How Adult Attachment Styles Relate to Perceived Psychological Contract Breach and Affective Organizational Commitment

The current study examines the relationship between adult attachment style and both perceived psychological contract breach and affective organizational commitment in a sample of college students with employment experience. Attachment style is argued to be an individual difference factor that affects how an individual perceives organizational events based on theory and existing empirical research related to adult attachment style. Individuals with insecure attachment styles were predicted to perceive more psychological contract breach and have lower levels of affective organizational commitment. The results reveal that individuals with higher levels of preoccupied and dismissive attachment styles perceived higher levels of psychological contract breach, and preoccupied attachment style significantly and negatively relates to affective organizational commitment. The relationship between attachment style and psychological contract dimensions was stronger for relational than transactional contract dimensions. Evidence is also found that perceived psychological contract breach mediates the relationship between preoccupied attachment style and affective commitment. Future potential research directions are described. The implications of these findings for managerial practice is discussed.     

Advanced models of quality function deployment: a literature review

In this paper, a literature review conducted to study the characteristics of advanced models of quality function deployment (QFD) that have appeared in the literature arena is reported. QFD technique emerged in Japan in the 1970s. QFD has been proving to be a powerful tool that can be used for translating the voice of customers into technical languages. Yet from the beginning of this century, researchers began to point out the need to refine, modify and improve the features of QFD technique. In order to fulfil this need, few researchers brought out several advanced models of QFD. While conducting the literature review reported in this paper, six types of such advanced models of QFD were identified in the literature arena and their characteristics were studied. The result of this study revealed that the procedural and computational complexities are least in the case of an advanced model called total quality function deployment (TQFD). TQFD technique replaces the complex computations involved in applying conventional QFD technique with simple ratings. Besides the formation of teams to translate the voice of customers into work instructions ensures the quick reactions to the customers’ desires in the actual field of implementation. In this background, at end of this paper, it is suggested to adopt TQFD for implementation in traditional organizations in which the prevalence of adequate education for adopting complex procedures is found to be least.     

Building entrepreneurial inter-firm networks in an emerging economy: the role of cognitive legitimacy

We take an organizational legitimacy perspective and use data from a large-scale nationally representative study on the state of small business in Saudi Arabia, in order to explore the antecedents to the formation of entrepreneurial ventures’ inter-firm networks in the context of an emerging economy (n?=?331). We argue that entrepreneurial ventures need to overcome a threshold of cognitive legitimacy in order to develop inter-firm ties with a diverse set of large, established firms. Results indicate that having a written business plan and a formal organizational structure are positively associated with the diversity of the new venture’s inter-firm network, while the education level of the entrepreneur does not have a significant effect. In addition, the effect of having a formal organizational structure is stronger for younger ventures. Implications are discussed.     

What's in a broken promissory obligation? Developing and testing a multiple component form measure of psychological contract breach

While the literature has suggested the possibility of breach being composed of multiple facets, no previous study has investigated this possibility empirically. This study examined the factor structure of typical component forms in order to develop a multiple component form measure of breach. Two studies were conducted. In study 1 (N = 420) multi-item measures based on causal indicators representing promissory obligations were developed for the five potential component forms (delay, magnitude, type/form, inequity and reciprocal imbalance). Exploratory factor analysis showed that the five components loaded onto one higher order factor, namely psychological contract breach suggesting that breach is composed of different aspects rather than types of breach. Confirmatory factor analysis provided further evidence for the proposed model. In addition, the model achieved high construct reliability and showed good construct, convergent, discriminant and predictive validity. Study 2 data (N = 189), used to validate study 1 results, compared the multiple-component measure with an established multiple item measure of breach (rather than a single item as in study 1) and also tested for discriminant validity with an established multiple item measure of violation. Findings replicated those in study 1. The findings have important implications for considering alternative, more comprehensive and elaborate ways of assessing breach.     

Text and metatext in the resource‐based view

This paper distinguishes between text and metatext in the resource‐based view (RBV) – that is, the actual words and logic fundamental to the RBV (the text) and the traditions, interpretations and applications of the theory (the metatext). It argues that Kaufman's ( 2015 ) criticism of the RBV as applied to strategic human resource management actually focuses on RBV metatext and not text. Indeed, unlike some RBV metatext, RBV text actually has a great deal to say about research and practice in strategic human resource management.     

The Middle Way: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and Rural Issues in the 20th and 21st Centuries

This article explains how the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC), from its founding in 1923 to the present, applied basic Catholic principles in response to a succession of changes in American rural society. In doing so, it proposed a middle way between capitalism and socialism and between the Democratic and Republican parties. In the 1920s, the Reverend Edwin V. O'Hara founded the NCRLC mainly to bolster the demographically weak rural Church. In the 1930s, the NCRLC turned to economic concerns in response to the Great Depression. It supported many New Deal programs that helped farmers as well as cooperatives and a “back‐to‐the‐land” movement. The Conference consistently supported the family farm as the basic institution of a morally and economically sound rural society. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Conference entered the realm of international affairs under Monsignor Luigi G. Ligutti and addressed problems of world hunger, land reform, and underdeveloped countries. Under Monsignor Edward W. O'Rourke, who became director in 1960, the NCRLC joined in the movement for social justice and campaigned for the rights of the rural poor and migrant farm workers. Starting around 1970, the Conference became increasingly interested in environmental and energy issues. The NCRLC is in harmony with the 21^st‐century pope, Francis, on rural and ecological issues.     

Buying Decision Coordination and Monopoly Pricing of Network Goods

We analyze how uncertainty about consumers' preferences affects the pricing of a network device and the interaction usage it enables. A premium device price may give high hardware profits, but adoption will be low reducing the profits from interaction services. The firm internalizing this adjusts its hardware price downward, and prices as if it was getting the maximal interaction usage profits from the full network. Profits decrease in uncertainty, whereas consumer surplus increases in uncertainty, but only if the level of uncertainty is high. Bundling the device and services is profitable if uncertainty relates mostly to consumers' private information.     

Leveraging of Reputation through Umbrella Branding: The Implications for Market Structure

The Klein–Leffler model explains how fear of reputation loss can induce firms to produce high‐quality experience goods. This paper shows that reputation can be leveraged across products via umbrella branding, but only by a firm with a monopoly on at least one product. Such a firm may be able to capture a market by using umbrella branding to make high quality credible at a lower price than the incumbent competitive firms. If monopolists compete for this capture, consumers are left better off than if the market remained competitive, in some cases even though the price increases.     

WHAT'S TO KNOW ABOUT TIME USE?

Stimulated by the availability of large sets of microeconomic data, research on the economics of time use has been a growth industry in the past 20 years. That growth has included studies that have focused on the effect of people's value of time; on the mix of nonmarket activities that they undertake; on the interactions of spouses’ choices of time use; on the valuation of nonmarket time, and on the timing of nonmarket and market activities. By laying out these research questions and indicating their importance, this essay provides a framework for a series of meta‐analyses.