Trust in management: the role of employee voice arrangements and perceived managerial opposition to unions

This study examines the relationship between employee voice arrangements and employees' trust in management using data from the 2007 Australian Worker Representation and Participation Survey of 1,022 employees. Drawing on social exchange theory and employee relations literature, we test hypotheses concerning the relationships between direct and union voice arrangements, perceived managerial opposition to unions and employees' trust in management. Consistent with our predictions, after controlling for a range of personal, job and workplace characteristics, regression analyses indicated that direct voice arrangements were positively related to employees' trust in management. Union voice arrangements and perceived managerial opposition to unions were negatively related to trust in management. The article concludes by highlighting the study's implications for management practice and avenues for further research.     

Correction to: The impact of a U.S.–U.K. free trade agreement on workers: a CGE model with worker displacement

Business Economics -     

High‐Growth Women’s Entrepreneurship: Fueling Social and Economic Development

High‐growth firms, often referred to as “gazelles,” are equated with entrepreneurial success and celebrated as the key to growing economies, and women’s entrepreneurship is a vehicle of economic and social development. This special issue publishes papers that address the general lack of research on high‐growth women’s entrepreneurship. In this introduction paper, we offer an adapted framework for the factors driving high growth across multiple levels: individual (entrepreneur and entrepreneurial team characteristics), venture (strategy, organizational structures, and systems), resources, location, and environment. We also introduce the papers in this special issue and present an overview of the contributions to this issue.     

Benchmarking as a Tool for the Modernisation of Local Government

This paper examines benchmarking as a tool of the modernisation process in local government and the contradictory tensions in the Best Value scheme are explored. Benchmarking is shown to encapsulate the dichotomous nature of a modernising philosophy which espouses innovation and local solutions alongside the government's centralising tendencies. One consequence is the advancement of 'compulsory' and 'defensive' modes of benchmarking with local authorities benchmarking for external accountability reasons; issues of tangible improvement are secondary concerns. These tensions are viewed as irreconcilable, the implication is that local government will need to carefully manage and evaluate its benchmarking activities.     

Strategic reporting by nonprofit hospitals: an examination of bad debt and charity care

Review of Accounting Studies - In this paper, we examine bad debt and charity care reporting by nonprofit hospitals around bond issuance. Given the tax advantages afforded to nonprofit hospitals,...     

How Common Are Bad Bosses?

Bosses play a fundamental role in workplaces. Yet, almost nothing is known about an important and basic question in labor economics and industrial relations. Are the right people promoted to be supervisors, team leaders, and managers? The infamous Peter Principle claims that incompetent bosses are likely to be all around us, but is that true? This article provides the first statistically representative international estimates—taking comparable data on thirty-five nations—of the extent to which employees have “bad bosses.” Using a natural measure, the article calculates that approximately 13 percent of Europe’s workers have a bad boss. Such bosses are most common in large organizations, in organizations without employee-representation committees, in the transport sector, and where workers themselves have no supervisory responsibility. Last, the article offers a practical finding as a potential aid to human resource training and hiring. Contrary to media portrayals, bad bosses are rated least bad on “respect for workers” and worst on their ability to get the job done. Lack of competence, not lack of consideration, appears to be the key problem.     

Saving Our Oceans: Scaling the Impact of Robust Action Through Crowdsourcing

One approach for tackling grand challenges that is gaining traction in recent management literature is robust action: by allowing diverse stakeholders to engage with novel ideas, initiatives can cultivate successful ideas that yield greater impact. However, a potential pitfall of robust action is the length of time it takes to generate momentum. Crowdsourcing, we argue, is a valuable tool that can scale the generation of impact from robust action. We studied an award-winning environmental sustainability crowdsourcing initiative and found that robust action principles were indeed successful in attracting a diverse stakeholder network to generate novel ideas and develop these into sustainable solutions. Yet we also observed that the momentum and novelty generated was at risk of getting lost as the actors and their roles changed frequently throughout the process. We show the vital importance of robust action principles for connecting ideas and actors across crowdsourcing phases. These observations allow us to make a contribution to extant theory by explaining the micro-dynamics of scaling robust action's impact over time.     

Bad bosses and self-verification: The moderating role of core self-evaluations with trust in workplace management

Who responds most strongly to supervisor social undermining? Building on self-verification theory (Swann, 1983, 1987), we theorize that employees with positive views of the self (i.e., higher core self-evaluations [CSEs]) who also maintain higher trust in workplace management are more likely to experience heightened stress and turnover intentions when undermined. We argue that this subset of employees (high CSE, high trust) are more likely to feel misunderstood when undermined by their supervisor and that this lack of self-verification partially explains their stronger responses to supervisor undermining. We find initial support for the first part of our model in a study of 259 healthcare workers in the United States and replicate and extend our findings in the second study of 330 employees in the United Kingdom. Our results suggest that the employees Human Resources often wishes to attract and retain—employees with high CSE and high trust in workplace management—react most strongly to supervisor social undermining.     

A Multilevel Analysis of the Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Ostracism: The Roles of Relational Climate,Employee Mindfulness,and Work Unit Structure

Journal of Business Ethics - Drawing on insights from social learning and social cognitive perspectives and research on the multilevel reality of leadership influences, we developed and tested a...     

Shareholder rights and share capital: the effect of the 1901 Russian Corporation Reform, 1890–1905

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, western European countries introduced general incorporation and additional flexible enterprise forms, but the Russian Empire left its concession system of incorporation in place. The Empire's only major corporation reform, the 1901 law, strengthened minority shareholder rights and removed bankers from boards of directors for certain corporations. The reform offers a rare opportunity to examine the financial effects of improving corporations’ principal–agent relationships through regulation, because the reform did not affect all corporations equally. Corporations affected by the reform had smaller total share capital, fewer shares, and higher par values for shares as observed in 1905. The new regulations may have increased the cost of having shareholders and hence disciplined corporations’ founders to be more conservative in raising capital by issuing stock. Removing bankers from boards of directors may have removed an important source of firms’ founding capital, though corporations could easily evade this provision. The results also show that, although the commercial code treated all corporations equally, there were two major groups of Russian corporations that behaved differently, and, despite the fact that corporate charters could grant individual exceptions to the commercial code, a revision in the commercial code changed corporations’ behaviour.