Sources of professional staff turnover in public accounting firms revealed by the exit interview

Employee and employer stated reasons for leaving public accounting were studied together with the conditions surrounding departure and the best and least liked qualities of CPA firm work. Data collected after employee terminations on selected aspects of the work was shown to be a good predictor of whether employees left of their own volition or at the request of the firm and revealed several areas suitable for improving personnel relationship and reducing professional staff turnover.     

Quality circles after the fad

On the face of it, it makes sense, If you want to involve your employees more in decision making and shift the organization toward a more participative culture, starting suggestion groups called quality circles seems to be a risk-free way to begin. Having studied many quality circles in different organizations, the authors of this article conclude that quality circles have their distinct advantages but that they have inherent in their design numbers of factors that often lead them to self-destruct. Quality circles are also said to be a poor forerunner for more participative approaches to management. Changing a quality circle into an institutionalized participative structure involves making many changes in important features of the organization that do not naturally flow from the implementation of a circle program. The authors describe the stages that quality circles go through, discuss the various threats they must survive, and then outline the most effective uses that managers can make of them.     

Who needs MBAs in HR? USC's strategic human resource management MBA concentration

This article describes the MBA concentration in Strategic Human Resource Management offered by the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Very few MBA programs offer such a concentration. We discuss the genesis of USC's program, its rationale, and its components. Launched in 1996, the program's success derives in large part from its close industry links. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Optimal delegation implications of central bank transparency

The interrelationship between monetary regime design and central bank transparency is examined. We find optimal delegation requires the central bank be either: ‘representative’, not choosing to publicly reveal its private information; or ‘ultraconservative’, deciding to be fully transparent.     

The real balance effect and the non-neutrality of money in a simple model of a small open economy

The paper examines the implications of the real balance effect for the neutrality of money in a small open economy model which contains an explicit treatment of aggregate supply. Two specific results emerge. First, an unanticipated monetary expansion is neutral in both the long and short runs, whilst an anticipated increase in the money supply has real short-run effects. Secondly, the non-neutrality associated with an anticipated monetary expansion manifests itself in a fall in output and employment during the transition to the new steady-state.     

Strategic wage setting, inflation uncertainty and optimal delegation

The paper examines optimal monetary policy delegation in an economy where wages are set strategically by a single economy-wide union whose objectives relate to employment and the real wage. Crucially, the central bank exerts imprecise control over inflation, giving rise to a positive relationship between the mean value of inflation and its variance. In this context, union concerns with regard to the employment goal render equilibrium sensitive to the conduct of monetary policy. As a consequence, optimal delegation arrangements closely resemble those identified as optimal in models that assume a direct aversion to inflation on the part of unions.     

High‐involvement work practices and analysts' forecasts of corporate earnings

Research has shown that high‐involvement work practices are positively related to corporate financial performance. However, it is unknown if investors are able to use information on high‐involvement practices to predict the performance of specific companies. In this study, we examine earnings forecasts for a sample of Fortune 1000 firms and find professional stock analysts consistently underestimated the earnings of firms that made greater use of high‐involvement practices during the 1990s. Based on data collected from newspaper articles and annual reports, we argue that these lower estimates resulted from a lack of information on innovative HR practices. Recommendations to managers for disseminating information on and leveraging highinvolvement HR practices are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Building effective organizations: transformational leadership,collectivist orientation,work-related attitudes and withdrawal behaviours in three emerging economies

Abstract

Previous cross-cultural research on transformational leadership has focused mainly on replicating the augmentation effects of transformational leadership over transactional leadership on followers’ attitudes and behaviours. Relatively few studies have systematically examined cultural impacts in moderating the influence of transformational leadership on work-related outcomes taking a cross-cultural perspective. Using a field survey of 577 employees from banking and financial sectors in three emerging economies, namely: China, India and Kenya, we examined the moderating effect of collectivism on the relationships between transformational leadership, work-related attitudes and perceptions of withdrawal behaviours. Our results found support for the moderating effect of collectivism on the relationship between transformational leadership and work-related outcomes, such as facets of job satisfaction, organizational commitment and perceptions of organizational withdrawal behaviours. In addition, our results lend support to the view that transformational leadership might be effective across cultures. The implications of these findings for future research on transformational leadership and cross-cultural research are discussed.     

Social welfare, positivism and business ethics

It appears that there is a conflict of values running through business ethics between profits accruing to shareholders and the cost of entrepreneurial activities on wider stakeholders. In the ethics research literature, the multiplicity of normative ethical stances has resulted in much debate but little in the way of consistent policy proposals. There is, by comparison, an extensive literature in positive economics that attempts to resolve value conflicts similar to those faced by business ethicists. In this paper the adoption of positive welfare statements are advocated and the value judgements implicit in economics are used as the starting point. It is argued that there is merit in expressly stating a set of value judgements to demonstrate the intractable nature of finding a social consensus without a positive social welfare function that explicitly weights the values. This paper reviews the arguments surrounding corporate objectives, particularly with regard to ethical considerations and the profit maximisation orthodoxy. This is discussed within the stakeholder-stockholder narrative. A range of ethical positions in the management strategy literature are analysed and discussed. It is argued that the values underpinning business ethics research can be conceived of via a function of social welfare (including an ethical 'auctioneering' model). The paper concludes by suggesting that all ethical positions can be captured by a Bergson-type welfare function.