Job evaluation systems and pay grade structures: do they match?

Job evaluation is usually applied in an organization in order to assess the relative value of jobs on the basis of which jobs are assigned to classes of pay grades. Thus, the assumption is that job value scores match with pay grade structures, and allow adequate predictions of basic job wages or salaries in practice. The validity of this assumption is questioned in this article. Data of five job evaluation systems (number of jobs: 16,809) were used to assess the effects of three system manipulations, concerning the number of anchors per scale (characteristic), the nature and the number of scales, and the weights of scales. Total job value scores of the manipulated data and the associated pay grades were compared with the non-manipulated ('original') scores. It turned out that even when two sets of job value scores are highly correlated (around 0.99), pay grade classification agreement was always less than 90 per cent, and in many instances much less. This result has important implications for the use of job evaluation in practice: when a fine grained system of pay grades applies, total job value scores may be deficient. Implications for a better match between total job worth values and pay grade classes are discussed.     

Coordination and learning in dynamic global games: experimental evidence

Coordination problems are ubiquitous in social and economic life. Political mass demonstrations, the decision whether to join a speculative currency attack, investment in a risky venture, and capital flight from a particular country are all characterized by coordination problems. Furthermore, all these events have a dynamic nature which has been largely omitted from previous experimental studies. Here I use a two-stage variant of a dynamic global game to study experimentally how the arrival of information in a dynamic setting affects the relative aggressiveness of speculators. In the first stage, subjects exhibit excess aggressiveness, which appears to be driven by beliefs about others’ actions rather than an intrinsic taste for attacking. However, following a failed first-stage attack, subjects learn to be less aggressive in the second stage. On the other hand, the arrival of new, more precise information after a failed attack leads to an increase in subjects’ aggressiveness. Beliefs, again, play a crucial role in explaining how the arrival of information affects attacking behavior.     

Sociocultural Impacts of Tourism: A Case Study from Norway

This article examines residents' perceptions of sociocultural impacts in the North Cape community in Norway. Case study, as a qualitative methodology, was employed to gather the necessary data. Based on the in-depth interviews with 22 permanent residents of the North Cape community, 10 influential factors were empirically identified: source of income; quality of life; community structure; demonstration effect; crime and alcohol; acculturation; perspective; status and community pride; conflicts; and physical impact. Furthermore, in contrast to the existing theory, the current study suggests that both those who are, and who are not economically dependent on the tourism industry perceive tourism positively. Both long-term and short-term residents believe that tourism's benefits outweigh tourism's costs. No noteworthy differences are found across sociodemographic factors such as education and marital status with respect to the residents' perception. The almost overwhelmingly positive response of the residents can be attributed to the current stage of destination development cycle at the North Cape.     

Commitment,Communication, and Leadership Determine the Leader： A Qualitative Analysis of Businessperson Characteristics Practiced by SME and Family Business Directors

This article outlines the details of an empirical study into the perceptions of small and medium-sized enterprise （SME） directors regarding the concepts of communication and commitment to leadership style and the interpretation of these concepts by way of depth interviews. The commitment by SME directors is represented by the themes of emotional commitment, visibility, financial bond, and personality traits. The communication by SME directors is represented by the themes of empathy, type of information, reaction and personality of the communication. The concept of leadership in the SME sector is typically closely associated to the charismatic leadership and the theory of the inclusive leadership （IL） style. The IL is a representation and use of all of the represented leadership styles depends on a situation. This study can be described as an exploratory study, consisting of qualitative in-depth interviews that were conducted with 19 directors of SMEs in the Netherlands and a qualitative matrix method was utilised.     

Foreign direct investment and governance quality in Russia

This paper studies the effect of poor governance quality on foreign direct investment in Russia. Using a survey of businesses across forty administrative districts, we find that higher frequency of using illegal payments and higher pressure from regulatory agencies, enforcement authorities, and criminals, negatively affect foreign direct investment. Our identification strategy builds on the exogenous cross-regional variation in worker strikes during 1895–1914, the period before the October Revolution. We find that moving from the average to the top governance quality across Russian regions more than doubles the FDI stock.     

The Effect of Chinese Demand and Supply Shocks on Peruvian Exporters

We study the impact of Chinese supply and demand shocks on Peruvian firm-product exports. Our results indicate that Chinese competition has a positive and significant effect on Peruvian firm exports, which suggests that firms are either (1) concentrating on markets where competition is tougher, (2) increasing R&D efforts, and/or (3) benefiting from a comparative advantage. The demand from China also has an overall positive and significant effect on Peruvian exports, but negative effect on the subset of data pertaining to minerals. This suggests that Peruvian commodities are being redirected from other markets to China.     

Leader and Organizational Behavioral Integrity and Follower Behavioral Outcomes: The Role of Identification Processes

Journal of Business Ethics - This qualitative field study is based on interviews with 20 experienced audit partners in France and documents the dialogical dimension of ethical deliberation in...