Proactive personality and work performance in China: The moderating effects of emotional exhaustion and perceived safety climate

Grounded in the interactionist paradigm, this study shows that emotional exhaustion and perceived safety climate constitute important moderators of the relationship between proactive personality and work performance. More specifically, the study analyzes the relationship between proactive personality and its behavioural outcomes—organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and job performance—and investigates the interactive effects of emotional exhaustion and perceived safety climate. The study involves 485 Chinese airline employees including pilots, flight attendants, engineers, and service employees. Proactive personality positively predicted OCB and individual performance. Emotional exhaustion and perceived safety climate moderated the relationship between proactive personality and individual performance both independently and jointly. Implications of the findings for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2009 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive Performance: A New Scale to Measure Individual Performance in Organizations

As a component of overall employee performance, adaptive performance refers to the ability of an individual to change his or her behaviour to meet the demands of a new environment. The concept is relevant to firms that face especially complex and volatile business conditions. Research and practice have been hampered by a general lack of a widely available, psychometrically sound, multidimensional scale of adaptive performance that is applicable across a wide range of job contexts. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we develop and evaluate a 19‐item scale measuring five dimensions of adaptive performance. Copyright © 2012 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A forecast simulation analysis of the next‐generation DVD market based on consumer preference data

Just as standards wars over formats had characterized VCRs upon introduction to the market, the next‐generation DVD standards war between Blu‐Ray and HD‐DVD lasted 6 years before Blu‐Ray won the contest. Beginning with stated preference data drawn from a structured conjoint survey conducted before Blu‐Ray became the de facto standard of the next‐generation DVD format, we estimate consumer preferences on digital video players. A Bayesian mixed‐logit model is used and market share simulations are conducted under various scenarios based on the estimated parameters from Bayesian mixed‐logit model to surmise the future South Korean digital video‐player market. Results indicate that consumers feel that network size and title availability are more important than hardware‐related facets of the product, such as definition and storage capacity. The level of title availability and price of the Blu‐Ray player for Blu‐Ray's dominance over DVD will dramatically vary by the penetration rate of DVD players.     

THE "VEREENIGING VOOR DE STATISTIEK", 1857–1892

This paper deals with the history of the nineteenth century Dutch statistical society: "Vereeniging voor de Statistiek", founded in 1857. In the second half of the nineteenth century the society flourished and had a considerable amount of members. It played a very active role for the establishment of a central official statistical bureau: "Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek". These activities ended with success in 1892. Then the society changed its name and did no longer engage itself with statistics. Members of the statistical society thought of statistics as facts about society, mostly numerical, but not always. They hoped to discover the laws which ruled society, by means of statistics. In that way the social sciences would improve.     

Youth on the road: Reflections on the history of tramping

Tourism is conventionally traced to the eighteenth century Grand Tour of aristocratic youth which, it is then suggested, was gradually democratized and adopted in modified form by the middle classes. In such a perspective, the road culture of contemporary youth travelers would simply represent one form of this democratized elite tradition. This paper argues instead that contemporary road culture is better seen as an upwardly rather than downwardly mobile cultural form. Tramping originated as a well-institutionalized travel pattern of working class youth. Despite its instrumental functions, it always had touristic components, serving as the young workingman's Grand Tour. When, in the course of the nineteenth century, it declined as a labor institution, it was romanticized and adopted by middle class youth for exclusively tourist purposes.     

Comparative assessment of tourist generating markets for New Zealand

Portfolio analysis has become a widely used strategic planning tool in many industries during the past decade. Strategic decisions in the tourism industry include issues such as which markets are most attractive (e.g. have greatest visitor expenditure potential); in which markets are a specific country's “products” most competitive; how promotional budgets should be allocated for greatest effectiveness; and what the promotional message should convey. Industry Attractiveness Analysis—a flexible variety of portfolio analysis—has been applied to the generating countries which supply tourists to New Zealand in an illustrative case study. Both national level and individual company applications are described and illustrated in 3 × 3 matrix form. These diagrams are, in themselves, a good communication mechanism which encourages rational, strategic thinking about managerial decisions and resources allocations. Past, present, and future situations can be portrayed in a graphically useful manner.     

Ownership concentration and corporate governance practices: substitution or expropriation effects?

The objective of this study is to analyze the relation between ownership concentration and corporate governance practices of a group of Canadian companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. We rely on the corporate governance index developed by the Report on Business (ROB) in 2002. Our empirical results are consistent with the expropriation effect argument that predicts a negative relation between deviation from the one share‐one vote rule and corporate governance best practices. In this context, the dominant shareholder has incentives to maintain weak internal controls in order to facilitate expropriation. In addition, consistent with prior research, our results give partial support to the substitution effect argument by showing a negative impact of ownership concentration on the board composition subindex. Copyright © 2007 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adaptive market efficiency of agricultural commodity futures contracts

In this paper we investigate the adaptive market efficiency of the agricultural commodity futures market, using a sample of eight futures contracts. Using a battery of nonlinear tests, we uncover the nonlinear serial dependence in the returns series. We run the Hinich portmanteau bicorrelation test to uncover the moments in which the nonlinear serial dependence, and therefore adaptive market efficiency, occurs for our sample.     

Determinants of corporate risk disclosure in large Spanish companies: a snapshot

Improvements in risk disclosure have been an important part of the corporate governance reforms. This paper is intended to identify the factors that explain the extent to which a sample of 35 listed Spanish firms disclose risk-related information. This study focuses on the risk disclosures made in the corporate governance reports during the year 2009. Using the content analysis technique an index was developed in order to assess the amount and quality of the risk information disclosed by Spanish companies. Several characteristics were selected and their influence on the level of risk disclosure was tested empirically. Results indicate that sector and risk level are positively related to the extent of corporate risk disclosures. This study adds to the international research on risk disclosure by extending the scope of the current understanding of risk reporting practices and their determinants. The findings could be especially useful for regulators and policy-makers in order to enhance risk disclosure and to improve transparency.