Business Ethics: Law As A Determinant of Business Conduct

The Principles of Corporate Governance require that business conduct conform to the law. In recent years, news reports of business misconduct have cast doubt on a conclusion that conformity is the prevalent practice. This article explores the influence of law on business conduct by comparing the law’s requirements and purposes with actual business conduct in the market. Specifically, it explores whether certain legal regimes are more effective than others in inducing greater commitment to legal compliance by corporate actors. The conclusion drawn is that the prevalent legal regime – a vague common law or legislative mandate – is typically associated with corporate conduct that evades or ignores the law’s mandate or its underlying purpose. Vincent Di Lorenzo is Professor of Law; Senior Fellow, Vincentian Center for Church and Society, St. John's University; J.D. Columbia University (Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar); Associate Articles Editor, Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems. Before joining the faculty at St. John's University School of Law, Professor Di Lorenzo was a member of the faculty at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and was associated with a major Wall Street firm practicing in the real estate-banking department. He is a member of the American Bar Association and the New York State Bar Association. Professor Di Lorenzo has authored many articles and books in the banking, legislation and real estate areas.     

The tails of justice: A critical examination of the dimensionality of organizational justice constructs

Justice experiences are proposed to demonstrate a normal distribution with very fair and very unfair experiences being relatively rare and the majority of experiences in the middle of the distribution. Further, it is the extreme experiences of unfairness and fairness that are most important in shaping behavioral reactions to fairness. The reliance on traditional Likert-type measures to assess organizational justice constructs and use of linear correlation-based statistics has limited the opportunity to observe these effects. Two proposals for developing new measures that could enhance our understanding of the tails of justice distributions include: (a) develop a zone of tolerance model to assess violations and “more than fair” tails of the fairness distribution and (b) examine baseline levels of fairness and the influence of these baselines on reactions to specific justice events.     

Organizing and integrating marketing and purchasing in business markets: An introduction to the special issue, issues and implications

The article is the introductory paper to the special issue on “Organizing and Integrating Marketing and Purchasing in Business markets”. It analyses the different organizational issues in the marketing and purchasing interfaces by an extensive analysis of the literature. It introduces the different contributions to the special issue and draw some reflections on further research steps.     

Organizational identification as a determinant of customer orientation in service organizations

The marketing literature suggests that frontline employees are the central determinant of how customer-oriented a service organization is perceived to be by its customers. However, little is known about the contingencies of employees’ customer orientation (CO) beyond personality traits and broadly construed work attitudes. Based on the social identity approach, the present article develops a multilevel model whereby CO is the result of identity-based management of frontline employees. Two empirical studies in the travel industry show that employees’ CO depends on employees’ organizational identification and their leaders’ acting as role models of CO.     

Dimensions and Levels of Trust: Implications for Commitment to a Relationship

Previous research has found that trust is positively related to commitment in buyer-seller relationships. However, the validity of this finding is questionable because trust has been operationalized in many different ways. For example, prior research has not distinguished among levels of trust (interpersonal or organizational trust) and dimensions or motives of trust (credibility or benevolence). In this study, we distinguish among the levels and dimensions of trust. The results indicate that trust in a sales representative (interpersonal credibility) is more strongly related to commitment than trust in an organization (organizational credibility). In contrast, trust based on organizational benevolence is a stronger predictor of commitment than interpersonal benevolence.     

跨国公司人力资源系统、企业文化与创新绩效关系的实证研究

本文通过实证研究确定跨国公司人力资源系统和企业文化对创新绩效的影响,以及企业文化在人力资源系统和创新绩效间存在的中介作用。在前人研究的基础上,构建了三者之间关系的基本模型,提出了三条基本假设。通过对长三角地区的150家跨国企业进行问卷调查,运用多元回归法分析了有效数据,发现注重培训、基于绩效的薪酬、发展团队三项人力资源实务和企业文化对创新绩效有影响,其中注重培训和公司文化对创新绩效的影响显著,而人力资源系统主要通过企业文化的中介作用来影响创新绩效。     

Organizing for disaster: Lessons from the military

Recent global events have highlighted the need for disaster planning by leaders in all types of organizations, civilian and military included. This article illustrates, from both academic and personal viewpoints, lessons learned during relief operations for the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. Having participated in this effort, I detail guidance for designing resilient and robust organizational structures that can deal with the uncertainties of a disaster environment. For example, organizations frequently form temporary command centers to improve information flow in a crisis. Consequently, managers are advised to create temporary organizational structures with a common cognitive map to improve sense-making for employees during turbulent times. Other lessons presented include the establishment of a nuanced priority system for assessing potential courses of action, and the need to eliminate bureaucratic barriers to action to improve the speed of response when lives are at stake. This article concludes by pointing out that proper organizational structures need to be considered prior to disaster in order for organizations to be effective and efficient during the course of a mitigation effort.     

Fostering an ethical organization from the bottom up and the outside in

Despite the best efforts of corporate compliance officers, boards of governance, auditors, and regulators, corporate misconduct continues to plague our markets. In this thought-provoking installation of Accounting Matters, we argue that efforts to fight fraud and other forms of corporate misconduct have failed, in part, due to the systematic approach employed toward a problem that is irregular, complex, and extends well beyond the boundary of the firm. By drawing upon research from the field of behavioral ethics to suggest a new approach that does more than just stress formal control systems, we illustrate how executives may strengthen organizational ethics through informal practices that work from the ‘bottom up’ and the ‘outside in.’ Our review includes practical recommendations regarding how to create shared responsibility for ethical leadership, how to empower employees to achieve both economic and ethical ends, how to enlist the aid of key stakeholders in identifying problems before they grow and spread, and how to redesign compliance practices to address the complex nature of corporate misconduct.     

Organizational innovation as an enabler of technological innovation capabilities and firm performance

This study assesses the relationship between organizational innovation and technological innovation capabilities, and analyzes their effect on firm performance using a resource-based view theoretical framework. The article presents empirical evidence from a survey of 144 Spanish industrial firms and modeling of a system of structural equations using partial least squares. The results confirm that organizational innovation favors the development of technological innovation capabilities and that both organizational innovation and technological capabilities for products and processes can lead to superior firm performance.     

Organizational and competitive influences of exploration and exploitation activities in small firms

This study explores organizational and competitive factors affecting exploration/exploitation activities in SMEs by examining the role of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), market orientation (MO) and perceived competitive intensity. We test the relationships among these variables using data collected from 55 manufacturing SMEs operating in the southern part of U. S. The findings provide a strong support for a positive association between EO, MO and exploration/exploitation activities. Perceived competitive intensity was only a significant moderator for the relationship between MO and the degree of exploratory activities. Our findings, hence, suggest the significant role organizational predictors play in enhancing exploration/exploitation activities in SMEs. Implications for research and practice are discussed.