Sales force leadership during strategy implementation: a social network perspective

Many new marketing strategies falter in the execution phase where managers fail to make frontline employees fully committed to implementing the new initiatives. While formal managers can apply transformational and transactional leadership behaviors to increase salespeople’s strategy commitment, peers can also exert a great deal of informal influence on salespeople. Building on recent social network perspectives of leadership, this paper investigates the interplay between the sales manager’s leadership styles and peer effects during the implementation of a new strategy in a large sales organization. The authors find that salespeople with high network centrality but low strategy commitment not only lower their peers’ commitment but also hurt the effectiveness of a transformational manager. Specially, the influence of a central salesperson becomes stronger when the sales group has lower external connectivity. However, sales managers’ transactional leadership can decrease the non-committed central salesperson’s influence over peers.     

Talking in the present,caring for the future: Language and environment

This paper identifies a new source that explains environmental behaviour: the presence of future tense marking in language. We predict that languages that grammatically mark the future affect speakers’ intertemporal preferences and thereby reduce their willingness to address environmental problems. We first show that speakers of languages with future tense marking are less likely to adopt environmentally responsible behaviours and to support policies to prevent environmental damage. We then document that this effect holds across countries: future tense marking is an important determinant of climate change policies and global environmental cooperation. The results suggest that there may be deep and surprising obstacles for attempts to address climate change.     

Aspects of Governance and $$\hbox {CO}_2$$Emissions: A Non-linear Panel Data Analysis

The reduction of \(\hbox {CO}_2\)emissions has been at the centre of worldwide debates on environmental issues, though its inclusion as one of the millennium development goals (MDGs) by the United Nations has changed the focus of relative literature. Among many, one of the World Bank’s “recipes” to achieve a higher position toward MDGs has been to undertake reforms for a better governance. While, the majority of researches’ focus has been on one single aspect and its relationship with the environment, some studies, have simultaneously considered two governance dimensions. In this paper, we focus on the role of several aspects of governance on \(\hbox {CO}_2\)emissions. This provides us with a chance to explore the possible impacts of all aspects of governance on a more direct measure of emissions, that is different to previous researches which have focused on the indirect transmission and considered the maximum of two. Using the IV method within panel data analysis, we show that only one single aspect of governance, Control of Corruption, has a negative significant effect on \(\hbox {CO}_2\)emissions and its effect has a non-linear relationship. The non-linearity exists in both parametric and nonparametric analysis after controlling for endogeneity.     

Self-assessed vs. statistical evidence of racial discrimination: the case of indigenous Australians

This paper provides new insights on the labour market discrimination faced by indigenous Australians one of the most disadvantaged indigenous populations in developed countries. Combining two large, nationally representative datasets, we decompose the employment gap between indigenous and non-indigenous populations as of 2014–2015, and show that differences in characteristics between the two groups account for only 43% of the employment gap for females, and 23% of the gap for males. We then demonstrate that statistical measures are positively related to discrimination reports of females and negatively related to discrimination reports of males. Our findings underscore the importance of improving transparency in employment processes for addressing the issue of disadvantage of racial minorities.     

On the role of governance and health aid on child mortality: a cross-country analysis

Globally, child mortality rates continue to be unacceptably high despite improvement in child health outcomes. The role of macro level indicators, such as governance and health aid on child mortality, remains under-researched. The aim of this article is to analyse the influence of governance and health aid on child mortality using cross-country data. A negative association between governance and the mortality rate of children less than 5 years of age was found using System Generalised Method of Moments Dynamic Panel, the linkage also exists in the results of quantile and semi-parametric regression. However, as in other literature, the role of health aid on child mortality remains ambiguous.