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Narcissism is often cited as a construct that is likely related to unethical leadership. Still, only a handful of empirical studies have examined the relationship between narcissism and workgroup outcomes, and practically none have linked narcissism to leader behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to use narcissism scores to predict behaviors associated with unethical leadership in a controlled setting.

Participants completed a measure of narcissistic personality. Participants also completed an administrative assessment center (AC). Qualitative analysis was used to code the behaviors in the AC into dimensions associated with unethical leader behavior.

Narcissism was related to the display of unethical behaviors during the AC. Scores on the narcissism scale correlated positively with behaviors associated with unethical leadership, including one-way communication, control of power, insensitivity to others, an unrealistic assessment of the environment, manipulative communication, and pseudo-transformational behaviors.

This is one of only a few studies that demonstrate a relationship between narcissism and observed unethical “bad” leader behaviors. Quantifying this relationship suggests that measures of narcissism could be used in leadership selection. Quantifying this relationship could also be used by coaches as they work to improve leader behavior.

As recently as 24 months ago, the principal focus of management attention was cost reduction. Today, the captivating target is growth. How do you account for this rapid shift in interest?

This masterclass seeks to identify the leaders others should emulate, what’s are best practices, how did the acclaimed exemplars get to be leaders, and what can we learn from their stories?

The author, a veteran practitioner and long-time observer of the evolution of strategic management regularly scans the business idea marketplace to identify any breakthroughs in the perennial quest for insights into the field of leadership.

Forget leadership – it’s strategy that matters. Companies excel when they adopt good strategies and implement them efficiently. The role of the leader is diminishing, and leadership has little utility as an organizing principle.

Look realistically at attempts to show how some CEOs shaped the future of their firms. Stories of success and failure typically exaggerate the impact of leadership style and management practices on performance. They focus on the singularities – the few extraordinary successes– and ignore the many events that failed to happen. We all fall prey to this affective fallacy when we extoll certain individuals – and then overweight their contribution to the success of their organizations.

We need to refocus our attention on strategy. Successful leadership ultimately comes down to good strategy and good fortune. We have little control over the vicissitudes of the macro-environment, but firms that adopt the right strategy will do better over the long term.

Much justification for third sector involvement in education advances from the notion that attributes from business and non-profit fields could benefit state-run public schools. The purpose of this paper is to explore this issue by examining theoretical underpinnings and expectations for third sector participation in public education systems, particularly with respect to educational innovations and improvements, and the structural opportunities, incentives, and impediments for such innovation.

The question is how third sector participation shapes the rate, nature, and types of innovations in education as schools interact in response to competitive pressures. This conceptual analysis of the third sector examines the political-economic features and structures of the sector in fostering innovation, with reference to the US sector that was specifically positioned to enhance the innovative capacity of publicly funded education.

The analysis indicates that educational innovations are not necessarily more prevalent in or because of the third sector, and that there are obstacles to their creation and diffusion. Moreover, schools often respond to competitive incentives in ways unanticipated by policymakers, such as school marketing rather than instructional improvement, sometimes in ways detrimental to goals set out for public education, such as social sorting. In fact, instead of the third sector simply developing or incentivizing innovations, there is evidence that this sector has adopted innovations developed in the state sector.

The analysis suggests that a third sector based more on a professional, as opposed to a competitive, model may better facilitate the development of innovative capacity in education.

A centuries-long history of theory and research shows that every authority system tries to cultivate a belief in its legitimacy. This paper focuses on the legitimation of regimes – social relationships and the rules that govern them. We use existing theory and research to identify a basic legitimation assumption that includes four conditions necessary to establish legitimacy. We also identify four corollaries of the assumption and use our own published and unpublished laboratory research to show (1) how successful experimental procedures satisfy the assumption’s conditions, and (2) how the failure of experimental procedures to establish legitimacy violate the assumption and its corollaries.

Humanity is maturing slowly and is soaked in blood, passing through his age of childhood and adolescence. He is now going through the last stages of his adolescence – producing, distributing, and trying to manage weapons of mass destruction; grabbing all he can for his selfish interests while millions starve in other lands and in our own neighborhood; holding also tightly to his ancestor's dogmas, superstitions, and divisive ideals of race, nationalism, and religion. Such mindset has recently manifested itself in huge scandals in the Catholic Church, and previously in Protestant denominations, and embezzlements in billions by the likes of Enron, Worldcom, and Arthur Anderson, and ultimately by the fundamentalist ideologies manifested in the likes of Osama Bin Laden and the Al‐Quaida organization. The democratic systems, while hanging on to old ideas, have necessitated what George Orwell foresaw as the need for “double‐speak” and “correct‐think” to be able to keep the illusion of democracy and at the same time control the passions of the masses. Wars, in the meantime, have continued, have brought devastation to the world and have claimed the lives of some 200 million people in the twentieth century alone. Man is at the brink. The question of business ethics cannot be addressed in a vacuum if he has lost a bigger truth – his humanity. One must either learn to grow up quickly or perhaps, perish.

This paper aims to present four blue-sky ideas for lowering the cost of the Government of Canada’s debt without increasing the debt’s risk profile.

The authors argue that each idea would improve the secondary-market liquidity of government debt, thereby increasing the demand for government bonds, and thus, lowering their cost at issuance.

The first two ideas would improve liquidity by enhancing the active management of the government’s debt through market operations used to support the liquidity of outstanding bonds. The second two ideas would simplify the set of securities issued by the government, concentrating issuance in a smaller set of bonds that would each be more highly traded.

The authors discuss the ideas and give an account of the political, legal and operational impediments.

Sam Walton opened his first Wal‐Mart discount store in 1962. Today, Wal‐Mart is not only the world’s largest corporation but also the world’s most admired company, according to a 2003 Fortune magazine poll. Wal‐Mart is competitive and successful because it has been doing many things right. This article helps shed light on the rise of Wal‐Mart and the roots of its competitiveness. Business practitioners aspiring to succeed can learn a great deal from studying the Wal‐Mart way of doing business.

The purpose of this paper is to describe lessons learned from integrating student-managed investment funds (SMIFs) in finance education systems based on the case of the Raymond Rebsamen Investment Fund at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas.

The paper has three main parts. First, it describes how the Rebsamen Fund operates as an integral part of undergraduate and graduate finance education at the Walton College. Second, it explains how the Fund spawned creation of sister funds, an institute, a 62-seat trading center, and coordinates with other agencies and stakeholders. Third, it lists strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing future SMIF integration into finance education.

The use of innovative experiential learning solutions like SMIFs bridging theory and practice can be enhanced by integrating them into effective systems of finance education.

Lessons learned include benefits of SMIF management by class, licensing and professional certification, trading centers, use of SMIF finances to support other components of education, proliferation of SMIFs, SMIF stimulation of academic units like centers/institutes, SMIF facilitation of collaboration, importance of tying SMIFs to student finance clubs, coordination of industry speaker visits between SMIF classes and clubs, and use of SMIFs in addressing cutting-edge challenges.

This paper discusses how SMIFs can be integrated in finance education.