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The global financial crisis of 2008 raises many governance questions regarding the roles and responsibilities of executives and board members. Simultaneously, CEO duality in the USA and elsewhere has come under renewed scrutiny because of the perceived loss of checks and balances and resultant abuse of power. The authors suggest that the financial crisis presents a unique opportunity to explore the effects of, and attitudes, to CEO duality. The purpose of this paper therefore is to investigate whether CEO duality is associated with bank failure and whether bank regulators, as can be expected, are opposed to CEO duality.

The authors investigated the correlation between CEO duality and publicly traded banks in the USA that received Federal bailout funds, using available databases, and investigated bank regulators' attitudes to CEO duality using a series of structured interviews.

No correlation was found between bank failure and CEO duality. However, a strong correlation was found between bank ownership and receipt of Federal bailout funds in that publically owned banks were far more likely to have received bailout funds than banks which were privately owned. Surprisingly, it was also found that Regulators accepted CEO duality for several reasons and have no agenda to limit it.

The results suggest that CEO duality is a less significant issue factor in corporate management than suggested by many previous researchers and policy makers. This has clear implications for governance, regulation and legislation.

This study is the first to investigate the relationship between bank performance and CEO duality. The authors' results suggest that whilst there may be many good reasons for limiting CEO duality, the key measure of adverse effects on corporate performance in this sector is not one of them.

Based on a duality approach, this study examines the path from utilitarian value via cognitive trust versus hedonic value via affective trust in online shopping well-being. This study also explores the moderating role of extraversion in the relationships between shopping value and trust.

A data set collected from 648 online consumers in Vietnam was used to validate the measures employing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and to test the hypotheses using structural equation modelling (SEM).

The results show that online shopping well-being is determined hedonically and affectively rather than in an utilitarian manner and cognitively. Affective trust positively contributes to online shopping well-being, but cognitive trust does not. The dual-process associations between utilitarian shopping value and cognitive trust and between hedonic shopping value and cognitive trust were also confirmed. Finally, extraversion moderates the cognitive and affective associations between shopping values and trust.

This study contributes to the literature on online shopping by applying a dual perspective to confirm the role of hedonic shopping value and affective trust in positively determining online shopping well-being. As a result, this study provides a deeper understanding about if and why online shopping well-being is affect-based, instead of cognition-based.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between the requirements for successful organisational change and the imperatives faced by management consultancy firms in running successful businesses, and how this interplay affects the ways in which management consultants influence organisational change projects.

The paper reviews literature on management consultancy and organisational change over the past 30 years to identify insights into this issue.

The paper shows that business imperatives faced by management consultancy firms affect the ways in which consultants influence organisational change projects. It shows how management consultants aspire to form strategic partnerships with their clients in order to win profitable business, and to plagiarise established organising practices and change management methods in defining their services in order to manage their costs. It illustrates how these aspirations give rise to a number of dualities that consultants face in undertaking organisational change projects.

Only limited research has been carried out into the ways in which the business imperatives of management consultancy firms interact with the requirements for successful organisational change in shaping the influence that management consultants have on organisational change projects. This paper demonstrates the significance of this issue and suggests directions for future research into it.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the dilemma of institutional duality (ID) confronting multinational corporations and to propose a workable solution for this problem.

The author has searched the literature using several terms directly related to the dilemma of ID and multinational firms.

The findings reveal that to attain “legitimacy”, subsidiaries strive to balance institutional pressures stemming from external environments in the host country and their parent organizations. Understanding institutional theories of multinational corporations enables the subsidiaries to manage external pressures. ID impact varies among subsidiaries, depending on institutional contexts and internal strategies of subsidiaries.

An “institutional duality incidence model” portraying how dual institutions make “legitimacy” problematic for subsidiaries is proposed. A framework for identifying factors generating ID dilemma and their management approach is also proposed. It is concluded that a multinational corporation that recognizes ID as a central concern is more likely to achieve and maintain a higher level of harmony with its subsidiaries and host countries.

Many organizations report difficulties in integrating lean. A possible cause could be that methods and tools do not support each other. The purpose of this research is, therefore, to explore the nature of the connections within the system. Understanding these provides practitioners with a better way of defining their system and offers researchers a conceptual model with a new way of understanding a company-specific production system (XPS).

The study is designed as a multiple case study with three organizations and, in total, 25 lean experts serving as respondents.

The connections between the elements of an XPS act as a duality based on a problem–solution (P–S) relation. These are categorized according to complexity and can be mapped into a conceptual model, where the connections can be either symmetrical or asymmetrical.

The results provide a method to analyze causes and effects in an XPS and a conceptual model. Given the limitations of a multiple case study, future research should explore connections depending on a broader variety of contextual conditions.

The results present a way to avoid a cherry-picking problem through understanding connections between elements in an XPS. This provides a new way to understand the weaknesses of an XPS.

The research provides a new approach with insights on how to conduct research in lean production by facilitating how to understand and interpret connections between elements in a system.

Research on organizational change and development is limited in how it addresses the processes that encompass change initiatives. In this chapter, we explore one dimension of these processes, the ways that research frames relationships between planned and emergent organizational change. We discuss five ways in which organization development (OD) research has addressed dichotomies between planned emergent change: separation, selection, integration, transcendence, and connection. We suggest that the most effective approach for considering this dichotomy is likely to be one that connects planned and emergent change over time. We further suggest that a means by which connection can usefully be created is through attention to a transient outcome of change attempts, the vitality associated with a change initiative at any moment. We present an example of how a connection frame was utilized in an extended research project. We also suggest an analytic framework and specific research methods consistent with a connection frame. In doing so, we suggest how the adoption of a connection frame by OD researchers and practitioners may lead to a more complete picture of organizational change.

Adopting the duality approach, this study aims to examine cognitive and affective associations between shopping values, impulse buying tendencies and consumer shopping well-being. In addition, the study also aims to test the moderating role of self-control and compare the proposed relationships across the offline and online shopping contexts.

A survey dataset was collected from a sample of 529 offline and online consumers in Vietnam. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to test the proposed relationships among the studied constructs.

The consequence of impulse buying is positive and affect-based. In addition, the positive associations between shopping values and impulse buying via dual process are validated and moderated by self-control. In addition, the association between cognitive impulse buying and shopping well-being is stronger in the online shopping context, whereas hedonic value has more influence on affective impulse buying in the offline shopping context. All other relationships are not statistically different across the two shopping contexts.

This study introduces an appropriate theoretical framework for studying impulse buying—the duality approach. Second, the research validates the dual process and positive consequence of impulse buying. Third, self-control's moderating role is validated, whereas the studied associations are initially compared across shopping contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of corporate board characteristics on the financial performance of Nigerian quoted firms. Board characteristics studied comprise board size, board skill, board nationality, board gender, board ethnicity and CEO duality.

The study employed the random‐effects and fixed‐effects generalised least squares (GLS) regression to test the six hypotheses formulated for the study, while controlling for firm size and firm age.

Using panel data from 122 quoted firms in Nigeria between 1991 and 2008, it was found that board size, CEO duality and gender diversity were negatively linked with firm performance, whereas board nationality, board ethnicity and the number of board members with a PhD qualification were found to impact positively on firm performance. The result of the robustness test using the same board characteristics for 160 small firms showed that board duality was positively linked to firm performance, while a PhD qualification was negatively linked to firm performance.

The study contributes to the understanding of the board‐performance link by examining both the traditional variables such as board size, CEO duality and other organisational attributes such as ethnic diversity, foreign nationality and competence variables represented by women and PhD holders, respectively. The results provide an insight for practitioners and policy makers on the importance of relying on institutional specifics in the prescription of corporate governance codes.

The study adds value to the global corporate governance discourse in two ways: first, the use of Nigeria, which is claimed to have one of the weakest business cultures in the world, and secondly, using a good number of proxies that are country‐specific for corporate boards.

The purpose of this paper is to study if the employees’ optimism-pessimism ratio predicts their creativity.

In total, 134 employees reported their optimism and pessimism, and the respective supervisors described the employees’ creativity.

The relationship between the optimism-pessimism ratio and creativity is curvilinear (inverted U-shaped); beyond a certain level of the optimism-pessimism ratio, the positive relationship between the ratio and creativity weakens, suggesting that the possible positive effects of (high) optimism may be weakened by a very low level of pessimism.

Being cross-sectional, the study examines neither the causal links between the optimism-pessimism ratio and creativity nor other plausible causal links. The study was carried out at a single moment and did not capture the dynamics that occur over the course of time involving changes in optimism/pessimism and creativity. Future studies may adopt longitudinal or quasi-experimental designs.

Managers and organizations must consider that, even though positivity promotes creativity, some level of negativity may help positivity to produce creativity.

This study suggests that scholars who want to study the antecedents of creativity (and innovation) must be cautious in focusing only on the positive or the negative sides of individuals’ characteristics, and rather they must explore the interplay between both poles. Individuals may experience both positive and negative states/traits (Smith et al., 2016), and this both/and approach may impel them to think divergently, to challenge the status quo and to propose “out the box” and useful ideas.

The paper aims to develop an efficient and compact hybrid S-curve-PSO (particle swarm optimization) controller for the optimal trajectory planning of industrial robots in the presence of obstacles, especially those used in pick-and-place operations.

The proposed methodology comprises a monotonic trajectory through bounded entropy of speed, velocity, acceleration and jerk. Thus, the robot’s trajectory planning corresponds with S-curve-PSO duality. This is achieved by dual navigation with minimal computational complexity. The matrix algebra-based computational complexity transforms the trajectory from random to compact. The linear programming problem represents the proposed robot in Euclidean space, and its optimal solution sets the corresponding optimal trajectory.

The proposed work ensures the efficient trajectory planning of the industrial robot in the presence of obstacles with optimized path length and time. The real-time and simulation analysis of the robot is presented for performance measurement, and their outcomes demonstrate a good correlation. Compared with the existing controller, it gives a noteworthy improvement in performance.

The novel S-curve-PSO hybrid approach is presented here, along with the LIDAR sensors, which generate the environment map and detect obstacles for autonomous trajectory planning. Based on the sensory information, the proposed approach generates the optimal trajectory by avoiding obstacles and minimizing the travel time, jerk, velocity and acceleration. The hybrid S-curve-PSO approach for optimal trajectory planning of the industrial robot in the presence of obstacles has not been presented by any researchers. This method considers the robot’s kinematics as well as its dynamics. The implementation of the PSO makes it computationally superior and faster. The selection of best-fit parameters by PSO assures the optimized trajectory in the presence of obstacles and uncertainty.