being redefined and organizations are being pressed to adapt as this new wave of workers is infused into business environments. One critical aspect of this phenomenon not receiving sufficient research attention is the impact of Gen Y ethical beliefs and ethical conduct in workplace contexts. It is widely accepted that distinct generational experiences shape ethical ideologies and ethical ideologies in turn affect the way people function in the workplace. Thus, Gen Y’s unique cohort experiences are likely to shape their ethical ideologies and consequent workplace judgments and actions. In this article, we examine Gen Y’s ethical ideology and study its impact on workplace functioning regarding leadership style, teamwork, and judgments about ethical violations. Our analyses indicate that Gen Y’ers tend toward situationalism (high idealism and high relativism), and their socially connected orientation produces more lenient judgments of collaborative vs. unilateral ethical violations. However, Gen Y’ers do exhibit individual variation. Relativist Gen Y’ers are more tolerant of ethical violations, whereas, Gen Y Idealists are less tolerant of ethical violations. High Idealists also show stronger teamwork and leadership characteristics. In addition, Gen Y’ers possessing servant leader traits exhibit incrementally better teamwork, and greater perceived unacceptability of ethical violations. We conclude by discussing implications of these findings for managing ethical climates and conduct.     

Changes over time in the return to education in urban China: Conventional and ORU estimates

Studies of the return to education in urban China have reported that this has increased over time, and that females typically have a higher return than males. In this paper we adopt a framework provided by the over education/required education/under education literature, and the decomposition developed by Chiswick and Miller (2008), to investigate the reasons for these findings. The finding by Chen and Hamori (2009), from analysis of data for 2004 and 2006, of the return to schooling for males exceeding that for females, is also examined using this decomposition.     

Anonymity in Computer-Mediated Communication: More Contrarian Ideas with Less Influence

Anonymity is thought to be an important means for ensuring a free exchange of ideas by encouraging the expression of minority viewpoints. However, we suggest that anonymity’s reduction in awareness of others potentially affects the expression and interpretation of comments that are made during a discussion. In particular, anonymity will increase the likelihood that comments will be made that are contrary to the majority opinion while at the same time decreasing the effect that those contrary arguments have on other group member’s opinions. This paper reports experimental results showing that anonymity led to more overall participation in discussions of ethical scenarios. However, equality of member participation did not differ between anonymous and member-identified groups, and anonymous groups had significantly higher awareness-related comments. This leads to the conclusion that additional participation in anonymous groups accommodates reduced awareness rather than reflecting the increased participation of normally reticent group members. In addition, anonymity led to more arguments in support of questionable behavior, suggesting that the freeing effects of anonymity apply to the social desirability of arguments. Finally, there was less change in opinion under conditions of anonymity than when comments were identified, suggesting that anonymous arguments have less influence on opinions than identified comments.     

Building the high-flex/high-value HR team

In many companies, the human resources function is considered necessary, but minimally important. Douglas Ready strongly disagrees and argues that a shoddy HR function will keep the rest of the company from high achievement. It's time to develop the people who are in charge of developing everyone else.     

Reasonableness and Section 4 of the Employment Act 1980

This article explains the origins of s.4 of the Employment Act 1980 and assesses the place of this provision in the corpus of labour legislation enacted by the Conservative government since 1980. Its principal aim is to concentrate upon the concept of reasonableness which is central to the operation of the provision and to evaluate critically the role of the EAT and the industrial tribunals in interpreting it. Finally, the article seeks to assess the impact of the tribunaľs interpretation of s.4 on union admission and expulsion procedures.     

Regularity conditions and scope estimates: The case of large-sized U.S. banks

We consider economies and diseconomies of scope for large U.S. banks by employing ordinary and hybrid translog cost functions. We examine the regularity conditions in output space where scope estimates are calculated and reject all models for which these conditions fail. The translog model always possesses violations. For the hybrid translog, violations occur in every case except one. In this one case, we find economies of scope.     

Taxpayer resistance,guarantee uncertainty,and housing finance subsidies

In the absence of external guarantees, a private firm's debt trades in the market at rates reflective of its private default risk. Not all firms go it alone, however. There are entities, government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), whose debt obligations enjoy federal guarantees. Federal guarantees affect housing finance indirectly in that they tend to enhance the creditworthiness of the debt obligations of the housing intermediary which lessens the debtholder's exposure to default. The market investor then becomes a willing buyer of GSE debt at a lower (subsidized) rate as a result of the government guarantee.Due to the fact that the subsidy rests on the presumption that the GSE debt will be bailed out by the government it can be seen that the subsidy in turn rests upon the presumption by the GSE debtholder that the taxpayers will honor the guarantee in the event of a GSE default. Hence, government subsidies to the housing intermediaries rest not on ongoing government outlays but rather on the confidence that the taxpayers will be willing, if called upon, to cover GSE losses, i.e., the confidence of a bailout.This article analyzes the effects on the GSE subsidy and on the taxpayer, if the debt markets charge for bailout risk. Bailout risk pricing is an economic event. When debtholders seek to protect themselves by pricing for bailout risk, this increases GSE borrowing costs and cuts into both GSE borrowers' subsidies and stockholder earnings. Higher borrowing costs leave the GSE in a weakened condition and increase the ex ante bailout cost to the taxpayer. When bailout risk premiums become priced by the market, it substantially lessens the government's ability to subsidize housing finance or other GSE activities.     

Swinburne's Challenge: A Note on Probability Estimates for Nontypical Potential Evidence Instances

General confirmation theory, and especially its Bayesian variant, has never been able to adequately address the issue of how to handle qualitative evidence instances. Such statements encompass a wide class including historical claims, those of the human sciences not incorporating quantitative models, legal statements and the like. The issue was recognized by the philosopher Swinburne (1973) who puzzled how such statements as, Caesar crossed the Rubicon, could be assigned a meaningful probability estimate. The present paper suggests that such statements can be transformed into, at least, plausible probability estimates. This requires a two step process: judgements made by credible raters, and the transformation of judgements into one or more reliability co-efficients. These reliability estimates can then be utilized in the standard Bayesian model to yield plausible degrees of belief between hypothesis and evidence.     

Is it the Law or the Lawyers? Investment Covenants around the World*

This paper introduces a new dataset from 50 private investment funds from 17 countries around the world. We analyse the frequency of use of investment covenants imposed by institutional investors governing the activities of private investment fund managers in areas pertaining to investment decisions, investment powers, types of investments, fund operations and limitations on liability. While the data indicate a role for country legality in affecting the frequency of use of fund covenants, the data further indicate that the presence of legally trained managers has a more pronounced role in affecting the use of covenants. As private equity and venture capital investment increases across Europe and elsewhere, our results indicate that legal practice factors will matter more than the legal setting for the establishment of covenants governing new funds.     

an anti-trust regime for Britain

Britain needs a complete transformation of its policy towards monopoly. Robert Miller argues that freedom of entry is the vital ingredient of policy for regulating monopolies and public utilities.