Contextualized Project Management Practice: A Cluster Analysis of Practices and Best Practices

The specificity of project management in different contexts and industries is recognized, but little empirical research encompasses a sufficiently broad range of contexts and project types to precisely identify these specificities. This article adopts such a wide perspective based on a large sample of data from an ongoing empirical investigation of project management practice. Contextual archetypes are identified (i.e., clusters of experienced practitioners that share similar organizational and project contexts). Archetypes of contextualized practice are then investigated through the study of the extent of use of empirically identified toolsets in each cluster. The results empirically confirm some well‐known assumptions about practice but also sharpen the knowledge and understanding of practice in real complex multidimensional contexts. A new concept of “performing‐maturity” emerged from the data. This concept sheds light on the entangled imbrications of maturity, competence, and success. Practices are regressed against performing‐maturity to reveal best contextualized practices.     

Linking improved knowledge management to operational and organizational performance

This research empirically examines the importance of knowledge management processes to operational and overall organizational performance (OPERF). Specifically, results indicate that a shared interpretation of knowledge among operational personnel mediates how knowledge is disseminated and used to design and implement a unified operational response to that knowledge. Further, results collected in a logistics operations (LO) context support a strong positive relationship between this knowledge management process and operational and organizational performance. Importantly, psychometric measures for organizational performance collected from managerial respondents were strongly correlated with secondary financial data for participating firms obtained from Compustat, thus supporting a link about operational performance and hard organizational performance data.     

Correction to: Putting relational contract theory to the test: experimental evidence

Experimental Economics - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-021-09712-z     

Subjective beliefs and economic preferences during the COVID-19 pandemic

Experimental Economics - The COVID-19 pandemic presents a remarkable opportunity to put to work all of the research that has been undertaken in past decades on the elicitation and structural...     

Giving Stated Preference Respondents “Time to Think”: Results From Four Countries

Previous studies have found that contingent valuation (CV) respondents who are given overnight to reflect on a CV scenario have 30–40% lower average willingness-to-pay (WTP) than respondents who are interviewed in a single session. This “time to think” (TTT) effect could explain much of the gap between real and hypothetical WTP observed in experimental studies. Yet giving time to think is still rare in binary or multinomial discrete choice studies. We review the literature on increasing survey respondents’ opportunities to reflect on their answers and synthesize results from parallel TTT studies on private vaccine demand in four countries. Across all four countries, we find robust and consistent evidence from both raw data and multivariate models for a TTT effect: giving respondents overnight to think reduced the probability that a respondent said he or she would buy the hypothetical vaccines. Average WTP fell approximately 40%. Respondents with time to think were also more certain of their answers, and a majority said they used the opportunity to consult with their spouse or family. We conclude with a discussion of why researchers might be hesitant to adopt the TTT methodology.     

麦肯锡全球调查创新与商业化

随着企业开始重新关注增长,创新冉一次成为了优先要务:在最近进行的麦肯锡全球调查中1,84%的高管称创新对于其企业的增长战略极为重要或非常重要.调查结果还显示,与危机前相比,企业用于产生出色创意并将这些创意转变为产品或服务的方法变化不大,而这并非因为高管们认为这些方法非常有效.此外,发现合适的人才、鼓励协作与承担风险,以及从头到尾组织创新流程等挑战也依然如故,这一点值得大家注意.事实上,过去几年的调查显示,成功创新的核心障碍一直没有变化,而企业在克服这些障碍方面也没有什么进展.     

Pay dispersion and the financial performance of the firm: evidence from Korea

Pay dispersion has been found in prior research to negatively affect both individual and workplace performance. In this study, we examine whether the relationship between horizontal pay dispersion and firm financial performance is curvilinear in nature, with moderate levels of dispersion leading to more positive outcomes than either low or high levels. Using data from a government-sponsored survey of Korean firms, we find support for the hypothesized curvilinear relationship between pay dispersion and firm financial performance. We further find that this curvilinear relationship is moderated by firm and human resource system characteristics. Where the firm had more incumbents in the rank being examined, where pay level was higher, and where there was greater organizational investment in performance evaluation and feedback, the positive slope (within the curvilinear relationship) inverted at a higher level of dispersion.     

Price determination and dynamic adjustments: An inverse demand system approach to meat products in the United States

In this study the process of retail meat price determination is depicted in the form of an inverse demand system taking into consideration the dynamic adjustments present in monthly consumption data. The general dynamic framework identifies both long run and short run effects in a systematic manner and allows direct estimation of the long run price and scale flexibilities that are consistent with theory. The empirical application based on monthly U.S. meat products data provides reasonable and promising results.The authors are senior econometrician, Department of Risk Management, TRS, American Express Co., Phoenix, and assistant professor, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, respectively. The work was performed when the first author was an assistant research scientist at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Ames. Journal Paper No. J-15784 of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa. Project No. 3109.     

Are there ENSO signals in the macroeconomy?

Whether ENSO has affected U.S. macroeconomic performance has been a matter of dispute. To address the issue we explore whether there has been any co-cyclicality of ENSO fluctuations and the rates of inflation and economic growth over the 1894-1999 timespan and, failing this, whether aperiodic ENSO shocks have had any impact on these variables. Neither co-cyclicality nor aperiodic shocks are discernible. While ENSO may briefly influence the performance of particular sectors of the economy in particular regions, as documented by the previous literature, such locally-important effects vanish into the noise surrounding macroeconomic trends in an economy as large and complex as that of the U.S.