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Existing research on the relationship between big data and organizational decision quality is still few and far between, and what does exist often assumes direct effects of big data on decision quality. More recent research indicates that such direct effects may be too simplistic, and in particular, an organization’s overall human skills are often not considered sufficiently. Inspired by the knowledge-based view, we therefore propose that interactions between three aspects of big data usage and management accountants’ data analytics skills may be key to reaching high-quality decisions. The purpose of this study is to test these predictions based on a survey of US firms.

The authors draw on survey data from 140 US firms. This survey has been conducted via MTurk in 2020.

The results of the study show that the quality of big data sources is associated with higher perceived levels of decision quality. However, according to the results, the breadth of big data sources and a data-driven culture only improve decision quality if management accountants’ data analytics skills are highly developed. These results point to the important, but so far unexamined role of an organization’s management accountants and their skills for translating big data into high-quality decisions.

The present study highlights the importance of an organization’s human skills in creating value out of big data. In particular, the findings imply that management accountants may need to increasingly draw on data analytics skills to make the most out of big data for their employers.

This study is among the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to provide empirical proof of the relevance of an organization’s management accountants and their data analytics skills for reaching desirable firm-level outcomes. In addition, this study thus adds to the further advancement of the knowledge-based view by providing evidence that in contemporary big-data environments, interactions between tacit and explicit knowledge seem crucial for driving desirable firm-level outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between humorous leadership and innovative behavior and the moderator effects of creative requirement and perceived innovation climate, beyond transformational leadership, and leader-member exchange (LMX).

Questionnaire data were collected from 150 employees of various organizations in Germany.

Employees whose leader used humor more frequently reported to be more innovative, when the employees perceived their tasks to require creativity and innovation. Perceived innovation climate did not moderate the relationship.

Different humor styles rather than just positive humor should be investigated in the future. Future research should incorporate multi-level designs and objective data on innovative behavior.

Humorous leadership is an important element of innovation-relevant leadership behavior. Its use may be integrated in broader leadership development approaches.

The study contributes to knowledge on humorous leadership and its relationship to organizational behavior. It enhances theoretical developments by considering the employees’ task and perceived innovation climate as moderator variables. It helps establish humor as a leadership tool beyond constructs such as LMX or transformational leadership.

Although the market for communication consultancies has been booming worldwide for many years now, there are still only a handful of theoretical concepts and empirical findings pertaining to communication consulting. This is the fundamental starting point for this paper, which sets out to answer the following research questions: What is the function of communication consulting? What are the differences between consultants' expectations of consulting and those of clients? How do consultants and clients deal with the contradiction between proximity and distance? What are the potential threats to the autonomy of consulting?

The paper combines a theoretical framework of communication consulting with a survey of German communication consultants and clients.

First, a theoretical framework is developed in which communication consulting is defined as follows: First, it opens up decision-related contingency and thus produces additional options for managing communicative relationships with internal and external target groups, before helping to close decision-related contingency. The results of the survey show that the expectations of clients and consultants for communication consulting are largely similar. In the closing dimension especially, most clients share the active role of self-conception of most consultants. On the other hand, in some opening activities, clients wish for more critical, independent and courageous consulting.

The scope of the empirical material is limited to communication consultants and clients in Germany and may therefore not be valid in other cultural contexts.

The paper closes a gap in both theory building and empirical research in communication consulting. The theory presented conceives of communication consulting as a hybrid of management consulting and process consulting and, in addition to the opening dimension, also takes the closing dimension of consulting into consideration for the first time. The study reveals a certain schizophrenia in clients: on the one hand, clients demand more critical consultants and thus call for more distance; on the other hand, clients prefer to be close to their consultants, particularly if they wish to work with them for the long-term.