Applying career concepts to strengthen the work-attitudes of service professionals

Given the nature of employment relationships today, service organizations can strengthen the organization commitment levels and reduce the turnover intentions of its professionals through providing job features important to their careers. These features include opportunities to perform challenging work, experience trusting relationships with customers/clients, and obtain extrinsic rewards. Using a sample of alumni from a hospitality business program, hypotheses that these features impact organizational commitment and turnover intentions, partially through strengthening professionals’ career commitment, are developed and tested. Findings suggest that challenging work opportunities impact these attitudes both directly and indirectly. So too trusting relationships with customers and clients indirectly impact organization commitment and intent to turnover (ITO). Results also suggest that, as a whole, satisfaction with extrinsic rewards has no effect. However, an analysis of multigroup mediation results revealed that for professionals working in professional service firms, satisfaction with pay reduces both attitudes. Implications for research in organization commitment and ITO, specifically the role and impact of career-based antecedents, are discussed.     

Being a JBR reviewer

Publishing academic research in influential journals is at the heart of modern knowledge economies. However, submitting to a top-tier journal such as JBR can be a challenging experience for some authors. In this piece I share my experience as a JBR reviewer and offer my thoughts on how authors should approach submissions and resubmissions to JBR.     

The ambiguous effect of minimum wages on hours

In a competitive model we ease the assumption that efficiency units of labour are the product of hours and workers. We show that a minimum wage may either increase or decrease hours per worker and the change will have the opposite sign to the slope of the equilibrium hours hourly wage locus. Similarly, total hours worked may rise or fall. We illustrate the results throughout with a Cobb-Douglas example.     

Emotions, store-environmental cues, store-choice criteria, and marketing outcomes

This study integrates extant research relating to store-related cognitions, customer emotions (arousal and pleasure), satisfaction, and loyalty into one framework. The researchers administer a survey to 274 customers in four coffee shops of a major chain. Using these data, the researchers test the hypotheses and model with structural equation modelling. The findings suggest that (a) store-related cognitions differentially affect emotions and customer outcomes (satisfaction and loyalty) and (b) the two emotions of arousal and pleasure differentially mediate the relationships between store-related cognitions and customer outcomes.     

Local complexities and global uncertainties: a study of foreign ownership and human resource management in China

Drawing on qualitative data, this paper examines developments in human resource and employment policies and practices among a sample of joint venture and wholly owned foreign enterprises operating in China. The research reveals that the effects of parent company nationality and ownership form were most visible in the areas of remuneration, worker representation and aspects of employee selection. There was, however, little overt involvement of multinational parent companies in the management of human resources of their Chinese operations. The trend was towards indirect reporting relationships with regional sub-units of multinational companies rather than direct links with the parent headquarters. Overall, these intermediate sub-units were playing an important role in the integration of Chinese business units in the global management systems of multinational companies.     

Agency and Tax Explanations of Security Issuance Decisions

This paper is an empirical examination of the relative roles of agency and tax considerations in corporate debt versus equity issuance decisions. Unlike earlier work, we conduct our tests on a sample of UK firms since the UK system of taxation does not create an obvious tax advantage to debt and hence affords an opportunity to evaluate the relevance of tax arbitrage considerations. We find that both tax and agency issues are important determinants of security issuance decisions. In addition, we demonstrate that our specification is robust to a variety of alternative explanations which have appeared in the empirical literature.     

The semiconductor silicon industry roadmap: Epochs driven by the dynamics between disruptive technologies and core competencies

The resource-based perspective has done much to identify idiosyncratic firm attributes that may be a principal source of competitive advantages. Unfortunately, there has been little systematic industry evidence to support the strategic importance of core competence, nor has there been much work on the temporal or cumulative nature of core capabilities within an industrial setting. Further, little or no research has been performed demonstrating how the advent of technological discontinuities or disruptive technologies plays a part in creating epochs in technology competency development and the roadmap of an industry. In this study, we analyze the evolutionary and cumulative nature of core capabilities and their interactions with technological discontinuities from a market-driven perspective. We have studied the evolution of 167 firms through the 50-year history of the semiconductor silicon industry. Over time, there were several structural shifts in the necessary competencies through the advent of disruptive technologies. In the last 30 years, however, the change in the required competencies has been more cumulative in nature. We summarize this in a roadmap detailing the epochs in the semiconductor silicon industry.     

The wages of sin: Employment and salary effects of violence in the national hockey league

This paper investigates the proposition that violence is a significant determinant of player salary and employment in the National Hockey League. The basic hypothesis is that teams are composed of two types of player: the skill player whose performance and reward depends on scoring and the like and the physical player who is rewarded for bringing violence to the game. Testing this hypothesis ultimately involves constructing a model of salary determination and testing for the joint equality of the coefficients of skill and physical players. The data consist of a sample of 388 players for the 1989–90 season. The major conclusion is that the coefficients of the estimated models are significantly different for skill and physical players, thus confirming the hypothesized distinction.     

Disorganization in the process of transition Firm-level evidence from Ukraine

Most post-communist economies are characterized by an initial collapse in aggregate output. Blanchard and Kremer (1997) and Roland and Verdier (1997) have recently modelled supply-side distortions – disorganization in the links of production – that can lead to a short-term output contraction after market liberalization and a recovery thereafter. This paper is the first to illustrate and test the effects of disorganization in the transition process by using a unique dataset of 300 Ukrainian firms. Our results show that for firms that existed under central planning, disorganization constrains employment and productivity growth during the transition process to a market economy. We also show that the effects of disorganization are greater the more out-dated the capital stock inheritance from the planning system. In contrast, disorganization plays no role in the determination of employment and productivity growth in newly established private firms.
JEL classification: P0, O0, D0.     

田纳西大学商学院 生物量——另一种能源

在谈及石油、天然气和煤的替代性可再生能源时，生物量资源（Biomass resources）常被人们所忽略——比如野草、林场和工厂的废料废渣、农作物的非粮食部分、城市木材废料（通常被丢弃在垃圾场）。