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To analyze FINRA’s focus on broker-dealer culture in its 2016 annual priorities letter and the application of the concept in FINRA disciplinary proceedings, to explain how that focus will affect FINRA’s examinations of firms, and to provide recommendations as to how a firm can develop or improve its culture of compliance.

This article examines FINRA’s current and historic pronouncements about “culture” in speeches, guidance, and decisions in disciplinary proceedings, and looks for common themes that should guide broker-dealers’ compliance.

This article concludes that even if the focus on culture might be regarded as an unnecessary overlay to the panoply of securities laws and regulations to which broker-dealers already are subject, firms should still take it seriously. It is now a focus of FINRA examinations for the purpose of fact-gathering, but FINRA might well elevate their concerns about culture into examination findings or worse.

This article gathers together all available information about the concept of firm “culture” and examines what aspects of the current focus represents legitimate concerns, and what aspects are unnecessary. The article takes the best of the guidance about culture and offers suggestions about how to improve a firm’s culture and, correspondingly, its compliance.

Extant literature has looked at the effect of alliance capability and organizational culture on alliance portfolio performance, but the relationship between the two has not been explored. The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that an alliance supportive culture is not only fostered by a firm’s alliance capabilities, but that it mediates the relationship between capabilities and performance.

Survey responses from 190 alliance managers, collected using a two-stage process, were analyzed to investigate the interrelationship of firm-level alliance capability, alliance supportive culture and portfolio performance.

Alliance supportive culture was found to mediate the relationship between alliance capability and alliance portfolio performance. This finding suggests that in order to effectively manage a firm’s portfolio of alliances, the benefits of alliance capability must be transferred broadly into the organization’s cultural orientation toward alliances.

Further research may extend this analysis to explore the effect of subcomponents of alliance capability and alliance culture to better understand fine-grained influences on alliance performance. The findings of this study also may be extended to inform how supportive culture orientation affects partner selection, negotiation and time to performance.

Managers should utilize culture-building actions as a way of extending the value of their firms’ alliance capabilities in order to improve their effectiveness across the portfolio.

Extant studies have considered the discrete effects of capability and cultural orientation on alliance portfolio success, but the mediation effect has not previously been investigated. The findings also identify a boundary condition for the benefit of alliance capabilities on portfolio performance.

This study aims to investigate the causal relationships within an experimental culture of improvisation capability and firm performance, following the logic of “culture-capability-performance” and building on informal institution theory and dynamic capability theory.

Data was mainly collected via on-site questionnaires from firm managers, and 196 valid questionnaires were analyzed using structural equation modeling to test the relationship among experimental culture, improvisation capability and firms’ performance.

Trust and support had a positive impact on firm spontaneity, while the effect of action promotion and error tolerance was not significant. Action promotion, trust and support demonstrate substantial positive effects on the creativity of a firm. Both dimensions of improvisation capability positively and significantly influence a firm’s performance.

The research respondents were firm managers. Cross-sectional data were used to analyze the model, which may cause common method variance. The research context was limited to China, and the generalizability of the results needs to be considered.

Firms can cultivate a culture of trust and support to enhance their spontaneity and improvisation capability. They can encourage cross-departmental communication, empower employees with autonomy in decision-making, provide appropriate resource support for employees’ decisions and use praise and reward incentives to spur further innovation achievements.

This study addresses the gaps in a firm’s improvisation capability within a Chinese market context by theoretically and empirically examining the role of experimental culture and assessing the relationship among each of the dimensions of improvisation capability in relation to firm performance identified in this study.

Earlier research has identified adaptive leadership strategies and organizational culture as two key factors that influence a firm's adaptive capabilities. However, little is known about how leadership and organizational culture affect each other. Nor do the authors know how the combined effects of adaptive leadership and culture facilitates organizational adaptation over time. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap by using a co-evolutionary perspective to enhance the understanding of this phenomenon.

Data were collected through informant interviews, observations and archival material.

Study findings reveal that leaders can enhance organizational adaptability by creating an appropriate context to guide the co-evolutionary interactions between their leadership strategies, organizational culture and employees towards the ongoing achievement of firm goals.

The study enhances the understanding of how leaders facilitate organizational adaptability, especially in a family business context.

Appreciation of the utility of strategy and the vitality of the culture in an organization can realize the development of a new culture-centric strategic business model (SBM). Culture beats, eats or trumps strategy is a legitimate and powerful argument often thrown to the air. The purpose of this paper is to un-code the relevance of this argument and to decode its significance.

This is a conceptual paper and builds on prior conceptual and empirical management research related to strategy and organizational culture. The approach is unbiased toward either strategy or culture.

The conclusion arrived at is that, in general, strategy must precede culture and culture must be aligned. In specific instances of governance, inner workings of a military organization, cross-cultural context of negotiations, creative advertising and management of change culture may predominate in tactics. Furthermore, with a strategy gone astray, or in the instance of a floundering business or start-up venture, culture must shift to first gear, lead the requisite goal and path development, and strategy must be aligned in the transition. A strategy–culture fit supports a sustained competitive advantage by virtue of a firm’s unique culture proposition (UCP).

The development of a culture-centric SBM will need to be tested by empirical research. The UCP will also need to be researched further.

The conclusion that strategy should generally precede culture will guide firms from not letting their organizational culture from undermining the success of major shifts in strategic goals and business model positioning.

The conceptual arguments will help leaders and managers from marginalizing the value of strategy. However, managers will also be directed toward paying attention to the damaging consequences of ignoring culture. Furthermore, managers will be able to appreciate that culture must not drive strategy, except in specific strategic decision-making contexts.

This paper aims to examine how a firm’s political party orientation (Republican or Democratic), which is measured as the composite index based on the political party leanings of top managers, affects bank loan contracts. This study also investigates how the political culture of local states has a significant impact on loan contracts.

This research uses various databases including the Loan Pricing Corporation’s DealScan database, financial covenant violation indicators based on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, firm bankruptcy filings and political culture index data to examine the impact of political orientation on the cost of debt. This paper also includes the state level of gun ownership and bachelor’s degrees to investigate how local political culture affects the loan contract. To control endogenous concerns, this paper uses an instrumental variable analysis.

Firms that have Republican-oriented political identities pay lower yield spreads for the main costs of debt including all-in-spread-drawn and all-in-spread-undrawn. This pattern is consistent with other fees of bank loans. This paper finds that an increase in conservative political policies toward Republican orientations is negatively associated with the cost of debt. The main findings also show that the political culture in the state where the headquarters of the borrowing firm are located plays an important role in bank loan contracts.

The findings in this paper provide evidence that a firm’s political party orientation significantly affects the loan contract terms in both pricing and non-pricing terms. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that shows the importance of political party identification on loan contracts by separating the sample into Republican, neutral and Democratic.

The available literature demonstrates that green human resource management (GHRM) practices enhance the firm's green performance. However, the studies fail to show how GHRM practices give rise to green culture and how such green culture influences the green competitiveness of a firm. Anchored on the Ability Motivation Opportunity (AMO) theory, this study investigates how firms can build green competitive advantage from GHRM. The study focuses on four enablers of green culture (EGC): leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement and employee empowerment. The study tests the mediating role of each EGC in the relationship between GHRM and green competitive advantage (GCA). The study findings provide managers with a deeper understanding of how GHRM supports the development of the EGC and how they explain the firm's GCA.

Data was collected from a large-scale survey of Malaysia's manufacturing firm. We managed to collect 96 valid and useable questionnaires.

We find that GHRM practices give rise to EGC and the EGC mediate the relationship between GHRM and GCA.

The study presents the EGC in the green competitiveness context and goes further to test its mediating role in the GHRM–GCA relationship. We also develop a novel conceptual framework that manufacturing firms can deploy to attain green competitive advantage.

This study aims to assess how innovative organizational culture and innovative leadership generate market flexibility for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the service sector to enhance their competitiveness. Both organizational culture and leadership are seen as firm-level resources capable of influencing the flexibility of the firm in periods of market turbulence. The study argues that SME service firms must use their internal resources to develop their flexibility capability which is more valuable, rare, inimitable and not substitutable.

SME service firms from Ghana are used to test the study’s hypotheses through robust standard regression analysis. A sampling frame was developed from an online database of small and medium enterprises operating in the service sector.

The findings suggest that although organizational culture and leadership may influence a service firm’s competitiveness, it is more viable to use these firm-level resources to create market flexibility capability to amplify the effect. This means, when culture and leadership propel the flexibility drive, the service firm is able to connect, coordinate and synchronize functional units to take advantage of new product and market opportunities. Additionally, market flexibility emanating from organizational culture and leadership wields enough power and resource support to tackle the turbulent market conditions better than firms with less support.

The managerial implication from this study is that firms should use their organizational culture and leadership to create flexible organizations that afford them the opportunity to adapt to the environmental dynamics. If both leadership and culture work together, they are able to create strong market capabilities such as flexibility which determines how well the firm will respond to the competition, customer demand and all other external pressures. It is, therefore, the view of this paper that SMEs should use their organizational culture and leadership to build a market-flexible organization to create a competitive advantage.

This paper shows how internal resources/assets such as culture and leadership generate the needed flexibility to create a competitive advantage for SMEs. This paper explains the two dimensions of Volberda’s flexibility from a firm-level resource perspective and highlights flexibility as a second-order capability whose cultivation and effectiveness are dependent on a firm’s culture and leadership. Evidence of how a firm’s market flexibility is fuelled by organizational leadership and culture is demonstrated. Finally, this paper shows how resource-poor SMEs in emerging African economies can enhance their market competitiveness through internal systems and processes.

The concern for environmental sustainability has created the need for businesses to embrace new environmentally responsible behavior, values and beliefs. Developing green culture has the capability of influencing employee attitudes and behavior and instilling certain values that shape an internal culture. The purpose of this study is to understand the causal relationship between the factors that influence green organization culture (GOC) in manufacturing small and medium manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) since they are considered significant contributors to environmental pollution. The study also aims to execute the driving and dependency power analysis to find the most and least significant factors of GOC.

The study identified eight factors through an extensive literature review and validated them with the specialists. The total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) approach was employed for discovering the interaction among the identified factors and developing their structural hierarchy. Further matriced impact croises multiplication applique (MICMAC) analysis was carried out to determine the driving-dependence power of each factor.

The study discovered that the factors namely “Top management commitment and support towards green practices and workforce greening F(2)”, “Internal regulatory forces towards the environmental system (F3)” and “Organization's mission including environmental concern (F6)” were observed to be the most significant ones. “Environment that creates green work-life balance F(8)” and “Environment that promotes green attitude and behavior F(4)” were identified to be extremely dependent on the remaining factors.

The proposed outline has been established in the context of India and is restricted to manufacturing SMEs. The methodology presented in the study relies solely on experts' opinions which are qualitative in nature. Integration with a different method can be used to do statistical validation and add new variables to the problem, thereby reducing restrictions. The findings may facilitate manufacturing SME owners/managers and HR managers to recognize the most and least important factors of GOC and their causal relationships. This will increase awareness of GOC practices among managers thus contributing to environmental performance.

It is essential for manufacturing small and medium enterprises to enhance their GOC for reducing its negative impact on the environment and further for gaining competitive advantage. Also, this research will offer insights into environmental management and enlarge awareness in the subsequent fields: of academics, practitioners and decision-makers who are engaged in managing environmental issues at various stages.

The researchers believe that the study is highly significant for manufacturing SMEs as they contribute to the economy as well as environmental degradation. Also, none of the research focused on understanding the causal relationships between the factors of GOC using the TISM approach in the Indian manufacturing SMEs context. This research adds an important contribution to the current GOC literature.

Managers and management studies have for long assumed the separation of humans and nature that led to criticisms due to overexploitation of resources. This prompted organizations to adopt effective environmental management strategies. In this context, the specialized literature states that green human resource management (GHRM) and green transformational leadership (GTFL) coupled with Green Culture (GC) is considered a central aspect in improving the organization's environmental performance (EP). Based on this argument, this study has shown how GHRM strategies as studied under the heading – green ability, motivation and opportunity (GAMO) and GTFL can help in improving the EP of organizations. Studies have highlighted culture as an important mediator, we have therefore explored the mediating effect of green culture between GAMO and EP and between GTFL and EP.

Using ability, motivation, opportunity theory and resource-based view, we have developed a model with GAMO and GTFL as independent variables, GC as a mediator and EP as the dependent variable. Data was collected from 150 top and middle-level managers working in Indian oil and gas companies, which is 50% of the target sample size and has been analysed using structural equation modelling.

The research identifies that GAMO and GTFL, in fact, positively influence the EP of organizations. Moreover, GC was found to have a partial mediating effect between both GAMO and EP and GTFL and EP.

Due to several constraints, this study is designed to be cross-sectional. Longitudinal study is encouraged in this area. Further, the study is based on oil and gas industry operating in India, going forward the study can be extended to other sectors, to increase the generalizability of the findings.

This study clearly shows that by investing in GHRM strategies, organizations will ultimately improve in green activities to improve see improvement in the firm's EP. The findings of this study that clarifies the importance of GTFL in building suitable culture give evidence to the leaders on why they should play a proactive role in leading employees towards environmental sustainability.

The originality of this study lies in studying the simultaneous effect of GTFL and GAMO for improving the EP. Also, studies on green management literature have mostly missed out on the important role of GC in improving EP which is addressed in this study. The data has been collected from oil and gas industry operating in India, which to the best of our knowledge is the first attempt. Overall this study has contributed to the literature on environmental sustainability by underpinning the empirical relationship between GC, GAMO, GTFL and EP which until now has been mostly limited to the conceptual level.