Many customers care about the societal costs of a company’s activities — pollution or depletion of resources, for example — and thus companies have an incentive to pay attention to their impact on society. They want to keep their reputation intact. But what if your company already has a rock-solid reputation? Is there any reason […]
Journal: Working Paper
Flexibility Vs Commitment in the Entrepreneurial Process
Scholars have identified different approaches to the management of uncertainty in the entrepreneurial process. The ‘classic’ model is ‘focused commitment’. The argument in this stream of research is that making commitments early may secure future opportunities and discourage rivals from investing, accelerate learning and enable economies of scale, and provide ‘first mover’ advantage. Put very […]
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Word-of-Mouth and On/Off Line Marketing
Word of mouth (WOM) behaviour has attracted a lot of attention from marketing executives in recent years, particularly in light of the increase in size, number and character of online communities. According to a 2012 Marketing Week article, WOM has moved on from the simple message passed on when someone sees a friend face-to-face and […]
How to Recognize Managements With Something to Hide
In recent years, the trust afforded to senior management has eroded significantly, particularly for those executives in finance-related positions. The demise of certain companies sent shockwaves across industries; successful covering up of the actual financial situation a company was in meant regulators, employees and the general public remained unaware till it was too late. Going […]
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Delaying Retirement Can Be Bad for the Brain
The greying of the post-war baby boom generation and increasing life expectancy are threatening the financial sustainability of pensions systems in many industrialized countries. European governments are responding by raising the mandatory retirement age. But this could be a short-sighted strategy. Recent research suggests that working for longer can have a negative effect on cognitive […]
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How Prosocial Goals Promote Employee Happiness
‘Employee happiness’ has been getting a lot of attention in recent years. The evidence is there to show that it is directly-related to business performance; your happy employees are almost certainly going to be more productive than the unhappy ones. Similarly, there has been a lot of research highlighting the factors that can lead to […]
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What Is the Real Value in CSR?
Exploring the relation between information that is presented in corporate accountability reports and future financial performance three professors from the Kellogg School of Management’s Accounting Information and Management Department focused on CSR expenditure figures and the future performance of the disclosing firm. Thomas Lys, professor of accounting information and management at the Kellogg School of […]
Motivation by Last Place Aversion
Professors Ilyana Kuziemko of Columbia Business School and Ryan Buell and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, working with doctoral candidate Taly Reich of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, collaborated on a series of experiments to explore how far people would go to avoid being in last place. One experiment was designed to measure […]
Severe Weather: Moderating Its Impact on Productivity
Does bad weather reduce productivity within factories and other workplaces? This is the question that the latest research from Marcelo Olivares of the Columbia Business School and Gérard Cachon and Santiago Gallino of Wharton addresses. The researchers used inventories and productivity statistics covering 10 years for 64 US automobile assembly plants, and matched them to […]
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Narcissistic CEOs – A Signature for Poor Performance
Recently, faculty from Kenan-Flagler Business School and Robert H. Smith School of Business looked at the relationship between egotistic (or narcissistic) CEOs and firm performance by measuring ego by the size of signatures on yearly SEC filings. They looked at about 400 CEO signatures from the annual SEC filings from companies in the S&P 500, […]
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