Is collaboration paying off for firms?

Practitioners, academics, and consultants are all calling for firms to drop their guard and collaborate with their business partners. At best, reports to date are mixed. Does collaboration work? Can firms do better? This research indicates the answer is yes to both questions, but managers must do more to reap long-term gains by formalizing relationships. Executives at many of today 's most successful companies provide important insights as to how this can be accomplished.     

The effects of polychronic-orientation upon retail employee satisfaction and turnover

Keeping front-line retail employees satisfied, and subsequently reducing their turnover, is important in retail management. This study introduces polychronic-orientation, or an employee's preference for switching between multiple tasks within the same time-block, as an employee trait with important implications for retail employee turnover. It demonstrates empirically that a polychronic-orientation has both direct (employee fit) and indirect (through fairness perceptions) effects on retail employee satisfaction. Moreover, by exploring these effects across career stages, polychronicity is revealed to be a stable and enduring trait but one whose impact is magnified in early stages of the retail career. Implications for hiring and employee education are derived.     

From State to Market

The first half of this century brought a striking increase in the role of the state in the economy, the second half an equally pronounced move towards the market. The object of this paper is to try to explain this paradigm shift.     

Why Are Health Care Managers Biased Against Hiring Service Providers With Tattoos?

Although health care managers often prefer to hire employees without tattoos, the source of this bias is unclear. One explanation is that tattoos are associated with being less responsible. An alternative explanation is that managers are concerned tattoos will hurt their organization's image. A sample of 187 dentists were shown a picture of a dental hygienist either with no tattoo, a small tattoo, or a large tattoo, and then asked about the hygienist. Results show that dentists do not associate tattoos with irresponsibility but are concerned about the fit of tattoos with the image of the practice. This means that dentists make hiring decisions based on stereotypes about customer stereotypes.     

Measuring the impact of road rehabilitation on spatial market efficiency in maize markets in Mozambique

This article analyzes the impact of road rehabilitation on the spatial market efficiency of maize markets in Mozambique. We estimate a modified version of the Parity Bounds Model (PBM) that allows us to test the impact of road rehabilitation on spatial efficiency. This article seeks to contribute to the existing literature in three ways. First, a unique data set, where road rehabilitation episodes between market pairs are identified, is developed. Second, special care is devoted to estimation of transaction costs due to the sensitivity of the PBM model to the quality of transaction costs estimates. Finally, as opposed to most existing literature that focuses on relatively distant markets, the article focuses on spatially closed markets. We find that maize markets tend to be segmented due to high transport costs. Following road rehabilitation, inefficiency and average absolute price differentials tend to decrease, and market pairs have tended to shift toward autarky regimes. Overall, while the results point broadly toward a positive impact of road rehabilitation on spatial efficiency, they are not as strong or as robust as one would like. Large increases in fuel prices likely offset the positive impacts of road rehabilitation on transaction costs, contributing to the increase in the probability of being in an autarky regime.