“He just didn’t seem to understand the banter”: Bullying or simply establishing social cohesion?

Within the professional kitchen bullying is reported as widespread, aggressive and related to a significant retention problem. This research explores negative behaviour in professional kitchens and its impact on organisational commitment. A mixed methods approach is used employing a survey among chefs followed by semi-structured interviews. An exploratory factor analysis examines the underlying constructs of bullying and job satisfaction and data are analysed through Partial Least Squares. Our research highlights that bullying behaviour is experienced most by younger, more junior chefs. However verbal bullying, the form most strongly reported, has no effect on either satisfaction or commitment. Emergent themes of communication and inclusion illustrate bullying behaviour to be a cohesive aspect of kitchen culture. Our findings suggest behavioural impacts, rather than bullying characteristics, must be considered within their context in order to establish whether or not they are actually damaging to an industry.     

Last dance or second chance? Firm performance,CEO career horizon,and the separation of board leadership roles

In recent years, many firms have chosen to separate their CEO and board chair positions. Prior research has demonstrated that there are three forms that a CEO–board chair separation can take: apprentice, departure, and demotion. In this paper, we examine the antecedents of these three types. Our results show that the three types of separation each have different profiles in terms of the prior performance of the firm, the independence of the board, and the career horizon of the incumbent CEO. The findings in this paper provide unique insights into the factors that drive boards' structural choices. As questions about board leadership structure become more nuanced and more relevant in both scholarship and practice, a full understanding of these factors will only become more important. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of crowdsourcing contribution type and temporal consistency on new product development success

Extant literature suggests that individuals contribute to crowdsourcing programs in various ways but offers few insights about whether participants' creative contributions (original new product submissions) or their evaluative contributions (scoring or commenting on others' submissions) have a greater impact on their ability to create commercializable new products. Using a large-scale data set obtained from the crowdsourcing website Threadless.com, our study examines the relative impact of participants' creative and evaluative contributions and the effects of different types of evaluative contributions on submission success (i.e., a participant's ability to generate a commercializable new product). Our findings reveal that submission success is enhanced when participants generate both creative and evaluative contributions. In addition, we find that submission success depends not only on the volume of the creative contributions that a participant makes but also on the temporal consistency with which said contributions are made (i.e., adopting a consistent vs. a sporadic submission pattern). Specifically, our findings show that a participant's creative contribution consistency enhances their submission success, especially when creative contribution volume is high. This research extends the existing crowdsourcing literature by offering new insights about how contribution type and contribution consistency in a crowdsourcing program impact submission success.     

The expert system: constructing expertise in an IT/management consultancy

Despite widespread uncertainty, if not scepticism, about the precise nature of the expertise that consultants bring to bear in their client engagements, organisations continue to employ consultants in large numbers, especially in information technology-related projects. Drawing on a participant observation study of IT/management consultancy practice, this paper seeks to explore the different ways in which consultants are seen as experts in the light of the pressures of the consultancy market place. The ongoing construction of consultancy expertise through the interaction of consultants and their clients with an array of elements, including technical knowledge, skilled practice, individual and collective experience, and commercial interests is discussed. It is suggested that, rather than being a relatively-enduring property of individuals, based on their mastery of a body abstract knowledge or their skills at managing the perceptions of their clients, the precarious and multi-faceted character of their expertise means that consultants are continuously engaged in its active construction through their situated practice.     

La transición de Tailandia en las esferas laboral y sanitaria

La economía de Tailandia ha cambiado rápidamente de la agricultura a la industria manufacturera y el sector de los servicios, pero el ordenamiento del mercado laboral y la representación de los trabajadores son mucho menos consistentes que en los países desarrollados, donde hubo una transición más lenta y gradual hace ya décadas. Los autores estudian el robustecimiento de las políticas y la legislación tailandesas en el ámbito de la seguridad y la salud en el trabajo, que obedece a las normas internacionales y a la nueva Constitución democrática. Por último, identifican los principales retos pendientes, entre ellos el cumplimiento de la ley y una medición mejor de los efectos del trabajo en la salud física y mental.     

Counterproductive work behavior as protest

We suggest that counterproductive work behaviors can be viewed as a form of protest in which organizational members express dissatisfaction with or attempt to resolve injustice within the organization. Incorporating the three key predictors (injustice, identity and instrumentality, [Klandermans, B., (1997). The social psychology of protest. Oxford: Blackwell.]) from the protest literature leads us to propose that counterproductive behaviors can be both individual and collective. Crossing this dimension with concepts of organizational and individual deviance leads to a fourfold classification of counterproductive work behaviors.     

Toward a Theory of Reinstatement: Seven Motivations for Reinstatement as Relationship Repair

There is a long, interdisciplinary tradition of examining why organizations remove privileges from members as a part of disciplinary action. In contrast, little is known about why organizations return privileges after disciplinary action has occurred. Nonetheless, such reinstatement is ubiquitous in organizations. This paper provides a starting point for a theory of reinstatement by using the emerging theoretical domain of relationship repair. Treating reinstatement as relationship repair highlights the importance of causal attribution, social equilibrium, relationship structure, and power as means of relationship repair. The paper uses these four bases of relationship repair to develop a series of specific motivations for why managers might reinstate privileges.     

The Strategic Significance of Negative Externalities

Negative externalities have competitive relevance in a market when they have selective impacts – as, for example, when a product in use imposes greater costs on consumers of rival products than on other people. Because managers have discretion over aspects of product design that affect external costs, the externality in such cases may be viewed as a strategic variable. This paper presents evidence of the existence of competitively relevant negative externalities. I introduce a metric for the externality's competitive effect, the external cost elasticity of demand, which I estimate econometrically using data from the motor vehicle industry. Managerial implications are considered. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.