Legitimacy of team rewards: Analyzing legitimacy as a condition for the effectiveness of team incentive designs

This article illustrates how the legitimacy of pay and evaluation processes in teams affect the effectiveness of team-based incentive designs in organizational work teams. We present a theoretical model of the development of legitimacy in team-based incentive designs and propose that the development of legitimacy for both pay dispersion in teams (i.e., difference in allocations of incentives among team members) and for the use of interdependent evaluations of performance promote team effectiveness. Our model introduces a new perspective to theorize about the conditions under which team rewards are an effective incentive design.     

Transforming audit technologies: Business risk audit methodologies and the audit field

Business Risk Audit (BRA) methodologies have been promoted by a number of the large audit firms in response, they claim, to the challenges of the information age and corporate clients’ needs for assurance. This paper subjects their claim to critical scrutiny, drawing on the perspectives of neo-institutional theories of legitimacy, the sociology of professional knowledge and the sociology of science and technology. To bring into play new Business Risk Audit methodologies a number of the larger firms have sought, through their auditing practice, to renegotiate the bases of their professional identity and status within audit firms and to widen their jurisdictional claims over other areas of expertise. These moves have been accompanied by the legitimation and embedding of Business Risk Audit in revised constructions of the market for audit, in abstract academic knowledges, reforms of professional education, and professional regulations. In providing a constructivist account of Business Risk Audit technologies, we argue for a theory of audit change that recognises (i) the centrality of legitimation processes and (ii) the co-construction of audit technology and the audit field.     

Structural interdependence within top management teams: A key moderator of upper echelons predictions

Studies of the effects of top management team (TMT) composition on organizational outcomes have yielded mixed and confusing results. A possible breakthrough resides in the reality that TMTs vary in how they are fundamentally structured. Some are structured such that members operate independently of each other, while others are set up such that roles are highly interdependent. We examine the potential for three facets of structural interdependence—horizontal, vertical, and reward interdependence—to resolve ambiguities regarding effects of TMT heterogeneity. Based on a sample of TMTs in technology firms, we find that the three facets of structural interdependence are potent moderators of two classic predictions: the positive association between TMT heterogeneity and member departures, and between TMT heterogeneity and firm performance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Socially Responsible Fund Managers Really Invest Differently?

To date, research into socially responsible investment (SRI), and in particular the socially responsible investment funds industry, has focused on whether investing in SRI assets has any differential impact on investor returns. Prior findings generally suggest that, on a risk-adjusted basis, there is no difference in performance between SRI and conventional funds. This result has led to questions about whether SRI funds are really any different from conventional funds. This paper examines whether the portfolio allocation across industry sectors and the stock-picking ability of SRI managers are different when compared to conventional fund managers. The study finds that SRI funds exhibit different industry betas consistent with different portfolio positions, but that these differences vary from year to year. It is also found that there is little difference in stock-picking ability between the two groups of fund managers.