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The modern construction industry is highly competitive and cost driven, with tangible adversarial relationships between projects' contractual parties at individual and organisational levels; there are conflict of interest as people to survive. Accordingly, team leaders on construction megaprojects (CMPs) in multinational engineering organisations strive to survive in such competitive markets. The research’s aim is to investigate relationships between team leaders' tenure and management styles towards professional subordinates on CMPs and elaborate how corporate governance can optimally address this conflict of interest and adversarial relationships.

The research methodology adopted processes of inducting theory using case studies. A qualitative approach was adopted as a primary data collection and analysis source. It involved case studies through primary data collection in semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 38 professional subordinates (interviewees) to discuss impacts of team leaders' tenure on their management style (a five-team leader, case studies). The research methodology is based on building theories from case study grounded theory research methodologies.

The research introduced the notion that team leader survival syndrome is pronounced and evidenced by adversarial reactions towards new or experienced professional subordinates where team leaders perceive professional subordinates, especially at senior technical levels, as potential risks that jeopardise their positions and employment survival possibilities. The syndrome is proven based on real-life case studies; it is constant, tangible and serious disorder of attitudes and behaviours. Longer tenure stimulates and accelerates these phenomena and syndrome, with 58% of team leaders exhibiting such syndromes. Optimum employee tenure is between 7 and 10 years. Corporate governance provides good resolution practices.

The research implications are useful to construction industry and academia. However, the analysis is limited to the case studies considered in Canada and Qatar. Due to small sample size for both case studies and respondents to the questionnaire survey, it is recommended for future exploration to expand the scope of research to larger sample size and various demographic and geographical locations.

Corporates should acknowledge the presence of team leader survival syndromes. They should thoroughly investigate sociopolitical relationships behind it and seek to understand consequences on professional subordinates. Corporates should also adopt a 360-degree feedback system; they should limit trust given to team leaders in this regard to responsible trust, to eliminate manipulation. Team leaders are perceived as being not always truthful and misrepresent capabilities and performance of their professional subordinates to senior managers. Corporate governance holistic multidimensional perspectives are required to provide resolutions of team leader survival syndromes.

The research has discovered a phenomenon that team leaders on CMPs in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organisations, prompted by virtue of long tenure in corporates or by power of their managerial level in organisations, perceive their professional subordinates, especially senior technical employees, as potential risks. It is thought promoting them would put their own positions and security of tenure at risk. Hence, team leaders act adversarially, to enhance their own survival prospects. This research introduced the novel team leader survival syndrome and introduced analyses, practical implications and recommendations.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent changes in corporate websites reflect firms’ survival. Since keeping a website online involves some costs, it is likely that firms would invest resources on it only when they are active and healthy. Therefore, when a firm dies, this event is likely to be manifested on its website as lacking updates or being down.

Changes in the corporate websites of a panel of Spanish firms were tracked between 2008 and 2014 in order to evaluate the approach. The status of websites, classified according to the type of change undergone, was used to infer firms’ activity status (active or inactive). Multi-period logistic regressions and a duration model were applied to study the relationship among the website status and the firm’s status.

Results showed that changes in website contents clearly reflect the firm’s status. Active firms were mainly associated with updated corporate websites, while inactive firms were more associated with down websites. In fact, results confirmed that the firms’ death hazard increases when the website activity lowers.

Although online information is increasingly being used to monitor the economy, this is the first study to connect online data to firms’ survival. The results revealed a new source of information about business demography and evidenced corporate websites as a fresh source of high granularity business data.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of owner family involvement in business on sustainable survival of family small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and to empirically validate the intervening role of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The authors analyze data from 489 owner and nonowner executives of 150 family SMEs using PLS-SEM (Partial Least Square–Structural Equation Modeling).

The authors found evidence that family involvement in business positively impacts the sustainable survival of family SMEs while corporate social responsibility partially mediates this relationship. Apart from effective family involvement in business, active involvement in social causes enhances a firm's ability to survive longer.

This study was conducted in a geographic context and data were collected from family-managed and controlled firms. Further research is needed to generalize the findings to all types of family firms in the global context. In an Islamic society, family firms need to invest in social causes, human development, and environmental sustainability through zakat, sadaqat, and donations.

The findings imply that family firms require stakeholder-centric competitive strategies and socially responsible behavior along with effective family control, commitment, enrichment, and successful succession since the path to sustainable survival goes through CSR.

Survival is the biggest challenge facing family SMEs forcing them to achieve the ability to sustain longer. Rooted in transaction cost economics (TCE) theory of the family firm and stakeholder theory, this paper validates an integrative model for family SMEs' sustainable survival.

Briefly reviews previous literature by the author before presenting an original 12 step system integration protocol designed to ensure the success of companies or countries in their efforts to develop and market new products. Looks at the issues from different strategic levels such as corporate, international, military and economic. Presents 31 case studies, including the success of Japan in microchips to the failure of Xerox to sell its invention of the Alto personal computer 3 years before Apple: from the success in DNA and Superconductor research to the success of Sunbeam in inventing and marketing food processors: and from the daring invention and production of atomic energy for survival to the successes of sewing machine inventor Howe in co‐operating on patents to compete in markets. Includes 306 questions and answers in order to qualify concepts introduced.

As small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) rely on board heterogeneity to raise capital and establish credit relationships with suppliers, it is crucial to investigate the board heterogeneity effect on their survival. In this study, the first research objective is to provide further insights on the discriminatory power of survival approaches, specifically on semiparametric approaches in survival analysis that take into consideration both fixed and time-varying covariates. The second objective is to examine the relationship between board size and SME liquidation by using resource-based theories that focus on measuring board heterogeneity through board size.

This paper uses survival approaches for modelling SMEs survival by examining the survival of more than 68,000 SMEs in the UK covering the before, onset and post 2008 crisis periods and with firms’ demographic characteristics and financial indicators. Survival analysis is effective to examine multiple causes of default/failure and how do particular circumstances or characteristics increase or decrease the probability of survival. Survival analysis brings more advantages than linear-based regression approaches by effectively handling the censoring of observations.

Motivated by resource-based theories, the authors find that the likelihood of a firm being liquidated robustly increases with a reduction in its board heterogeneity measured through board size. This finding is held under non-parametric, parametric, and semiparametric approaches using survival analysis. The research shows better causal explanation and discriminatory power on using the semiparametric-based survival analysis approach considering both fixed and time-varying covariates.

This study demonstrates the better performance and causal explanation of the survival model using time-varying covariates compared with those using fixed covariates. In addition, the authors delve into board heterogeneity, measuring through the board size to investigate how the number of board directors affects the firm liquidation, it is also a factor worth considering when a small and medium firm is forming its board.

This research investigates the board heterogeneity effect on firm survival using survival analysis approaches. The authors contribute to the knowledge on board heterogeneity of SMEs. Specifically, the size of more than three directors could help reduce SMEs liquidation risk. This result gives a recommendation to firms or start-ups when forming their director board. This research also provides further insights on the applicability of survival models with unique UK SMEs data covering the before, onset and post 2008 crisis periods.

By utilizing a large sample of firms during the period 2006–2017, the author determine which types of firms are more likely to go bankrupt. The author shows that over-leveraged firms have significantly higher probability of going bankrupt, which highlight the importance of the concept of optimal corporate capital structure. The author finds that private firms and export-oriented firms experience lower hazard rates. Proposed hazard statistical model highlights that more profitable firms, firms with better liquidity, firms with more tangible assets and larger firms all have statistically higher survival rates. The author finds that bankruptcy rates are the lowest among service firms and the highest in construction industry. Ownership variables indicate that state-owned firms, firms with foreign ownership and firms, owned by holdings, are less likely to fail, all else equal. Finally, the author demonstrates that proposed statistical model successfully predicts the probability of bankruptcy. The mean cumulative hazard function for a group of surviving firms is statistically significantly lower compared to a group of failing firms. In order to survive in a long run, firm’s management should especially be aware of their optimal capital structure and use rather less leverage than going over the sustainable level.

When making going concern assessments, Statement on Auditing Standards No. 59 (Auditing Standards Board 1988) directs auditors to consider the nature of management's plans and ability to mitigate periods of financial distress successfully. Corporate governance factors reflect attributes of control, oversight, and/or support of management's plans and actions intended to overcome financial distress. Correspondingly, this study investigates the impact of certain corporate governance factors on the likelihood of a going concern modification. Using survival analysis techniques, we examine a sample of 161 financially distressed firms for the time period 1988–1996. We find that auditors are twice as likely to issue a going concern modification when the CEO is replaced. We also find that going concern modifications are inversely associated with blockholder ownership. We also confirm Carcello and Neal's (2000) findings with respect to the association between an independent audit committee and an increased likelihood of modification. In a repeated events setting, we find that insider ownership and board independence are inversely associated with repeated going concern modifications. Our study concludes by proposing implications for the current financial reporting environment (including the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002) and future research avenues.

As major economies throughout the world gradually pick themselves up after 2001’s downturn, what are the prospects for the UK property industry? Is it safe to say that it has avoided the plunging values experienced in the early 1990s recession and what can corporate occupiers be doing to ensure survival in uncertain economic conditions?

This study investigates the connection between corporate governance and zombie firm’s exit time.

With a sample of 2,794 French zombie firms, the analysis focuses on four aspects of corporate governance: board size (BS), managerial ownership (MO), director turnover (DT) and ownership concentration, using tobit regression.

Dimensions of corporate governance have an important role in determining zombie firms’ exit time. MO and ownership concentration increase zombie firm exit time, whereas larger BSs and DT reduce it.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to include corporate governance as a characteristic relevant to zombie firms’ exit time. It provides new insights on why some zombie firms remain in the market longer than expected.

This study updates the literature review of Jones (1987) published in this journal. The study pays particular attention to two important themes that have shaped the field over the past 35 years: (1) the development of a range of innovative new statistical learning methods, particularly advanced machine learning methods such as stochastic gradient boosting, adaptive boosting, random forests and deep learning, and (2) the emergence of a wide variety of bankruptcy predictor variables extending beyond traditional financial ratios, including market-based variables, earnings management proxies, auditor going concern opinions (GCOs) and corporate governance attributes. Several directions for future research are discussed.

This study provides a systematic review of the corporate failure literature over the past 35 years with a particular focus on the emergence of new statistical learning methodologies and predictor variables. This synthesis of the literature evaluates the strength and limitations of different modelling approaches under different circumstances and provides an overall evaluation the relative contribution of alternative predictor variables. The study aims to provide a transparent, reproducible and interpretable review of the literature. The literature review also takes a theme-centric rather than author-centric approach and focuses on structured themes that have dominated the literature since 1987.

There are several major findings of this study. First, advanced machine learning methods appear to have the most promise for future firm failure research. Not only do these methods predict significantly better than conventional models, but they also possess many appealing statistical properties. Second, there are now a much wider range of variables being used to model and predict firm failure. However, the literature needs to be interpreted with some caution given the many mixed findings. Finally, there are still a number of unresolved methodological issues arising from the Jones (1987) study that still requiring research attention.

The study explains the connections and derivations between a wide range of firm failure models, from simpler linear models to advanced machine learning methods such as gradient boosting, random forests, adaptive boosting and deep learning. The paper highlights the most promising models for future research, particularly in terms of their predictive power, underlying statistical properties and issues of practical implementation. The study also draws together an extensive literature on alternative predictor variables and provides insights into the role and behaviour of alternative predictor variables in firm failure research.