Search results

In 2011, Brazil introduced a national pay-for-performance (P4P) scheme called the National Program for Improving Primary Health Care Access and Quality (PMAQ), rolled out over three cycles and reaching more than 5,000 municipalities and 40,000 family health teams (FHTs). There is little evidence on how the PMAQ was implemented locally and whether this variation in implementation affects performance, particularly, in terms of work process indicators. This study compared different cases of municipal-level PMAQ implementation (bonuses paid or not to FHTs) over the last two program cycles to analyze the quality of the work processes, actions and services of FHTs.

This was a cross-sectional analytical study using secondary data from an external evaluation of the Brazilian PMAQ. In total, 27,500 FHTs participated in the evaluation. They were divided into four clusters based on whether or not municipalities paid bonuses to workers during cycles 2 and 3 of the program (2013–2019). Variables regarding work processes, actions and services were classified as “Quality Assurance – QA” or “Continued Quality Improvement – CQI”, and an individual score was assigned based on the average score of each variable.

The four clusters displayed an increase in overall QA and CQI scores between the two program cycles; though this increase was small between the set of primary health care teams that received bonuses and those that did not.

This paper contributes to bridging the gap in the scientific literature for evaluative studies on the relationship between direct payment for performance to health professionals and better quality actions and services in low and middle-income countries.

Against the backdrop of IBM Personal Computer Business's acquisition by Lenovo Group, this case introduces the remodeling process of Lenovo's HR organization and development team, during which the company's 5P principle, namely “Plan (think clearly before making promise), Perform (promise is to be fulfilled), Prioritize (company's interest is top priority), Practice (make progress every day in every year), Pioneering (venture any experiment to be a trailblazer), takes shape. After learning about Lenovo's recruitment of internationalized talents, cross-cultural coaches for senior leaders, cultural development in internationalization and risk aversion in international operations, we can understand what Lenovo's HR team does to avoid conflicts in corporate culture and ethnic culture in cross-border mergers and acquisitions and integration, and how to adjust and change the HR management system.

Remuneration policies may differ from country to country, and their effect on bank stability could be due to the legal framework. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the legal system impacts the relationship between CEO compensation and bank stability across countries.

To test the study hypotheses, the authors use panel data of 74 banks operating in ten OECD countries during the period 2009–2016 and apply the generalized moments method regression model to better remediate the endogeneity problem.

The findings confirm that a country’s banking regulations significantly affect its bank stability. Common law countries have less bank stability than civil law countries. This result can be interpreted by the fact that, in common-law countries, banks’ CEO are strongly protected by the law, so they allocate a large part of bank assets to risky loans to improve their variable remuneration.

The research can help policymakers understand bank stability in one country. Any legal reform would require prior knowledge of how risk-taking may arise in executive compensation.

The contribution is to explain the controversial effect of executive compensation on bank stability in the framework of legal theory. The authors argue that regulators should monitor compensation structures and that the country’s legal origin of law shapes the CEO compensation structure and is a determinant of bank stability. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies exploring this field. So, this study tries to shed more light on the dark side of CEOs’ behavior when undertaking risky projects to maximize their remuneration.

Expressions of pride may elicit others’ envy. In the consumer context, prior research has repeatedly demonstrated that such envy significantly affects consumers’ attitudinal and behavioural responses towards the object of envy. This paper aims to investigate whether this pride-envy relationship is bi-directional. Does being envied by others affect consumers’ self-directed feelings of pride, as well as their subsequent attitude towards a product (i.e. the object of envy)?

Three experiments examined how emotional reactions of envy from others may influence consumers’ subsequent affective and attitudinal responses towards their own product or purchase. The first experimental study (n = 129) examined whether exposure to benign envy from others evokes higher levels of authentic pride and positively influences product attitude. The second experiment (n = 159) investigated whether exposure to malicious envy from others evokes high levels of hubristic pride, and therefore, negatively influences product attitude. The third study (n = 80) was a quasi-field experiment seeking to provide further empirical support for the relationship between benign (vs malicious) envy and authentic (vs hubristic) pride and their effects on attitude.

The first experiment showed that when participants observed expressions of benign envy towards them, they expressed authentic pride, which ultimately increased positive attitudes towards the product. The second experiment showed that when participants observed expressions of malicious envy towards them, they expressed hubristic pride, which, in turn, reduced positive attitudes towards the product. The effect of malicious envy was further moderated by susceptibility to social influence, whereby the indirect effect of malicious envy on product attitudes was only significant among participants with high susceptibility. The third experiment demonstrated the relationship between benign (vs malicious) envy and authentic (vs hubristic) pride and the effects on attitude in a quasi-field study.

The present paper aims to fill a research gap by showing how being the recipient of others’ malicious or benign envy affects consumers’ self-directed feelings of pride, as well as their attitude towards a product that is the object of envy.

The current research is among the first to show that the emotional expressions of other consumers can influence existing consumers’ affective responses and attitudes towards a product. These findings highlight the importance of building a positive culture and community around brands and products, whereby other consumers’ consumption of the brand or product is perceived positively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical evidence demonstrating that others’ expression of benign (malicious) envy may lead to the self-feeling of authentic (hubristic) pride, which has a downstream effect on attitude towards the product.

This study aims to investigate why anti-corruption statutes are not efficient in Nigeria’s upstream petroleum industry.

This study is a doctrinal legal research that embraces a point-by-point comparative methodology with a library research technique.

This study reveals that corruption strives on feeble implementation of anti-corruption legal regime and the absence of political will in offering efficient regulatory intervention. Finally, this study finds that anti-corruption organisations in Nigeria are not efficient due to non-existence of the Federal Government’s political will to fight corruption, insufficient funds and absence of stringent implementation of the anti-corruption legal regime in the country.

Investigations reveal during this study that Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) operations are characterised with poor record-keeping, lack of accountability as well as secrecy in the award of oil contracts, oil licence, leases and other financial transactions due to non-disclosure or confidentiality clauses contained in most of these contracts. Also, an arbitration proceeding limit access to their records and some of these agreements under contentions. This has also limited the success of this research work and generalising its findings.

This study recommends, among other reforms, soft law technique and stringent execution of anti-corruption statutes. This study also recommends increment in financial appropriation to Nigeria’s anti-corruption institutions, taking into consideration the finding that a meagre budget is a drawback.

This study reveals that corruption strives on feeble implementation of anti-corruption legal regime and the absence of political will in offering efficient regulatory intervention. Corruption flourishes due to poor enforcement of anti-corruption laws and the absence of political will in offering efficient regulatory intervention by the government.

The study advocates the need for enhancement of anti-corruption agencies' budgets taking into consideration the finding that meagres budgets are challenge of the agencies.

Despite its significance, research on how attribute framing affects ordering decisions in dual sourcing remains insufficient. Hence, this study investigated the effects of attribute framing in a sourcing task involving certain and uncertain qualities of two suppliers and analysed the role of attention with respect to suppliers' information in framing effects.

The impacts of attribute framing on sourcing decisions were demonstrated in two online between-subject (2 × 2 factorial) experimental studies involving professional samples. Study 2 was an eye-tracking experiment.

In Study 1 (N = 251), participants presented with a “high-quality” rather than a “low-quality” frame made different sourcing decisions, opting for larger percentage of order(s) from a supplier under the “high-quality” frame. This pattern holds true for suppliers who differ in risk. This finding was replicated in Study 2 (N = 129). Attention asymmetry related to the information on supplier quality contributes to this effect. Attention directed towards information regarding the supplier's quality under a positive frame mediated the relationship between attribute framing and sourcing decisions.

Highlighting the positive attributes of a risky supplier is essential when ordering from the risky supplier is an optimal decision. It is advantageous for suppliers to highlight positive rather than negative attributes when describing the quality of their components against others.

This is the first study to examine the effect of attention on the relationship between attribute framing and dual sourcing. This presents a new behavioural perspective wherein managers' attention to information plays a vital role.

Given the serious question raised by the subprime of the 2008 global financial crisis over the rising practices of excessive rewarding of executives in the USA and European firms, the executive pay-performance nexus has emerged as a popular topic of debate in the contemporary corporate finance research. Conducted mostly on the Anglo-Saxon contexts, research outcomes have been inconclusive and dichotomous. Considering this backdrop, this study aims to investigate the endogenous relationship between executive compensation and risk taking in the context of the USA.

Using a large sample of non-financial firms from 2010 to 2020 based on panel data and two-stage least square regression. In this study, the riskier corporate decision is measured as book leverage and ratio of R&D expense to total assets. Chief executive officers’ (CEO) experience and age are used as instrumental variables, and these are expected to influence compensation incentives and, hence, affect firm riskiness indirectly. Firm size, return on assets and CEO turnover are reported to affect compensation and corporate decisions, therefore, included as control variables. Given that higher executive compensation is related to riskier corporate decision in firms, this study incorporates total wealth (i.e. accumulated equity related compensation) as an additional proxy of compensation, and this selection is justifiable by the perfect contracting notion of the agency theory.

The results of this study show a significant positive and increasing nexus among compensation and riskier corporate decisions. Besides, the compensation level proxied through the percentage of each form of compensation in total compensation is very important as greater equity and greater salary diminishes risk taking.

The outcomes of this study have useful implications for firm stakeholders and policymakers.

The level of pay measured by the percentage of each type of compensation in total compensation is of utmost importance as it can increase or decrease risk taking in corporate decisions.

New Public Management-informed pay-for-performance policies are common in public sectors internationally but can be controversial with delivery agents. More attention is needed on contingent forms of bottom-up implementation of challenging policies, in emerging market economies, for professionals who face tensions between policies and their codes of practice. Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) mediate policy implementation through discretionary practices; health professionals have enhanced space for discretion based on autonomy derived from professional status. The authors explore policy implementation, adaptation and resistance by physicians, focusing on payments for health workers in Turkey.

The researchers conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 12 physicians in Turkish hospitals and thematic analysis of interview transcripts, using a blended (deductive and inductive) approach.

The policy fostered discretionary behaviours such as cherry-picking (high volume, low risk procedures) and pro-social rule-breaking (e.g. “upcoding”), highlighting clinical autonomy to navigate within policy restrictions. Respondents described damage to relationships with patients and colleagues, and dissonance between professional practice and perverse policy incentives, sometimes leading to disengagement from clinical work. Policymakers were perceived to be detached from the realities experienced by SLBs. Tensions between the policy and professional values risked alienating physicians.

This study utilises participant self-reported perceptions of discretionary behaviours. Further work may adopt alternative methods to explore the relationship between self-reporting and observed practice.

The authors contribute to research on differentiated, contingent roles of groups with high scope for discretion in bottom-up implementation, pointing to the potential for policy-professional role conflicts between top-down P4P policies, and the values and codes of practice of professional SLBs.

The main goal of this study is to determine the role of employee commitment in the relations between the compensation system and turnover intentions of employees in the Republic of Serbia, as well as to investigate whether there is a mediating effect of employee commitment in this relation.

The primary methodology implemented in the research was data gathering, obtaining theoretical research works on the proposed relations and empirical studies based on the PLS-SEM, analysed by IBM SPSS Statistics and SmartPLS data processing software. The data for the analysis was obtained from a total sample of 764 employees, collected in the Republic of Serbia via an online questionnaire.

The results indicated a positive statistically significant relationship between the formative construct (compensation system) and reflective construct (commitment), as well as a negative statistically significant relationship between the compensation system and reflective construct (turnover intentions). Employee commitment partially mediates the relationship between the compensation system and turnover intentions of employees.

The study was conducted in Serbia and is thus rooted in the specific national context which is characterized by high power distance and high uncertainty avoidance and more collectivistic society with feminine values more expressed. Most of the previous investigations related to the mentioned constructs were performed in companies from more developed countries, including Western Europe and the United States of America, whereas there has been no such research conducted in Serbia to date. The results portrayed a mismatch between the expected relations regarding the attitudes of employees to the rewards and the proposed national context. Modern companies in Serbia need to follow a modern reward mechanism to build stronger commitment and decrease turnover intentions. Moreover, in most earlier research works, compensation was examined in terms of satisfaction with rewards, while this study was based on questions related to perceptions of employees toward HR compensation practices (“The organization offers me”-type questions), not related to their satisfaction. Further, in the majority of previous research works, the compensation system was examined as a variable in combination with other HR processes (staffing, training and development, career development, employee relations, HR planning, communication, etc.), as a HPWP, while in this case the authors used only the practice of compensation (reward elements and employee performance evaluation) to investigate relations with commitment and turnover intentions.

The theory of third order inference is a theory of how cultural beliefs influence individuals' decisions under conditions of interdependence and uncertainty. In this study, I build on prior work extending the theory to the role of third order information on social trust in public goods dilemmas. Namely, I argue that when second order information on the beliefs of those relevant to the group task are present, this information should influence decision-making over first and third order.

I test this argument in an experimental public goods game. After measuring first order social trust, participants are randomly sorted into one of four conditions – two that pair third and second order information on social trust as parallel and two that pair them as in conflict.

The results suggest that in the presence of second order information on social trust, third order information doesn't have an effect on cooperation.

The study extends the theory of third order inference to understanding the role of social trust at the first, second, and third levels in public goods dilemmas. It puts second order information in competition with third order in predicting cooperation. It suggests that resolving the uncertainty over the second order beliefs of a collective is key to preventing inefficient equilibriums when second and third order beliefs conflict.