Search results

Drawing on human capital (HC) and social capital (SC) as well as the Jack-of-all-trades theory, this paper aims to clarify the relationship between international assignments (IAs) of employees and their entrepreneurial intentions. The study proposes that such IAs provide specific environmental features which may enable employees to build up diverse skills and network relations conducive to entrepreneuship.

The authors collected data using an online survey, targeting professionals and managers in Germany and Switzerland. They used 223 complete responses. Before data collection, they ensured the suitability of their questionnaire by employing well-tested scales and consulted independent experts in survey design and methodology. They tested their hypotheses by applying multiple mediation modeling.

As hypothesized, the authors find empirical evidence that diverse skills and network relationships as well as poor career prospects, positively mediate the relationship between IAs and entrepreneurial intentions of employees.

We applied simple random and the snowball sampling method. Our approach involved the use of headhunters, international employers and relocation companies as multipliers.

Our results have practical implications for employees and employers. Employees on international assignments can proactively pursue opportunities in order to utilize the acquired experiences and resources for taking up entrepreneurial activities. Employers can try to retain these employees to facilitate (international) corporate entrepreneurship.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to highlight the entrepreneurial ambitions of international assignees. It thus provides initial insights into this topic.

Risk management is now considered the responsibility of all financial services professionals, not just senior leaders or risk specialists. Very little is known about the role of staff in risk management, so the purpose of this paper is to, first, clarify what constitutes “desirable” risk management behaviour by financial services staff based on the practitioner and regulatory literature. Based on this understanding, the authors analyse the characteristics of those who are most likely to display such behaviour.

The paper analyses some 36,000 survey responses across ten banks headquartered in Anglo countries.

Desirable risk management behaviour at the employee level includes compliance but goes well beyond mere compliance to include speaking up, thoughtful engagement with and accountability for the risk management framework. The authors find a significant negative association between individual risk tolerance and desirable risk management behaviour. Older workers as well as those with greater seniority are more likely to report desirable risk management behaviour. The link between female gender and risk management behaviour is not supported after controlling for individual risk attitudes. The authors provide evidence that females who succeed in financial services do not conform to traditional female stereotypes.

Findings suggest financial institutions should hire/retain more older workers and those with lower risk tolerance to improve risk management. Hiring more females, however, is not likely to lead to better risk management.

The paper is the first to investigate risk management behaviour in financial services staff. The research exploits a unique, difficult to obtain data set.