An investigation of ingratiation as a career management strategy: evidence from Singapore

In spite of the recognition that career politics, and therefore ingratiation, is widely used to manage careers, there is a dearth of empirical studies on ingratiation as a career management strategy. Consistent with Ferris and Kacmar's (1988) suggestion, the study reported here investigated the conditions (defined by situational variables, career concerns and personality variables) under which ingratiation is used as a career management strategy. Data were obtained through a structured questionnaire from professional employees (N = 214) in public and private sector organizations in Singapore.

Factor analysis of the 21-item career concerns scale revealed four solutions representing internal and external career concerns. The results of the hierarchical regression revealed that situational variables explained most of the variance in ingratiation, followed by career concerns and personality variables. Among the individual variables, task ambiguity, supervisor reward power, managerial responsibility and need for achievement were significant while personal success approached significance. Internal career concern of autonomy development was unrelated to ingratiation. Of the interaction terms, only supervisor reward power and Machiavellianism approached significance. Directions for future studies are suggested.     

An evolutionary approach to the delimitation of labour market areas: an empirical application for Chile

An evolutionary approach to the delimitation of labour market areas: an empirical application for Chile. Spatial Economic Analysis. Labour market areas (LMAs) are argued to represent a more appropriate policy framework than administrative units for the analysis of spatial labour market activity. This article develops LMAs for Chile by applying an evolutionary computation approach. This innovative approach defines LMAs through an optimization process by maximization of internal cohesion, subject to restrictions of minimum levels of self-containment and population. To evaluate the appropriateness of the LMAs, comparative analyses are performed between alternative delimitations based on different parameter configurations of the proposed method versus administrative boundaries and the most widely used method for official LMA delimitation, the travel-to-work areas method.     

Applying human rights standards to employment rights in the USA: The Human Rights Watch Report 2000

This essay reviews the international human rights standards that the Human Rights Watch Report uses as standards for judgment, summarises with some commentary the Report’s major findings and recommendations, comments more fully on certain findings and recommendations, and, in conclusion, raises several issues that need to be addressed given the state of freedom of association and other related human rights in the USA.     

More than lip service: linking the intensity of empowerment initiatives to individual well-being and performance

We conceptualize empowerment initiatives as varying in terms of intensity – or the degree to which the intervention is rhetorical (aiming to influence employees' sense of control at work, what we refer to as surface empowerment) as opposed to actual (aiming to influence the actual degree of employee job authority, what we refer to as deep empowerment). We then test the effects of rhetorical vs. actual empowerment interventions on employee well-being and performance, as well as the degree to which self-efficacy mediates these effects on the basis of a simulation-based experiment. Results indicate that although both surface and deep empowerment initiatives have beneficial effects on individual well-being, only the latter results in performance increase. We also find that self-efficacy fully mediates the association between surface empowerment (as compared with non-empowerment) and well-being, but only partially mediates the association between deep empowerment (as compared with non-empowerment) and well-being.     

Bringing Political Skill into Social Networks: Findings from a Field Study of Entrepreneurs

The authors integrate the entrepreneurship literature's sociological and behavioural perspectives and examine the processes through which entrepreneurs first build social networks and then use the network resources for enhancing venture performance. Field interviews of entrepreneurs during a six‐month period reveal that political skill is an important individual‐level factor that influences the construction and use of social networks. Theoretical and practical implications of the major findings are discussed.     

A Simple Proof of the Equivalence of the Limiting Distributions of the Continuous-Time and the Embedded Process of the Queue Size in the M/G/1 Queue*

This paper presents an extremely simple proof of the known remarkable fact that for the M/G/1 queue the continuous-time process describing the number of customers in the system has the same limiting distribution as the embedded process describing the number of customers in the system just after service completion epochs.     

纳滤膜分离技术的发展及应用

本文介绍了纳滤膜的发展及其特点,其中重点介绍了其分离的机理和过程。并对纳滤膜分离技术的应用进行了介绍。     

Response to haar's comment— and the beat goes on: Corporate downsizing in the twenty‐first century

Corporate downsizing continues to be a major strategy used by organizations to cope with a dynamic and turbulent global marketplace. A fundamental assumption made by executives is that this strategy improves the financial health of the corporation. De Meuse, Vanderheiden, and Bergmann (1994) examined several indices of financial performance over a five‐year period and found that firms employing downsizing experienced a deterioration in financial performance rather than an improvement. Haar (1999) questioned the findings of this study, asserting that if a company's risk level would have been included in the analysis, their results could have been different. In the present investigation, risk was incorporated in the original analysis. Again, the findings strongly indicate that downsizing was not an effective corporate strategy for enhancing the financial performance of corporations. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Entrepreneurial ecosystems and the lifecycle of university business incubators: An integrative case study

University business incubators (UBIs) are an important part of the ecosystem that supports entrepreneurial activities and economic development. Extant research has focused on examining UBI activities at a single point in time, but there is a paucity of theoretical and empirical work aimed at understanding the forces that explain why and how UBIs change over time. This is an important gap because establishing a university business incubator does not assure its development and growth. We address this issue by drawing upon the Fisher et al. Academy of Management Review, 41(3), 383-409 (2016) Identity-Legitimacy-Life Cycle model to explain how the pursuit of resources and organizational legitimacy shapes the development of UBIs along key strategic and operational dimensions, which has implications for performance evaluation over time. We illustrate with a case study about the creation and evolution of the DMZ, a leading UBI at Ryerson University in Canada. This case provides new insights about the dynamics of UBIs and their relationships with the entrepreneurial ecosystems in which they are embedded. Implications for future research, management practice, and public policy are discussed.

     

R-estimation of the parameters of a multiple regression model with measurement errors

We consider the theory of R-estimation of the regression parameters of a multiple regression models with measurement errors. Using the standard linear rank statistics, R-estimators are defined and their asymptotic properties are studied as robust alternatives to the least squares estimator. This paper fills the gap of the rank theory for the estimation of regression parameters with measurement error models. Some simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the R-estimators.