Search results

In this chapter, two academics from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan collaborate with the President of their university to present their experiences and ideas about positive strategic leadership. Positive strategic leadership is derived from the juxtaposition of ideas from the growing stream of research on positive organizational scholarship with what is already known from the literature on strategic leadership. The authors embed new views into current theoretical perspectives on strategic leadership to provide an integrative overview and use the president's experiences during the nationally followed Affirmative Action cases as a vehicle for illustrating five themes: (1) A lifetime of experiences shapes who you are, (2) issues commonly choose you before you choose them, (3) begin with a purpose in mind, (4) appreciate divergent views, and (5) be a beacon for the future. Additionally, the authors provide practitioners with some “takeaways” on positive strategic leadership.

John Antonakis (PhD, Walden University) is professor of Organizational Behavior at the Faculty of Management and Economics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research is centered on individual-difference antecedents of effective leadership, the measurement of leadership, and the links between context and leadership as applied to neocharismatic and transformational leadership models, and the development of leadership.

In most portfolio performance studies, a reference portfolio is used to assess the performance of a portfolio manager. The choice of an appropriate reference portfolio is essential to yield a fair and unbiased evaluation of the manager. In the following analyses, category‐based benchmarks are assessed against established benchmarks to evaluate, which alternative accurately evaluates a portfolio manager's performance. The results indicate that the category‐based benchmarks are more appropriate comparison reference for evaluating the systematic risk of equity portfolios and equity security returns.

As CEOs now communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders, it has become increasingly difficult to ensure that the intended meaning of their messages is received. Boas Shamir focuses on how leaders engage in the management of meanings in order to (1) justify their actions and the changes they introduce to the organization; (2) recruit followers and motivate members of the organization to support their actions; and (3) create shared perceptions and interpretations so that members’ actions are guided by a common definition of the situation. Heike Bruch, Boas Shamir, and Galit Eilam-Shamir show how the leader of a large Swiss-based company actively managed the views, interpretations and energy of more than 100,000 employees through weekly e-mail letters when the company faced grave financial difficulties. Gretchen Spreitzer, Mary Sue Coleman, and Daniel Gruber show how an incoming university president dealt with an ongoing lawsuit regarding the university's use of affirmative action in its admissions processes and worked with various stakeholders to firmly establish the university's identity.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the organizational literature and improve the understanding of the slack and performance link by: examining the slack and performance relationship using a configurational approach and by considering equifinality and its possible effects on this relationship.

Using cluster analysis, ANCOVA, and means comparisons this study identifies different configurations of slack and their associated performance implications.

The results show that configurations with higher levels of slack outperform those with lower levels of slack suggesting a positive relationship between slack and firm performance. The findings also demonstrate that alternative configurations of slack can result in similar levels of performance suggesting the existence of equifinality in this relationship.

This study contributes to prior research by moving beyond traditional linear and contingency views of slack and considering a configurational approach. An important contribution of this study is that while level of slack may be important it appears that how the various types of slack are bundled also serves as an important factor in firm outcomes and should be examined by future researchers.

The results indicate that managerial attention should be paid to not only identifying appropriate levels and types of slack for the organization but also to appropriate ways to bundle theses resources.

This study provides an important contribution to the literature by determining if certain slack bundles result in higher levels of performance and if there are multiple ways of bundling slack resources that result in similar performance outcomes.

We examine the sources of performance for a sample of mutual funds that invest primarily in utility companies. Given recent deregulation developments in the utility industry and the sub‐market performance of utility stocks in the 1990s, we hypothesize that utility funds may be considering alternatives to traditional high‐yielding electric utility stocks. Although there is anecdotal evidence that utility funds may be tilting their focus away from electric utility stocks, we find that utility mutual funds as a group are no more or less heavily invested in utility stocks today than they have been over the past 10 years.

Using a Constrained Choice Theory framework, this paper will identify variation in choosing the constraint-reflective priorities of budget, taste, or health by sociodemographic group, familial status, and weight category. Identifying which groups experience unique constraints will allow for customized healthy eating programs to address barriers specific to each group.

Data are derived from a paper survey of families with children in Lexington, KY and analyzed using logistic regression.

The results of this study confirm that some sociodemographic groups are more likely to choose priorities that reflect contextual constraints in their lives than others. In particular, having a higher income reduces likelihood of prioritizing budget and increases chances of prioritizing taste. Being married or cohabitating is correlated with choosing health, but having more children reduces the likelihood of prioritizing health. Being obese correlates with increased likelihood of prioritizing budget. Membership in each of these categories reflects constraints on which foods are purchased for the home.

Families are encouraged to improve their diets by eating at home, but families face many constraints when choosing healthy foods at the grocery store. Understanding the constraints experienced by various groups when shopping for food will lead to health policy that more fully addresses barriers to healthy eating for groups with disproportionately high incidence of diet-related disease.

This paper extends Constrained Choice Theory by applying it to a new aspect of health, purchasing groceries, and also by examining a wider variety of sociodemographic groups than previous research.

Two or multi-sided platforms - defined as those companies that aim to connect two or more groups of customers leveraging the opportunities provided by indirect network externalities – got massive attention from both scholars and practitioners over the last decade. Entrepreneurship scholars mainly focused on the platform's ability to enable entrepreneurial ventures for the complementors' side, exploring the network-centric view. This study aims to expand it by exploring the broader influence that sides can have on the platform provider's entrepreneurial decisions over time, during the evolution of the two-sided platform.

The study is based on a longitudinal single case study developed over five years. The research presents the born and evolution of Friendz, an Italian two-sided platform.

The research presents a four-phases evolution process that shows how the entrepreneurs may first leverage an existing platform to develop a new venture and then develop his/her own two-sided platform. In this latter phase, the findings show how the sides may actually influence the platform provider's entrepreneurial decisions, both in terms of value proposition design, but also regarding the creation of new ventures.

The study contributes to the two-sided platform literature highlighting new evolutionary paths that expand current literature and highlight the doubling platform approach. Moreover, it contributes to the entrepreneurship literature offering a novel perspective on the entrepreneurial dynamics in two-sided platforms by re-balancing the power between the platform provider and the sides within the double network-centric view.

From a practitioners' perspective, this study offers an evolutionary path and specific tactics related to the evolution of an entrepreneurial venture based on a two-sided platforms that may inspire entrepreneurs working on two-sided platforms on how to use existing platforms and on the management of sides and the value propositions used to target them.

This study takes a novel perspective at the intersection between platforms and entrepreneurship literature streams, exploring the power that sides have over the platform provider in shaping the platform's entrepreneurial evolution. In doing so, it proposes a double network view on two-sided platforms and highlights three network-related tensions that can guide the evolution of the two-sided platforms.