When age does not harm innovative behavior and perceptions of competence: Testing interdepartmental collaboration as a social buffer

Can older managers overcome stereotypes relating age to low competence? We integrate the literature on age and cognitive ability with research on innovation to explore whether—and if so, when—employees' age harms performance and promotability appraisals made by their supervisors. Multisource, time‐lag data from 305 project managers indicate that the negative stereotypes can be explained through decreased innovative behavior. However, older employees are not always seen as poorer performers with less potential to be promoted due to their reduced innovative behavior. Rather, interdepartmental collaboration moderates these effects. Specifically, older employees with low interdepartmental collaboration are less innovative and receive worse performance and promotability appraisals than younger employees, but the “age handicap” vanishes when older employees collaborate with members of other departments. Organizations should foster formal or informal collaboration among units to prevent negative consequences of an aging workforce.     

Lobbying as a potent political marketing tool for firm performance: A closer look

This study endeavors to enhance political marketing literature about the impact of lobbying on firm performance. Our sample is composed of 140 U.S. firms and spans the years 2007–2014 to encompass the 2007–2009 recession and the subsequent recovery period. Our findings indicate that lobbying expenses positively contribute to firm performance. Also, government contracts in both ways, dollar amount and number of government contracts, act as mediators between lobbying expenses and firm performance. In addition, organizational slack moderates the relationship between lobbying expenses and government contracts. The managerial implications suggest that lobbying expenses can be leveraged as a potent tool for firm performance. Firms with larger lobbying efforts acquired both, higher dollar amounts and a greater number of government contracts.     

Exploring job crafting: Diagnosing and responding to the ways employees adjust their jobs

Recent research has developed an in-depth understanding of how workers change their jobs on their own to improve their performance and well-being, a process called job crafting. This research suggests that managers, coworkers, and organizations need a better understanding of how to manage job crafting to capitalize on its benefits and reduce costs. This article will help organizations diagnose the occurrence of job crafting, recognize the differences between goal-oriented approaches to job crafting as opposed to withdrawal-oriented avoidance job crafting, and identify the seven specific types of job crafting: work role expansion, social expansion, work role reduction, work organization, adoption, metacognition, and withdrawal. We conclude with recommendations for managers, coworkers, and organizations on how to diagnose and manage job crafting.     

Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: An Empirical Revisit of West German Consumers' Attitudes Toward Products and Brands from Former East Germany

More than 25 years after the German reunification, data show that products/brands from the eastern regions of Germany (“Neue Länder”) still do not have significant shares in the country's western part (“Alte Länder”). To analyze potential reasons for this phenomenon, our current study replicates a previous study that investigated selected attitudes of Alte Länder consumers toward products/brands from the Neue Länder. It is shown that factors such as consumer ethnocentrism, product judgment, willingness to buy, and economic animosity continue to influence consumer behavior and as such our study offers potential explanation for the failure of Neue Länder products/brands in the western regions of Germany.     

Social media affordances in entry‐level employees’ socialization: employee agency in the management of their professional impressions and vulnerability during early stages of socialization

This study examined how entry‐level employees interacted with social media during three stages of organizational socialization. They navigated between four different media affordances (persistence, editability, visibility, and association) while experiencing them as both enabling and constraining in different socialization stages. Qualitative interview data analysis revealed during anticipatory socialization, job applicants realized visibility and persistence in relation to institutional and individualized socialization. During encounter, new employees managed personal and professional life boundaries carefully against the association and visibility affordances. Although some participants used both public and enterprise social media for obtaining job‐related information and understanding coworkers and company culture, during metamorphosis, most interviewees adopted passive information seeking strategies and experienced a paradoxical tension between the enabling and constraining affordances of social media. Findings are discussed with regards to employees’ exertion of agency in managing their professional impressions and coping with high levels of uncertainty and vulnerability during early stages of socialization.     

Determinants of students’ entrepreneurial intention to compete in a fast-pitch competition

Despite the heightened popularity of entrepreneurship education, there remain open questions regarding best practices in co-curricular programs. Using the theory of planned behavior, the authors examine how students’ intention is shaped to increase the likelihood of participation in entrepreneurship co-curricular programs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the relation between entrepreneurial identity and entrepreneurial intention theory. They find the popular personality trait, openness, is related to ambition, which reveals the interaction between personal elements (personality/identity) and contextual elements (aspirations to success/intention), a novel finding in the literature. This further illustrates the interconnectedness between the theory of planned behavior and the entrepreneurial event model     

Smart work and hard work: explicating a learning orientation in strategic management accounting

This paper examines the skills and aptitudes necessary to undertake a strategic management accounting project. It argues that individuals involved in such projects are required to work both smart and hard. This argument is developed theoretically by reference to the work of educational psychologists who have identified two different types of goal orientation which people pursue in achievement situations: the learning orientation and the performance orientation. Evidence that strategic management accounting requires a learning orientation is provided by means of a case study which describes its use in a competitive tendering situation. This is followed by a discussion of the potentially symbiotic relationship of strategic management accounting and organizational learning. The discussion leads to the specification of a research agenda that may have significant implications for the practice and learning of management accounting.     

Independent Movement or Government Subcontractor? – Strategic Responses of Voluntary Organizations to Institutional Processes

The purpose of this paper is to identify factors that can explain differing responses of voluntary organizations to the pressure of homogenization that follows from interaction with public authorities. The paper is theoretically based on institutional organization theory and resource dependence theory, and empirically on research on voluntary organizations in the social sector. It is asserted that the following factors may explain voluntary organizations' ability to maintain autonomous in relation to public organizations: the characteristics of the organizational field, the focal organization's relations to the dominating organization in the field, organization characteristics and intra–organizational processes and strategies.     

Does success diminish competitive responsiveness? Reconciling conflicting perspectives

Previous research provides conflicting evidence of the association between the past performance of a business and its competitive responsiveness, with researchers observing both positive and negative relationships. To clarify this issue, the authors test a model using survey data from the retailing industry. The model delineates direct and indirect mediated paths through ability to respond, motivation to respond, and awareness of competitors’ actions to show how past performance can have both positive and negative influence on competitive responsiveness. However, the overall impact of past performance of an organization on its competitive responsiveness is positive. The implications of these findings for research, practice, and theory are discussed. Satish Jayachandran (satish@moore.sc.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing in the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. His research interests are focused on issues related to the market responsiveness of firms. His research has been published in theJournal of Marketing and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He was a recipient of the Harold H. Maynard Award for 2001 from theJournal of Marketing. He was nominated a young scholar by the Marketing Science Institute in 2003. Rajan Varadarajan (varadarajan@tamu.edu) is Distinguished Professor of Marketing and holder of the Ford Chair in marketing and e-commerce at Texas A & M University. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of strategy, international marketing, and e-commerce. His research on these topics has been published in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theAcademy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Business Horizons, theJournal of Business Research, and other journals.     

Duration and the price behavior of fixed-rate level payment mortgages: An analytical investigation

In this research we use a continuous payment formula for duration to examine the price behavior of a fixed-rate level payment mortgage. In the case where the mortgage is held to maturity, duration increases monotonically as term-to-maturity increases, regardless of changes in the market rate of interest. In the case where the mortgage is prepaid prior to maturity, there exists a unique market interest rate below which duration is a monotonically increasing function of time of prepayment, but above which duration has a global maximum at some time of prepayment prior to the term-to-maturity.