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By the view of attention-building activities as “tools of power,” the authors investigate the impact of subsidiary involvement in attention-building activities on the strategic influence of subsidiaries within multinational corporations (MNCs).

The study is based on survey data from 110 international subsidiaries located in Sweden. Five hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling with linear structural relations.

The study shows that organizational commitment and external scouting activities, as two attention-building activities, do not directly affect the ability of subsidiaries to gain a strategic influence in MNCs. Rather, the results provide support for the importance of headquarters’ positive attention as a mediator between such activities and subsidiary strategic influence. This implies that subsidiaries do not receive any strategic influence through these activities unless they receive explicit positive attention from the corporate headquarters.

This study contributes to the micro-political view of the MNC by offering insights into the impact of attention-building activities of subsidiaries as a potential source of strategic influence for MNC subsidiaries.

This study aims to examine the effects of ethical leadership on job satisfaction, affective commitment and burnout of health care employees, considering frustration tolerance and emotional stability as moderating variables.

A questionnaire was used to survey health care professionals working in private and public Austrian health-care organizations (hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and sanatoriums). The questionnaire consisted of items from well-established scales. The collected data (n = 458) was analyzed using correlation and regression analyzes.

Findings indicated that ethical leadership is significantly positively related to job satisfaction (r = 0.485, p < 0.01) and affective commitment (r = 0.461, p < 0.01) and is significantly negatively related to burnout (r = −0.347, p < 0.01). The results also suggest that frustration tolerance (ß = 0.101, p < 0.1) and emotional stability (ß = 0.093, p < 0.1) moderate the relationship between ethical leadership and burnout. Furthermore, a moderation effect of emotional stability in the ethical leadership and affective commitment relation was indicated. No moderation effect was found for frustration tolerance or emotional stability for the relationship between ethical leadership and job satisfaction.

Ethical leadership emphasizes the socio-emotional dimension in a leader-employee relationship, which can easily be neglected in times of staff cuts and work overload. Leadership training should include the development of skills in how to visibly act as a moral person, as well as how to set clear ethical standards and communicate them to employees.

This study adds value to the limited evidence on the beneficial role of ethical leadership in health care settings. In addition, frustration tolerance and emotional stability have not before been investigated as moderators.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often lack adequate accounting systems and may even fail because of accounting inefficiencies. Indeed, accounting can mitigate the course of a crisis and support a troubled SME’s turnaround. Its impact on reorganization success, however, has scarcely been researched so far. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the effects of several accounting parameters, namely, the quality of accounting systems, quality of early warning systems, formal planning, the standard of financial accounting and reorganization planning on the short- and long-term success of court-supervised reorganization.

The impact of accounting on reorganization success is investigated in a sample of all SME bankruptcy cases with ten or more employees (n = 117) in Upper Austria in 2012 including data for short-term survival (in 2016) and long-term survival (in 2019).

This study found evidence that the general quality of accounting systems, the quality of early warning systems and written reorganization plans positively influence the outcomes of the analyzed court-supervised reorganizations of SMEs. In particular, the existence of a reorganization plan significantly increases the short- and long-term reorganization success by ensuring the efficient and effective use of resources in the reorganization process.

This study should increase the awareness of SMEs’ owner managers, consultants, creditors and legislators for the importance of accounting in the context of reorganization. The fact that the effect of accounting on reorganization success is less pronounced in the long-term view indicates the necessity of increasing the strategic focus in SMEs’ accounting instruments.

This study provides new evidence on the impact of specific accounting parameters on the short- and long-term success of the court-supervised reorganization of SMEs. Furthermore, this study points out the high relevance of reorganization plans for SMEs.

People around the world are not sufficiently capable or willing to engage in retirement planning. New technological tools have been proposed as a promising solution to foster involvement and consequently encourage retirement planning. This paper aims to test whether an interactive online pension planner can improve participants’ behaviour, behavioural intentions, attitude, knowledge and perceived ease of use, usefulness and enjoyment.

In collaboration with a company specialised in technologically advanced pension planners, three different versions of an online pension planner were created. The control condition only allowed participants to check their pension situation and the composition of future retirement income. In the medium interactivity level, participants could choose to modify certain variables affecting their pension income, on top of the features from the control. The highly interactive planner additionally included an interactive budget tool and showed whether the accumulated pension income was sufficient to cover the desired spending. Data were collected with the help of an online panel (N = 285).

This paper finds a positive effect of interactivity on behaviour within the planner, that is, the number of clicked options, as well as on participants’ intention to check their personal pension situation in the upcoming three to six months. Moreover, this paper finds gender differences: male participants prefer a high level of interactivity, while women prefer a medium level.

An interesting modification to the current research design would be to use personal, self-relevant data in the online pension planner. Moreover, conducting the study in a computer laboratory could increase concentration on the task, and hence involvement. Next to gender, there might be other factors that possibly influence the results. It would be interesting to investigate other measures of behaviour such as the time spent on the pension planner. Further research should also study the effects of other features that shape user’s perception of interactivity, which include human-to-human interactivity.

The results show that technological services, such as advanced online pension planners, can positively affect engagement with retirement planning. Thus, pension providers are encouraged to use interactive online pension planners. The results with respect to gender suggest tailoring pension planners to match specific preferences of recipients. New service technologies provide novel opportunities to cater to individual differences by, for example, integrating less interactive features for women than for men in a pension planner. Moreover, cognitive involvement should be stimulated by integrating relevant, interesting and valuable information.

Lack of engagement with retirement planning is an important challenge to Western societies. People who do not sufficiently search for information about their expected pension benefits may encounter significant pension gaps resulting in detrimental welfare effects at retirement. This problem is enhanced by the fact that increasingly, the risks and responsibility for retirement planning are being shifted towards pension plan participants themselves. Thus, finding ways to increase engagement with retirement planning by making use of advances in service technologies brings benefits to society.

First, this paper contributes to the customer engagement literature by studying how new technological interfaces improve user experiences, knowledge and engagement within the low involvement context of retirement planning. Second, this paper advances service research by zooming in on customer heterogeneity in using the technology-based online pension planner and studying the moderating effect of involvement and gender more closely. Third, this paper contributes to the financial services literature by studying how new service technologies can help to increase attitudes, knowledge and engagement with retirement planning.

The purpose of this study is to show that an important antecedent of perceived knowledge quality is an employee’s position in the organizational network due to their participation in different interest groups. In particular, this study theorizes that brokers establish a network of groups, which increases perceived knowledge quality vis-a-vis the social capital that employees draw on.

To test this study’s hypotheses on the influence of the structural position of knowledge brokers on the positive effects of social capital on perceived knowledge quality, this study combines data from an online survey with longitudinal archival data from a youth-care organization who used an enterprise social network (ESN) for knowledge sharing.

This study found a mitigating effect of being a broker on the relationship between trust and perceived knowledge quality, and also between inter-team interaction and perceived knowledge quality for lower levels of both trust and inter-team interaction on perceived knowledge quality.

Although the hypotheses are supported, in light of prior research, the authors would have expected stronger and positive effects.

This research is particularly interesting because it emphasizes the important role of social capital. For organizations that deal with trust issues, it might help to stimulate employees to broaden their activity on ESNs by becoming active in multiple groups.

While knowledge sharing on ESNs is generally conducive for creating organizational value, there is a lack of understanding of what drives employees’ perception of the quality of shared knowledge, and how this perception may depend on their position in the social network. To investigate this question, the authors turn to social capital theory.